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

1. 0:00 – 9:54

   Why Write About the Sublime?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

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

   2. RGRobert Greene0:27

      [laughs] Wow, that would be a long time. I would be beat Robert Caro.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:32

      Mm-hmm.

   4. RGRobert Greene0:33

      Uh, no, seven years.

   5. CWChris Williamson0:34

      Seven.

   6. RGRobert Greene0:35

      So, so back in like 2000, I read a book on the sublime and I got really excited and I thought, "This is, this is really interesting," but I knew there was no market for it. It was kind of a weird book.

   7. CWChris Williamson0:46

      Mm-hmm.

   8. RGRobert Greene0:46

      And I intended after the war book, this was gonna be my next book with the Sublime, was gonna shock my readers with something totally unexpected. I hired a researcher, I started doing it, and then 50 Cent trotted along and said, "Let's do a book together," and so I pushed Sublime aside. I made the 10th chapter of the 50th, 50 Cent book about the Sublime, about how he nearly died from the gunshot wounds and, you know, his near-death experience. And then I... From 50 Cent book, there was a chapter about mastery, so I turned that into the book Mastery. And then, I don't know, human nature w- anyway, I just got totally sidelined. And then, you know, I had my, quote-unquote, "near-death experience," and suddenly, you know, God was telling me, "This is the time you need to write a book on the Sublime. No more putting it off," because it was a sl- it was a sublime experience to come that close to dying, you know?

   9. CWChris Williamson1:43

      A lot of your work is focused on power, seduction, manipulation, human nature.

   10. RGRobert Greene1:47

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:49

       Why get interested in writing about the Sublime at all?

   12. RGRobert Greene1:54

       Well, um, a lot of what happens with humans and what goes wrong with them is on a deep psychological level and level of consciousness. So the first three books are kind of the social game, the surface game that we all play, right? 'Cause we're a social animal, and nobody really instructs us... Even though we're a social animal, nobody ever teaches us how to be social, and we make all these mistakes and we suffer. So, uh, that book came out of my experiences in Hollywood and all the suffering I had and all the 50 different jobs with the psychotic bosses that I had and all that. All right? Um, but there's something deeper going on with human. It's something more than just the social game. It's how we experience life itself and how we relate to the world around us, and I'm just noticing a kind of deadness in people's experience, a kind of flatness.

   13. CWChris Williamson2:47

       Mm-hmm.

   14. RGRobert Greene2:48

       Like everything has been flattened out by social media in a way, you know? And people aren't experiencing anything on a deep level. There's nothing surprising anymore. You know, I, I look at my Instagram feed and it's, it's interesting and I see cat videos and they're great, and, and the first time I see it, it's, "Wow, that cat's doing incredible things," and the second, the third time, it's all the same. It really... There's differences, don't get me wrong, but in the end it's all program, it's all algorithms, it's all the same.

   15. CWChris Williamson3:17

       Mm-hmm.

   16. RGRobert Greene3:17

       And I think people are suffering, suffering deeply from it. I was taking a bike ride the other day in Griffith Park. I just had this epiphany that I'm living in a madhouse. Everyone's going insane, and I'm, I'm going insane as well, and why is that? Why do people feel so cramped and so restless and turning to all these different things in our politics and, and technology? Everything's just going haywire. I feel like there's something deep, deeper, happening deep in our consciousness and a kind of disconnect from what it means to be alive. You know? When you come close to dying, you know what it really means to be alive. And so I don't know if I'm being too grandiose, but I really wanna help people in their suffering and give them a roadmap for how you could possibly experience life on a deeper level. It has nothing to do with manipulation, it has nothing to do with power or seducing.

   17. CWChris Williamson4:18

       Mm-hmm.

   18. RGRobert Greene4:18

       It's on a deeper psychological level that I'm trying to, to reach you.

   19. CWChris Williamson4:22

       It feels like you're talking about life having the color stripped away from it in some ways.

   20. RGRobert Greene4:27

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson4:28

       That the, uh, the amplitude of the waveform is just being compressed down and everything's little wobbles. Nothing's that great and nothing's that f- that deeply felt.

   22. RGRobert Greene4:41

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

   23. CWChris Williamson5:38

       Mm

   24. RGRobert Greene5:38

       ... because the adult brain works by inhibiting, by filtering everything down so you don't get too much information, right? So you can survive, so you can walk through the streets and think about what you're doing tomorrow and plan and not get hit by a car and all these other things. It's inhibiting all the, all your sensory information. The baby, the two-year-old, the three-year-old has no inhibition. Everything is interesting. Everything is exciting, okay? And then- Slowly, you reach a point as you get older and older and older that that, that disappears from your experience. Everything looks familiar. Things don't seem strange to you. Things don't seem unfamiliar. You don't look up at the night sky and go, "Wow, stars. Wow, infinity. Wow, how weird, how interesting," right? I remember I was a kid driving with my family on these road trips that were so boring. You know, I was going nuts with my sister next to me, and I would look out the window, and I would imagine all these things going on. Like, I was imagining Indians on the hills and what they were doing, and animals and stuff. The... Our imaginations were so vivid. Everything was intense.

   25. CWChris Williamson6:49

       Mm.

   26. RGRobert Greene6:49

       And then you lose it. Slowly, you lose it, and you're in your 20s, in your 30s, and you're not really aware of it, but you feel something missing in your life because you once knew this intensity that you have lost, right? Uh, that's how I, that's how I try to describe it.

   27. CWChris Williamson7:08

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

   28. RGRobert Greene7:45

       Because, um, because there's too much information, right? And you have to, you have to plan, and you have to sch- you have to have your life. And the- we're all so busy, and there are so many things coming at us that if we were paying attention to everything like the baby does, the child does, we wouldn't be able to function in our day-to-day life. So the brain has to filter for us. And the... Aldous Huxley, he calls it the small mind and the big mind, and our minds get smaller and smaller and smaller as we focus on the things that we need to survive. I know it myself. I'll be meditating, and constantly these thoughts coming up about, "What am I gonna do in an hour? What's gonna happen when I need to... I didn't do this phone call. I didn't return this email." My mind is just doing it naturally. I can't help it, right? The mind is trying to filter things down so you can survive, so you can get by, so you can schedule and plan your life, but it goes too far. It takes over our life.

   29. CWChris Williamson8:43

       Mm.

   30. RGRobert Greene8:44

       Everything becomes about survival. Everything becomes about getting by, and so you're missing s- Now, I, I'm not saying y- this, the sublime has to be part of your continual experience, right? That you wouldn't be able to do your job, you wouldn't be able to get to work. It'd be too much.
2. 9:54 – 13:40

   Did Our Ancestors Experience Life Differently?

   1. CWChris Williamson9:54

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

   2. RGRobert Greene10:11

      Well, it's not, because we're aware of our, our death. We're aware of our mortality. And even if you don't think about it, it's in the back of your mind all the time. You're continually... It's, it's there that you're, you're gonna die some point, and you see your p- your parents die, or you see friends die, et cetera. And so the sense of our mortality weighs on us very much. And why spend 20 years building up modern wisdom and doing all of this work and working like a dog when you're gonna die? What's the point? It's meaningless, right? Why go through all that effort? Why not just go out and enjoy yourself, Chris, right? So the sense of death puts, poses a question o- on us. Why are we alive? What is the point of this? And our ancestors thousands of years ago were very much, much more aware of death than we are now. Like, death is, is, is hidden from us. We never see it. We don't see the animals that are killed for our food. People die in hospitals far away f- we never s- we can go through our entire life and never see somebody who dies, right? But our ancestors, it was there before them. Most children died in childbirth. Mothers died in childbirth constantly, right? It was alw- the smell, the feel of death was all around.

   3. CWChris Williamson11:31

      Mm.

   4. RGRobert Greene11:32

      And so what... There must be some other reason, must be some point to our existence. There must be something greater. And so the need for knowing about our mortality is what is greater than my individual existence that I can attach myself to and not feel so small and helpless and vulnerable-

   5. CWChris Williamson11:53

      Mm

   6. RGRobert Greene11:53

      ... that my death has no meaning? Okay, well, I could connect myself to the cosmos, to the stars, to spirits, to gods. And I have a story in this, in my book where these people go into a cave, these, uh, cave explorers in France in the 1990s And they come upon these cave paintings from the early Paleolithic period 37,000 years ago, the most insanely beautiful paintings you've ever seen. You can watch a documentary by Werner Herzog about that, and you can see it for yourself. It's called The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It's the Chauvet Cave in south of France. And there are all these ritual, these, uh, re- remnants of all these rituals that they're practicing, et cetera. So 37,000 years ago, they were trying to... This had nothing to do with survival. Being in these caves was dangerous. There were bears. It was dark. It, to them, represented, like, hell or, like, the underworld. There was no survival reason to go into caves and have these perform- have shamans perform these dances, these rituals, these cave paintings. They were searching for something else. And so humans naturally are searching for something else besides the day-to-day existence that they go through. If you try to repress it, it will come out in other ways, and I talk about that in the book. You'll go through the false sublime. You'll try to get it through drugs. You try to get it through action movies, through Marvel movies. You try to get it through online porn, through addictions, through all sorts of, through drugs and et cetera, you know, stimulants. If you're not searching for it in this real way, something happens to the human spirit, and you search for it in all these other counterproductive ways, if that

3. 13:40 – 20:11

   What is the Sublime?

   1. RGRobert Greene13:40

      makes any sense to you.

   2. CWChris Williamson13:41

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

   3. RGRobert Greene13:46

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

   4. CWChris Williamson14:19

      [chuckles]

   5. RGRobert Greene14:21

      Behave yourself, Kane.

   6. CWChris Williamson14:22

      Mm-hmm.

   7. RGRobert Greene14:23

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

   8. CWChris Williamson15:16

      What's that like?

   9. RGRobert Greene15:17

      Well, um, she thought at first it was kind of a little bit, "What's going on here?" But then as it's happening, it's like, "This is insanely exciting," right? She's dying. It's literally killing her. She takes a shower. You don't realize, but the brain constructs the fact that you are separated from everything else so that you can walk through a space-

   10. CWChris Williamson15:40

       Hmm

   11. RGRobert Greene15:40

       ... and negotiate. It's the somosens- sensory, somatosensory part of the cortex. It kind of helps you deal with space and separates you from other things. It's shutting down, and now the water and the shower are a part of her, and there's nothing separating her from anything else. All that internal chatter shuts down. The, you don't realize, but your brain is always chattering and hearing things. Her brain goes completely silent. What bliss to have your brain silent. The world is so interesting and weird, and then seeing things not as visual things but as little pixelated dots. At first, the sensations are exciting. It's like I'm free from the restrictions of my brain, and now I'm part of everything I see.

   12. CWChris Williamson16:26

       Hmm.

   13. RGRobert Greene16:27

       It's like a mystical experience. She nearly dies. She somehow saves herself because she can't figure out how to even make a phone call. She somehow gets survives, she survives, but she's like a, an infant in a woman's body now. When she comes out, she has no language. She can't speak. She can't understand what anybody's saying. And slowly, it takes her eight years, and she recovers her, her cognitive abilities, and she's depressed. She's going, "When I suffered my stroke and it shut down all those filtering mechanisms, I felt like I was in heaven. I felt like it was the most blissful thing. And now I can think, I can write, I'm cog- I have cognitive powers, but my life is hell." And she wants to go back to where she was during her stroke.

   14. CWChris Williamson17:17

       Hmm.

   15. RGRobert Greene17:18

       And so she wrote a book about that called My Stroke of Insight, about how she found her ways somehow logically as a n- as a scientist back to those sensations she had during her stroke. So my point is, by a huge tangent, your culture is limiting your experience. Your brain is limiting your experience. Your brain is constructing what you think is real, but it is not real. It is like a red pill. You think it's real, what all this is? This is not what a bat's reality is. It's not what a fly's reality. It's not what a dog's reality is. Ours is no different. We think it's the only reality, but it's not. The Sublime are experiences that take you outside these limits, that take you outside the circle that we live in. You're experiencing what, uh, what al- alien, like what animals are experiencing. You're experiencing what the cosmos, it actually is like to be connected to, to something universal, to have actually Be part of the Big Bang because your body was formed, the same components that came from the Big Bang.

   16. CWChris Williamson18:24

       Mm.

   17. RGRobert Greene18:24

       It's getting outside that circle and exposing yourself to things that the brain doesn't normally allow you to experience. And when you touch... So let's say that the Sublime is like a doorway outside these cultural and brain limits, and when you look at that door, when you touch and you look through it, it's like a shock, it's like a shutter. Wow. You know, things are really weird. Things are strange. Life is amazing. And it changes you. Like my, my death experience changed me. There's no going back once I now had this blast of, of death feeling inside my body. There's no going back. When you experience that, mountain climbers talk about this all the time because mountain climbers are continually experience the Sublime, and I have several stories in there of people like that, but-

   18. CWChris Williamson19:12

       The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentous. Their co-founder, Jeff Byers, played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary, so he built Momentous around a higher standard. Every product from Momentous uses evidence-backed ingredients, transparent doses, and independent third-party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sports, so what's on the label is actually what's in the tub. It's why Momentous is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms. It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout.

4. 20:11 – 27:40

   The Mind-Blowing Probability of Human Life

   1. CWChris Williamson20:11

      Is it a surprise that humans aren't just walking around all the time perpetually bemused at the fact that we're alive and how unlikely it is?

   2. RGRobert Greene20:20

      Uh, that was like one of the chapters I wrote in there, and I said, "I, I break it down this way. If you look at your body and what your body does, you don't have to think about breathing. You don't have to think about your heartbeat. If you have a, a, a, a scratch or a wound, your body heals itself. It has these antibodies." It's insane what the body can do. And when you're threatened with a life, like something's about to kill you or something, or there's a tiger right in front of you, the body produces these hormones that save your life. If you're a long-distance runner, you get all this dopamine and all these other effects that help you keep running, running, and running. The, what the body can do is absolutely incredible, right? Where does this come from? Where does the brain come from? Where does consciousness come from? It's part of a evolution that goes back millions and millions and millions of years. And if you start thinking about this story about how you have... Your brain is actually part of... has a reptilian part to it. There's a lizard brain inside you right now, and that there's layers to your experience that go back millions and millions of years. You go back to how life almost never formed on planet Earth, right? And it almost formed with creatures that look different, totally different from ourselves. The main, uh, body form of all animals and all creatures is a, a body and a head and limbs. Back in the Cambrian explosion 600 million years ago, there were s- 10 different other body types that nearly took over, and they have pictures of them. They're the strangest-

   3. CWChris Williamson22:03

      What, like?

   4. RGRobert Greene22:04

      Huh?

   5. CWChris Williamson22:04

      What, like?

   6. RGRobert Greene22:06

      You can look it up.

   7. CWChris Williamson22:06

      Right.

   8. RGRobert Greene22:07

      Opabinia, hallucina- I, I, I write them down in, in the book.

   9. CWChris Williamson22:11

      Uh-huh.

   10. RGRobert Greene22:11

       If you look at them, you go, "My God, they're like something out of a nightmare," right? And it was just by an accident that our body type became the pr- predominant one. And so all these little, little bottlenecks in evolution could have occurred where we would... nothing would be what we think, what, what looks like today. And then if the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct because of an asteroid hitting our planet 68 million years ago, dinosaurs would still be walking the Earth, and we wouldn't be here.

   11. CWChris Williamson22:42

       Mm-hmm.

   12. RGRobert Greene22:43

       If you think about this, if you think about how life originated, if you think about the Big Bang and everything that happened, y- y- you can't take anything for granted. You can't take anything for granted, right? It's just an amazing story.

   13. CWChris Williamson22:58

       I once, manually, this is before AI, when I gave a TEDx talk, I had to try and reverse engineer what the likelihood was of you being alive, your parents, your grandparents-

   14. RGRobert Greene23:10

       Yeah, yeah

   15. CWChris Williamson23:10

       ... your great-grandparents, all the way back for as long as you can.

   16. RGRobert Greene23:13

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson23:13

       And i- i- that's before you even factor in how many sperm there are, and that if only it had been, without getting too graphic, if it was the next pump and not that pump-

   18. RGRobert Greene23:23

       Yeah

   19. CWChris Williamson23:23

       ... when your great-grandparents were having sex.

   20. RGRobert Greene23:25

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson23:26

       It's a different kid.

   22. RGRobert Greene23:27

       Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson23:27

       Just-

   24. RGRobert Greene23:27

       And different gender, different everything

   25. CWChris Williamson23:29

       ... if you've got performance anxiety as a guy and you're trying to get your missus pregnant, one of the things to not think about is that each different microsecond of how you finish will probably result in a different kid coming out. That's probably quite a reliable way, I think, of [laughs] making you feel a little bit uncomfortable about-

   26. RGRobert Greene23:45

       Yeah

   27. CWChris Williamson23:45

       ... about what's going on. But yeah, it's, it's unbelievably tenuous, and I guess it makes sense in one way because you think, well, if we were looking around just at wonder, at awe, like the, the lady who was having the stroke, like me in the shower, the water from the shower head, we're one.

   28. RGRobert Greene23:59

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson23:59

       The separation that I have perceived is, is a, a mere figment of the way that my brain constructs the world, but we are the same. Can you have a job? Can you drive through traffic whilst feeling like that? Maybe not

   30. RGRobert Greene24:13

       Yes, you can.
5. 27:40 – 32:00

   Is Your Ego Blocking the Sublime?

   1. RGRobert Greene27:40

      Right?

   2. CWChris Williamson27:41

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

   3. RGRobert Greene27:46

      Well, so you're, you're kind of trapped in your, in your, in yourself, in your ego, in your own thoughts, and your thoughts kind of revolve around, "What are people thinking about me? Why did my parents do this to me? Why am I so angry?" You feel envy. You feel resentment. You have all these grievances. You feel excitement. You have hope and, and all these other things going on. But you're inside your mind all of the time, right? You're inside your own world, and you're not connecting to anything else outside of it. And so sometimes, you know ... Look, I think you can't deny the fact that a lot of people are very miserable right now and unhappy. One out of six Americans is on some kind of drug d- to deal with depression, right? Pretty high number. And a lot of people are experiencing that are not taking these drugs, right? Something is missing in their life. And if you're ... So what do you do? Well, maybe I need to have therapy, right? Maybe I go talk to a therapist about it, or I talk to my spouse about my problems. And as you talk and talk and talk, you get further and further into yourself. You become the center of everything. That's all you think about. My childhood, who, who, who bothered me, who oppressed me. Why didn't I get what I want? Why isn't the world more fair? You're locked inside your ego, and it's like a prison. And the sublime is taking you outside of your ego, taking you outside of that. And so I have a story in the book of a man, a therapist in Buenos Aires, and he has a patient named Miguel. And Miguel has a wonderful life. He's got a great job. He makes a lot of money. He's got a beautiful house. He's got a gorgeous wife. He's got three kids. He has everything that you could want in life. But something is missing, and he's talking to the therapist. And they talk, and they talk, and they talk, and finally, the therapist has had enough of this. Says, "We're not getting anywhere. Here's what I'm gonna do. We're gonna go climb the highest mountain in the Southern Hemisphere, Mount Aconcagua in, in, uh, Argentina in the Ap- in the Andes," right? The highest mountain in, in, in the Southern Hemisphere. "We're gonna train for six weeks to climb it 'cause it's a very arduous climb, and then we're gonna do it. And, and I'm not gonna tell you why. Just no more talking therapy. Just shut the fuck up. We're just gonna train, and we're gonna climb this mountain," right? They train. They start climbing the mountain. And the, you know, the, the sight of the stars as you're climbing higher and higher. It's a, it's a high desert mountain. It's spectacularly beautiful, and the snow and everything. It's just an insane experience. It's a cosmic experience. They don't get to the top because it's, there's storms, and it gets very dangerous, and they finally retreat. But the man is transformed by this experience more than all of the talking because he was taken outside of himself-

   4. CWChris Williamson30:44

      Mm

   5. RGRobert Greene30:44

      ... and he was exposed to something much greater. So he got out of his small little ego world with his wife and his problems and why he's miserable and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How can you be miserable when you're ex- you're seeing what the world that we live in, right? And so your ego is the actual impediment to ex- ex- experiencing the sublime, and this is a way of kind of getting outside of that. In, in Zen Buddhism, they talk about ego attrition.

   6. CWChris Williamson31:13

      Mm.

   7. RGRobert Greene31:14

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

6. 32:00 – 40:24

   What Is Your Daemon Trying to Tell You?

   1. CWChris Williamson32:01

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

   2. RGRobert Greene32:17

      Well, what I've tried to do is the, the daemon is an ancient concept, but it's in almost all ancient cultures, and the idea is you have a second self inside of you, and it's an interesting thought. So when I read about that, I'm going, "A second self? What is that second self?" Right? The first self is the one you take for being who you are. It's your social self. It's what people have told you who you are. "I'm shy. I'm an introvert. I'm an extrovert. I'm dramatic. I'm arrogant. I'm aggressive." You know? People define who you are as you get older, right? Your parents defined who you are. Uh, your teachers defined who you are. You no longer th- you no longer are connected to who you actually are. You become a reflection of this social world that you live in, and that's the self that you take for being who you are. But it's not. It's false. It's fake. It's a creation. It's a social creation, right? But at the same time, there's something very real inside of you. You have your, you have your heartbeat. You have your particular moods. You have a temperament that's different from anybody else, and you can't verbalize it. Why am I attracted to this food? Why does this kind of woman always excite me, and this other one doesn't? Why do I love this certain kind of books? What ex- these, these weird things that excite me that I can't put into words have nothing to do with the social realm, right? There's something deep, deep, deep inside of you, and in the ancient world, they call that a daemon or a second self. Also, ancient cultures had other words for it. The ancient Egyptians had a different word for ka. I talk about an- another, uh, African culture that had a different word for it, sunsum. But the idea is that when you're born, there's, there's something about you that's unique, that's different from anybody else. It's what also is called your soul, and the daemon is like a voice inside of you that is who you really are. And when you start doing things in life that have nothing to do with what you love or what you like, the daemon speaks to you and says, "That's not ... You're going in the wrong direction. Something is bad."

   3. CWChris Williamson34:31

      Mm.

   4. RGRobert Greene34:31

      "You need to follow who you really are." And if you listen to that voice, like Socrates did or like a lot of artists do or people who are truly creative, they hear that voice even when they're in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. I hear it all the time.

   5. CWChris Williamson34:46

      Mm.

   6. RGRobert Greene34:46

      Something isn't right. Something doesn't fit. It doesn't fit my physiology. It's not who I am. When you connect to that voice, when you connect to that daemon, wow, it's very powerful, right? And it, it, it is sublime because it's connecting you to who you were at the moment of your birth. At the moment of your birth, you were something different about you. There was unique ... You, you were born, which is a strange thing to be born into, thrown into this world. It's connecting you to the very first days of your life when the gods put a daemon inside of you. Okay, I know that's not the words we want to hear right now, but that's how the, the legend is, right? And so what's sublime about that is that you have another self to you that is truly more authentic than the social self, and to explore it and to go into it is a very exciting and liberating feeling. You know? It's discovering something very primal about yourself that has nothing to do with what other people think about you.

   7. CWChris Williamson35:49

      A quick aside. If you've wanted an Eight Sleep but could never quite justify the price, things just got very interesting. They've somehow managed to make it significantly better and cheaper at the same time. Introducing the brand-new Pod 6. It's now 50% smaller, meaning it fits under most bed frames, and there are nine times more sensors built into it. Despite all of these upgrades, the Pod 6 now starts at just $1,999, the lowest starting price Eight Sleep has ever offered. Best of all, for the first time, Eight Sleep has introduced solo sizes, including single side options for queen, king, and California King beds. And they've got a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally, so don't be scared by the currency amount. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod 6 by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Have you ever read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman?

   8. RGRobert Greene36:49

      Who? What?

   9. CWChris Williamson36:50

      Philip Pullman. It's this, uh, kids book series called His Dark Materials. It had The Subtle Knife in it-

   10. RGRobert Greene36:56

       Uh-huh

   11. CWChris Williamson36:56

       ... The Golden Compass.

   12. RGRobert Greene36:57

       Oh.

   13. CWChris Williamson36:58

       Uh, so-

   14. RGRobert Greene36:58

       Wow

   15. CWChris Williamson36:58

       ... it's, it must be 30 years old. The first book must be at least 30 years old now, 'cause I was listening to it when I was 11, 12, 13, and it had been around for a while. I remember I used to go to the library in Norton, in the northeast of England, with my mum, and I would get the story tapes, and this is a big book, so I'd be coming back with a stack of tapes like that, borrowing them from the library for two weeks, and we'd have to take them back before or else we'd have to-

   16. RGRobert Greene37:23

       Uh-huh

   17. CWChris Williamson37:23

       ... pay a fine of £1 or something. And it's one of my favorite book series, and I actually read it, listened to it, I guess, in the wrong order. So I listened to The Subtle Knife first, which is the second book, and, uh, it kind of makes sense. The third one makes no sense at all, so you have to listen or read the first two. But anyway, uh, in this world, the children are born with daemons, and the daemons take the form of-

   18. RGRobert Greene37:46

       Does he use that word?

   19. CWChris Williamson37:47

       Yes.

   20. RGRobert Greene37:48

       Fantastic.

   21. CWChris Williamson37:48

       Uh-

   22. RGRobert Greene37:48

       I have to look this up

   23. CWChris Williamson37:49

       ... it's, it's wonderful. And th- they take the form of an animal, like a little animals. They represent animals that are around.

   24. RGRobert Greene37:54

       Right.

   25. CWChris Williamson37:54

       And when the, uh, kids are still children, the animals can change. They can cycle through. They can be a bird and fly ahead and go and do stuff, or they can come back and, and be a dog and, and pet them, or they can be a wolf and scare people.

   26. RGRobert Greene38:07

       Wow.

   27. CWChris Williamson38:08

       But when children hit puberty, the daemon settles into a final form, and it never changes again for the rest of life.

   28. RGRobert Greene38:19

       Uh-huh.

   29. CWChris Williamson38:19

       And there's these themes of sort of Adam and Eve. There's a male and female protagonist, and they're both quite young, and they fall in love. And as they fall in love, they hit puberty. And as they do that, all of this stuff happens in the universe. And these two, uh, daemons, these senses of self that were malleable, that were open, they're concretized, and they're locked in-

   30. RGRobert Greene38:41

       Yeah
7. 40:24 – 47:12

   The Arc of Transcendence

   1. CWChris Williamson40:24

      But I guess thinking about the daemon, Plato brought this up.

   2. RGRobert Greene40:27

      Yes.

   3. CWChris Williamson40:28

      And then he was killed. Carl Jung-

   4. RGRobert Greene40:30

      No, no, no, Socrates.

   5. CWChris Williamson40:31

      Uh, uh, Socrates.

   6. RGRobert Greene40:31

      Yeah, yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson40:32

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

   8. RGRobert Greene40:38

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson40:39

      And then he went insane a little bit. I don't know. Yeah, Carl Jung touched the edges of, of sanity a couple of times, would you not say?

   10. RGRobert Greene40:46

       Uh, he had mystical experiences when he was in his, like, 30s, and then he had a near-death experience, which I ta- write about-

   11. CWChris Williamson40:55

       Mm-hmm

   12. RGRobert Greene40:55

       ... in his 40s.

   13. CWChris Williamson40:56

       Mm-hmm.

   14. RGRobert Greene40:57

       And then he went... You know, if you consider going into, into ancient cultures and his whole world that he creates in his books-

   15. CWChris Williamson41:04

       Symbolism

   16. RGRobert Greene41:04

       ... insanity maybe, but-

   17. CWChris Williamson41:06

       Yeah

   18. RGRobert Greene41:06

       ... he was a very high-functioning psychoanalyst.

   19. CWChris Williamson41:09

       I would ag- I... That's, that's fair. But-

   20. RGRobert Greene41:10

       And writer

   21. CWChris Williamson41:11

       ... my, my point being here, I think-

   22. RGRobert Greene41:12

       Yeah

   23. CWChris Williamson41:13

       ... that, um, a lot of people who go into the world of the daemon-

   24. RGRobert Greene41:19

       Yeah

   25. CWChris Williamson41:19

       ... it seems to be an arc. It seems to be quite a common arc for someone that is specifically interested in investigating human nature, psychology, history, philosophy, that world. Why is that going from ignorance to knowledge to something deeper, something more transcendent? Is that, do you think, a, a typical arc that a lot of, uh, thinkers go through?

   26. RGRobert Greene41:42

       Well, I, I use for one of the archetypes of the daemon the story of Friedrich Nietzsche, and if anybody went insane, he went insane.

   27. CWChris Williamson41:51

       [laughs]

   28. RGRobert Greene41:52

       So that fits what you were saying more than Carl Jung.

   29. CWChris Williamson41:55

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   30. RGRobert Greene41:55

       And the story of Nietzsche was he, he's the son of a pastor who's extremely religious, who plays the organ in church, and as a boy, Nietzsche's extremely religious. He loves his father. He's gonna follow in his father's footstep, and his father dies of some neurological disorder, and he ki- his father kind of goes insane.
8. 47:12 – 53:21

   Is It Your Daemon or Just Impulsivity?

   1. CWChris Williamson47:13

      How does someone recognize the difference between the daemon speaking their truth forward, the logos being projected, and impulsivity-

   2. RGRobert Greene47:23

      Impulsivity

   3. CWChris Williamson47:23

      ... short-termism-

   4. RGRobert Greene47:25

      Oh

   5. CWChris Williamson47:25

      ... their more base instincts, their coping mechanisms, the paths of least resistance, their fears masquerading as wisdom, but actually just being, uh, um, uh, um, compensation coming up inside of them. I, I can imagine in one world a person could convince themselves that this is actually their inner truth but a- is much closer to something like, yeah, impulsivity.

   6. RGRobert Greene47:50

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

   7. CWChris Williamson48:24

      Hmm.

   8. RGRobert Greene48:25

      People who, who kn- who listen to that voice, and they acquire power, and they hurt people, and they manipulate, and they destroy, and they're evil, they are truly demonic because their daemon is not connected to something kind of playful and spiritual and transcendent. But to answer your question, um, you hear all these voices in your head, right? We don't call them voices because we just think of it's just our minds or- ... talking to us or they're saying things to us-

   9. CWChris Williamson48:56

      Yeah

   10. RGRobert Greene48:56

       ... right? You gonna smoke a pipe?

   11. CWChris Williamson48:58

       Uh, it's a, an e-pipe. It's... When I feel like I'm pontificating and getting really close to something that's a-

   12. RGRobert Greene49:04

       Uh-huh

   13. CWChris Williamson49:04

       ... a great highfalutin idea, I like to sit here and do this.

   14. RGRobert Greene49:07

       Oh, please.

   15. CWChris Williamson49:08

       [laughs]

   16. RGRobert Greene49:09

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

   17. CWChris Williamson49:13

       Yeah.

   18. RGRobert Greene49:13

       It's vaping?

   19. CWChris Williamson49:14

       Yeah. [laughs]

   20. RGRobert Greene49:15

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

   21. CWChris Williamson49:20

       Okay.

   22. RGRobert Greene49:21

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

   23. CWChris Williamson49:25

       I think this one is, what? Peach and mango or something. It may be a slightly different smell to the one that your father-

   24. RGRobert Greene49:29

       Oh, oh, probably

   25. CWChris Williamson49:29

       ... was, was smoking. [laughs] Yeah, berry and peach. Yeah. [laughs]

   26. RGRobert Greene49:32

       Yeah. He was doing hardcore tobacco. It's what ended up, it's ended up-

   27. CWChris Williamson49:35

       Yeah

   28. RGRobert Greene49:35

       ... killing him. But, um-

   29. CWChris Williamson49:36

       Ah, what a shame. Well, I'm sure this will kill me too, so.

   30. RGRobert Greene49:38

       No, it won't. No.
9. 53:21 – 1:00:52

   How to Know You’re on the Right Path

   1. CWChris Williamson53:21

      I spoke to David Deida. You know, Way of the Superior Man author, so, uh, illustrious longtime author. And I, I did his first podcast interview in over a decade, I think, a few months ago. And I did a bit of research, and I, I didn't know much about him before I sat down with him, and he just had this crazy, just as far as I could see, illogical career, very illustrious, but totally illogical. He starts off in the '80s doing AI and computer science, writes a ton of papers-

   2. RGRobert Greene53:56

      What's his name again?

   3. CWChris Williamson53:57

      Uh, David Deida. Uh, writes a ton of papers-

   4. RGRobert Greene54:00

      Deida?

   5. CWChris Williamson54:01

      Deida. D-E-I-D-A.

   6. RGRobert Greene54:04

      Okay.

   7. CWChris Williamson54:04

      Deida. Uh, Way of the Superior Man is a very, very, very popular book, um, from about 30 years ago, 20 years ago. Uh, anyway, he starts off computer science, AI, and then he decides that he is gonna leave that, and he pivots into writing for a while. Then he goes into, uh, tantra and, um, reworking emotions through sex.

   8. RGRobert Greene54:31

      Right.

   9. CWChris Williamson54:32

      Then he moves into yoga for a long time.

   10. RGRobert Greene54:34

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson54:34

       Then he gets into masculinity and men. Then he goes back into doing hard... Oh, he does hardcore ma- He does a decade of hardcore mathematics, like pure mathematics.

   12. RGRobert Greene54:42

       Wow.

   13. CWChris Williamson54:43

       Then he gets back into some AI stuff, and I asked him on the episode, "This, to me, just feels like a kind of quite unwieldy, meandering, uh, trajectory. Can you explain to me how you tie all of these threads together?" And he said I have a very strong sense when something is no longer for me.

   14. RGRobert Greene55:04

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson55:04

       And so, okay, well that's interesting, but a lot of people have that, and, and it seems like you have just continually pulled the ejector seat button and fired yourself out the top of whatever aircraft you're in-

   16. RGRobert Greene55:13

       Mm

   17. CWChris Williamson55:13

       ... over and over again without fear that, well, I'm near the top of my industry in this one domain. Maybe if I leave it behind, I'm not going to be as good in the next one. I'm not gonna be as respected.

   18. RGRobert Greene55:23

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson55:23

       I'm gonna have to make a decision that I regret in future.

   20. RGRobert Greene55:26

       Yeah, yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson55:28

       Yes, it's interesting that you've followed your own instinct and you've been interested in stuff, but what's more interesting to me is the decisiveness and the conviction that you have about it.

   22. RGRobert Greene55:36

       Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson55:36

       Like that's what's rare.

   24. RGRobert Greene55:37

       Yeah, yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson55:38

       Right? Not the meandering interests. Curious people are curious about lots of things.

   26. RGRobert Greene55:42

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson55:43

       And he said something like, "When I'm out of alignment, the pain of no longer following what I know that I should be doing is so much greater than-

   28. RGRobert Greene55:54

       Yeah

   29. CWChris Williamson55:54

       ... the fear of anything else."

   30. RGRobert Greene55:55

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10. 1:00:52 – 1:06:00

    Don’t Let Fear Hold You Back

    1. CWChris Williamson1:00:52

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

    2. RGRobert Greene1:00:59

       Well, I I talked a lot about that in the book Mastery. Um, so what I tell people is you could go on through your 20s and your 30s following a career path that makes you money, that g- gets you a family, gives you stability, but isn't quite you, and then you get into your 40s, and that sense of discomfort kind of grows, and maybe you get a little disengaged from your work, and maybe you go have an affair with your secretary and some kind of drama happens. Maybe you start taking this kind of drug or something like that, or you gain a lot of weight. Then you're in your 50s and you're kind of locked into this, and you, "Jesus Christ, where am I going? Well, it's too late to change. I'm just gonna settle into it." You're on... Then you're like, it's too late, right?

    3. CWChris Williamson1:01:49

       Yeah.

    4. RGRobert Greene1:01:50

       It's very, very painful, very, very painful to kind of wake up and realize that you headed in the wrong direction in life.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:01:58

       Mm.

    6. RGRobert Greene1:01:58

       And so what I tell people is, particularly if you're in your 20s, you don't want that to happen to you. And so you think that money and stability is the only thing that matters, but it's not. You have to have a sense of adventure. You have to have a sense of exploring. You have to have some courage in this world to pursue something that suits you and isn't necessarily gonna make you as big an income as this other c- career path, you know? And so you have to realize that you're gonna pay a price for violating this law, for violating this need, this law of who you actually are. You're gonna pay a price, and that is you're gonna disengage from your work. You're gonna start having habits and addictions and things because your body will... Your body tells you the truth.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:02:51

       Mm.

    8. RGRobert Greene1:02:52

       You know, I know physically I feel uncomfortable and, and this man, David, probably would tell you the same thing. It's a physical sensation. Your body is gonna rebel at some point. You're gonna get illnesses. You're gonna become diabetic. You're gonna start gaining weight. You've disconnected fr- from the reality of who you actually are. You will pay a price. I try and hit people in the brain with that and say, "Look, y- you, you don't want that fate." I was talking... This is slightly related. I was talking to a man who's a basketball coach of a G League team, uh, which is the league before you get into the NBA, very successful, and he was now offered the head coaching job of this NBA team because... And he's in his 30s. And he, and he was expressing that fear of, "I have this really comfortable job, and I made all these great relationships, and now I'm gonna enter this world where people are... Everyone's gonna see me. Everyone's gonna judge me. I could easily fail. You know, my reputation will be r- ruined, and I won't have this chance to go back to where I was." And I told him, "Take the job. Don't look back. You're gonna learn so much more. Being young and excited will be an advantage for you over all these other kind of retread coaches in the NBA. It's gonna be the best thing you have, but don't be afraid. Your fear is holding you back. Just go for it." He, he didn't, and, uh, his team won the NBA championship even-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:04:23

       No way.

    10. RGRobert Greene1:04:25

        Yeah.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:04:25

        All right.

    12. RGRobert Greene1:04:25

        Not last year, but the year before.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:04:27

        Cool.

    14. RGRobert Greene1:04:28

        Um, it took him, like, five years to get there. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't like the next, first season he, they won championship.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:04:35

        Mm.

    16. RGRobert Greene1:04:36

        But your fear is holding you back, and your fear is making it seem like you're being reasonable, but in fact, you're just afraid, and you're just listening to the voices, and you're just listening to your spouse or whomever who's trying to tell you to take the safe route. My wife could tell you this story. Years ago in the '90s, my mother... I had-- 'cause I told you I was a loser. I had a... I was jump- I couldn't hold a job for more than five months. I finally had a job in television in Hollywood, right? Looked like stability finally landed on Robert's shoulders, and I w- I couldn't stand it. I hated it. It was, like, the most miserable period of my life, and I was gonna quit, and my mother tried to convince my then girlfriend to tell Robert, "He's gotta keep this job. I mean, what's... He's crazy. What's he doing?" And, um, I, you know, I, I had to ignore that completely and, and, and incur their disappointment and, and everything else and just, I quit 'cause I couldn't stand it.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:05:38

        Mm.

    18. RGRobert Greene1:05:39

        You know? But I could have listened to my mother. I could have listened to voices that told me, "You're 35 years old. Time to settle down, Robert. Time to get into a job, trying to get into that niche in Hollywood, become a television writer, and you make a good income, and..." Yeah, I'll make a good income, but I'll kill myself in 10 years.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:05:58

        [laughing]

11. 1:06:00 – 1:10:23

    Why Understanding Scale Changes Everything

    1. CWChris Williamson1:06:01

       All right, getting back to the-

    2. RGRobert Greene1:06:02

       Sublime

    3. CWChris Williamson1:06:03

       ... Sublime.

    4. RGRobert Greene1:06:04

       Please.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:06:04

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

    6. RGRobert Greene1:06:12

       Well, uh, the, the idea of scale i- is, is very important to me because, you know, animals, God bless them, they have their, their i- interesting, strange consciousness, but they're not aware of anything outside of their immediate environment. They don't know what's happening outside what they can see or smell, right? They're not aware of, "Here I'm in America, and what's going on in China?" Okay? No animal has that. We have consciousness, and we're aware of things on the other side of the planet, on the, what's going on in the sky with our sun and, and beyond that, right? And so when you open your eyes to that and you literally take it in, the first thought is, "My God, am I insignificant. I am so small-" Right? The universe is 13.8 billion years. I live maybe, if I'm lucky, 80 years. You try and, and, and divide 13.8 billion by 80 and you go, "Jesus Christ, my life is like nothing. It's like a, a, a life of a fly." It's like passes by in no time. You think of the distances and how immense things are. You are so small. You also... There are eight billion people on Earth. You're one of eight billion people. You're, you're in- you're, you're meaningless. You're so small, okay? That sense of scale and being aware of how small you are and how infinitesimal, how you're like just a piece of dust, has two effects on you. Number one, it's kind of, "Oh my God, I feel horrible." On the other hand, that's insane that I am aware of this vastness, that I am aware of time, that I am part of this incredible drama, right? That I can be aware of endless time. I can be aware of a limitless universe kind of thing. Children have that sensation. It's kind of dizzying to feel that, to be aware of it, to be aware of the vastness of things. It puts everything in perspective. It makes you realize that the little bitty concerns that you have in the moment aren't really that important in the long scheme of things. In fact, they're incredibly unimportant. When you're a child, that smallness is very apparent because you literally are small. You literally are weak and vulnerable, and because of that, you're curious. You want to know. Everything seems interesting and exciting and weird, and you look up at the night sky, and it like, it has that sense of terror and excitement, which is the sublime in essence, a mix of these two powerful emotions.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:08:59

       Hmm.

    8. RGRobert Greene1:09:00

       And that's what gives you the intensity of your experience, that sense of scale of, of how small you are. But then you get older, and your ego takes over, and you, you become the center of the universe instead of you being this tiny little insignificant ant, right? And everything revolves around you and your desires and your needs and, and, and, and all that. You don't, you don't want to feel vulnerable. You don't want to feel that smallness, that weakness, that helplessness. But the price you pay for reversing the true scale of things is that life loses that intensity. It loses that little extra thing that happens when you're aware of how short your life is, when you're aware of, of how immense things are, and you pay a price, and things get kind of flat, right? Because everything revolves around you. When you go out, take a hike on a mountain, and you're just thinking about your own problems and your own world, and you're not seeing things. You're not seeing the vastness of the landscape around you. And so having a sense of scale of, of what's truly matters, of how truly small and insignificant you are, to me is a very, very important part of becoming conscious, of being a human being, and people lose that as they get older.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:10:19

       Hmm.

    10. RGRobert Greene1:10:19

        And you want to return to that sense of scale. Does that make any sense?

12. 1:10:23 – 1:18:54

    How History Changes Your Perspective

    1. CWChris Williamson1:10:23

       It does indeed. I imagine as well, you, you mentioned your, uh, penchant for history, uh, uh, uh, obsession with history. All of your books have got huge historical content, maybe not usually as far back as Neanderthals, but still. Uh, I imagine that reading history can give us greater perspective, access to the sublime as well.

    2. RGRobert Greene1:10:43

       Yeah, I mean, um, so when you're of... History gives you several things. First of all, you think everything is new and everything is different and exciting like AI and social media. Yeah, they didn't have AI, I, I grant you that, so that's new. But we've always had kind of versions of social media. People have always been gossiping about other people. People have always been sharing information. It's just now on a much wider level. But nothing is ever new. History runs in these cycles, and you see them over and over and over again. I just read an article in the newspaper this morning about how there's this trend in Spain where all the young people in their early 20s are rebelling against the socialist government, and they're wanting to become conservative and go back to the traditional Spain that they knew, and they all dress like preppies. They wear khaki pants and white shirts and starched shirts and very kind of English style-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:11:42

       Hmm

    4. RGRobert Greene1:11:42

       ... of like English nobility kind of thing, and loafers, loafers with little, you know-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:11:48

       Tassels and stuff

    6. RGRobert Greene1:11:49

       ... tassels and all that stuff.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:11:50

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

    8. RGRobert Greene1:11:53

       Okay. [chuckles]

    9. CWChris Williamson1:11:54

       Yeah, yeah.

    10. RGRobert Greene1:11:55

        They're called Cayetanos because the name Cayetano was a very kind of, uh, you know, upper class name that you give to a boy. And so they're all getting into this, and the women are getting... And it's like being, dressing traditional and loving bullfights and going to bullfighting and not liking immigrants and trying to go back, and even interest in, in Franco and in the fascist period of Spain. Well, it's a reaction. Young people are continually reacting against what is f- is fashionable from their previous generation, right? When I was growing up, we were react... It was the '70s and '60s, and we were rebelling. We were angry. We hated every, all the conservative stuff, shit going on. We wanted to be hippies. We wanted to take drugs. We were reacting. So every generation reacts to what happened before and goes in this new direction thinking, "God, we're so subversive. We're so new." But it's not new. It's what has happened for thousands of years, and even in ancient Babylonia, they were complaining about how the young generation... There's a tablet, one of the earliest tablets about how young people are ignoring their elders and wanting to go off in some new direction. You read history, you realize it's a cycle. It just continually happens over and over again. It puts things in perspective. The other thing is you don't realize, but you're walking around in a world of ghosts. Dead people are everywhere around you. They live inside of your brain. You don't, you, you don't-- Your language that you have was created thousands of years ago. It evolved. That's where your thoughts come from. Your thoughts aren't your own. They're built out of all these little mo- these little moments in language as it, as it evolved, right? Your brain is structured from all this evolution and things that happened earlier on. Your consciousness was something that was built over thousands of years. Your values, what you value as a human being, the fact that you feel envy, the fact that you're wary of strangers, these are all things that people felt ten thousand years ago. And so you're not, you're not... You think that everything is new and fresh, but you're actually-- It's like a necropolis, I say, that we live in. The dead are everywhere. They're all around us. They're in our values. They're in our clothes. They're in our systems. They're in our thoughts.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:14:16

        Hmm.

    12. RGRobert Greene1:14:16

        They're in our music. They're in everything. Everything human is structured according to certain codes that have been invented, have been around for thousands of years.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:14:25

        Mm-hmm.

    14. RGRobert Greene1:14:26

        History makes you aware of all the dead that are around you, of, they're inside of you. It makes you aware that nothing is new. It's a liberating, sublime feeling to, to di- deep into history.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:14:37

        In other news, if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swoll, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for twenty years, and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around one obsession, to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, and weights that you need to do, everything. So all that you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP app could wipe your ass for you, it probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference, and if you're serious about training, it'll do the same for you too. Right now, you can get up to fifty dollars off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's rpstrength.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout.

    16. RGRobert Greene1:15:34

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

    17. CWChris Williamson1:16:23

        Hmm.

    18. RGRobert Greene1:16:23

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

    19. CWChris Williamson1:17:01

        [chuckles]

    20. RGRobert Greene1:17:01

        Uh, that you could explain going back to all sorts of other things happening in America, going back to the 18th century if you want, going back to ancient times if you want. It's all part of a single chain. And when I see people who have no sense of history, who don't reali- who on- who their only reference points are things that have happened since the year 2000, I think, "God, you're not really human."

    21. CWChris Williamson1:17:28

        Hmm.

    22. RGRobert Greene1:17:28

        You're not really connecting to what it means. It's not like you have to be a deep student of history, but you have to be aware that history has formed you, that history has formed your values, it has formed the world around you. So it's not gonna make you more money. It's just-- I think it's gonna make... Yeah.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:17:46

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

    24. RGRobert Greene1:17:50

        Yeah. Very much so. I mean, uh, so everything y- everything is in the present. You know, everything y- y- you see, it's all like what social media is telling you, what the algorithms are saying, and it's making you angry, and it's making you fascinated. You, you know, you, you, you see this thing on Instagram, "God damn it, why is he doing it?" And if you had any kind of context, if you had any kind of distance, and if you had any sense of history, you would know that people that are, have been playing on your emotions, and they've been playing on your emotions in the 1930s, you know, with Hitler, that there's a trend for, for, for, um, demagogues and propaganda. You would have some distance from your own reactions. You would be able to see that people are manipulating you because you're not so tied into the images that are flashing before your mind here, and you would step back and you would go, "Maybe there's something else going on here than what I'm actually seeing."

13. 1:18:54 – 1:24:06

    Does History Repeat Itself?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:18:54

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

    2. RGRobert Greene1:19:32

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:19:33

       And that, um, history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes thing. Like-

    4. RGRobert Greene1:19:37

       Yeah

    5. CWChris Williamson1:19:37

       ... I think history just straight up repeats a lot of the time.

    6. RGRobert Greene1:19:40

       It does. It does.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:19:40

       Or at least individual actors and the tactics that are used to do-

    8. RGRobert Greene1:19:43

       Yeah

    9. CWChris Williamson1:19:43

       ... the wrapper that's around it. I remember seeing this, uh, concern that was written around the time of the printing press-

    10. RGRobert Greene1:19:53

        Mm

    11. CWChris Williamson1:19:53

        ... that if people were able to read more freely-

    12. RGRobert Greene1:19:56

        Yeah

    13. CWChris Williamson1:19:56

        ... especially in the common language, that this would be the undoing of the brains. The, the people would be so lost in, in books and, and in reading these words that they would become completely disconnected from the world around them.

    14. RGRobert Greene1:20:09

        Right.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:20:09

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

    16. RGRobert Greene1:20:20

        Oh, yeah.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:20:21

        Yeah, but this time it's different.

    18. RGRobert Greene1:20:23

        Yeah.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:20:24

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

    20. RGRobert Greene1:20:34

        Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:20:36

        But you have this very long, illustrious record of people saying, "Yeah, but this time it's different," over and over and over again.

    22. RGRobert Greene1:20:44

        Yes, you do. You do.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:20:44

        And it not being different.

    24. RGRobert Greene1:20:45

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

    25. CWChris Williamson1:21:12

        British, no dark side.

    26. RGRobert Greene1:21:13

        What?

    27. CWChris Williamson1:21:13

        I'm British, no dark side.

    28. RGRobert Greene1:21:14

        Oh, right. [laughs]

    29. CWChris Williamson1:21:16

        Yeah. Yeah.

    30. RGRobert Greene1:21:16

        I used to see a pass by a theater-
14. 1:24:06 – 1:28:57

    Has Science Made It Harder to Access the Sublime?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:24:06

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

    2. RGRobert Greene1:24:16

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

    3. CWChris Williamson1:24:56

       Mm.

    4. RGRobert Greene1:24:56

       All these other physicists, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, they all had this sense that they were uncovering something weird and strange about the universe, and it made them shocked, and it made them excited. Jane Goodall studying, uh, uh, primates, like how insane was that? The best scientists, and there are many, many, many of them, even those neuroscientists are in awe of what they're discovering. So, you know, you, you look in the paper, uh, like I, I read the other day that they're discovering the origins of black holes, astronomers. They see these red dots on all the, in the telescope, these vet teles- powerful telescopes, and they now dec- decided that those red dots are the earliest form of black holes, and that they were formed at the beginning of the universe. Now, you could look at that and just say it's a fact. And okay, well, black holes, yeah, yeah, kind... But then you could go with your imagination and go, "Close to the beginning of the universe? You mean like, like a few million years after the universe, there are these things out there that they're seeing, and that scientists are able to, like, take these red dots and, and extrapolate that they're actually black holes?" And then what is a black hole? It's something so powerful that gravity, uh, is not powerful, and light can't escape it. If you take the discoveries of science and you use your imagination, they're like, it's like insane. We're uncovering what our ancestors were up to. We're uncovering the origins of life-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:26:34

       Mm

    6. RGRobert Greene1:26:34

       ... how life might have been invented in, in, in the soups of oceans four billion years ago. It's, it's absolutely mind-blowing, but people aren't thinking like that. They're not going, taking that next step and having a sense of awe about it. They're just facts.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:26:51

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

    8. RGRobert Greene1:27:01

       Yeah

    9. CWChris Williamson1:27:01

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

    10. RGRobert Greene1:27:26

        Yeah

    11. CWChris Williamson1:27:26

        ... on a daily basis, and-

    12. RGRobert Greene1:27:27

        Well put

    13. CWChris Williamson1:27:28

        ... your body is made out of everything you put into your mouth, and your brain is made out of everything that you put into your eyes and ears.

    14. RGRobert Greene1:27:33

        Yeah.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:27:33

        And if you think about what that consumption pattern is like, you are basically feeding yourself fast food for your amygdala on a daily basis.

    16. RGRobert Greene1:27:40

        Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:27:42

        There is still... You know, you talk about sort of pagan time, pagan religions, this sense of so much more wonder, so many more unanswered questions, the opportunity to use story and narrative and personification. It's the-

    18. RGRobert Greene1:27:58

        Yeah

    19. CWChris Williamson1:27:58

        ... gods fighting that's made the e- the, the, the lightning, how much easier it must have been to have been infused by life. Should we all become pagans again? Is that the answer? Can we just do that?

    20. RGRobert Greene1:28:09

        I would love it if we would. I would-

    21. CWChris Williamson1:28:11

        I'm down. If you wanna make a, if you wanna make a pagan-

    22. RGRobert Greene1:28:14

        [laughs]

    23. CWChris Williamson1:28:14

        ... a pagan commune somewhere, I'll join.

    24. RGRobert Greene1:28:16

        I, I would 'cause I, I've always felt myself to be pagan.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:28:20

        Mm.

    26. RGRobert Greene1:28:20

        Um, I've always, uh... When I see-- When I go to the British Museum and I see that section on Assyria, and I see some of those massive sculptures of, like, half human, half tig- lions, whoa, I feel like it's expressing something so powerful in me. I've always been deeply, deeply attracted to the designs, to the things of, like, the, um, in the Aborigines, their, their little paintings that they make of-

    27. CWChris Williamson1:28:48

        Mm

    28. RGRobert Greene1:28:48

        ... you know, the waves inside of animals, something. It seems more alive. It seems like something so powerful and so direct.

15. 1:28:57 – 1:33:41

    What We Get Wrong About Paganism

    1. RGRobert Greene1:28:57

       I don't... Yeah.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:28:58

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

    3. RGRobert Greene1:29:02

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

    4. CWChris Williamson1:29:43

       Yeah.

    5. RGRobert Greene1:29:44

       I sort of researched that, and the words for, for gods was like a, a flash of light. And so the gods were not these entities, were not these characters, were not these human forms. They were forces in nature. They were these powers. There was waves of energy.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:30:03

       Mm.

    7. RGRobert Greene1:30:03

       And so when you felt sexually drawn to somebody, Aphrodite was, like, inhabiting your body. It was a force inside of you that came outside of you.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:30:15

       Yep.

    9. RGRobert Greene1:30:15

       So in our modern, sophisticated world, when I fall, when I'm sexually attracted to this woman, it's just my hormones are acting up, right? You know, it's just me, you know, and whatever. But in fact, we're-- Your sense of desire comes from something much larger than yourself, right? It comes from how we have to reproduce, how biology is operating in this. It's something transcendent, and the desire for atoms to c- to, to meet and form matter, the des- uh, I have this story in there of, of pr- paramecium in the water, and this scientist was seeing how the paramecium had this desire for one to go inside the other.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:31:00

        Mm.

    11. RGRobert Greene1:31:00

        That's not how paramecium reproduce. They reproduce by splitting. So it had nothing to do with reproduction. It was a desire to be combining with other paramecium, and he was saying that this is a force in nature, that nature is built around this desire for things to be attracted and to kind of in- incorporate the other thing.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:31:20

        Mm.

    13. RGRobert Greene1:31:20

        And so, so the sexual desire is actually you are being possessed by something greater than yourself. It could be Aphrodite. That might be the name you put to it 3,000 years ago. I still might even think that it could be Aphrodite. But the gods weren't like these funny creatures, kind of laughable, silly things. They were these forces that in, that in, that c- possessed you. And I describe in there one of the oldest mysteries, the Eleusinian Mysteries, that went on for thousands of years, and all of the greatest thinkers were initiated in it, and it changed them. They, they spoke of ... It was the most incredible thing they ever been to. It makes Burning Man seem like nothing, okay? Mm. Mm. Sorry to say. Um, and so it, it was a way of making you feel that you had died and then were reborn, just like the myth of Persephone and Demeter- Mm ... who's, who has to go into the underworld, her daughter, and that's when winter happens. Then she reemerges, and that's when spring happens. But the sense of feeling your, your death and being reborn, that's what th- these gods, that's what the religious experience was. If we could go back to that, if we could incorporate that into our 21st century mentality, it would be awakening of human consciousness. I would be all for it. I would start wearing pelts and horns. I'd be as- [laughs] ... pagan as anybody 'cause I'm all for the pagan world. Sorry. [laughs] And you, and you know what? Take it one step further. Yeah. Christianity, which is the, probably the most powerful religion on the planet Earth- Mm ... is a pagan religion. It has roots in paganism that are extremely deep, and a lot of the ideas and a lot of the rituals. Dionysus was a Greek god who was di- who died and then was reborn, and there's so many parallels between the myth of Dionysus and Jesus Christ. You could go on and on and on. The roots of Christianity are from paganism. So to make this sharp distinction between Christianity and paganism is totally bogus. There is no distinction. Mm-hmm. Paganism is still within our belief system today. Yeah. Yeah. It's one flow.

16. 1:33:41 – 1:44:16

    Are Supernatural Abilities Just Senses We Can’t Access Anymore?

    1. RGRobert Greene1:33:41

       Yeah. Yeah. What was that story about the Russian explorer and the- Oh, yeah ... Siberian tiger? Yeah. Yeah. That's one of my favorite stories. Um, so ... And they made a great movie out of it. Uh, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, I believe in the '80s, did a movie. It's called Ders- Dersu Uzala. I highly recommend you see it. This Russian explorer at the turn of the 20th century, his name is Arsenyev, he's exploring the Siberian Taiga, which is this vast kind of wasteland o- of snow and, and, um, and, you know, it's just ... There's indigenous tribes, et cetera. And he's exploring because there are parts of the Tiberian Saiga, the Siberian Taiga, sorry. [laughs] The Tiberian Saiga. It's Tiberian Saiga. Very good. Got that wrong. I'm getting a little punch drunk here. The Siberian Taiga that had never been seen before, so he's sent out there to map it, right? He's a scientist, right? Very good scientist, a, a cartographer. So he's out there, and he's going through this area that's, that's very wild, that no Russian has been before, and he's ... There's this man. They're, they're having a camp- They're sitting by their campfire, and this indigenous man named Dersu Uzala asks if he can sit by their fire with them and, uh, smoke his pipe. And he was a trapper, a hunter, who's by himself. He belongs to this tribe called the Gold, um, but he's, lives mostly on his own and, and, you know, occasionally he meets other members of his tribe, but he's basically a hunter, a trapper. And Arsenyev invites him to sit by the campfire, and they share a meal, and slowly he falls under the spell of this man. And he says, "Will you join us on our expedition? We need somebody like you." And the man agrees, okay? He'll be their guide. He'll show them, you know, where to go. And slowly he realizes that this man with his pagan beliefs is so much more powerful than they are. His body, first of all, he's in his 50s or 60s. He has 20 times the energy that they have. He can do feats that they can't even imagine, right? Because his consciousness isn't telling him, "You can't do this. You can't do that." He's just open to everything. He knows every little detail of the forest. He can read like you can read a book. He knows by the tracks on the ground what animal passed, what kind of mood they were in, whether they were i- in heat or not, and whether they were hungry. He can read everything by how the branches are broken. He can see the sky and say, "A storm is coming," even though it's, like, two days beforehand. He smells the temperature, the weather. He says that the, the forest breathes and is alive, and he knows how it breathes, and he can feel it. One day they encounter a tiger. They hear the, the roaring of the tiger, and Arsenyev is terrified. He can't believe it. The tiger's gonna about to pounce on them. And a Siberian tiger is, believe me, is something you don't want to encounter. So he picks up his rifle. He's about to shoot it, and, and the, uh, Dar- Dersu, the indigenous guy, goes, "Put that away." And he walks right up to the tiger, and he starts talking to it, and he starts telling it, he says that the tiger is the soul of the jungle, and if you s- mess with the soul of the jungle, you're gonna pay a price. Noth- nothing in, in the forest will ever, uh, cooperate with you. And he goes up, and he talks to the, uh, tiger, and he says, "Amba," which is the name of the tiger, to his group, "don't be mad. We're here just walking around. We're not gonna bother you. Please be okay." And the tiger walks away. And [laughs] Arsenyev is like, "My God, uh, weren't you terrified?" He goes, "No, no, never, never. If you w- if you shot him, I would never be your friend. You would have violated the ..." Anyway, he comes to realize that this man has an intelligence and a spirit that humans have lost. Mm. That we once were so close to the environment that we could read everything, that our senses were so alive. We could feel the weather, we could feel animals, we knew the spirit of everything around us. And it, and it ends up that our, that Dersu is murdered a few years later by people who st- who, who rob him, and he's so sad that this is a world that's disappearing, and he speculates, "If only we had kept some of this with our scientific spirit," 'cause he was a scientist, "how powerful it would be, because this man taught me everything about the jungle, about the, about the Siberian taiga." So that's the story.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:38:18

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

    3. RGRobert Greene1:38:30

       Well, um, we are capable of so much more than we think we are. Um, so I, I have stories in there of, of people kind of stretching the limits. So there's a story about a mountain climber, 'cause I'm kind of very interested in mountain climbers and the sublime. And he climbs this mountain in Colorado, and he gets to the top, and he's elated, and now he has to go back down. He can see that a storm is brewing, but he decides to go back down the other side and find some new, uh, areas that he hadn't climbed before. So he's descending, the storm's coming. It's getting a little bit sketchy out there. Suddenly, he's on this ledge, and he falls. And as he's falling, his knee hits the rock, and he cracks his knee open, and he lands on a ledge that's, like, like, a foot wide, okay? Maybe a foot and a half wide, and he lands on his crampons. So he's bleeding, his knee is cracked. He's sitting on this tiny ledge. He's somehow very lucky that he landed there. He fell about 30 feet. The storm is coming. He's alone, and he's going, "I'm, I'm d- I'm about to die," and he starts crying. He starts sobbing. And then a voice inside him says, "Try to get to your feet. Just try to get to your feet." And it's really painful. His, as I said, his knee is cracked. He somehow manages to get to his feet. Then all of a sudden, as he looks, he can see that there is a slight way that the ledge can lead to another ledge. It's very precarious. But then suddenly, he feels this rush of energy, this, like, he doesn't know what it is, and he starts descending onto these tiny ledges, you know, s- whatever the word is. He finally finds his way back down the mountain, and he's ecstatic. He's like, "My God, I was like a mountain goat the way I was suddenly able to descend this mountain. What happened to me? What were these powers that suddenly came to me?" Right? "I can't make sense of it." And then he goes to a hospital, and he takes some months to recover, and he's going, "What was that? What was that experience? I have to have it again," 'cause it was so ecstatic. He spends the next 20 years of his life trying to have that experience again, and he fails, and he fails, and he fails. He climbs Mount Everest. It doesn't work. It's just, you know, uh, leeches are eating at w- at his knees, and he's, he's miserable, and, and there's, you know, storms, et cetera. He tries long distance condist- um, long distance running. He gets moments where there's some kind of ecstasy, but it's not the same. He reads about the neurology of the human brain, and he goes into indigenous cultures, and he realizes that shamans back then, people who had these initiation rituals, would put people to the brink of death and then bring them back, and that they would then have these experiences like he had. And he decided that they had mastered the neuroendocrine system. They could control their no- their own hormones, because what happened to him on that mountain was his body, his hormones, were creating these dopamines and these adrenaline effects that gave him that mountain goat power.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:41:44

       Mm.

    5. RGRobert Greene1:41:45

       Okay? So anyway, the, the lesson here is he finally discovers it. He creates this, his own, what he calls a mountain run. I, I... That's not the word, but he creates these runs. He takes a map, and he makes a circle, and he's gonna run that circle no matter what comes into his path, right? In, in these wooded areas, even if a mountain or a stream, he's gotta create that circle. And in doing this, he comes upon a cliff that he has to climb. He gets that experience again. Okay, but the point is, our bodies have these insane powers that we have. A lot of it is from our physiology, right? From our, our own hormone system for how things, when we're in a sense of danger. So if you took any stockbroker on Wall Street, as rigid and tight and conservative and limited as anything else, as un-sublime as any creature you can imagine on our planet, and you dropped him in the middle of an island alone, and he had to survive, his senses would start waking up. These, some of these effects would happen.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:42:54

       Mm-hmm.

    7. RGRobert Greene1:42:55

       And he would discover some of these, quote-unquote, "supernatural powers" that he possesses, because when your senses are dead, you're l- you're not connected to the, to your own body. You're not connected to these immense powers that we have, right? And I sensed a little bit when I was this close to death, and I could feel, I could feel, like, death inside of me. It was like something really powerful and really strong, not like anything else, and it was like a power that I can't even verbalize, but is out there somehow, and it's going to happen to everyone when they die. You're gonna s- feel that. You're gonna feel like you're connecting to something uni- cosmic, right? And so there's something-- And then when you emerge from that, your physiology and your brain is slightly altered, and you don't have supernatural powers, but the world looks different.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:43:52

       Mm.

    9. RGRobert Greene1:43:52

       And that, you know, it's not without... I'm not taking LSD. I'm not taking, uh, you know, uh, why- ayahuasca, or whatever you call it. Again, it's just there. It's my f- my own brain. Your brain has these weird, weird, weird powers that you're not even accessing because you're not even connected to your body anymore. You're not connected to your own mortality. You're not connected to your senses.

17. 1:44:16 – 2:01:39

    How Your Environment Awakens Your Senses

    1. CWChris Williamson1:44:16

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

    2. RGRobert Greene1:44:24

       Whoa.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:44:24

       And he was out in the plains off the, uh, van, out, uh, out, out of the Jeep, and he said they'd been tracking this animal for ages. I don't know whether it was a rhino or not. And they'd realized that they were really, really close to it, but they couldn't work out where. They were next to this huge big bush, and they're looking around, and then they heard this little [snorts] from the other side of the bush. They heard this sound, and they realized that this animal that they'd been tracking, let's say it was a rhino, was 20 feet on the other side of a very large shrub.

    4. RGRobert Greene1:44:57

       Yeah.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:44:58

       And he talks about this sort of rush of adrenaline. He told me this story, and it always stuck in my mind. And then I went to go and film a documentary series in Zambia, and the Zambezi River, I didn't realize, runs between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Like, literally five miles, four miles, three miles, maybe wide. You can see there's, hey, there's a different country on the other side of that thing. And I was taken out to do an old school style of safari. This is when, from the golden era of safaris in sort of the '60s, before some now are closer to sort of a seven-star hotel experience that's in the middle of the Masai Mara or whatever. And this was if you want a shower, you need to warn them half an hour before so they can go and heat some water. It's a bucket-

    6. RGRobert Greene1:45:43

       Yeah

    7. CWChris Williamson1:45:43

       ... that gets run through.

    8. RGRobert Greene1:45:44

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:45:44

       You sleep under the stars. You're in a glorified-

    10. RGRobert Greene1:45:47

        When is this? When was this?

    11. CWChris Williamson1:45:48

        Uh, two years ago. Two and a half years ago.

    12. RGRobert Greene1:45:50

        Oh, really? Wow.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:45:51

        Yeah, yeah. Very recent. Um, so I mean, you get a plane to Addis Ababa, uh, Addis Ababa in, uh, Ethiopia.

    14. RGRobert Greene1:45:57

        Yeah.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:45:57

        And then from there you fly in, and then from there you get a little [mimics propeller]

    16. RGRobert Greene1:46:00

        Wow

    17. CWChris Williamson1:46:01

        ... 10-person plane, less, where I didn't realize this, but the fuselage, the bit or whatever it is, the bit that's on the wing that I assumed was where the fuel went, the sort of long bit where the wing goes over the top of it-

    18. RGRobert Greene1:46:14

        Yeah

    19. CWChris Williamson1:46:14

        ... no, that's where your bags go.

    20. RGRobert Greene1:46:15

        [laughs]

    21. CWChris Williamson1:46:16

        So you put your luggage, your luggage in the w- And I'm looking out of the window and I'm like, "That is half open." Like that latch is half open.

    22. RGRobert Greene1:46:22

        [laughs]

    23. CWChris Williamson1:46:22

        Just pairs of pants and trousers and stuff flying behind us maybe if that had happened. It didn't, so we land and then we get a Jeep, and then we get on a boat, and the boat's an hour and a half.

    24. RGRobert Greene1:46:30

        Wow.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:46:30

        Then they find this one bend in the river, and this is where they'd set up camp, and they do it every single year, and it's not too dissimilar to Burning Man.

    26. RGRobert Greene1:46:36

        Yeah.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:46:36

        That everything that they use while they're there-

    28. RGRobert Greene1:46:39

        Yeah

    29. CWChris Williamson1:46:39

        ... is either from the local environment-

    30. RGRobert Greene1:46:41

        Yeah
18. 2:01:39 – 2:08:59

    How to Rediscover Your Sense of Wonder

    1. CWChris Williamson2:01:40

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

    2. RGRobert Greene2:01:52

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

    3. CWChris Williamson2:01:58

       Oh, it's the number one. That's before anything else.

    4. RGRobert Greene2:02:01

       Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah.

    5. CWChris Williamson2:02:02

       Yeah.

    6. RGRobert Greene2:02:02

       Because I'm gonna... The book is, is, um, organized to be very practical. So it has stories, it has things that are kind of make you feel, "Wow, that's weird. That's tr- I never thought of that before." But then I have exercises in each chapter about how to, uh, incorporate this into your daily existence.

    7. CWChris Williamson2:02:20

       Mm.

    8. RGRobert Greene2:02:20

       And then I have meditations that are a little bit weirder about how you can kind of make a sort of poetic way of accessing this. Um, and so for instance, um, you know, it's easy for people to talk about thinking about your mortality and your death, right? It's a kind of exercise that philosophers go through, the Stoics, et cetera. But I always felt like it's kind of weak because you can't think about death. It's something beyond thinking. So I have an exercise where I literally take you through what it will feel like when you're dying based on my research and based on my own experience, and I have you lie down, and I have you feeling like the world is going distant away from you, that your body is sinking into the ground, that your skull is getting heavier, it's sinking in, that your bones are dissolving, that everything is kind of moving away from you, and that maybe your mind is separating from your body at some point. And then to feel that sensation and to make it as visceral as possible, and then to take that feeling and then go outside and walk in the world and tell yourself, "This is what I, I, I, I died and this is what the world looks like after I've died," right? And how different the world looks like after you've been through that experience. If you take it seriously enough and you go through it, then you will be able to have that kind of strange moment of how different things look like when you sense that you won't be there anymore and how everything has an intensity-

    9. CWChris Williamson2:03:47

       Mm

    10. RGRobert Greene2:03:48

        ... that it didn't have beforehand. So the book is very practical, but the main thing is, as in everything in life, you have to feel the desire for it. So if your desire, if your priorities in life are just making money, getting by, doing your career-

    11. CWChris Williamson2:04:09

        Mm

    12. RGRobert Greene2:04:09

        ... you're gonna read my book and, and it won't really have any long-lasting effect. But I'm trying to hit you over the head, I'm trying to really make it clear to you that this is something that is gonna have a very powerful impact on your experience of life.

    13. CWChris Williamson2:04:24

        Mm.

    14. RGRobert Greene2:04:24

        And I want you to take all of your emptiness, all of your restlessness, all your feelings like you're missing something in life, and I want you to bring them up like you're vomiting them, and that you're feeling them coming up from the bottom of your... and into your throat, and you sense how, what you, what you're actually missing in life, and you're not diluting it in any way. And I want you to feel the kind of ugliness-

    15. CWChris Williamson2:04:49

        Mm-hmm

    16. RGRobert Greene2:04:49

        ... that exists in the world with the social media, the pettiness, the polarization, and you want something else.

    17. CWChris Williamson2:04:57

        Mm.

    18. RGRobert Greene2:04:57

        You have to have a desire for something else, otherwise this won't mean anything to you, right? Because we're emotional creatures. We're not-- We think we're rational and cognition is everything, but really it's emotions that, that determine, that, that are the most powerful thing. Just like when you had the experience with the elephant, it wasn't your mind suddenly coming into place, "Oh, I've got to do this, that, and the other." It was this powerful feeling that affected your emotions, right? You have to feel, want to feel the sublime before anything else.

    19. CWChris Williamson2:05:28

        Mm.

    20. RGRobert Greene2:05:28

        You wanna have to get rid of all of your baggage and just have like kind of, I hate to use the word, but like a mental enema. [chuckles]

    21. CWChris Williamson2:05:36

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    22. RGRobert Greene2:05:37

        And just like get rid of all this other stuff. If you don't have that desire, if you think your life is fine, the sublime won't have any appeal to you. But I'm trying to make it, hit you over the head with the idea that there's something deeply, deeply missing, and your life will have an intensity. You will be experiencing things on a different level if you let this in. Once you have that, you've gone to that level where you say you've had your come to Jesus moment, you go, "Yes, I need this in my life. Yes, it's important to me," then the things that I try and sneak into your brain will have the effect, 'cause I'm, I'm always trying to like-

    23. CWChris Williamson2:06:14

        [chuckles]

    24. RGRobert Greene2:06:15

        ... instill a little bit of a poison into you and make you look at the world differently.

    25. CWChris Williamson2:06:19

        Mm.

    26. RGRobert Greene2:06:20

        But you have to have the desire, and you have to realize that you're restless and you're bored for a reason. You're not getting something. And this world is making you passive.

    27. CWChris Williamson2:06:32

        Mm.

    28. RGRobert Greene2:06:32

        It's making you dependent on algorithms. It's making you dependent on food. It's making you dependent on what other things people are doing for you. The sublime is where you finally become active with your own experience. You take it over. You're the curator of your own experience.

    29. CWChris Williamson2:06:47

        Mm.

    30. RGRobert Greene2:06:47

        Not Meta, not Google, not ChatGPT, but you are now the agent of your own experience. You're gonna create, curate your own experience, and this book is gonna help lead you there. And so just feel that need to, to get outside of the kind of bubble and the emptiness that you experience in your daily life.
19. 2:08:59 – 2:19:31

    The Biggest Lesson From The Law of the Sublime

    1. CWChris Williamson2:08:59

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

    2. RGRobert Greene2:09:22

       It's a good question. Um, well, so a, a lot of the book, uh, I'm kind of criticizing as directly as I can, uh, the modern technological world that is flattening your experience, and you're gonna be kind of rebelling against it and you're gonna be going, "God, Robert, you're so old-fashioned. What's your problem? You know, get with it," you know?

    3. CWChris Williamson2:09:48

       Yeah. Get on TikTok.

    4. RGRobert Greene2:09:49

       Huh? Yeah.

    5. CWChris Williamson2:09:50

       Get on TikTok. Yeah.

    6. RGRobert Greene2:09:51

       Yeah. Um, and they're gonna be a little bit annoyed with that and, you know, "Why can't I just incorporate social media? Isn't social media sublime? Can't I incorporate that into my life? Why are you so critical-

    7. CWChris Williamson2:10:02

       Mm

    8. RGRobert Greene2:10:02

       ... of these things?" I don't want you to stop all the technology in your life. That's not possible, and I'd be a hypocrite to say I don't. I, you know, use ChatGPT sometimes to look up certain things. But I want you to be aware of how it's, it's deadening you, how it's having a negative effect on your experience of life. You don't have to get rid of it. We are-- We think too much in black and white terms. It has to be either this or the other. You can still use the internet. You can still use AI if you have to. You can still be a modern person doing your modern things. But you can exist also at the same time in this other realm. You can explore it and you can see... So I was thinking about myself the other day. I was meditating, and I was realizing that, um, I'm kind of programmed. My ideas are kind of programmed, and I'm w- following Instagram, and it's kind of having an effect on me.

    9. CWChris Williamson2:11:05

       Mm.

    10. RGRobert Greene2:11:06

        I could see the effect it has on me.

    11. CWChris Williamson2:11:07

        What is that effect?

    12. RGRobert Greene2:11:08

        Well, I watch one cat video, 'cause I have a cat. I'm like, "Wow, this is amazing. It's incredible." I happen to love animals.

    13. CWChris Williamson2:11:17

        Yeah.

    14. RGRobert Greene2:11:17

        They have these videos of this man who has a tiger, and he's, like, wrestling with the tiger, and yet they're kind of-

    15. CWChris Williamson2:11:22

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

    16. RGRobert Greene2:11:26

        Yeah, yeah.

    17. CWChris Williamson2:11:26

        Yeah, okay.

    18. RGRobert Greene2:11:27

        And like, wow. You know? And then... And I'm thinking it's not... It, it's an emotional thing that it's playing on. It's playing on, you know, sort of raw, basic emotions of not just fascination, but just kind of curiosity or just sort of images. And I'm weak. I'm care- I'm, I'm falling into this trap.

    19. CWChris Williamson2:11:49

        Mm.

    20. RGRobert Greene2:11:49

        It's part of me. I can feel, I can sense the intoxication, the addiction, and why it works.

    21. CWChris Williamson2:11:56

        Mm.

    22. RGRobert Greene2:11:56

        And it worked on me. And being able to look at myself and see that it was happening to me, that I was falling into these traps now allows me to kind of step back and, and, and, and have some distance from it and control it and not fall into that and stop watching these videos. So you're probably gonna be a little bit repulsed by how I look at mod- the modern world, and you're gonna think, "Oh, I, I can't live like that." I'm not telling you to change your life. I'm telling you to expand your life-

    23. CWChris Williamson2:12:28

        Yeah

    24. RGRobert Greene2:12:28

        ... to expand your mind and get outside of these little bubbles that you exist in.

    25. CWChris Williamson2:12:33

        So much of what people are trying to achieve is using the modernly socially accepted and rewarded modes of reward, accomplishment, status, respect, money, commercial opportunity, access, materialism, in an attempt to feel the way that you're trying to give them a more direct source of access to. Like, the w- the wonder that you feel when you finally sell the business for a billion dollars or something, like, might be more easily accessible. Might be more easily accessible by going for a long hike up a very difficult mountain without your phone.

    26. RGRobert Greene2:13:16

        Yeah.

    27. CWChris Williamson2:13:16

        Like, it might, it might be. And if you were to look at the amount of time that at least in the modern world people have apportioned their efforts out to tens of thousands of hours trying to build the business for this one moment. Like, have you given the mountain a crack? That might be, that might be one way. So there's this recent, um, essay I read by Adam Mastroianni, who's fucking wonderful. He runs Experimental History on, on Substack, and he says, "Incentives are for Losers," is the title of this new piece. And what he's saying is... He uses this analogy of when he used to play baseball as a kid, and the posh kids would have their own helmet and their own kit, and it would be really shiny and really nice. But if, like him, you didn't have your own helmet, you'd be given one of the rec room helmets, and it would be sweaty and smell like it was worn by 10,000 10-year-olds before you because it had been. And it would... Put it on, and it probably would disintegrate if it got hit by the ball or whatever. And he uses this analogy. He says, "If you don't arrive into the world with your own set of values, you are forced to put on somebody else's. You're forced to put on everyone else's in that same kind of a way." And the reason he says incentives are for losers is that, uh... And this is, like, kind of... I still don't know how I feel about this, but I'll put it to you. His position is standing at the bottom of a ladder or a number of ladders like status, respect, acclaim, money, and looking at the top, you assume that the people at the top got there by choice, not by necessity or blind, uh, faith that this is the thing that's going to fix it. But as you begin to kind of ascend it, you realize that these people are, as he says, spiritually chinless. Says a lot of the people that have won the games that are widely accepted to be played have played the games that are widely accepted because they didn't arrive with their own helmet. They just put on the helmet that everybody else was wearing. So he's quite critical. He's not saying you can't try and achieve mastery in something or success and acclaim and money, but that many of the people who do decide to make that their entire life's pursuit didn't choose to do it. That's his sort of... That's his theory, and it makes me feel that almost, like, anarchistic middle finger rebellion thing gives me the same kind of sense as when you're speaking about your new book, which is, "Hey, there's something deeper out there," and it's not for most people. There's a very kind of, I'm sure, large, meaningfully large for selling books, but, like, minority cohort of people that are like, "Yeah, I actually want to do this myself. I'm pissed off enough at the fact that life feels flat and empty and gray that I'm gonna go and decide to pursue this thing." And it's the same with, with Adam's insight around incentives. Most of the incentives are kind of puppeting you. They're not taking you towards something that you want. They're hijacking a reward system that you're not aware of. And, uh, yeah, I think people getting pissed off at the fact that their life isn't as colorful as they would like it to be is a good first step.

    28. RGRobert Greene2:16:18

        Well, you know, uh, I wrote a book o- on human nature, Laws of Human Nature. It's about 560 pages.

    29. CWChris Williamson2:16:24

        Mm-hmm.

    30. RGRobert Greene2:16:24

        Kind of dense, no imagery. It's kind of... At first glance, it looks incredibly intimidating.
20. 2:19:31 – 2:21:16

    Where to Find Robert

    1. CWChris Williamson2:19:32

       Robert Greene, ladies and gentlemen. Robert, you're great.

    2. RGRobert Greene2:19:34

       Thank you, Chris.

    3. CWChris Williamson2:19:34

       I appreciate you. I... You were maybe episode 45 or 60 or something on the podcast seven years ago, and then we-

    4. RGRobert Greene2:19:42

       I thought I was one of your first.

    5. CWChris Williamson2:19:44

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

    6. RGRobert Greene2:19:51

       Oh, it was before that-

    7. CWChris Williamson2:19:52

       You think?

    8. RGRobert Greene2:19:52

       ... because we got introduced by our friend, our common friend, and she was trying to get me on your... This was, like, on over Skype.

    9. CWChris Williamson2:19:57

       Abbey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I remember. I think it was... It might have even been earlier. It might have been in the 20s. It was a long time. It was at least seven years ago.

    10. RGRobert Greene2:20:05

        At least.

    11. CWChris Williamson2:20:05

        It was at the very least seven years ago, and I appreciate you and your time and-

    12. RGRobert Greene2:20:09

        Oh

    13. CWChris Williamson2:20:09

        ... your, uh, preparedness to stare into the abyss and have it stare back to you as you keep on writing these things and-

    14. RGRobert Greene2:20:15

        Oh, thank you. Thank you very much

    15. CWChris Williamson2:20:16

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

    16. RGRobert Greene2:20:20

        Um, well, uh, I have a website. It's kind of one I've had for God knows how long. It's called powerseductionandwar.com. The and is spelled out. Powerseductionandwar.com. There you'll find links to Instagram, TikTok, all the things I tell you not to pay attention to-

    17. CWChris Williamson2:20:37

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

    18. RGRobert Greene2:20:38

        ... I'm here guiding you to.

    19. CWChris Williamson2:20:39

        Mm-hmm.

    20. RGRobert Greene2:20:39

        And my YouTube channel and all that stuff. And then the book will be out... I don't know when you're gonna post this, but the book will be out, I believe, November 10th.

    21. CWChris Williamson2:20:48

        Amazing.

    22. RGRobert Greene2:20:49

        So look for it then.

    23. CWChris Williamson2:20:50

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

    24. RGRobert Greene2:20:52

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

    25. CWChris Williamson2:20:54

        All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude, yes. A quick note. Lots of people tell us that YouTube unsubscribes them from the channel even though they already pressed it. So just check down there and see if the subscribe button is pressed. You get access to episodes before anybody else if you do. Supports me and the show, helps me to bring you bigger and better guests, uh, and it makes me very happy, so just go and give it a tap for me. I thank you. [blows kiss]

Episode duration: 2:21:16