Access the Sublime & Live Your Best Life | Robert Greene

1. 0:00 – 2:47

   Robert Greene

   1. RGRobert Greene0:00

      People would come to me and they would say, "Well, Robert, I don't know what my life's task is. I'm in my 20s. You write about it. You write about Da Vinci, you write about all these other people, and I have no idea." So I had to go like, "Why wouldn't they know it?" Because if you think about your early childhood, you had those moments. You knew that you would love this ... You loved kicking a ball. I had ... I loved sports. But thinking deeply about their experience, I came to realize that first of all, they've lost a deep connection to those childhood experiences, to those moments. They've forgotten about them. Why have they forgotten about them? Be- all these other voices intervened. Their parents told them what they should love, what they shouldn't love. They had to learn math and they didn't wanna learn math. The teachers told them what they were good at, which kind of constrains your brain into a certain career path. We have to cut out all of those voices. We literally had to go back into their childhood to uncover those moments where something sparked and they were excited, not because their parents told them, but because it was them.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman1:05

      Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Robert Greene. Robert Greene is a renowned author of books such as The Laws of Human Nature, The 48 Laws of Power, and The Art of Seduction. Another one of his books, entitled Mastery, remains one of my all-time favorite books and is one that I have recommended to the students I've taught in classes, in my laboratory, and to my friends and family and acquaintances for years. But with all of that said, I do believe that the topics Robert discusses today are the most important of all, and I don't say that lightly. Today we talk about the sublime and how to access the sublime. For many of us, we hear the sublime and it sounds abstract. But today Robert explains that accessing the sublime in your daily life is not only possible, but is truly the key to a great life, one full of rich experiences in your work, your relationships, your relationship to yourself, to animals, and even to the galaxies. And importantly, today Robert provides tools and examples for how to access the sublime in daily life. So it's probably obvious by now that I'm a huge fan of Robert Greene as the person, and his books and his teaching, including his teachings in today's conversation. You're in for a real gift with this one, so enjoy. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Robert

2. 2:47 – 7:40

   The Law of The Sublime

   1. AHAndrew Huberman2:47

      Greene. The Robert Greene. Welcome back.

   2. RGRobert Greene2:49

      The Andrew Huberman. [laughs] Well, thank you.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman2:52

      I'm not shy about my adoration of your book, Mastery.

   4. RGRobert Greene2:56

      Oh, thank you. Thank you.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman2:57

      Long before I had a podcast, I recommended it to students in my courses related to biology and neuroscience when they would ask for book recommendations. Um, I have a signed copy, thanks to you, on my shelf. I return to it often, and I'm thrilled you've written this new book, The Law of the Sublime. Um, I'm so excited. I haven't read it yet 'cause I just got it from you today, but my question is pretty straightforward. So if 48 Laws of Power was about how the world is constructed and how to navigate it, and Mastery was about mentorship and how to realize our unique gifts and potential-

   6. RGRobert Greene3:37

      Yeah

   7. AHAndrew Huberman3:38

      ... and Laws of Human Nature, you've written a lot of books, my friend, is h- how we understand ourselves and others in the context of general principles, The Law of the Sublime is about?

   8. RGRobert Greene3:51

      It's about experience. It's about how you experience your day-to-day life, not in terms of success or power or dealing with other people, but just your sense of how you experience being alive and how you kind of open yourself up to the strangeness of this world that we inhabit. So I think a lot of our experience now, how we process our, our thoughts and emotions, is being kind of programmed and controlled in ways we're not aware of.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman4:25

      Mm-hmm.

   10. RGRobert Greene4:25

       So I like to think of consciousness as this kind of mental space that we inhabit. I envision it in this book as kind of a circle, right? Although there's really no limits to our consciousness. But this is a circle in which our thoughts kind of move around within sort of certain limits, our behavior, our emotions, what we think of the world, what we think of as reality, right? And within that circle, our experience of life can be kind of constricted. It can be kind of the sameness. Everything seems sort of familiar. Yes, you'll have kind of experiences that might stand out, but they're all still sort of similar, and then you, you go on a vacation, you climb a mountain, you come back to your daily routines. It doesn't really stick in you. You know, like when Maslow describes like peak experiences that kind of change you. And so I'm interested in that level of experience that shakes you up, that gets you out of that circle, that makes you aware that there is another reality out there. So I have a chapter in the book about how the brain constructs what we consider as reality. It con- it constructs how we perceive the world. It constructs a, a, an ego, a self, and all these other things. But there's something else out there. There's another way of experiencing the world. And so the sublime is something that lies outside that circle, right? There are these points. I compare them to doorways. So the word sublime in Latin means up to the threshold of a door, sub lumen. Lumen meaning a threshold, right? And so- In these doorways to something outside the circle, you're moving, uh, closer to it, and you're peering through it, and you're realizing there's something else, there's something else out there that's not part of your daily experience, and it shakes you up. It gives you a kind of shock. The sublime is a mix of pain and pleasure. The pain is, it's outside my comfort zone, it's, it's not what I'm familiar with, but the pleasure is the newness of it, the novelty, the excitement that it generates. And so each of those doorways that I mention are, are, are chapters in this book. But I'm trying to get you outside of this... So the circle could be rather small. When you were a child, when you were born, that circle was rather large because the world was so new and fresh and unfamiliar, and you were excited about everything, and your imagination was animating everything around you. And then as you get older, it kind of gets smaller and smaller and gets constricted and flat, and you're not using your imagination. Everything is, gets kind of dead to you. And so I'm trying to enliven, alter your experience of life itself at its roots, at, at the very roots of your consciousness. And unlike any of my other books, each chapter ends with exercises that you can use to kind of bring these ideas that I've introduced to you in this specific chapter into your daily experience 'cause I don't want this to be an academic book about the sublime and the brain and all these other things. I want it to be something that you incorporate into your daily life.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman7:39

       Do you

3. 7:40 – 13:11

   Accessing the Sublime in Everyday Life, Drugs, Stroke

   1. AHAndrew Huberman7:40

      march through these sorts of, um, d- I wanna say Doors to Perception, but that was-

   2. RGRobert Greene7:46

      No

   3. AHAndrew Huberman7:46

      ... that was-

   4. RGRobert Greene7:46

      That was Aldous Huxley

   5. AHAndrew Huberman7:47

      ... that was Huxley, right? And he, um, championed the use of LSD to get access to and go through some of those doors.

   6. RGRobert Greene7:54

      Yeah

   7. AHAndrew Huberman7:54

      Um-

   8. RGRobert Greene7:54

      And mescaline. He was heavily into mescaline.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman7:56

      Maybe we'll talk a little bit about psychedelics and altering perceptual-

   10. RGRobert Greene7:59

       Sure

   11. AHAndrew Huberman8:00

       ... windows, but I think most people are very familiar with the fact that their daily life and their perceptions are very heavily constrained.

   12. RGRobert Greene8:08

       Yeah.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman8:09

       Uh, certainly once we reach adulthood, our experiences might not be mundane, but they're v- certainly repetitive.

   14. RGRobert Greene8:16

       Yes.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman8:18

       In the book and, and just in general, a- are you a fan of accessing what you refer to as the sublime on a regular basis? Is this something that we can do, like, daily through micro-practices, or is there real value also in things that really take that sphere of everyday experiences-

   16. RGRobert Greene8:37

       Yeah

   17. AHAndrew Huberman8:37

       ... and really turn it into a, a completely different shaped object?

   18. RGRobert Greene8:41

       I think both. So what happened to me, I, I did a lot of, uh, drugs when I was in my early 20s and my late teens, and they had a lasting effect on me. I can remember taking one particular trip on peyote in the town of Mendocino up on the coast in Northern California, and I'll never forget the experience and how it altered how I look at just life itself, right? The simplest things. And so when I had the original concept for this book 20 years ago, I was gonna have things like that. I was gonna take drugs like that. I was gonna do a- ayahuasca. I was gonna go to the Amazon. I was gonna do all these a- uh, adventures, swimming with dolphins, seeing champ- chimpanzees in, in the, in Gobi National Forest. Then I had my stroke, right? And so my stroke made it so that my near-death experience kind of brought the sublime back to me in a very real sense. I wanna write this book, but I can't travel. I can't do any of these things that I thought I could do. I could take the drugs, but I, it, I'd be a little bit dangerous considering I can't walk very well and my balance is bad. So sitting there in my office, how do I write this book without those kinds of experiences? And I recalled when I, just after my stroke, I'm sitting in the hospital bed the first day after kind of trying to process what had happened to me, and I'm looking out the window, and everything looks so different to me. It's as if I had just been born. Everything looks strange, doesn't it? The sky is blue. It's weird. The clouds are passing. I'm seeing birds in there. I'm seeing trees swaying in the wind. I go, "Goddamn, this world is insane. It is so beautiful. It is so marvelous. I've never noticed it before. It has this incandescence to it," right? And then it faded. That feeling faded because it was the, the shadow of death that had come over me, and it kind of... Death can create that kind of effect on you. Then I'm home, and it's kind of missing, and I'm wondering, how am I gonna g- able to get the sublime, experience it in order to write about it? I start looking out my window again, and sort of the feelings start coming back. And then I sit out in my backyard, which is not very large, and I'm seeing, like, there's this whole world in the backyard. It's, it's not the Amazon. It's not Africa, but it's filled with all these insects, all this life. There are flowers. There are trees. So my point is the feeling starts coming over me that the sublime is part of our everyday life. It's everywhere around us, right? You can look at this cup here that's in front of us. Normally, we just see a cup that we use to drink out of, but in the sublime and sometimes on drugs and sometimes after death, you look at it, it's this weird shape. It's this funny color, this handle. It's got-- It maybe even seems to ha- be alive in some ways. It's got this material aspect to it, nothing to do with its use value. When you take drugs, you know, even on cannabis, that something goes off in your brain where you're looking at things as they are and not as their uses and their functions, and the colors and the shapes and the materials strike you just for what they are l- and they did when you were a child So my point is, it's all around you. Your body is the product of eight hundred million years of evolution. Your nervous system was like the first eyes in, in, in the Cambrian explosion when they first evolved eyes and optic nerves and, and a nervous system, right? It's inside of your body. You are a product of all these-- of evolution. Your body is utterly weird and sublime that it operates with-- automatically, you know? I just had surgery on my eye because I had a k- a, a little sort of cancerous melanoma there. The, the doc-- the surgeon cut into it. He cut in... You know, it was pretty violent. He had to take skin from my ear and replace it there. It's only ten days later, and the skin is growing back. It's insane. It's miraculous what the body can do. So the sublime doesn't have to be these extraordinary things. Just your day-to-day life is filled with these, uh, quasi miracles.

4. 13:11 – 15:43

   Sponsors: David & Eight Sleep

   1. AHAndrew Huberman13:11

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5. 15:43 – 23:06

   Attention, Neuro-Sublime, Tools: Self-Remembering, Meditation

   1. AHAndrew Huberman15:43

      Two weekends ago, I was up at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur and-

   2. RGRobert Greene15:47

      I love it up there

   3. AHAndrew Huberman15:47

      ... amazingly beautiful place. I hope everyone gets the opportunity to visit at least once. It's a spectacular place. One of the founders, Michael Murphy, is now ninety-six.

   4. RGRobert Greene15:56

      Yeah.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman15:57

      And he was describing what-- We don't know if it was a stroke or it was some other event, but he had sort of a blackout and fall recently. He's very clear-headed, and fortunately, he's still, still mobile. But he was talking about the aftermath of that experience and how, um, his sort of pixelation of the world was altered in some way that-

   6. RGRobert Greene16:19

      Yeah

   7. AHAndrew Huberman16:19

      ... has now allowed him to appreciate all these different colors and shapes in the same environment that he's spent so much time.

   8. RGRobert Greene16:27

      Yeah.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman16:27

      So it matches very well what you described.

   10. RGRobert Greene16:30

       Yeah.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman16:30

       And artists like Chuck Close, who had, you know, visual quote-unquote deficits that allowed them to do incredible art at a different kind of spatial scale.

   12. RGRobert Greene16:39

       The famous example is the painter El Greco-

   13. AHAndrew Huberman16:41

       Mm

   14. RGRobert Greene16:42

       ... with, you know, his odd shapes and how he figures the human, uh, body. It's so weird. It's like looking through a concave mirror or something. He had some kind of eye problem, right? There's lots of examples of artists like that.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman16:55

       Yeah. So it raises this question for me, uh, which is to access the sublime, is it sufficient for us to just think about our current perceptions differently? Like, it-- we-- So taking away drugs, taking away strokes, and the level of perception that I have now, my perceptual abilities to hear music a certain way and see the world a certain way, feel, touch a certain way, th-they're constrained, but they're pretty vast. This is true for everybody. But I do have the option to think about them differently. Is that one portal into the sublime, or do we actually need to change our perception, our default perception? Because what you described for you-

   16. RGRobert Greene17:39

       Mm-hmm

   17. AHAndrew Huberman17:39

       ... or what Michael Murphy described for him was forced upon them-

   18. RGRobert Greene17:43

       Right

   19. AHAndrew Huberman17:43

       ... on you. And you turned it into gifts, not the least of which is components of, of the book. But for most people, and drugs will do this too, right? But is it, is there a portal to the sublime through just thinking about our current perception, sans drugs, sans brain, uh, events? Just differently. Just to decide, "I'm going to look at this mug differently," and it will have some-

   20. RGRobert Greene18:10

       Yes

   21. AHAndrew Huberman18:10

       ... meaningful output.

   22. RGRobert Greene18:11

       Yes. Um, so I talk in the book, there's a chapter where, called The Neuro-Sublime, where I'm talking about how the brain constructs the world around us, and I discuss... I don't know if you've ever had Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor on your, on your show.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman18:25

       I have not.

   24. RGRobert Greene18:26

       But I t- discuss her stroke and what it did for her. But then there's this Armenian mystic named Gurdjieff, right? Amazing man. It was the turn of the 20th century, and he visited all of the, uh, most esoteric cults in the Middle East and the Far East, 'cause he had this idea that they were about to disappear, and he wanted to glean all of their secrets and create this new kind of philosophy that would alter human consciousness. And he had this experiment that he said, "What makes a human being human is our, uh, attention." So an animal, and God bless, I love animals, but their attention is generally somewhat limited to what's in front of them, to their needs to survive. They're not looking up at the sky and wondering about what's going on, right? They're not thinking about what's on the other side of that mountain and what's happening. So we have the ability of this incredible attention, and we, when we pay attention to something and we focus on it, we kind of alter our brain chemistry, and something magical can happen. And he had this notion that people are just sleepwalking through life, that they're not awake. He said if a human being were truly awake, there would not be wars, we would not be killing each other, would not be all this misery that we inflict on fellow humans, right? We're asleep. We're not, we're not aware of what we're doing. He had this exercise, he calls it Self-Remembering. I talk about it in the book. And he says, "You have an experience at a moment in life, and you focus on it deeply, and you tell yourself you're remembering it. You're gonna remember it." Because what happens is, what happened three years ago on a day in July, you'll never remember what happened there, 'cause you were asleep. You weren't paying attention. There are moments in life where you're paying attention, where you get some kind of shock and you remember it. He wants you to have that kind of focus every day. So he has this exercise where you look at things deeply and just focus on them. "I'm remembering, I'm remembering. I'm r- I'm experiencing it in the moment." And he had this pupil named Ouspensky, a very famous m- mystic, Russian mystic, who was deeply depressed, he was suicidal, and he became a, a, a pupil, a disciple of Gurdjieff. He starts practicing this. He looks at a vase of flowers in his room, focusing, attending it. "I'm remembering it. I'm seeing it. I'm here today. I'm looking at it." After 30 seconds, your mind wanders. He can't do it. But then after a minute, he notices that that flower starts looking different, and the degree of his focus and attention on it, just as it is, as he's telling himself, "I'm gonna remember it. In, in three years it'll be stamped in my memory." He gets better at it, and then he walks outside after he gets, after months of practicing this, just looking at th- things, simple objects, and suddenly the houses look different to him. They look like they're almost, like, alive. Everything is intense. He's walking outside and he's got this attention, this focus. The world is altering. And then suddenly he finds himself in a tobacconist on the, completely on the other side of Moscow or s- Saint Petersburg, I don't remember which city. He goes, "What happened?" He realized that he f- a moment he fell asleep, and he wasn't remembering things, and three hours later he's on the other side of town in a tobacconist buying cigarettes.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman22:01

       Wow.

   26. RGRobert Greene22:02

       And what he realized is he had this intense focus remembering, where he's awake, and now it made him realize that normally in life you are asleep. We don't realize how asleep we are because we don't have that contrast to what it's like to be fully awake. So my point is, it's an exercise that can literally alter your neurology in some way. It can alter how you perceive things. It doesn't require drugs. It re- requires this kind of intense focus. And meditation can have the same effect. I do meditation every morning. They've proven that meditation literally alters your brain. There's literally something, your thoughts can alter the matter of your, the wiring of your brain. So you don't need drugs. Drugs are a wonderful gateway, and Huxley describes it beautifully, but there are practices among Tibetan Buddhists, Zen Buddhists, where they get similar kind of effects through meditation, right? Or through some of these practices that I mentioned.

6. 23:06 – 29:57

   Perception of the World, Emotion

   1. AHAndrew Huberman23:06

      There's this wild finding in neuroscience, visual neuroscience, that comes to mind, uh, that I'll just briefly share with you if you wanna reflect on.

   2. RGRobert Greene23:14

      Sure.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman23:14

      Great, and if not, then, uh, certainly just-

   4. RGRobert Greene23:17

      No, I'll-

   5. AHAndrew Huberman23:17

      ... tell us. So we assume that when we look at something that our perception of it is pretty stable, but there's this really cool set of experiments where they paralyze the eyes of people-

   6. RGRobert Greene23:32

      Yeah

   7. AHAndrew Huberman23:32

      ... in a reversible way. And, and you quickly find that if you look at something, they can perceive it, and then it disappears because our nervous system has, our eyes move, these little saccades, as you know, but it's all about change in the same way that you walk in a room, it smells really good, and then the smell disappears. But it didn't disappear. You, you got this habituation.

   8. RGRobert Greene23:52

      Right. Right.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman23:52

      This happens everywhere in the nervous system.

   10. RGRobert Greene23:54

       Right.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman23:54

       But then there's this wild finding that if you continue to have people look at the same location-

   12. RGRobert Greene24:01

       Yeah

   13. AHAndrew Huberman24:01

       ... the percept of what was there changes i- in, in a significant way. And of course, the physical attributes of the thing didn't change.

   14. RGRobert Greene24:11

       No.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman24:11

       But the, but the, the perception, the, the conversion of those photons into what we perceive, the abstraction of what's out there changes. I think it matches precisely with what you're describing. What's so incredible in the example you gave is that the person was able to sort of maintain that shifted perception for long periods of time. It's almost like it enters the memory system. We can get back to the s- to the perception, but also the state that we were in of being, quote-unquote, awake. I find that remarkable.

   16. RGRobert Greene24:42

       Yeah.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman24:42

       Because the, the, the mug, the, the vase, the flower, they're beautiful, certainly flowers, but in some sense they're trivial too, right? Like, there's nothing inherently interesting about a mug until I start creating a story about it. Like, people designed this, it's gone all these wonderful... But you really have to go down that rabbit hole. So the question I have is, given how malleable our perceptions are, what quality of meaning is actually meaningful? Because, like, on drugs, and this is one of the problems with psychedelics, or MDMA-

   18. RGRobert Greene25:20

       Yeah

   19. AHAndrew Huberman25:20

       ... for instance, one has to be very careful, certainly on MDMA, which is a sympathogenic drug, right? Because you can hear a song and you can fall in love with your love for that song on repeat for four full hours, which is perhaps interesting. There might be an insight or few there. But in some sense it's not like one could say, "Well, that's trivial. You, you assigned a meaning to something that's trivial." And I think that's where people get scared, that if they start to e- go through these, uh, portals to, to the sublime, that they're gonna end up kinda weird, that they're gonna be the person that's like, "Did you see how-"

   20. RGRobert Greene26:00

       [laughs]

   21. AHAndrew Huberman26:01

       "... many ants are crawling up that curb?" And you're like-

   22. RGRobert Greene26:06

       Yeah, yeah

   23. AHAndrew Huberman26:06

       ... "Yeah, it's cool, but you know, like, if you-"

   24. RGRobert Greene26:07

       Yeah.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman26:08

       "Yeah, if you go down there I'm sure it's pretty cool," right?

   26. RGRobert Greene26:10

       Yeah.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman26:10

       But no one... Most people don't wanna be that guy or that lady all the time because we have a name for that, and it's not kind. None of us wanna be the crazy person who's f- who's creating meaning out of the trivial. So how do we cope with that?

   28. RGRobert Greene26:26

       'Cause the way I'm looking at it is you're actually seeing things as they are because your brain is filtering down things for you and creating this familiarity and this sameness so that your mind isn't overwhelmed with chaos.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman26:41

       Mm.

   30. RGRobert Greene26:42

       So that you can get through the, you know, um, Aldous Huxley w- in, in Doors of Perception was calling the mind at large, that if you didn't have this filtering all... You would be seeing all of these incredible things, but the mind is like this little funnel that just kind of filters and prunes everything that you see.
7. 29:57 – 39:08

   Spatial & Temporal Scales, Childhood, Time as a River

   1. AHAndrew Huberman29:57

      You're definitely not crazy, and I'm... And by the way, I'm totally on board, uh, this notion and the, and the practice of looking at things differently in order to experience life differently, to extract more mean- real meaning from-

   2. RGRobert Greene30:12

      Yeah

   3. AHAndrew Huberman30:12

      ... from life. Many times growing up in California, been here 51 years, I can remember driving along Highway 101

   4. RGRobert Greene30:19

      Sure

   5. AHAndrew Huberman30:19

      And, and I would stop and, and you know, and I'd like pee on the side of the road, and I would see some like beautiful fence lines. I love fence lines. And I would think, "Oh, these, this fence line looks so old with barbed wire."

   6. RGRobert Greene30:31

      What is your interest in fence lines? I'm curious about that.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman30:33

      I, I don't know. I, I don't know. I just think they're beautiful, and they're ... A lot of old fence lines along 280, um, and along 101 when you drive from Southern to Northern California, and just big fields, you know?

   8. RGRobert Greene30:46

      Yeah

   9. AHAndrew Huberman30:46

      It is still undeveloped, um, to this day, and ev- occasionally you'll see like an old, what looks like a cabin that's, like no one's bothered to take away. It's like falling over and-

   10. RGRobert Greene30:55

       Yeah

   11. AHAndrew Huberman30:55

       ... I would need to get someplace, so I would get back in my car and drive away. But inevitably, when I would get out, you know, and pee, and then I'd, yeah, like look at the fence line and I'd think there's so much interesting detail just in this-

   12. RGRobert Greene31:08

       Yeah

   13. AHAndrew Huberman31:08

       ... little, um, interface between the barbed wire and the wood on the fence line, and I used... And I still have this thought. I'm like, "I could spend all day there-

   14. RGRobert Greene31:17

       Yeah

   15. AHAndrew Huberman31:17

       ... but I have to go someplace else."

   16. RGRobert Greene31:19

       [laughs]

   17. AHAndrew Huberman31:19

       You know? And then I realize, and it, there, there are an infinite number of spatial scales that we can look at things.

   18. RGRobert Greene31:25

       Yeah.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman31:26

       I th- I, I think we can agree that's true. And then there are an infinite number of temporal scales that we can look at things and experience things, and this is the thing I'd li- I'd like to get your, your thoughts on.

   20. RGRobert Greene31:35

       Sure.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman31:36

       So the spatial scale is pretty straightforward for most people to digest. So you say, okay, well, I can look at something very small in my environment, the texture of something, or I can look at the whole environment. And we had Dacher Keltner on the podcast. He's a Berkeley scientist who studies awe, and he said that-

   22. RGRobert Greene31:54

       Oh

   23. AHAndrew Huberman31:54

       ... the experience of awe comes about when we transition quickly from focusing on small spatial scales to big spatial scales.

   24. RGRobert Greene32:01

       Ah.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman32:01

       Like walking through a forest and suddenly there's a huge vista.

   26. RGRobert Greene32:03

       Oh, wow.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman32:04

       You know?

   28. RGRobert Greene32:04

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman32:05

       Um, you're in Yosemite and you're like, all of a sudden you reach a peak and it's like-

   30. RGRobert Greene32:08

       Yeah, yeah
8. 39:08 – 42:52

   Death Sublime, Near-Death Experiences

   1. AHAndrew Huberman39:09

      I have an absolute obsession of, about this, uh, time perception thing, in no small part because if as a younger person I realized I could look at the fence line in great detail or-

   2. RGRobert Greene39:20

      Yeah

   3. AHAndrew Huberman39:20

      ... keep moving on, at this conversation with Barbara, it was the, our last conversation before she passed, I went on to realize it's not uncommon that as people get closer and closer to the end, provided they are lucid, and she was, it's as if there was an avalanche of new and beautiful information pouring in. And I should point out, this was not the, the report of somebody who was, like, kind of drifting away. I mean, that was part of the sadness of it all is she was very present. But in that presence, she was able to extract what seemed like many, many years of experience.

   4. RGRobert Greene39:56

      Wow. Yeah

   5. AHAndrew Huberman39:57

      And in a non-- She was a very calm person always, and in a very non-anxious or urgent way. It's as if the end was coming, and instead of freaking out, her, her perception, the camera onto the world just became super high resolution-

   6. RGRobert Greene40:14

      Right

   7. AHAndrew Huberman40:14

      ... and at, you know, near infinity frame rate, and she was just reporting these things.

   8. RGRobert Greene40:20

      This is a- as she's dying? Is-

   9. AHAndrew Huberman40:22

      Well, she was about a week out at that point.

   10. RGRobert Greene40:24

       Yeah.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman40:25

       So close, yeah.

   12. RGRobert Greene40:26

       I have a whole chapter on death and the death sublime and near-death experiences. And what often happens in the death process is the brain is dying as well, right? And as the brain dies, some of the things, the constructions of the brain, such as time, right, and such as vision and such as the self, start breaking down, start dissolving. Near-death experiencers have this sense sometimes of ecstasy as they're dying. Now, not all of them. In the studies of near-death experiences, about 85%, I'm just throwing out that number, are positive, but then there's the hellish near-death experience. So they're not all angels and beauty and stuff. But a lot of people are dying, and they feel the ego dissolving, and they feel the sense of abstract time dissolving, and they feel all the social pressures of life dissolving, and they're ecstatic. They're elated. It's like a liberation, right? It's the sense that time is actually much more plastic than we think it is. The first person to study near-death experiences is in the 19th century. It was this man named Albert Heim. He was a Swiss man. He was an alpine climber when he was, uh, very young, and when he was, like, 21, he fell as he was climbing. He was gonna die. It was like a 100-foot fall. And as he's falling, suddenly he remembers his whole life, right? All these things, he starts revisiting it. And then later he starts to-- wants to analyze it and he goes, "In 15 seconds of a fall, I had experienced like years of things happening," right? The cond- condensation was insane. He wrote an article about it, and suddenly hundreds of other articles start coming to him of people who had near-death-- who fell in climbing, uh, accidents and had the same experience. And people who like jump off Golden Gate Bridge, the few who survive, and there are some people who survive, speak of the same thing. Their experience of time as they're falling and as they're about to die is completely altered, and in just those 10 seconds, it's as if they lived like five years or something. So our sense of time is not so logical and rational as we think it is, and we can alter our perception of time literally by how we think and how we experience life.

9. 42:52 – 44:06

   Sponsor: AG1

   1. AHAndrew Huberman42:53

      I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. I'm excited to share that AG1 has just launched their newest formulation, AG1 Pro. AG1 Pro takes the clinically backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens, and adds three important new ingredients, creatine monohydrate, calcium HMB, and zinc carnosine. Each serving has five grams of creatine monohydrate to support muscle strength and performance, as well as brain health, calcium HMB to support muscle recovery and reduce muscle breakdown, and zinc carnosine to support and improve the lining of your gut. All three of these ingredients have compelling science to support them, and therefore, I love seeing them added to the existing AG1 formula. As most of you know, I've been taking AG1 every day for nearly fourteen years now. I started taking it long before I even knew what a podcast was. It's a great product, and it's now made even better with the new AG1 Pro formula. If you would like to try AG1 Pro, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. AG1 is giving away a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first subscription. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription.

10. 44:06 – 50:13

    Octopus, Changing Our Time Perception & Animal Species

    1. AHAndrew Huberman44:06

       One of the reasons I love aquaria and I have so many fish tanks is that whether there's one fish or octopus or many, when you look at a fish tank or an ocean scene of any kind, the, the mind enters this weird state-

    2. RGRobert Greene44:20

       Yeah

    3. AHAndrew Huberman44:21

       ... because you can't control nor you c- nor can you predict what's gonna happen next. If a fish is swimming leftward, you sort of predict it will continue to swim leftward, but then as soon as you predict that, it gener- [chuckles] it moves. And so there's this, you sort of have to let go of your anticipation of what's gonna happen next.

    4. RGRobert Greene44:36

       Uh-huh.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman44:37

       There's some constraints, but it puts my mind into this, like it's almost like a, it releases something.

    6. RGRobert Greene44:46

       Yeah.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman44:46

       It's the, the expectation component d- is just has to unlatch.

    8. RGRobert Greene44:50

       Uh-huh.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman44:50

       And in that, I think you get-

    10. RGRobert Greene44:51

        I see

    11. AHAndrew Huberman44:51

        ... additional perception.

    12. RGRobert Greene44:52

        That's interesting.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman44:53

        It just unlatches. I mean, the, y- there's nothing you can do. I think looking at the shore at the ocean is the same.

    14. RGRobert Greene44:59

        Right.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman44:59

        The waves roll in generally. You know, objects fall down as opposed to up. We, we know this, but, uh, I think it's the, the presence of, of unpredictable things, we, we just accept it, and then the brain just goes someplace new and, and I think useful.

    16. RGRobert Greene45:13

        This is slightly off, a little bit off what you're saying, but there's a story in there about a man who had a relationship with an octopus, so I think you can relate to that. He wrote... He did that famous movie, My Friend the Octopus.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman45:24

        Oh, yeah.

    18. RGRobert Greene45:24

        Right, right?

    19. AHAndrew Huberman45:25

        Mm-hmm.

    20. RGRobert Greene45:25

        But he actually has a story about, he wrote a book about it, and he essentially decides to, he's gonna cold dive off the coasts of South Africa where he grew up, incredibly cold temperatures. There's a kelp forest, which is a kind of a strange concept, right? It's a forest underwater of all this magnificent kelp, and the weirdest creatures live in there, including octopus. And he, he's not going in there looking for octopus. He's s- he's free diving in this very cold water, exploring this insane landscape. And he comes upon an octopus, and they slowly become friends, and they have a slightly erotic relationship. It's clear from the way he describes it that there was like this love interest and this sort of eroticism, because at one point, the octopus, you know, s- grabs his arm, and he can feel it, and it's like, it, it's pretty intense. And then at one moment, the octopus has grabbed him, and they float together to the top, and it was like this l- this love thing going on between them, right? And then, of course, as you know, the octopus dies, right? And he's, he's heartbroken about it, and that's when he decides he's gonna do this f-- Well, he's been f- he's been filming the whole thing, and he's gonna create this film. But my point is, in the s- six or eight months that he had this relationship, quote-unquote, with this octopus, his whole concept of time was altered because he was living in her time. It was a female, obviously laid eggs and died. Imagine an octopus lives for three years at most. It-- He saw these intense experiences. It got attacked by a shark. It lost some of its limbs. The limbs grew back. This three years, what is its sense of time? Compressed in those three years is just all of these incredible experiences, and he felt in being close to this octopus, he was like living in her time period. Time was passing at a diff- much different rhythm as he was living in her world. And so the idea is that there are animal, insects that live for like a month, right? And so our experience of time is relative to our time span as well, and in these kind of encounters with other species, we can kind of some ways alter our concept of time. If you try to experiment that with your dog, you might find something similar. How does your dog experience time?

    21. AHAndrew Huberman47:56

        I, I feel like, uh, this conversation was like designed to enchant me, so I'm just-

    22. RGRobert Greene48:01

        Oh. [chuckles]

    23. AHAndrew Huberman48:01

        Thank, th-thank you. Yeah, you know, the, uh, having, uh, had dogs and now another puppy, you... I'm familiar with the rhythm. You entrain to their rhythm, and they to you. This is a big part of the relationship.

    24. RGRobert Greene48:12

        Yeah.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman48:12

        Like the daily walk becomes a prerequisite.

    26. RGRobert Greene48:15

        Oh, yeah.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman48:15

        It's not a, it's not an option. The dog needs it.

    28. RGRobert Greene48:17

        Yeah, yeah.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman48:18

        And, and you learn to love everything about it, and that word feels really relevant here, entrainment. You know, we're, we're bound to this circadian rhythm, this twenty-four-hour rhythm, as I mentioned earlier. Nobody escapes it. Some people need more sleep than others, but Nobody escapes it. But everything else, we're sort of entrained to a particular schedule, and our body learns to anticipate things and adjust our perception and our energy levels to when we exercise, when we work, when we see our, um, significant other and, and, or dog, uh, or both. The idea that we can access different time perception references, time domains through interactions with other species is, like, absolutely thrilling to me. Absolutely thrilling. And I will say, having had several octopuses now, and cuttlefish prior to that, that, um-

    30. RGRobert Greene49:03

        Cuttlefish, wow
11. 50:13 – 55:03

    Attention, Phone & Vulnerable to Influence, Tool: Slowness

    1. AHAndrew Huberman50:13

       What you're describing is, and, and the reason I'm enchanted is that, is that it's really like the richness of life-

    2. RGRobert Greene50:19

       Yeah

    3. AHAndrew Huberman50:19

       ... is available to us when we let go of our kind of mostly human-made things. I, and I don't wanna focus on the negative, but, 'cause there are certainly positive attributes of technology, but I'm concerned that something about excessive use of social media is... You said earlier that we're programmed, but that we're like, with each passing year, we're becoming more and more locked to one time, space-time relationship.

    4. RGRobert Greene50:50

       Right.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman50:51

       And an expectation of dopamine updating and novelty-

    6. RGRobert Greene50:56

       Yeah, yeah

    7. AHAndrew Huberman50:56

       ... et cetera. And going away for a weekend without the phone, um, or getting a, a total night's sleep without the phone in the room [laughs]

    8. RGRobert Greene51:04

       Yeah, yeah

    9. AHAndrew Huberman51:04

       ... um, not looking at it for the first 30 minutes of the day.

    10. RGRobert Greene51:07

        Yeah.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman51:08

        I think anyone who's done those things will say that it significantly alters and improves one's experience of the rest of the day.

    12. RGRobert Greene51:15

        Right. Right.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman51:16

        So maybe we are being programmed. Not to sound paranoid.

    14. RGRobert Greene51:19

        Well, we are, and it, it's, it's whose interest are we being programmed for? I mean, um, is it, is it just to, to make money? Because if people's attention spans are kind of constantly being splintered this way, it's harder to focus. It's much more... You're much more vulnerable to influence-

    15. AHAndrew Huberman51:40

        Mm-hmm

    16. RGRobert Greene51:40

        ... right? To advertisements, to, to all kinds of gimmicks and things that are being implanted in your brain because you're not able to focus deep enough and think independently, so there's that danger. And then on the level of mastery in which I'm talking about how the human brain functions and what it wants and what, what it needs as nourishment is it needs slowness. It needs the slow pace of learning bit by bit by bit by bit progressing, and then the brain alters as new pathways are created. And so you are literally in charge of your brain and how you... the landscape of your brain. And when it's like this other rhythm that people are programmed for, you, it's a landscape that's like a desert. There's no life coming up in it. There's no connections that are happening, and you're such, so much more vulnerable to people's influence, right? And that's, to me, the scary part.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman52:41

        Yeah. One of the most impressive things I saw in the last year or so is this, um, gold medalist at the Olympics, a freestyle skier from, um, this woman who's at Stanford. I think her name is Eileen Gu. There's a press conference, uh, where somebody asks her, "What do you do to, like, train your mind? You seem so articulate and-

    18. RGRobert Greene52:59

        Uh-huh

    19. AHAndrew Huberman52:59

        ... um, and so sharp." And, um, and in my mind, I'm thinking, you know, uh, Eileen is, uh, clearly, uh, you know, you know, far to the, the right o- uh, of average on, on many, many things, right? But at Stanford a- and elsewhere, but I will say often at Stanford, you encounter this phenotype.

    20. RGRobert Greene53:16

        Uh-huh.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman53:16

        Like, people extremely articulate, and very fast, and very present.

    22. RGRobert Greene53:21

        Yeah.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman53:21

        It's like a thing.

    24. RGRobert Greene53:22

        Right.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman53:22

        And, and a- again, not just at Stanford, but there are a lot of them-

    26. RGRobert Greene53:25

        Yeah, sure

    27. AHAndrew Huberman53:25

        ... among the undergraduates especially. So her answer is, I- is incredible. Her answer was about slowness, not about speed.

    28. RGRobert Greene53:34

        Right, right.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman53:34

        Her answer was that she spends a lot of time in her head-

    30. RGRobert Greene53:37

        Yeah
12. 55:03 – 1:01:53

    Slowness, Getting Outside of Human Social World, Tool: Mountain Climbing

    1. AHAndrew Huberman55:04

       I'd love your thoughts on experience versus report of experience and different ways to report experience. Here's my motivation for this question. I think people are experiencing things, but a lot of times they're recording it now as they do it-

    2. RGRobert Greene55:23

       Yeah

    3. AHAndrew Huberman55:24

       ... in order to share it with other people, and the, the motivation for that is entirely understandable. But you look at a concert, everyone's filming the concert, and they're sharing it with the people who can't be there, so there's a really nice component to it. But if somebody, let's say, goes on a big adventure, a, a long backpacking trip, trip in Yosemite or down to the Amazon, some people are doing that and not reporting it to anyone. But I think now because of camera phones and social media, most people are thinking about if and how they will report the experience they're having, if not in real time, later.

    4. RGRobert Greene55:59

       Yeah.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman55:59

       And you, on the other hand, although there are clips of you on podcasts and so forth on social media, we're all grateful for that, you've chosen to do the long timescale reporting of your adventures and experiences.

    6. RGRobert Greene56:15

       Yeah, yeah.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman56:15

       And movies are like that, too. Couple hours, but still longform compared to social media.

    8. RGRobert Greene56:20

       Yeah.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman56:20

       And you beautifully describe this thing about entering the timescale of the octopus's life or the dog's daily experience, and I, I was thinking to myself, well, kind of like movies I've fallen in love with, um, concerts that transformed me. You know, they require that I actually just be there-

    10. RGRobert Greene56:40

        Yeah

    11. AHAndrew Huberman56:40

        ... and not think about the export of that experience at all.

    12. RGRobert Greene56:42

        Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman56:44

        So once again, I'm wondering, are we limiting ourselves? Are we getting locked into the technology that is really limiting our experience? And what was the value for you in doing a long-term writing of this book?

    14. RGRobert Greene56:59

        Well, it was more than long-term writing because I couldn't type, so my left hand is still kind of frozen, and so I had to hand write the entire book. You were talking about slowness. I had a system of two book stands, one next to each other, a notebook. I would write a story in the notebook by hand. I would then edit it by hand, recopying what I had written and occasionally changing a word, and then going back and doing the same thing there, and then going back and doing it again. So I had to like, my... It altered my thought processes because I was used to typing very fast, right? This was a whole different layer of thinking that I had to go through because when you're handwriting, your thinking really has to slow down. You have to focus very deeply because you can't like quickly change things, right? So it, it created for me a different kind of book, I think, th- that slowness factor. But part of the sublime is getting outside the human, the human realm, right?

    15. AHAndrew Huberman58:08

        Mm-hmm.

    16. RGRobert Greene58:08

        Okay? So we live in this period where we never interact with anything that's not human, right? So even if you're in the wilds, y- you're in Yosemite or something, you're still with your phone, you're still navigating with your phone, you're still recording it so people can see you. You're immersed in the social human world, right? And it's this little bubble that you live in, but life is much greater than the human. There's a universe, there's a cosmos, there's animals, there's landscapes, there's the weirdness of being alive, there's time, all these things that can, you can explore and you can alter. But if you're so locked into the human social world, you cannot access the sublime, right? And in ancient cultures, there's a lot of things in there about our indigenous and our ancient ancestors 'cause I'm obsessed with that as, as I am with childhood. And for them, they, uh, they look at the world and they see like plants coming up out of the ground. They see enormous mastodons and bears that are twice the size of what bears are now, and they're going... They are obsessed with what isn't human, and that's where religions start from, and that's where spirituality starts from, is all these things that transcend the human and how insane it is that life dies and then reemerges out of the ground, that these large animals are created. Okay? So part of being human is this obsession with what isn't human, what transcends us as a species, fascinations with just the elements, with the clouds, with the sky, with everything around us that isn't just the social world. And so when you're so locked in and you have to climb a mountain, I have a lot of things in there about climbing mountains, which can be an incredibly sublime experience because if you think about it, you're literally climbing up the s- the, the, the side of something that's millions of years old, that predates humans, right? That emerged out of the ground, out of this incredible process. You're climbing into the sky. You're there, you're like almost like a bird, right? You're, you're leaving the el- oxygen levels are changing, your brain is changing. Climbing a mountain can be an incredibly sublime experience, and mountain climbers have some of the m- have reported some of the most sublime experiences because at every moment, particularly rock climbing, they could die, right? And the intensity of life and death, it just makes it an addiction, okay? But if you're climbing the mountain and you're like filming it and looking at it and look- and navigating through it, you're not, you're not experiencing the mountain itself. So the technology is actually a major roadblock to experiencing the sublime. It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be. You could use it as a tool and an instrument. So I, I looked online for, like, things that are going on with space and the new telescopes that they have launched and the images from NASA about our universe. That is utterly sublime, and I can't access that directly. I can't climb into the sky and see these things. So I'm not totally against technology. You can use it to sort of mine these incredible things that science is uncovering, but it's not about my reporting it back to other people. It's not about the social aspect of the Hubble, of the Vera Rubin telescope and, and you know, what it means to me and my ego and how my infl- people who are my followers can follow that. It's just about the experience itself, right? So technology can be used for the sublime if it's not about your influencing and about the, the social element.

13. 1:01:53 – 1:07:57

    Experiencing the World Beyond Us, Tool: Think Musically

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:53

       Is it fair to say that when we try to experience life at the same speed that we're going to report those experiences, something crucial is lost?

    2. RGRobert Greene1:02:07

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:08

       Because one of the great joys for me in doing laboratory science, which I haven't done in a few years, we shut my lab basically in 2023, '24, 'cause my post-docs moved on and I was doing this other podcast thing-

    4. RGRobert Greene1:02:22

       Yeah

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:22

       ... was I would spend years looking at things down the microscope-

    6. RGRobert Greene1:02:25

       Yeah

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:25

       ... collecting data-

    8. RGRobert Greene1:02:27

       Wow

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:27

       ... observing things. And of course, the job of a scientist is to then take those, uh, observations and then put them into photo micrograph form and put them out into the world for evaluation-

    10. RGRobert Greene1:02:39

        Yeah, yeah

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:39

        ... and sharing.

    12. RGRobert Greene1:02:40

        Yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:40

        But the process of writing a paper is a whole different biz. I'll go into seminars and talking about the work. It's, it's at a completely different speed or a completely different spatial scale, but-

    14. RGRobert Greene1:02:51

        Yeah

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:51

        ... the adventure was down the microscope.

    16. RGRobert Greene1:02:53

        Yeah.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:53

        The report of the adventure was in papers and at meetings.

    18. RGRobert Greene1:02:56

        Yeah, yeah.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:57

        I never thought about the meetings or the paper as I was doing the work. It is like a, it's a totally different set of brain circuits, and that's sort of a bit of what you're describing here. And I wonder, you know, our mutual friend Rick Rubin, he'll-- he talks a lot about how he encourages artists to forget about how they're going to be perceived in order-

    20. RGRobert Greene1:03:13

        Yeah

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:13

        ... to do their best work-

    22. RGRobert Greene1:03:14

        Yeah

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:14

        ... which then, of course, is perceived in the best way.

    24. RGRobert Greene1:03:17

        Yeah.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:18

        That, but you have to get out of the, the delivery mode.

    26. RGRobert Greene1:03:22

        Yeah.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:23

        And so going to a concert and filming yourself for the rest of the world there, it's, it's like a collision of, of brain circuits and y- and it's almost like it detracts from the experience.

    28. RGRobert Greene1:03:33

        Yesterday, I was driving back from Topanga. I was being in a, in a limo chauffeured back to my house, and I'm listening to music. And I'm listening to this, um, recording of, of Scarlatti, this composer, by, by Horowitz, the famous pianist. And I'm trying to, like, get inside of each note and follow the music as it flows, and it's very difficult. My mind was continually wandering. But as I'm going inside the flow of the music, which alters your experience of time, by the way, I'm starting to see things in the music itself, and I'm thinking the rhythms and the patterns and certain falling of notes has this emotional effect that's very interesting. And so I'm thinking along with the music, and I'm inside the notes, and I'm inside the progression, and I'm inside the composer's mind who composed it. I'm reliving his experience as he composed the music.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:29

        [chuckles]

    30. RGRobert Greene1:04:30

        And so the music has this level of experience, this level of being inside of it that can be very powerful because music is utterly sublime. I have a lot of things in there about music because music takes us back to our pre-verbal roots. Birds sing. Language probably evolved from music itself, right? And music itself, instrumental music doesn't have words, but it feels like the essence of our emotions, of our consciousness, right? So when you're able to enter into music and f- and I have a cha- an exercise where you think musically and you follow the notes and you follow the logic and the progression, it's a very sublime experience. But if you're at a concert, first of all, it's a little harder at a concert 'cause the music's of a different order, but you can still do that. I remember, I'm gonna date myself, and people are gonna be laughing at me, but I would go to Grateful Dead concerts in the '70s when I was in college, and you could still have that, that-- What I'm doing with Scarlatti, I would do with some of their long instrumental pieces, which were quite sublime. So when you're doing that, you're not inside the music. You're, you're, like, recording it. You're just... It's just like this, it's just like entertainment or something to, like, stimulate you on this base level. There's a way of experiencing things where you're inside them and not outside, and movies are the same way. I like it when I watch a movie, particularly of, of a different period of time or from the past, I like to feel like I'm inside the actual movie itself, that I actually can experience it as if I am there. So when you're so immersed in how other people are looking at you and that your only way of r- of thinking about it is in terms of how other people are seeing it, you're not experiencing the actual cultural moment. And culture can and should be sublime if you, if you experience it differently.
14. 1:07:57 – 1:15:11

    Slowness in Writing, Tool: Handwriting; Cuttlefish, Hand Gestures

    1. RGRobert Greene1:07:57

       Yeah.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:57

       Which raises a question. I was thinking this before.

    3. RGRobert Greene1:08:00

       Yeah.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:00

       You opted to write the book by hand as opposed to using audio recordings. Why was that? Because you could have easily just sat with hands still and, and done that.

    5. RGRobert Greene1:08:10

       Well, well, so in the end, I filled over 100 notebooks with my handwritten things. Literally, you c- I can show you in my garage. But at the very end when I thought things were good enough, I would use whisper transcription, okay? And then I would print it out and hand, and edit with hand again, and then finally dictate it again one final time and edit it with one hand. Okay, so the slowness was, was intense. But you know this as, as, as a neuroscientist, the relationship between the brain and the hand is a very, very powerful one. It has very ancient roots. So many of the neural pathways involve the hand and the brain because that's where our intelligence evolved, picking up things and manipulating them and creating tools. The relationship between the brain and the hand is very, very powerful. So when you hand write, you're using the brain differently than when you type and look at a screen. It's a different flow of time, okay? And then if you just dictate into the computer, it's even kind of even more alienating in a way because your hands aren't involved at all. At least in typing you are. And so to me, I tried to immediately dictate it. Something was lost. I didn't feel like I was expressing something deep because my hand literally has to be involved in the creation of it. And I would find, first of all, the transcription things, you know, AI is so sophisticated, but the transcriptions things are actually quite primitive. They don't do punctuation. They don't exactly hear what you're saying, so you have to, you'll have to go back over a lot of it. It can be very frustrating. It's not like I'm creating oral literature. I'm not Homer. I'm not remembering a, not singing about a ballad of people that I've memorized. And so it's like this immediate thing that's coming out of you, whereas writing by hand, you have to think. You have to sit there and ponder each movement of your hand and the ink. I also got heavily into ink, I have to say, so it's... I'm a fetishist because handwriting is a very sensual experience, where this isn't. And so I, I got all these fountain pens, and I buy all these different colored inks from this company in Italy and the different, the inks have this beautiful kind of flow to it and a feel to it, to actually see ink on the page. So handwriting is a kind of a sensual experience if you go through it, right? Like, calligraphy can be a very sensual experience. So people will say, "Why don't you just dictate your book, Robert? It's so easy." But I couldn't find, I couldn't... It wasn't me. It wasn't, like, natural to me, and so I had to go recourse to the handwriting aspect.

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:10:59

       I have a, a question and a, and a perhaps interesting tidbit to share about the hands and handwriting. What color ink are you, a black, a blue-black, or a blue?

    7. RGRobert Greene1:11:09

       I had different colors. So there's this company called Visconti, Italian company. They make wonderful fountain pens.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:18

       Mm-hmm.

    9. RGRobert Greene1:11:19

       And they have this one hand fountainar called Homo Sapiens, which is my favorite, and they have these beautiful bottles of ink, and I have sepia, which I love. It's a beautiful color. Sepia, it's this weird brown, yellow-brown. For an ink, it's magnificent. I have black, I have turquoise, and I have red, and then I also have green, but I don't use the green very much. So I would mix up the colors because that would, each day it said, "Look, what color do I feel like today? Oh, I feel like writing in red," you know? But then I'd always end up kind of going back to sepia because I love that sepia color.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:55

        This is, uh, clearly being communicated through the universe to us. Um, you know the origins of sepia is from the ink-

    11. RGRobert Greene1:12:03

        Yes

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:03

        ... of the cuttlefish.

    13. RGRobert Greene1:12:04

        Yes, [laughs] .

    14. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:05

        So we worked on, or had is how I prefer to say it, Sepia bandensis, which is the dwarf cuttlefish. So the Latin name of the cuttlefish is actually sepia.

    15. RGRobert Greene1:12:14

        Oh, right.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:14

        And their ink was the original source.

    17. RGRobert Greene1:12:17

        Right.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:17

        Well, the-

    19. RGRobert Greene1:12:17

        Is the ink that color that comes out of them?

    20. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:19

        Yes. Yeah.

    21. RGRobert Greene1:12:19

        It is?

    22. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:20

        I mean, depending on the, the water environment they're in and the lighting they're under.

    23. RGRobert Greene1:12:24

        I never thought of that. I never thought of that.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:24

        But yeah, that's, that's-

    25. RGRobert Greene1:12:25

        That's really interesting

    26. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:25

        ... that's the, the origin. The hand, um, you may or may not know, I learned this from my good friend Eddie Chang, that we were discussing earlier-

    27. RGRobert Greene1:12:32

        Yeah

    28. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:32

        ... the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, one of the leading expert neuroscientists on speech and language and epS- epilepsy and a, a true savant of all things, uh, neuro and more. He told me that the hand representation in the brain isn't just close to but is nested inside the language areas.

    29. RGRobert Greene1:12:51

        Ah.

    30. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:52

        The Italians tell us this right away.
15. 1:15:11 – 1:16:31

    Sponsor: LMNT

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:11

       I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking LMNT makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise. So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink sixteen to thirty-two ounces of water with an LMNT packet dissolved in it. I also drink LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. LMNT has a bunch of great-tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free LMNT sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free sample

16. 1:16:31 – 1:23:31

    Childhood, Tool: Uncovering Your Life’s Task

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:31

       pack. I'd like to talk a little bit more about childhood.

    2. RGRobert Greene1:16:34

       Okay.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:34

       And, um, I know I've asked you this in a previous meeting, but long ago in-- when I read Mastery, I was just, you know, like clubbed over the head, uh, in the best possible sense of the phrase with the, the statement that you made, um, that some event early in life for each of us kind of portends what we should or ought to explore later in life.

    4. RGRobert Greene1:17:04

       Yeah.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:17:04

       Like that there's some unique event that places some unique capacity, curiosity, hunger in us to go do something that is uniquely us. No other person had that experience-

    6. RGRobert Greene1:17:18

       Yeah

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:17:18

       ... and the experiences that follow that would allow them to do that thing. What is your suggestion for people who want to think about what that seed event might have been if they don't know? Like, like how do we know what that thing was for us if we're like twelve years or older?

    8. RGRobert Greene1:17:33

       I was always clear for myself about what that was because I was obsessed from a very early age with words. I just thought words themselves are very strange and very weird that we have these words that mean things. And I remember, I think I was in the third grade, my teacher put up the word carpenter, and she said, "Now try and see how many words you can form out of those letters." And for some reason, that just excited me so much, that with these little individual letters, you could create all these different words, right? I don't know why. I can't explain it. There's no, there's no logic behind it. But it seemed like letters and words were magical, and that always attracted me. So I always felt a connection to-- knew I had to be a writer because I had that, that weird connection to words themselves, not just what they meant, but the sounds of them, right, obsessed me. But after writing Mastery, a lot of people would come to me 'cause it-- I talk about your life's task, and I also have a chapter in the new book about this concept. Um, and they would say, "Well, Robert, I don't know what my life's task is. I'm in my twenties. You write about it. You write about da Vinci. You write about all these other people and stuff. I have no idea." And I had to go across this barrier because I never had that experience. I always knew that it had to be writing. So I had to try and understand their perspective, which is in teaching, good teachers know that they know more than their students, but they have to put their minds in the minds of the students who don't know enough. So you have to kind of lower yourself into their way of l-- not lower, but inside their less kno- knowledgeable experience. So I had to go like, "Why wouldn't they know it? Why would they have..." Because if you think about your early childhood, you had those moments, right? You knew that you would love this, you loved kicking a ball. I had-- I loved sports, right? You knew that I loved music and sounds. I talk a lot about How-ah, Howard Gardner and his five frames of intelligence. You had one of them. But thinking deeply about their experience, I came to realize that first of all, they've lost a deep connection to those childhood experience, to those moments they've forgotten about them. Why have they forgotten about them? Maybe they weren't as intense as mine was, but also what happened was all these other voices intervened, right? Their parents told them what they should love, what they shouldn't love. They had to learn math, and they didn't wanna learn math. The teachers told them what they were good at. They get funneled through this system which kind of constrains your brain into a certain career path. This is what you have to learn, right? And they hear a thousand different voices in their head, and they have no connection to what they really love, to what Abraham Maslow calls your impulse voices, voices inside of you that you're im-- that are natural, that are physiological inside of you. They don't hear it anymore. And so I had to kind of realize that we have to cut out all of those voices, and I would go through this process, and I compared it to, like, archeology. We were digging, digging, and digging into their childhood for little fossils of information. I would kind of go through a process of, "Can you remember certain moments in your early-- What's, what are your earliest childhood memories? What are memories of things that were very exciting to you?" We literally had to go back into their childhood to uncover those moments where something sparked and they were excited, not because their parents told them, but because it was them. And for me, it's a hard concept to understand because I always had that, but people lose touch with what they a- what their own bodies want, what their own impulses, their own desires are telling them. And so we would cut through all of the other noise. I would also go through this process of, "You're in your twenties. What is it that you hate? What repels you? What repulses you?" For me, I hated working for other people. I'll just lay it out straight. I hated the egos. I hated the political games. I hated people... It wasn't about results. It was about currying up to the boss and how good you were with the charming stuff. I hated it. I never lasted more than 11 months at any single job in my entire life. So knowing that I could not work for other people, the only thing I could do was write books, 'cause it's the only profession for me where I had, didn't have a boss, essentially. I mean, you kind of have a boss. But anyway, what is it that you hate? What are the things that you can't do that when you do, they just feel wrong? And a lot of it is when you are frustrated, that's the, that's a key moment in your life. What is frustrating to you? Listen to that voice because it's, uh, it's, it's part of that, that life's task, that, that inner voice that's talking to you saying, "This isn't you. This doesn't fit you." Listen to it and don't just see frustration. See something positive. It's telling you something about what your, about how you've taken a wrong path in life. It's not easy, and I sometimes spend days with these people and, and weeks trying to help them, but I've had had some success, but it takes time. You know? You have to be willing to commit to the time, and you have to journal, and you have to write about yourself, and you have to go deep into your memories. You have to think about your childhood, and you have to go back into those moments that had nothing to do with what other people were telling you.

17. 1:23:31 – 1:28:55

    Stroke & Insight; Finding Sublime in Daily Experiences

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:23:31

       I think, um, I've heard two different notions about how great ideas and insights come to us. Uh, one is in the doing. You know, we're-

    2. RGRobert Greene1:23:39

       Yeah

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:23:40

       ... drilling, drilling, lathing, lathing away-

    4. RGRobert Greene1:23:42

       Yeah, yeah

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:23:42

       ... and ideas or a physical thing, and the, and the other is that they come to us spontaneously, a-away from the attempt to, like, get to an answer. You... Like in the shower or-

    6. RGRobert Greene1:23:51

       Yeah, yeah, yeah

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:23:52

       ... or while running or doing something.

    8. RGRobert Greene1:23:54

       Yeah.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:23:54

       And I, I wonder for you, uh, has that process of insight and epiphany changed as when comparing before as to, um, after your stroke? I mean, you're still fairly mobile. You're clearly very articulate, but I wonder, are your, are your ideas coming in at a different rate or in different places because of-

    10. RGRobert Greene1:24:14

        Well, I'll tell you-

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:24:14

        ... the, the changes in your physical life?

    12. RGRobert Greene1:24:16

        I'll tell you what happened, and it's very interesting. I noticed after my stroke that I was more emotional. I had less control over my emotions. I would suddenly start crying, and I don't really know why I was crying. I would suddenly feel mo- a l- kind of this wave of ecstasy. Why is it happening to me? And then I did a little bit of research, and you would know more about this, but stroke, the right side of the brain, affecting the right side of the brain often has that effect on stroke victims. The left side is language and logic and, and reasoning powers. The right side... And these, there's a lot of cliches involved in the left/right things, and I understand that, but the right is, is a more kind of holistic and more kind of emotional part of the brain. And so I was feeling on a deeper level. I was also feeling like so much more empathy for people.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:25:13

        Hmm.

    14. RGRobert Greene1:25:13

        Right? Like, I would see other people who were handicapped, who were still in a wheelchair, and I would, like, almost wanna cry, and I'd almost like, "Damn it, I understand your weakness. I understand the feeling of helplessness." So my brain shifted into something more emotional. I saw a quote from the poet John Keats, one of my favorite poets, and it said, "Oh, to have a life of sensations instead of thoughts." And so You can think emotionally, you can think through sensations, you can empathize, you can feel your way into things, and it's a different form of thinking. And it made me realize how much your brain and the structure of it alters how you think and how you relate to the world. So something I had no control over, a stroke, altered me in this weird way. It made me more emotional. So it makes you realize how the brain so much controls who you are and how you experience life. And so I had this much more kind of intuitive feel for the subject. The sublime was no longer an intellectual thing like it would've been 20 years ago. It was a feeling inside of me. And when I wrote a, a, a story, it would resonate inside of me and I knew that it was right. And if it felt too intellectual, I said, "This isn't working for me."

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:26:36

        So would you say your stroke sort of freed you up to some extent to allow certain things to come out that like, you know, p- maybe before you would've self-edited?

    16. RGRobert Greene1:26:47

        I think so, and I think, um ... I don't know. Uh, it's gonna sound woo woo. It's gonna sound like I've, I've gone off the deep edge, but it felt like, um, the stroke happened for a purpose.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:27:02

        Mm-hmm.

    18. RGRobert Greene1:27:03

        Right? And to me, the way I look at it is if I see it as a curse, I become a bitter person and I just shrivel up. But if I see it as a blessing, it's a much different experience, and the blessing was that I had to find the sublime in the smallest details. Readers aren't gonna be able to trek through the Gobi Desert. They're not gonna be able, a lot of them, swim with dolphins. They can't have these adventures, but everyone lives in a house, in a room. We all feel kind of constricted. I could now make, bring the sublime to the level of your daily experience because I compared myself... The image that came to me when I sat in my little office trying to write the book was that I was a bird in a cage, right? I used to be flying around and having all this fun, and now I was in a cage, and I, I had to accommodate myself to a cage, and I had to kind of find a way to sing inside my cage. And so a lot of people are like that. They don't have acc- They don't live in mansions. They don't have magnificent gardens. They live in small apartments. And I don't wanna give this feeling like the sublime is some elite experience that, that, that only s- rich people can have. The point of the book is that the need for a transcendent experience is, which what the sublime is about in many ways, is as important a need to humans as clothing, as shelter, as companionship, as anything else. It's deeply, deeply embedded in our nature, right? So I want it to feel like everybody can have access to it. So if a stroke victim whose life is so limited can find their way to the sublime, then that means that anybody can find their way, and that's how I wanted to write the book.

18. 1:28:55 – 1:35:24

    Flow & Transcendent Experiences, Prodigies

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:28:55

       What I'm about to ask is somewhat of a merge between some of your prior books-

    2. RGRobert Greene1:28:58

       Sure

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:28:59

       ... about power, about personalities-

    4. RGRobert Greene1:29:02

       Yeah

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:02

       ... about performers, and the newest book-

    6. RGRobert Greene1:29:06

       Yeah

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:06

       ... coming out soon about the sublime, and in order to try and make this succinct, I'll just do this in bullet points.

    8. RGRobert Greene1:29:14

       Yeah.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:15

       We've had a lot of discussions on this podcast about mitochondria, which are s- the powerhouse of the cell and energy and so forth, and one guest in particular, Martin Picard, who's an expert in mitochondria, talked about directing mitochondrial energy toward particular endeavors. Focus is what creates our lives and us-

    10. RGRobert Greene1:29:35

        Yeah

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:35

        ... people's experience of us and our experiences. There are these people throughout history who seem to have so much energy, and to ex- focus that energy so intensely and do incredible things in art and, you know, oration. You know, like, uh, we might call this, like, charisma.

    12. RGRobert Greene1:29:58

        Yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:59

        And they often died early.

    14. RGRobert Greene1:30:01

        Yeah.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:01

        And I've, I've been really intrigued by this. Like, maybe they, their energy was packed in space and time and, and focus into such a, like, a dense beam that they couldn't go on-

    16. RGRobert Greene1:30:13

        Yeah, yeah

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:13

        ... a long time.

    18. RGRobert Greene1:30:14

        Yeah.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:14

        Right? [laughs] Uh, and I don't... This is really woo, what I'm about to ask.

    20. RGRobert Greene1:30:17

        [laughs]

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:17

        But in researching this and writing-

    22. RGRobert Greene1:30:20

        Yeah

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:20

        ... uh, The Law of The Sublime, did you ever think about, like, what was the experience of some of the people that you had written about earlier? Like, the intense life of, uh, somebody like 50 Cent, the intense life of some of the people you wrote about in, um, The Laws of Seduction, who are these extreme examples of life energy-

    24. RGRobert Greene1:30:40

        Yeah

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:41

        ... funneled through a particular personality and style.

    26. RGRobert Greene1:30:44

        Yeah.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:44

        And many of whom, I mean, 50's still around, but many of whom are n- they die early.

    28. RGRobert Greene1:30:51

        Yeah.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:51

        Does, uh, did that ever come to you as, as an idea? Like, uh, th- this isn't the slow-paced life. These are people that-

    30. RGRobert Greene1:30:59

        I see what you're saying
19. 1:35:24 – 1:37:02

    Sponsor: Function

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:35:24

       I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. Function provides over 160 advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot gives you insights into your heart health, your hormone health, autoimmune function, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added access to advanced MRI and CT scans. Function not only provides testing of over 160 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, it also analyzes these results and provides recommendations for improving your health from top doctors. For example, in a recent test with Function, I learned that some of my blood lipids were slightly out of range. As a result, I decided to start supplementing with nattokinase, which can naturally help reduce LDL cholesterol, and it did. In a follow-up test, I could confirm that this strategy worked. My blood lipids are now back exactly where I want them. Comprehensive lab testing of the sort that Function offers is just so important for health. I mean, how else are you gonna know what's going on under the hood? And while I've been doing blood work for years, it used to be time-consuming, complicated, and expensive. In fact, I used to spend thousands of dollars per year trying to get this kind of data, and the data, frankly, were not all that good. But now with Function, it's extremely easy and affordable. A Function membership is only a dollar a day, $365 a year, and if you think about the information it provides and the health challenges it helps you avoid and the proactive things that it can do for you to enhance your health, I truly look at it as a savings. To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code Huberman for a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman.

20. 1:37:02 – 1:42:33

    Love Sublime, Vulnerability & Falling in Love

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:37:02

       Several times you've said that accessing the sublime is about relating as a human to things that are not human.

    2. RGRobert Greene1:37:09

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:37:10

       Is there any way to access the sublime through human-human interaction?

    4. RGRobert Greene1:37:14

       Yes, most definitely. So I have a chapter called The Love Sublime, and it's not the art of seduction, and people are going, "Robert, have you changed?" And I go, "Well, no." Seduction is a book in itself, but love is something different. And so I talk about the sense of falling so deeply in love with another human being that you lose a sense of your own ego, and the chapter is called Escape the Prison of the Ego: The Love Sublime. And the idea is the human being has two sides to us. We're physical. We have an animal side, but we have something else, and I would, I would hate to use the word, but I would say it's spiritual, right? And so if the only interest in, in the other person is about sex- There's some level of satisfaction to it, but there's also an emptiness that goes with it, right? But if it's just about religion and about, you know, going to church or whatever, there's nothing physical in it, and it doesn't feel so deeply human. It's just the spiritual. But I'm a human being. I have a body. I have sexual desires. I have all these other things going on inside of me that religion has nothing to do with. Love is an area where you can combine the physical and the spiritual into something very, very, very profound. And I say it's kind of the ultimate human experience that we can have because your physical attraction to someone turns into something spiritual. People are objects that we cannot see inside of them. But in love, that object becomes a subject. They become something that's inside of them. You can feel their experience. They become a part of you. Now you-- people will wonder, "Well, how often does that ever happen?" You know, "That doesn't sound like my experience." What I try to explain is the metaphor we use is falling in love, and it's very eloquent, so it's literally a sense of falling. And falling has an element of fear, right? That's what you have to understand. Love isn't about comfort and security and, and Russell Stover chocolates and, and handing out red roses and Valentines. There's something dark and terrifying about it because you're falling. You're letting go of your defenses, and you're being vulnerable like an animal that's exposing its belly, and that's a frightening experience. And what happens to people is as you start falling, you stop and you go, "I don't completely trust this person. I'm be-becoming vulnerable, and if I become vulnerable," this isn't conscious, it's unconsciously, "they can hurt me. They could abandon me." And the feeling of abandonment is, like, perhaps the most primal, horrible emotion for a human to have. It goes back to our early, early childhood experiences, right? And so we stop falling, and we start going, "I'm not so sure about them. Maybe they don't love me as much, or maybe I can't trust them." And as you go through that process, the other person senses it in a very primal way as well, and they stop falling because they can feel that you're not falling along with them. If you fell completely and you lost your defenses, the other person would be invited to fall along with you. And so the reason you've never experienced it in your life is you don't wanna be vulnerable, and that's very natural in the modern world because our life is harsh, and there's so many intrusive things going on. You wanna defend yourself. I'm trying to tell young people in particular that you live in a culture that does not want you to be in love with someone.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:40:52

       Hmm.

    6. RGRobert Greene1:40:52

       They demean love. They demean the aspect of it. They think of it sentimental and old-fashioned, the concept of love that I'm bringing out right now. And I wanna tell you that the act of loving a person and letting go of all your defenses is a form of rebellion against the ugliness in this world. You're, you're doing something different. You're rebelling against all the narcissism and all the defensiveness and all the closed-off elements in our culture, and you're saying, "Fuck you," to that culture. "I'm gonna fall in love with a single individual, and it's gonna be an incredible, transcendent, sublime experience." I wanna bring that back into the culture because in the 13th century, we had this, uh, this new thing called courtly love, right? And it's where our whole notions of Western love came from, right? Troubadours writing about it, and the sense of love was a physical and a spiritual experience, and it was kind of sacrilegious because only Christ should be a spiritual experience. So there was something very kind of rebellious about this idea that loving a man or a woman could actually be a spiritual experience. I'm hoping in that chapter to bring back that value, particularly among young people, because they're so afraid of being vulnerable. They're so afraid of being hurt, and being hurt is okay. It's a very important human emotion to go through. Rejection and feeling hurt is actually an experience that will grow you in a way, and never allowing that falling process to occur is, I don't know, you're gonna miss something very deep in life.

21. 1:42:33 – 1:47:16

    Love, Trust; Opposites as False Enemies, Embracing Masculine & Feminine

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:42:33

       It does seem that people are in a very self-protective mode these days. Part of me wants to say it's because of the need for every experience, including love, to be reported on. You know?

    2. RGRobert Greene1:42:46

       You go back to that, but I think it's true.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:42:47

       I mean, yeah, you know, like, that people are gonna have to post it, and it's gonna have to be shared. Actually, I found recently a f- a friend got married, uh, we're not real close, but, um, in a really stealth way, just like it, you know, and I wasn't close enough to them to be invited, and I was like, "That's pretty awesome." They just, like, went and got married with-

    4. RGRobert Greene1:43:08

       Yeah

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:08

       ... their closest people-

    6. RGRobert Greene1:43:10

       Yeah

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:10

       ... completely stealth.

    8. RGRobert Greene1:43:11

       Yeah.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:12

       This is a public-facing person. Nobody knows it.

    10. RGRobert Greene1:43:14

        Yeah.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:15

        And the reason I think it's awesome is because it means it was just for them.

    12. RGRobert Greene1:43:20

        Yeah, yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:21

        And, uh, you know, and they're early in the relationship, but, like, that's, that's pretty darn cool.

    14. RGRobert Greene1:43:26

        Well-

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:26

        As opposed to the need to project it out to the world and tell everybody and, uh, like, that's-

    16. RGRobert Greene1:43:31

        I have this, I call it th-th-this demon that's inside of you. It's a voice that's constantly telling you to mistrust the other person-

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:40

        Hmm

    18. RGRobert Greene1:43:40

        ... and to feel like something is wrong in the relationship. It's a demon inside of you that's speaking to you, and a lot of it is social. Your friends will tell you, will, will fill you with doubts about the other person.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:43:51

        Hmm.

    20. RGRobert Greene1:43:51

        "It's not cool to be so involved with another person. You're being egotistical. You're cutting yourself off." You're gonna hear these voices, and that's what I meant about the culture is kind of against this whole thing. And so The social element is actually playing a very large part in the fact that you don't want to make a fool of yourself, for instance. You want people to think that you're cool, that, you know, you c- you can sleep with many different women, that you're, that you're not such a, a sob. You know, you don't, you're not gullible kind of thing. And so it's a kind of a cynicism and a hardness that I, I find very dangerous because s- the sublime is kind of letting go of things, and it's almost like softening yourself to the world and letting the world enter into you and kind of transport you, and that's what this kind of love sublime is inviting you into.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:44:46

        Well, and the incel movement is the ultimate extreme of, of this. Although now, large part because of recent events, we're also seeing something kind of analogous to the incel movement on the female side.

    22. RGRobert Greene1:44:59

        For sure.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:44:59

        A lot, lot of-

    24. RGRobert Greene1:45:00

        They have a name for it. I can't remember what it is, but yeah.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:45:03

        Yeah. Yeah, this, uh, I don't wanna go down the sociopolitical, uh, uh, rabbit hole, but-

    26. RGRobert Greene1:45:09

        No

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:45:09

        ... so there's a big divide right now that is really about lack of trust.

    28. RGRobert Greene1:45:13

        Yeah.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:45:14

        Love has been kind of relegated to the, the, uh, idiot's path.

    30. RGRobert Greene1:45:19

        Yeah, yeah.
22. 1:47:16 – 1:56:28

    Religion, Awareness of Death, Loss of Spirituality

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:47:17

       You sort of touched on, um, spirituality and religion and notions of God. I think any conversation about the sublime, at least this conversation, I, I feel like would be incomplete if we didn't sort of, uh, address that, that for many people, not all, but for many people, a literal love relationship where they love God and they feel that God loves them is an, is a profoundly important part of their life experience.

    2. RGRobert Greene1:47:48

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:47:48

       It's not just consoling, but it, it really gives them access to-

    4. RGRobert Greene1:47:53

       Yeah

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:47:53

       ... um, levels of perception and experience that are irreplaceable by humans. So I'll just say it directly. I don't get the sense that you're a religious person. You can correct me if that's wrong, but everything you've said, you know, accessing the sublime is about the relationship to the non-human. Even the pain and pleasure piece, like the, you know, the depictions of Christ on the cross is a-

    6. RGRobert Greene1:48:12

       Right

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:48:12

       ... a, you know, it's a painful image, but then there are these loving images of, um-

    8. RGRobert Greene1:48:16

       Yeah

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:48:16

       ... that's Christianity, but y- you get the idea. So where does the concept and, for you, the experience of spirituality, religion, and God match up with the sublime? Where does it not square with your own experience?

    10. RGRobert Greene1:48:32

        I don't know. I, I, it, it's, it's, it's a very complex issue. Um, so there are different forms of religion. I- in Buddhism, there really isn't a concept of a higher being. It's that you yourself are, are Buddha. Buddha is mind, and mind is Buddha, so it's inside of you kind of thing, and there's some elements of Christianity that way. But when I look at the earliest religions, indigenous religions and spirituality in the pagan world, 'cause I have a chapter on pagan religion in, in the book, I say that this need to feel transcendent, to feel connected to something higher than the individual life is deeply, deeply sublime. It's a deep human need, okay? And so why do we have this need for belief in something higher than ourselves? It's because we're aware of our death. We're aware of our mortality, unlike any other animal that we know of. Animals intuit the moment that they're going to die, but they don't think about it. We have the ability to think about our death, and it cripples us. If I'm gonna die, why write a book? Why bo- why spend all these years doing things? It's gonna cancel everything out. There's no meaning or purpose to my life. So our awareness of death makes us go search of something higher, of something, a deeper and deeper need inside of us. And religion, for centuries, played a huge, huge role in satisfying that need, and it was a very important need. And it kept To some degree, a level of sanity among humans. And then in the 18th century, it was, uh, that we can pretty much pinpoint is when religion really started to fade in Western experience at least, right? With the Enlightenment and, and certain philosophers and the birth of science and then the Industrial Revolution, and the sense of God faded from our experience. People are still religious today, but this sense of it being a living presence that was with you every... If you study Western civilization in the 14th century, God was a part of everything that you thought and did, everything you saw, every food that you ate, every element of life was embedded in the sacred, right? We humans lost that. And then in the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution happens, science, the world is changing, and people started to rebel against that. They were frightened of it, and there was, like, the Romantic movement, and that is when the word sublime came into our language and became very popular. The Romantic poets popul- and philosophers popularized the word sublime. So my point is, is that we've reached this point where I believe, although there are a lot of religious people, the really deep sense of spirituality, the really deep sense of something larger than you that you-- lives inside of you, that you are a part of and that is guiding your life, is lost. And with it, a very, very important part of our life is lost. Religion was an anchor in our lives, and now it's gone. Now, I'm not saying that I'm a believer. I'm just saying, I'm just noting this phenomenon, and I feel like the loss of religion, the loss of a sense of something transcendent is what is partially making us insane right now. I look at the world, and I feel like it's a madhouse. People are just going berserk. They're so disconnected from their bodies, from their lives, from, from everything, from their environment. And so the loss of God, the death of God, the death of religion was a very, very painful moment in our history and in our psyche. And in some ways, getting back to a kind of a transcendent experience is, is, in some ways can, can solve this, can help us, can get us back to something very-- a very elemental need in us. And in an odd way, I find that discoveries of science have a very deep kind of spiritual component, that we're learning about the human brain is insane. What the... You know, I, I'm not saying it was a creator about it, but there's something absolutely transcendent about studying the human brain. Learning about the cosmos, learning about the Big Bang is, to me, a, a, it's like a spiritual experience. And so we can recover some of that in the modern world. We don't necessarily have to go back to organized religion, but a sense of feeling that we are part of something much larger than our individual lives is an actual critical component to our experience.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:53:32

        I really appreciate those thoughts and insights. I, I was thinking about, uh, your book, The Law of the Sublime, as a portal into richer experience. I, I wasn't thinking about the macro there. Were you thinking about the sort of macro offering and hope for the book to have that impact as you wrote it, or is that-

    12. RGRobert Greene1:53:50

        Yeah

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:53:50

        ... 'cause it, you wrote it across many years.

    14. RGRobert Greene1:53:53

        Yeah.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:53:53

        Uh, sever- seven years you said, and so-

    16. RGRobert Greene1:53:54

        Yeah

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:53:54

        ... it sort of happened in parallel with, with the, uh, with the, the maddening of madness taking over the world.

    18. RGRobert Greene1:54:01

        It was always in the back of my mind, but it's a grandiose ambition, so I don't wanna be grandiose. But I tell you, recently I saw a film that I love by this director Pasolini, Italian director, and it was called The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. And literally Pasolini, who was a homosexual Marxist and was pretty much an atheist, he grew up in Italian Catholic culture, he kind of fell in love with the idea of Christ, and he did a film literally recreating the Gospel according to Matthew, the Book of Matthew in the New Testament. He uses all of the words from that chapter, and he use-- and he chronologically goes through all of the experiences of Christ, and he uses non-professional actors. The guy who plays Christ is, like, a 19-year-old Spanish student of mathematics. He just plucked him out, right? And the movie is, is, is actually a very spiritual experience because it literally feels like you're there, and you can literally understand where it comes from. I was raised Jewish, but when you read the New Testament, it's beautiful, and the ideas in it are beautiful. So I went back, and I reread the Book of Matthew, and I'm going, "How can a, a philosophy that is so much about love..." And there's, uh, expressions in there where somebody asks, "Well, um, should I love my neighbor?" And Christ says, "Anybody can love your neighbor. What you need to love is the person who's not your neighbor. You need to love the person furthest away from your experience, the marginalized, the people that normally are hated." How can a religion that expresses that end up now being this kind of philosophy of division and hatred and marginalizing and polarization and, and victimization? How is it that we take something and turn it into its opposite? It's something maybe I'll write about in another book because it's a phenomenon that fascinates me.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:56:04

        I don't claim to know the answer deeply, but my reflexive response is by taking something that's not of humans and humans contorting it, perverting it into something that's of them.

    20. RGRobert Greene1:56:18

        Yeah.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:56:19

        Right? Uh, you know, and I think Perverted is the operative word there, right?

    22. RGRobert Greene1:56:23

        Yeah.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:56:23

        You know, it's, I think, stolen spirituality. It's manipulated

23. 1:56:28 – 2:02:49

    Best & Worst of Being Human

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:56:28

       and it... Is it fair to say that one of the major barriers to the sublime is focusing on things that are of humans too much?

    2. RGRobert Greene1:56:38

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:56:38

       You know, I mean, humans do incredible things, but, um, and is it then fair to say that maybe the world's losing its mind because we have too much awareness of what other humans are doing all the time?

    4. RGRobert Greene1:56:50

       Yeah.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:56:50

       And it's blocking our awareness of all the other stuff around us.

    6. RGRobert Greene1:56:54

       I was reading the newspaper this morning, uh, which I do every morning, and there was two articles in there. One was they're beginning to alter their idea of where alien life could f- could evolve. There are these planets out there that are ro- that are, uh, I think they call it K7 or something, I don't know. They're, um, around a star that is much larger than our sun and that therefore burns rather s- more slowly. And they're perfectly round. They're no- they're not marred by all these, um, meteors that have hit planet Earth. And because they're a perfect distance from the sun, they probably have water, and probably life forms could evolve on these planets, and they were calling it it would be like a paradise of evolution. I, I can't remember the specifics of why they say that, but it would be an environment much more conducive to life than planet Earth, and it was speculating it took us almost four billion years to evolve intelligent life on planet Earth, and that's probably why we haven't encountered other alien intelligent life forms, is it takes so long to develop, right? But these planets, their star won't burn out. They've probably been around much longer. There probably could be intelligent life, right? I'm thinking, that's one article in the paper. People should be, like, exploding over that thought because not o- what it does is it makes you realize our own planet and how weird it is that life evolved on it, and it was a very precarious experiment. It almost never happened. So it makes you realize how precarious life is on planet Earth. The other ar- article I read was about dinosaurs and this fossil that was discovered in China of an early bird. It's the most preserved fossil of a, of a bird in the dinosaur era because what is the relation... Birds are evolved from dinosaurs. We know that, but there were also flying pterosaurs. There were flying reptiles that weren't, that didn't evolve and that weren't dinosaurs, right? And I'm thinking, they were explaining how beautiful th- the fly- how they took to flight and the different forms of flight that occurred, thinking, "My God, our planet, just imagine what that life was like back then, how insane it was that there were dinosaurs, how insane it was." My point is we could be immersing ourselves in all of these insane things that science is revealing to us. It can literally alter our minds and our relationship to people, to life. When you realize that life was this thin experiment that almost never happened, it alters how you look at things, right? So yeah, we have to get outside the human, but scientists are the ones who are uncovering it. Humans are this insane creature that is able to uncover the secrets of the universe, right? So in essence, I try and say in the book, we are sublime, that we can do that, that we can undercover what is not human and the laws of the universe and things going on. So it's not like the human is this ugly thing. If you think of science, it's built up of hundreds of thousands of individual work, research papers, people immersing themselves in details and then uncovering these fantastic things, right? So to me, science is a sublime phenomenon, and it's humans uncovering these insane stories. It's not like I'm saying I hate humans and you guys have to immerse yourself. It's actually the opposite. We have uncovered this, these ins- phenomenal stories. We are the creators of what is sublime, and so that to me is, is... I can remember the early days of the internet back in the early 2000s where it wasn't what the internet is now. It was actually a realm of kind of freedom. I could, I could connect to somebody in Thailand who was interested in Nietzsche, which who I am, and was interested in John Coltrane, who I am, and we could talk and we could connect and we could see, yes, you come from a very different culture. Why are you interested in these things? And it would be very fascinating. It was this realm of, of freedom. It was like a, a giant human brain. So technology could be sublime. It could lead to a paradise. Humans have a sublime quality, but we also have the capacity for something much different. And look at what the internet has become. It's become something that is not like it was in the early 2000s. It's turned into something very ugly and very dark.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman2:01:46

       Yeah, I have thought for a while now that the, the real problem with humans is our propensity to get absorbed by drama-

    8. RGRobert Greene2:01:58

       Yeah

    9. AHAndrew Huberman2:01:58

       ... and by numbing out.

    10. RGRobert Greene2:02:01

        Oh, God, yeah.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman2:02:01

        Uh, in, in fact, my mental practice in the morning, I do a short meditation, very brief. I can do the sunlight thing and the rest, but I have this, um, imagery that I implant in my head of like a thin, almost like a tightrope that I have to walk.

    12. RGRobert Greene2:02:19

        Uh-huh.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman2:02:19

        And on either side is like a sl-

    14. RGRobert Greene2:02:21

        Okay

    15. AHAndrew Huberman2:02:21

        ... slide down to the, not to the death, but and one side is drama, and the other side is numbing out.

    16. RGRobert Greene2:02:27

        I see.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman2:02:27

        And I do- Realize that you have to get a certain distance, and then, and then that ti- that tightrope turns into more of a, of a flat surface that you can rest on and stay.

    18. RGRobert Greene2:02:36

        Uh-huh.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman2:02:37

        But those early hours, like-

    20. RGRobert Greene2:02:38

        Wow, that's very, that's very true

    21. AHAndrew Huberman2:02:39

        ... you know, I, I need to do that because otherwise the, there are too many things, algorithms and so forth, that can just yank me down the, the either side of that tightrope, and it's not good.

24. 2:02:49 – 2:10:42

    Accessing the Best of Humanity, Tools: Slowness, Creativity & Senses

    1. AHAndrew Huberman2:02:49

       I realize that you put actionable tools in, in the book, but I'm pulling from what we've discussed so far. I'm, I'm hearing that an important component to accessing the best of what is human, but also the non-human in order to enrich one's life and access to the sublime is a slowing down. So that means intentionally not leaping onto the, the time scale, the rhythm of just anyone.

    2. RGRobert Greene2:03:18

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:19

       Uh, to be very deliberate about that-

    4. RGRobert Greene2:03:20

       Yeah

    5. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:20

       ... or just anything.

    6. RGRobert Greene2:03:22

       Yeah.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:22

       And I do hear you loud and clear saying that, you know, humans have a tremendous amount of value to offer our lives.

    8. RGRobert Greene2:03:29

       Yeah.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:29

       And, and not just in, in love, although certainly there-

    10. RGRobert Greene2:03:32

        Yeah

    11. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:32

        ... as you described. But it does seem that it's getting harder and harder to have a great life, even with resources.

    12. RGRobert Greene2:03:44

        Yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:44

        The, the, the challenge becomes not getting yanked down the sides of the, of this, uh-

    14. RGRobert Greene2:03:49

        Yeah

    15. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:49

        ... you know, imagery.

    16. RGRobert Greene2:03:50

        Numbness.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:51

        Yeah.

    18. RGRobert Greene2:03:51

        Yeah.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman2:03:52

        So I think we can easily see the barriers to a good life, to the sublime, are the... I- if you wanna just toss out a couple other, like, tools or ways to access the better version of ourselves so that we can get to the sublime. Uh, you mentioned meditation, writing by hand. These might seem, you know, simple-

    20. RGRobert Greene2:04:10

        Yeah

    21. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:10

        ... but they're very profound ways to, to get there. Do you keep your phone out of the room when you work, when you relate, uh, to other people?

    22. RGRobert Greene2:04:17

        I do, but of course, I'm human and it tempts me, and I understand the addiction. So I've, uh, I don't wanna, uh... There's a slight hypocritical side to me 'cause I can feel it, and I do have to take the phone and put it in the drawer, and I'm getting better and better at it. But you talked about numbness. I think a lot of the sublime is a function of your sensitivity to the world.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:42

        Hmm.

    24. RGRobert Greene2:04:42

        So you were born with these senses, like any creature, that are open, that are constantly giving you feedback from the environment, right? That's what senses are for. That's what they're designed for, so you don't die, so you see there's a tiger over there and it doesn't kill you. Your senses are there to connect you to your environment, to connect you to the outside world. I have a story in the book about this Russian scientist at the turn of the 20th century. He was a geographer who's sent to Siberia to kind of discover, to map, give a map of, of Siberia, the, the, the forests there called the Taiga. And he encounters in, in the middle of this an indigenous hunter named Dersu, Dersu Uzala, a famous book, and then, and a movie was made of it. He's part of this indigenous culture called the Gold, which is on the brink of extinction, and he's a lone hunter and trapper. And the Russian scientist invites him to join their expedition as a scout because he's intrigued by this man. He slowly realizes that this man has an intelligence and a sensitivity to the environment that is far superior to anything that he possesses. He can read the sky and the climate, and he knows the weather that's coming. He can see the birds and know what it indicates. At one point, they encounter a tiger. They hear a tiger growling through some bushes, and a Siberian tiger is not something you wanna mess with, right? And so the Russian guy gets frightened. He's, he's frightened. He's got a frightened exper- uh, uh, reaction. He picks up his rifle, and Dersu says, "Put that rifle down." He, like, screams at him, and he goes, walks up to the tiger, which he calls Amba, and he goes, "Amba, calm down. We no, we're not here to hurt you. We understand y- this is your forest. We respect you. We will not harm you." And the Russian guy's freaking out, and the tiger walks away. And at the end of the story, Dersu ends up getting murdered by some people who were stealing his, whatever he, his trappings. He goes, "We humans have lost something. If only we could keep our scientific culture," which he is a scientist, "but also have these powers of our senses, we would be another animal. We would be insane, we'd be insanely powerful, and we wouldn't be so destructive." We have powers that come through the senses. It's a form of intelligence, right? And when our sensory experience is so limited as it is as we live in towns and cities, it's so same. It's not, we're not really, we're not really listening to sounds. We're not really smelling things. We're not really looking. Our thoughts become constricted. We think we're just intelligent animals, but we're physical creatures. Our intelligence is modeled after our senses, and if we only see the same things, our minds kind of atrophy. And our creativity and our inventiveness came from being in these environments that were dangerous, and we had to see and think and feel our way into things, into the, into the world, right? So a lot of the sublime is a function of your sensitivity. You can recover that. It's not like your atrophied senses are forever like that. You can put yourself in these environments. You can go to the desert, and you can walk through the desert, and you can feel the emptiness and the silence and the lack of vegetation and, and let the environment inhabit you, and your senses will awaken. You can go to a mountain. You can swim in the ocean. You can sit in your goddamn backyard and encounter it like I did with my sublime book. Your senses are waiting to be awakened If we took somebody who was like a stockbroker on Wall Street with the most atrophied senses you can imagine, and we gave him a shot of LSD or peyote, suddenly it would all open up. He would have these experiences as well. So the point is, it's not dead. It's there. It's wanting to be awakened. Like that guy who I said had his self-remembering experiences, it awakened him. It can happen at any moment, but it's a function of your sensitivity to the world and how you use your senses to let the world inside of you and enclose yourself in this little kind of citadel.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman2:09:05

        What I'm gathering is that our ability to be sensitive, to feel things with a lot of intensity, and to really be explorers, like curious explorers, are key portals to the, this thing that you're calling the sublime.

    26. RGRobert Greene2:09:23

        Yeah.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman2:09:23

        And we could spend all day thinking about the barriers to the sublime, but one thing that I do appreciate about the way human brains are wired, it's one of the great gifts of the, the human brain, is that whatever we focus on tends to exclude other options. So if we go toward drama and numbing out, it excludes other options for some period of time.

    28. RGRobert Greene2:09:44

        Right.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman2:09:45

        If we move toward what we're curious about and heightening our sensitivity, um, those exclude the, the bad options. And one thing that I, I love about you so much, man, is that you-

    30. RGRobert Greene2:09:57

        Yeah
25. 2:10:42 – 2:16:26

    Next Book, Invisible, Fiction

    1. AHAndrew Huberman2:10:42

       if you would, I'd like to ask you, uh, one final question.

    2. RGRobert Greene2:10:46

       Sure.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman2:10:46

       And it's the meanest question I could possibly ask.

    4. RGRobert Greene2:10:48

       Oh, good. I look forward to it.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman2:10:50

       Yeah, I had a feeling you would.

    6. RGRobert Greene2:10:52

       Okay.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman2:10:52

       You know, as somebody who just finished a book-

    8. RGRobert Greene2:10:54

       Oh, yeah

    9. AHAndrew Huberman2:10:55

       ... by hand after seven years-

    10. RGRobert Greene2:10:57

        Uh-huh

    11. AHAndrew Huberman2:10:57

        ... and really grinding it out, and God bless you for doing it, and have written all these other amazing books that I have read and that I do love-

    12. RGRobert Greene2:11:05

        Okay

    13. AHAndrew Huberman2:11:05

        ... what's the next book?

    14. RGRobert Greene2:11:07

        Oh, shite. [laughs]

    15. AHAndrew Huberman2:11:08

        Or is there s-

    16. RGRobert Greene2:11:09

        Uh

    17. AHAndrew Huberman2:11:09

        ... a seed or something in your mind that you're willing to share? And no is a perfectly good answer, obviously.

    18. RGRobert Greene2:11:14

        Well, I have two strains. I know I can't do another book like that bec- like this because I'm in, heading into my late 60s, and I don't have the energy. I had a stroke, and I just can't put myself through it. I can't wait seven years because I don't know how much life I have left.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman2:11:30

        No, you're gonna be around a while, man.

    20. RGRobert Greene2:11:32

        All right, I hope.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman2:11:32

        You're doing all the right things.

    22. RGRobert Greene2:11:33

        Okay, I'm trying, but you never know because people with, who are survivors of strokes often don't have a long life expectancy. It happens particularly when, the age that happened to me, 'cause you're, you're prone to other things happening unless you're very careful. So I can't do another big project. But I'm kind of obsessed with something that's very hard for me to, to describe verbally, but it has to do with the invisible. How many things affect our lives that you cannot actually see and that are very powerful, but that if you could see, it would alter your theory, it would alter your experience. So to give you an example, we can't see the future. We have no knowledge of the future. But things are happening right now in each, in our present moment, little trends that are gonna create the future. And if we could somehow see them, if we could under- kind of crystallize them into some form, we would have this kind of knowledge of where we're headed, and it would be very powerful. And there are people in history who demonstrated a high ability to predict what was coming, and they fascinate me. They like to live outside of their time. But we live in these abstract spaces where w- everything is, is symbolic to us. We, we just live in these abstract worlds, and they're invisible, and we're not aware of their influence on them. And I wanna kind of make visible all of these things that you don't think about are affecting your life. It's a weird concept in my head, and I've kind of detailed on pen and paper some examples and things, but it's gonna be a shorter book, and it's gonna be about negative space, about seeing what's not there as opposed to what's there, what's missing in the picture, okay? The other thing is I'm toying with the idea of writing s- fiction because it would be an insane challenge for me. It'd be using a different part of my brain. But I'm kind of fascinated with the tech world and how it's so misguided, and where did it come from, and what is it about humans that have created this kind of slightly monstrous future that we're headed towards. And I've known some of these tech overlords. I've met them, and I'm kind of interested in their psychology and where it came from and what is the origin of this form of thinking that is, I find, very, very dangerous, right? And so it's very inchoate. It's very much, uh, nebulous. But I'm toying with these characters, and I'm researching about it, and I'm going deep into the origins of this deep levels of alienation that are, that are being birthed in this present moment through our technology. And Fiction will give me the ability to kind of go inside their minds in a way that's, I can't really do with nonfiction, right? So I find what I want to express about this dangerous world we're headed to is more suited for fiction than nonfiction. So I'll see. Those are two ideas I'm toying with, and hopefully my life goes on long enough to try and create them.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman2:14:53

        I really appreciate you sharing where your deliberation, um, is around that. I have great confidence you'll be ar- around a while.

    24. RGRobert Greene2:15:02

        Oh, okay.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman2:15:02

        Come on now. You're doing all the right things.

    26. RGRobert Greene2:15:04

        Yeah.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman2:15:05

        You're exceedingly sharp and exceedingly kind in taking the time to come talk about the book and share these ideas with us.

    28. RGRobert Greene2:15:12

        Uh-huh.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman2:15:13

        Um, again, I'm super excited to read it. You're a real role model to me-

    30. RGRobert Greene2:15:16

        Uh-huh
26. 2:16:26 – 2:18:24

    Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter

    1. RGRobert Greene2:16:26

       it.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman2:16:27

       Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Robert Greene. To learn more about his work and to find links to his various books, including his new book, The Art of the Sublime, please see the links in the show note caption. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review, and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms, so that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's hubermanlab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email, and I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Robert Greene. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. [outro music]

Episode duration: 2:18:25