Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Surprising Truth About Human Nature with Robert Greene #320

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

What are the laws or principles that underpin all human behaviour? Today's guest is someone who has spent many years trying to crack the code and answer that very important question. Robert Greene is an American author and speaker best known for his books on power, strategy and seduction. He's authored six international bestsellers, including his very latest, The Laws Of Human Nature. Trying to understand why people do what they do may sound simple, but it is a highly complex undertaking. Robert has looked at traits such as narcissism, self-absorption, and envy that, I think it’s fair to say, we would describe as negative. But he says that all these impulses – these laws of human nature – can be found in all of us to varying degrees. Coming to terms with that isn’t always easy, but spotting these qualities in ourselves will better enable us to do the same in others. In fact, Robert takes the view that our ability to understand ourselves and relate to others, is our most important survival tool, because we're all social animals. And by understanding these universal laws of human nature, we will improve our mental resilience, our emotional well-being, we’ll be more successful, and we'll have better relationships. We talk about so many thought-provoking topics in this conversation, including the need for radical honesty if we're truly going to change ourselves and the dangers of black and white thinking. Robert also shares what he learnt when he suffered from a serious stroke, including why he now meditates for 45 minutes every single morning, and the insights he's gained from doing so. This is a really powerful conversation that I think is going to have you thinking, questioning, introspecting and reflecting. But ultimately, it's a conversation that will inspire you to take action. I hope you enjoy listening.  Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore https://www.calm.com/livemore https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/320 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

The worst situation is to feel like you're miserable, you're unhappy, you feel blocked in what you're doing, but you don't have the requisite energy to change yourself. But nothing in life comes easy, and you have to have that intense emotional energy, urgency, welling up from within you to say, damn it, I don't want to live like this anymore. And you've got to push yourself into that feeling. When you're in that mood, a human being can accomplish absolute miracles. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. podcast, Feel Better, Live More. What are the laws or principles that underpin all human behavior?

Yes, the behavior of the people around you, but also the behavior of yourself. Well, today's guest is someone who has spent many years trying to crack the codes and answer that very important question. Robert Greene is an American author and speaker best known for his books on power, strategy, and seduction. He's authored six international bestsellers, including his very latest, The Laws of Human Nature. Now, for many years, Robert has set out to try and understand why people do what they do, a simple sounding yet highly complex undertaking. He's looked at traits such as narcissism, self-absorption and envy that I think it's fair to say we would mostly describe as negative. But he says that all of these impulses

can actually be found in all of us to varying degrees. Now, coming to terms with that isn't always easy, but Robert makes the case that spotting these qualities in ourselves will better enable us to do the same in others. In fact, Robert takes the view that our ability to understand ourselves and relate to others is our most important survival tool because we're all social animals. And by understanding these universal laws of human nature, we will improve our mental resilience, our emotional well-being, we'll be more successful, and we'll have better relationships. Now, we really do talk about so many thought-provoking topics in this conversation, including the need for radical honesty if we're truly going to change ourselves, as well as the dangers of black and

white thinking. Robert also shares what he learnt from a life-threatening episode a few years back when he suffered from a serious stroke, including why he now meditates for 45 minutes every single morning and the insights he's gained from doing so. This is a really powerful conversation that I think is going to have you thinking, questioning, introspecting and reflecting, but ultimately it's a conversation that will inspire you to take action. I hope you enjoy listening. And now, my conversation with Robert Greene. I see a lot of people out in the world who are struggling. They're struggling with their lifestyles. You know, they want to make change. And I'm wondering, how do you think these laws of human nature can help people who are struggling with their lives? Well, it's a very good and important question.

I mean, we all have to be very practical. We have to get by. We have to put food on the table. We have to feed our children. We have to do certain basic things to survive. And so, but there's another side to that, and that is a sense of fulfillment in our lives. And a lot of people, particularly with the great, what they

call the great resignation going on during the pandemic, are feeling that disconnect. They're working and they're getting money, but they feel kind of empty and something isn't happening for them. And so the book is trying to tell you that we're social animals, that our survival, our happiness, our sense of fulfillment depends on our ability to get along with other people. Okay. And in order to do that, you have to become aware. You are generally in a state of sleep. You are not really aware of who you are, of what makes you an individual, of what makes you tick,

of where your thoughts come from, of where your emotions come from. And that lack of disconnect to something essential and vital about what makes you an individual, it has a very deleterious effect on all the things that you do in life. It also makes you a very poor observer of people and their nature. It also makes you a very poor observer of the few toxic people that you inevitably encounter in your life. People, you know, the great narcissist, the passive aggressive, the people full of envy. And because you don't recognize them, because you're not paying attention to yourself and to them, you create all kinds of emotional turmoil in your life. And this could be as simple as you have a job and your boss is someone that you just can't deal with or get along with, or you have colleagues, and it drains you of so much energy. And it makes that work seem almost impossible.

And it makes that work seem almost impossible. And so by flipping the switch, by learning about who you are, about the fact that you have a lot of these negative impulses that I talk about in the book, understanding yourself on a deeper level, allowing yourself now to judge people for what they are, not what you think they are, not projecting onto them, will make your life at work and everything so much easier. So it's not going to necessarily make you a lot of money and help in the most essential and immediate needs in life, but I think it will have a very, very important effect on your overall mental health. You mentioned awareness there and self-awareness, awareness of other people is something that I also find is missing a lot these days. Sometimes people will make changes when their motivation is high and it will last a few weeks, maybe a few months, but often they'll revert back. And over the last few years, Robert, I've really been thinking, it's not just information that my patients need. It's changing the way they think, changing the way they approach the world.

Actually, at its core, it's about understanding themselves better, why they find certain things easy to do, why they fall back into certain patterns when life gets tough, which really speaks to a lot of the things I think that you write about. Very much so. Very much so. I mean, and it's not easy, you know, because the way our brains are set up, the way our physiology is, we don't really introspect a lot. It's not easy to look at yourself. We are easily distracted by appearances, by what's going on in the environment. And to actually take the time to be alone, because you can't introspect when you're in a crowd or when you're talking to people. You have to be alone.

or when you're talking to people. You have to be alone. You have to spend quality time actually thinking about your desires, your needs, about some of the patterns of your behavior. And that is not often a pleasant process, quite frankly. And one thing that happened in writing The Laws of Human Nature, each chapter deals with a sort of a negative quality in our nature, more or less, you know, aggression, irrationality, grandiosity, envy, conformity, etc., etc. Coming to terms with the fact that you share these qualities is not pleasant. It's not easy. It's not fun. And I had to go through that in writing the book. I had to become aware of the fact that I, the writer of the book, am actually quite self-absorbed. I have narcissistic tendencies, right? But if you can't come to terms with the fact that you are by nature self-absorbed, how can you then begin to change it and become more empathetic and become more interested in

other people? So I completely agree with what you're saying. I mean, what you're talking about there to me is a radical honesty. It's a radical acceptance that, look, I may not wish to have these traits or these behaviours. I may judge other people for those behaviours, but actually if I look in the mirror carefully and rationally, I may see some

of those traits in myself. Do you get much pushback from people when they read these things initially? You go, look, that's not me. I'm not self-obsessed. Because you talk a lot about that at various parts of your writing that actually, you know, many of us are a little bit self-obsessed and actually we need to learn, as you say, to be more curious about other people than about ourselves, which I think is a really helpful thing to think about. But I don't know, what are your thoughts on that? Well, I think people who read, for instance, the chapter on narcissism and self-absorption, they understand what I'm talking about. I'm not saying that everyone out there is a narcissist on the level of, let's say, a Donald Trump or some of

the great narcissists that we know in news or in our lives, etc. I'm saying that it's a scale, right? There are what I call deep narcissists who their level of self-absorption never allows them to get out of it. I say that our self-esteem is kind of like an internal thermostat. And that at a certain point, when it gets really low and we become so wrapped up in ourselves, we can't rise above a certain level to pay attention to other people. We're just so absorbed in our own problems, our own needs, and we use people to get what we want, right? Now, there are people who are very low on that thermostat, and there are all of us who are kind of hovering. And depending on circumstances which make us more depressed in which we become more self-absorbed we kind of fluctuate but we are all on that scale right yeah so some people who push back are the ones who see

like podcasts and videos where i say this they go well that's not true i know a lot of people in my life who are incredibly narcissistic and i'm not like them etc etc etc but if you actually take the time to read the chapter, I recognize that it's a scale and there are people who fall much more deeply into it. You're probably not on that scale, but look in the mirror and recognize human nature by the way our brains are constructed, by the way we are, we are self-absorbed.

You cannot get out of that fix, right? And you have to understand the fact that you have these tendencies before you can begin to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to a conversation, I'm sitting in a bar or a restaurant with someone that I've met recently, I'm not really listening to them. You're kind of half listening to them. You're absorbed in your own thoughts, your own ideas, your own concerns, your own anxieties. You're half listening to them, and you're projecting onto them your own desires, your own needs, and your own wants, right? Yeah.

If you can't recognize that, if you don't have that degree of self-awareness, I could write 8,000 pages, it won't any difference but you have to at least have that moment that come to the Mohammed moment where you see that yes you when you are in a conversation you are not really paying a deep attention to people because you are not as interested in them as you are in your own thoughts and concerns and and you need to flip that around. Yeah, it's so, so important that unless we can truly be transparent and honest with where we are at now, and those tendencies that we have, we're never going to be able to make meaningful change, which is why we, in my view, stay locked in all kinds of negative cycles, because we're pushing back. And, you know, I once spoke, Robert, to Matthew McConaughey on this podcast a couple of years ago when his

autobiography was out. And he said something to me that I've always thought about since that conversation. I was talking to him about what process he goes through when he's going to play a different role. You know, how does he get into character? And he says something to the effect of this. It's not about really getting into character. It's about finding that character inside of me. It's finding where does that live inside of me, then sort of really tapping into that. And that really surprised me and shocked me at the time because I thought, I just assumed actors are trying to pretend to be someone else

and how would they dress? How would they act? What are their mannerisms? But when he said, no, I need to find that part inside of me, I found that pretty profound, actually. Well, that has great application to daily life um i can't remember um who i said it i think it's either william james the great psychologist or somebody like that but that if you want to understand another person you have to almost mimic them you almost have to put yourself

in not only mentally but even physically and kind of put yourself in their shoes and see the element in them that is also in you. And one of the things that I try and say, to me it seems so logical and rational, is that we're all descended from the same source. Although in this world we seem so divided and everyone, ethnicity, class, etc., the actual truth is our brains are essentially wired in the same way. We have descended from the same creature. If you pull back and look at it from a scale of hundreds of thousands of years, those differences that seem so sharp right now actually kind of vanish, right? so sharp right now actually kind of vanish, right? And so if we all have the same kind of brains and we all come from the same evolutionary source, we are all going to have the same traits. And I'll give you one example. It's a very important part of the laws of human nature, but that I discuss in many of my books, which is the trait of envy. And I say that envy is a quality that we all have. It's deeply

embedded in human nature, but it's one thing that we never ever admit to ourselves. You might admit, yeah, I can be self-absorbed. Yes, I can have a dark side. Yes, I can be irrational sometimes, et cetera. But you will very ever rarely admit that you feel envy towards another person, that you want what they have, and that that causes you to behave a certain way, right? And so it's a deep secret, and envy is something that's incredibly prevalent on social media. Social media is a tool for actually accelerating all of our envying tendencies. Well, if you look at the literature and you go back to hunter-gatherer societies, which survived up until the 19th and even into the 20th century,

envy plays a deep, deep role in their cultures. A lot of their rituals, like about giving gifts, is about making sure that nobody looks more important or more favored than another person because they know envy can be deadly and murderous when it's only 40 of you living in a group, right? And they've shown, studies have shown that even primates like chimpanzees feel envy. This is deeply rooted in our nature. So stop trying to have this idea that,

oh, I'm different. I'm different from other people. I'm better than they are. I don't have these negative qualities. I'm somehow superior. I tell people, the person who tells you that I'm not a narcissist, I'm different, is actually revealing how deep their narcissism is because they're trying to show how different they are from other people. Yeah. You said envy is a quality. That was interesting to me. It's a quality. It served a role back then. You beautifully described why that was the case. I've never really heard envy described like that before. I think envy,

very few of us would call it a quality. And as you say, I think one of the reasons we don't admit it is because we feel people will look down on us. It's something that we don't want to have, even if we do have it. I mean, and you bring up social media and the online world, I guess, in general, but particularly social media. What do you think that has done to our human nature? Human nature being these core kind of principles that we all have. Now, from my understanding of your work, we may all express different personality traits, we may have different characteristics, but at our core, we've got these laws, as you call them. Those laws exist in all of us. What do you think social media has done to them? And are any of the laws, I guess, more

necessary now in the era of social media than perhaps they might have been 20, 30 years ago? of social media than perhaps they might have been 20, 30 years ago? Well, yes, I like to look at it in this slightly more macro way. So I say that human, think of human nature, I say in the introduction to the book, that it's like a pawn that is moving us around our nature, we're not aware of it. And it's moving us on a chessboard and making us behave in ways that we're not even aware of. And this goes back hundreds of thousands of years, right? And so it's like this power that envelops the world and is actually influencing all of our decisions. Now, what I mean by that, to specify a little differently, is when you looked at the beginnings of the internet going back to the early 2000s or in the late 90s

and i remembered very well it was a tremendous sense of freedom and liberation we're going to be able to communicate with people we can connect to them on a higher level we can say we can cut out the middleman we can cut out mainstream media how exciting what it's like the wild, wild west. And then what happens is slowly, slowly, slowly, drip by drip by drip, human nature starts intervening and perverting that tool for liberation and freedom and turning it into the zone where it's about getting people to buy things and manipulating our emotions and making us hate each other and making us envy, you know, what other people have, et cetera, et cetera. This happens so many times and people have written about it. The invention of the telephone, which began as this kind of thing for business and just

communicating stuff like that, became this major source of gossip, et cetera. Things are created that have this kind of potential to be something fantastic, but our nature intervenes. And now we see like the internet is like the zone where criminals can thrive, et cetera, et cetera. And so it happens again and again throughout the course of our history. And so I'm not saying that social media is inherently bad. I'm saying that our nature tends to pervert it that way. And if we could become aware and see that, we could perhaps change it. And you asked me, are there particular laws that are more and more relevant to what's going on? I will point out two of them. One is envy,

which I already mentioned. So when you're on Instagram, and believe me, I will point out two of them. One is envy, which I already mentioned. So when you're on Instagram, and believe me, I'm as guilty as anyone. I use Instagram every day. I love it. But when you're sitting there day in and day out, and you're looking at the amazing holidays that your friends are taking in Bali, and how they're dating the most handsome, most beautiful woman on the planet, and how they just are in this incredible car. People aren't taking pictures of themselves looking fat and waking up in the morning. They're all looking trim and beautiful and buffed out. They're all on these amazing vacations. They're not taking pictures of themselves in their kind of, you know,

crappy, dingy apartments, et cetera. It's making you think like, wow, I'm missing something. There's something I want out there that I don't have. And this is having incredible social impact on us. People far smarter than I are writing about the effects on envy, on politics, on voting in the United States, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure it's happening all over the world. The other chapter that I talk about is the chapter on the shadow, which was deeply influenced by the great psychologist Carl Jung, who very eloquently talks about the shadow. And I'm trying to say that we have a dark side, and it's a dark side that we

all have. You listening out there, you do have a shadow, you have a dark side, and it communicates itself outwardly in ways you're not even aware of. Well, social media and the internet become this great playground for venting all of your dark emotions and never having to pay a consequence. I'm talking about trollish behavior, where you can be as mean and nasty and say all the worst things to people, and nobody ever gets to know that you've done it, who you are, et cetera, it becomes like this area where you can vent. It becomes a shadow land, in other words, right? And so you can present yourself as a social justice warrior.

I'm on the cause of justice and rightness. At the same time, you're canceling people. You're making their lives miserable because it makes you feel like you're okay and justified. But it's actually a zone where you can play out and vent all of those dark impulses that in normal society are greatly discouraged. So the final thing I'll say is we are this incredibly sophisticated, technological, amazing animals. Look what we've created. But the internet and technology is actually in some ways making us revert and bringing out some of these most primitive qualities in human nature. Yeah. It's really fascinating, Robert. Over the past years, I've met a lot of people face to face who I first came across on social media. And I'll be honest, some people I didn't particularly warm to on social media.

When I met them in real life at a conference or an event, I thought, Oh, wow, you're completely different. Like I really like you, You know, we get on, we're engaging and we're having a great conversation. And I've, you know, I've written about this myself as well. And I've thought long and hard about this. And, you know, you mentioned narcissism and how we've all got narcissistic traits within us, if we're honest enough to look at ourselves. within us, if we're honest enough to look at ourselves. When it comes to social media, do you feel that in many ways, the narcissism that lives within all of us tends to get magnified because that's the nature of the medium. The medium wants you to share what you've done, what you're good at. You have this sort of perfectionist presentation.

You know, it is about this, look at me, this is what I've done. I mean, being aware of this is great, but isn't it the nature of the medium? Is there anything, number one, we can do about that? And then I guess the follow-up to that, Robert, there's another big theme in your work that I love is this idea about nonverbal communication. In fact, you say there's a second language that we're all speaking, and it ain't with words. And I found that really, really powerful. And of course, on social media, the whole nonverbal communication piece is gone. So how do you think all those things play together? So how do you think all those things play together? It's not that the internet or social media inherently does that.

So we could see a potential here, for instance, where, and I had this sensation early on, as I said, in that first kind of frontier days of social media, wow i have access to the to the lives to the desires to the wants of all these people around the world right people are writing me now that you know i after my books etc from japan from brazil etc and they're they're opening themselves up and they're venting and i can like i can empathize more deeply now. I can understand people on a higher level. It's not inherently bad social media. It could be an incredible tool for exercising your empathy because it actually can connect people, right? But the way it's designed now, it's designed now to manipulate emotions, right? As opposed to actually stepping back.

So manipulating emotions makes you self-absorbed. When what you see is always geared towards making you angry or outraged, it's all about you, you, you, you, you. It makes you funnel deeper and deeper into yourself. It makes you funnel deeper and deeper into yourself. I notice on this site, I don't know if it exists in the UK, called Nextdoor, where it's telling you it's all about your own neighborhood and what's going on. And I get these emails. Every single goddamn email is about a crime, a burglary, somebody being assaulted, et cetera. That's not my neighborhood. I never see anything like that. They choose those particular posts algorithmically to get you angry and upset and worried.

You're going to click on it. It's clickbait. It's designed to manipulate your emotions. And when you get emotionally roiled, you're not thinking about other people. You're not thinking about your own neighborhood and what's going on. You're worried about yourself. You're worried about how other people see you, right? And then the other thing is, and you eloquently point out, you know, normally nonverbal communication plays a deep role in our presence, right? So somebody on the internet can roar like a lion. They can appear to be aggressive and really confident, right?

But if you met them in person like you do at a conference, you go, wow, that person that seemed like a roaring lion is actually like a timid little mouse. Well, it's because you're not seeing any of those cues and signs on social media. You're seeing the front that people are presenting. And the front that you want to present, as I've mentioned before, is always your best. You look the best. You're never going to vent on social media all of the kind of negative qualities that you hate about people. You're going to present yourself as being in favor of the best causes, as being confident and strong. And if I were to meet that person face to face, I would realize that they're riddled with insecurities. And there's nothing wrong with that. We all have insecurities. I do as well. But not being able to pick up. And the other thing is, we are physical creatures. We are embodied,

right? We live in our bodies. And being able to be physically in front of people is extremely important to our intelligence, to our health. You're able to pick up cues about people that you're not even aware of. You're reading their body language, their tone of voice, their eyes, the way they smile, how they stand, et cetera, et cetera. their tone of voice, their eyes, the way they smile, how they stand, etc., etc. When you spend all of your time in virtual worlds, where very little of that is apparent,

that skill is degrading. You're not able to pick up cues anymore because you haven't spent time among people. You know, when I read novels from the 19th century, like by Jane Austen, I'm astounded at her sensitivity to every single nuance about people, about their faces, about their gestures, about their behavior. And I'm thinking, well, why were people like that back then? And it's not just famous writers. It's because you spent all of your time dealing with people, flesh to flesh, person to person. It's a skill that you developed. It's a skill that we are slowly losing because we're not socializing enough. Yeah. You write about Milton Erickson. It was really powerful. It was really interesting. It reminded me about a couple of things in my own practice, actually.

Can you tell us a little bit about Milton Erickson and how that story helps demonstrate things about nonverbal communication? Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health.

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Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually, they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Well, I got interested in Milton Erickson many, many years ago in my first book,

because he was a therapist. He's the inventor, sort of, or inspired what we know as NLP. And he also, in many ways, invented hypnotherapy. But he was this brilliant, brilliant man, I thought. And he was very strategic in how he approached his therapeutic choices, which I found extremely interesting. But his life is what is even more interesting. So he lived in Wisconsin, somewhere like that. And when he was 18 years old, he developed polio. And there was an incredible outbreak, a plague of polio in the first couple decades of the 20th century. And he was like 18 years old. And he was, you know, you could imagine how active and, and, you know, how much energy you have when you're at that age. Suddenly he is completely

paralyzed and completely bedridden. Okay. He can't even move the muscles in his eyes to look in any direction. Everything is completely paralyzed, but his eyes are open and he's conscious. He's aware. It's like a nightmare. It's like hell. And he has this incredibly active mind. He can't read. He can't do anything. He can't talk. He can't interact. The only thing he can do, the only way he can entertain himself, so to speak, is to pay attention to people. So he had these sisters that he was very close to. They would come into his room and they would try and help him and nurse him. They would talk to him. The only thing that mattered to him at that point was paying deep, deep attention to their body language. It became like a game, like a puzzle, because it was the only intellectual thing he

could do, right? And he would notice sometimes that when his sister said no sometimes the tone of voice actually meant kind of yes a little bit sometimes no really meant a no or if she flipped her hair a certain way that kind of revealed a certain kind of emotional energy going on she seemed interested but her eyes looked a certain way. He knew that she was getting bored being there, et cetera. Year after year, day after day, year after year, in this intense study, made him an absolute master of nonverbal communication. So he ends up miraculously surviving polio and gaining back all of his powers, his speaking, et cetera.

He could walk, although he had to walk the rest of his life with a cane. He then went on to study psychology. And then he became a therapist in the early days when in America, there weren't that very many therapists, right? And not of the Freudian school, etc. He was mostly trained in kind of more of like a physiological approach to psychology. He applied this to his patients. He could tell the moment they opened the door to walk into his office, the way they walked, the way they moved, the way they sat, he could read their minds on a level that was just uncanny. And his patients would say that. They would say, Milne, it's like you can see through me. And he literally could because he had mastered what I said and you mentioned as the second language. Scientists have, you know, it's just a number, but they say that more or less 90 to 95% of human communication is nonverbal, right?

It's as if you are only learning 5% of English, you know, just a few words, et cetera. This language that you only are paying a little bit of attention to is incredibly important. And the powers you can gain from mastering this language are unfathomable. It will deeply, deeply help you in connecting to people and understanding them on another level. Yeah, it's fascinating. Thank you for sharing that story. I think I've also read that in his

room, he would put his desk in one corner so he would actually see, I think I heard you say this in an interview once, that he would watch the patients walk in. So he would get a lot of information from that. So as I hear that, I think, well, is this a trainable skill? Is this something that all of us could potentially get better at? Obviously, Milton had a medical reason to actually need to go down that route. Many of us don't have such an urgent, or we don't, I guess we don't think of it as an urgent need to do that, but maybe we should be looking at it as an urgent thing that we should be getting better at.

Robert, it was the first time we were having a conversation together. I've been a medical doctor for just over 21 years now. And when I was reading about Milton in your books, it reminded me a little bit about things that I've done throughout my practice that I didn't quite realize why I was doing it. But, you know, hearing that story sort of reframes it for me. So certain things I would always do in the UK, I would never use the intercom system. I would always make an effort to go and greet my patient in the waiting room and walk with them or walk alongside them or behind them to my

consultation room. And although I don't think I quite realized it at the time, I honestly feel I was just picking up all kinds of clues as to what was going on with that person in their lives. And it's something I've always felt actually, that that human side to medicine is arguably, for me, the most important part of medicine. Particularly, I'm not talking about if you're in the ER or the A&E, or you've had a car crash where you need trauma surgery, you need blood tests, you need acute medical care. I'm talking about the rest, what is 90% of medical care these days, something like that. I think it's that human side. If we could embrace it a little bit more, pick up the clues that our patients are giving us,

I'm convinced that we would have much better outcomes. Well, yes, there's so many things that you brought up there. You know, nonverbal communication is not just body language, it's also your behavior. So the fact that you're getting up and greeting people is an act. It's an action that speaks. It says, I'm not just this machine working through an intercom, through a computer. I'm a human being. I'm connecting to you as a doctor on a human level. And so I tell people, you're not just paying attention.

Don't get the cliche that it's all just about the obvious stuff about the body. It's also what people do is a language. If they're chronically late for an appointment, if their desks are messy, and I'm afraid my desk is very messy right now, these say things about people. So you're learning a language that is about gesture, behavior, action, and about the body itself. But medicine, many books have been written about the problems itself. But, you know, medicine, many books have been written about the problems that technology has created for doctors, where they spend so much of their time evaluating their patients while literally looking at a screen, right? And everything is algorithms

and data and hospitals are huge on accumulating vast amounts of big data on that and just kind of funneling you into this. And here in the States, I'm dealing now with my own health issues. I unfortunately had a stroke four years ago. And the kind of cookie cutter approach where you can tell that this all has to do with data and information. It's not personalized. It's not looking at me as somebody who has suffered a stroke in very different circumstances from what other people necessarily had. There's no individual treatment at all. It's because it's all done through computers, through data, through algorithms. And in the past, doctors were some of the best people,

if they were great doctors, at observing people, at listening to them, and actually even diagnosing things through what they saw on the body, right? Through certain stiffness and movements would tell you about their muscles, their joints. They might even have an internal problem that you could detect in their skin. People were masters at diagnosis by simple observation. And just think of it this way. We humans are incredibly gifted for this kind of skill. You asked me, is it just a function of having polio? But think about it for a moment. Go back in time as I've done before, to hundreds of thousands of years ago to our ancestors before the invention

of language. Human beings, we are very weak and fragile creatures compared to like leopards and tigers and even chimpanzees, right? The only thing we can do is run, but we can't run as fast as a leopard, etc. So we lived in these social, and that's what made us very powerful, being a social animal and working together and cooperating. But you lived for hundreds of thousands of years without language, without words, right? There were no words. You may be grunted, et cetera, et cetera,

but there was no abstract concepts. Everything depended on observing people on a deep level, fellow members of your group. Your survival depended on it people on a deep level, fellow members of your group, your survival depended on it like Milton Erickson's did. And I have this belief, and other people have speculated the same, that our ancestors were almost telepathic in their, I don't mean to get so woo-woo, but they could almost read what was going on in other people's minds because they were so paying such deep attention to it. It is a skill built into all of us through our mirror neurons, through the way the brain operates when we look at people, how we have theory of mind, how we're able to get inside the skin of other people. All of us have that potential. It's just

that we're not using it. We're not paying attention to it because we don't think it's important enough. I think any mother would say that they can intuitively pick up what's going on with their baby or their young child. I think we all know and have experienced that feeling when we walk into a room and no words are being said, but we can just sense the energy isn't particularly inviting. We've all felt it. The question is, can we feel it more? For people who say, Robert, okay, I'm with you. I understand. I need to get better at this. Where would you advise that they start? where would you advise that they start? Well, I have a chapter on it, and I describe exercises that you can do.

And people have written amazing books about it, people who are experts on it. Some of them were working in the criminal system where they had to learn this skill in order to kind of read criminals and serial killers, et cetera, and behavior patterns, and it was a very important skill. But there are excellent books written on the subject. But the main thing is the quality of attention that you're paying to other people, right? So if you can just turn around this one thing, you'll end up starting to pick up cues and you'll get fascinated by it.

You'll start seeing the potential here. But if hearing me now or hearing you now, you're going to say, oh, that's interesting, but you're never going to act on it, right? Because it seems interesting, but your life doesn't seem to depend on it. it seems interesting, but your life doesn't seem to depend on it. And then you go into a room and you kind of sort of half pay attention and look at people's tone of voice, et cetera, et cetera. And the next day you won't, you won't build on it, right? You need to actually go deeper into it and sense the potential within this and become fascinated and hooked on it, right? So a lot of it is in your attitude in how you enter a scene. So if you're already absorbed in your thoughts,

if you're someone that can only think in terms of words, if you can only hear that same stream of thoughts going in your mind, you can't do it. You have to turn that off. You have to be able to be incredibly present. So the first thing you'd have to do is develop this ability to be incredibly present with people and not trying to judge them or categorize them through words, but actually kind of feel what they're like, feel what they're going on, what's going on in their minds, feel what their moods are.

I tell people nonverbal communication is not going to be able to teach you how to read people's thoughts. That's essentially impossible. It can teach you to pick up their moods, their emotions, what is going on inside of them. And to me, picking up people's moods and emotions

is more important than their thoughts because thoughts can be very deceptive. We deceive me, picking up people's moods and emotions is more important than their thoughts, because thoughts can be very deceptive. We deceive ourselves, etc. I'd rather be able to understand what a person is feeling in the moment than what they're thinking, because it's more real, it's more direct, it's more immediate. Okay. But you can't get to that point if you're not like extremely present in that moment, right? And focused on exactly what you're not like extremely present in that moment right and focused on on exactly what you're receiving from this information that you're receiving you're not picking it up because you're not in the moment so that's the first thing and then i i go through various little exercises that you can have things you can do going into a cafe or when you meet a person for the first time,

et cetera, et cetera. The exercises I recommend are very detailed, but more important is your mindset and your attitude and how you approach this. A, it's incredibly important to me. B, I have to stop thinking with words and language and judging and see. I have to be in the moment and present. And then all the other cards will kind of fall into place. To be present with other people and observe their nonverbal cues would mean that many of us need to say less, talk less, actually listen more, listen to both sets of those languages, not just the words coming out of someone's mouth. And of course, being quiet, being present is something, again, many would say might be becoming a lost art for

many human beings these days for a whole variety of different reasons, including, I guess, how easy it is to distract ourselves into the lives of other people these days. I know that you meditate every morning and you have done for many years. Meditation, I guess, is a practice that helps cultivate a huge level of self-awareness. You have to be present with yourself. Presumably being present with yourself is a necessary skill in order to be present with other people? I think it's extremely important. Yeah. I mean, so when I'm meditating, I've been doing it now for 12 years, although I wish it had been more of my whole life. And I do it every morning,

no matter what, even if I'm flying on a plane, I managed to do it every single day for 45 minutes. And what it does is you're sitting there. And if you've ever done it, you know that thoughts immediately bubble up, that you don't know where they come from. And a lot of them are unpleasant thoughts, things that you were maybe a little bit ashamed about, or that reveal kind of pettiness or anxieties that you really wouldn't want to expose to the world at large. And you start picking up things about yourself, and it creates a kind of humility. Whereas you can go through the day thinking,

wow, I'm so confident, I'm so in control. You know, I have all these great ideas, etc. When you're on those pillows, cushions, and you're meditating, it's humiliating because you when you're on those pillows, cushions, and you're meditating, it's humiliating because you realize you're not. You're full of doubts, insecurities, anxieties, stupid, petty, trivial thoughts, et cetera, et cetera. It's a real way of looking into who you are. And in order to do that, you have to literally be on those cushions and have no distractions, no music.

I don't have any, you know, people like to listen to recordings. I don't, I forget what they call it, some kind of meditation, guided meditation, et cetera. All meditation is great, but I think the best is no distractions, no music, no sounds, no people, no nothing intervening. So you have only yourself, right? And so you go deeply, deeply into yourself. And eventually you get beyond all of those niggly little thoughts and those kinds of insecurities, et cetera, and you find something deeper about yourself, but you become incredibly sensitive and present to who you are.

And then that allows you, that awareness allows you to maybe change things. So for instance, I'm aware of how many silly anxieties I have. I'll be sitting there meditating and I'm trying to focus on, I do Zen meditation on this kind of larger Buddhistic pitchistic pitch picture of the environment etc um what is going to in in japanese then is muh and then and then i'm sitting here worried about you know the stupid little conversation the day before and then i learned through this that i have to drop these these feelings and drop them and and alter myself well that same kind of presence and awareness that you develop for yourself a kind of sensitivity to who you are to your moods to what makes you

different to your your good qualities and your bad qualities is what now makes you able to deal with that with other people you know on a higher level um because to me i have this idea i don't know it's hard for me to verbalize it but the consciousness is almost like grains of sensitivity to it it's almost like a camera when you used to have those cameras that would focus and things would become more and more into focus right and when it was unfocused you could see all these little grains when you are sensitive it's like it's focused it's like you see pick up all the little things going on in the environment in the picture and you're open to things you're picking up cues etc etc you have to get down on your hands and knees and say to yourself i am insensitive i am not picking up

things i am not paying attention i am lost in not paying attention. I am lost in my own thoughts and my own worries and my own concerns. If you can develop those grains of sensitivity, then those nonverbal cues, you don't need to read a book. You'll naturally find your way to it. Yeah. Why did you start to meditate? Well, I've always been interested in it. I've been interested in Zen Buddhism forever. Since I was in college, I had a philosophy professor who gave me this great book called Zen Comments on the Moon Kong,

which is kind of like the Bible for Zen Buddhists. And I've always wanted to. I've just been too busy. You know, I couldn't find the time. And then writing my books was so stressful, quite honestly. And I'm going through it right now. I'm thinking so deeply. I'm trying to get at the core of it. I'm grinding away hour after hour. I'm developing terrible health issues. And it was also probably what partially contributed to my stroke. I couldn't function anymore. I was just so intense that it was literally going to kill me. So meditation was almost like a way to save my life and save me from dulling that intensity and making me kind of slow down and becoming more present, et cetera, and better able to deal with my anxieties.

So I finally came to that in August of 2010. I can remember the day I marked it down in my calendar where I started the process, you know, because I figured if I don't do this, something terrible is going to happen to me. So things got so bad that you thought this thing that you've read about, you wanted to do, but you never could find the time to do, you just thought, right, that's it. Now I have to make time for this. You also said that you do this every day. You never miss a day. Now, as someone who's spoken to tens of thousands of patients and watched them and heard them report back on various things they're trying to do I find that really really interesting the way you phrase

that and I guess since the day you started has it been constant or was it like a up and down until you realized wait a minute I'm a better human being when I meditate every day? So I approached meditating like I approached swimming and mountain biking and writing books, discipline, discipline, discipline, right? So in the beginning, the only thing that changed was it was more like 15, 20 minutes. And slowly I upped the minutes as i became better at it but um i just feel like i get to the point where it's an addiction right and if i somehow there have been a couple of mornings there have been maybe a few days that i missed i have to confess and particularly right after my stroke i couldn't meditate uh for at least just a week, but then I got right back onto it.

When I miss it, man, something is wrong. It just feels wrong. And there's, I know that I'm studying a lot about brain chemistry right now for a chapter I'm running. There are chemicals that are released in the form of meditation. You know, you could talk about the oxytocin or dopamine or whatever it is, and they become physically addicting but if if we're creatures that have addictions right that's not a bad addiction to have i'm afraid yeah you know so um but yeah i i do it every i've been doing it regularly and consistently because it's only in that way that it becomes satisfying, right? It's a very difficult discipline.

It's not like learning a language or a musical instrument where you can see progress. You have days, like this morning, I was tired and I can't control my thoughts. They're just bubbling up like crazy. And I'm trying to go back into what I'm meditating on and bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, right? It's not like you suddenly master it. It's a constant struggle, but you do have progress. You do get to the, like I can do 45 minutes now. And it seems like 20

minutes to me. It goes back pretty quickly. Whereas a few years ago, it would have been kind of torture. So there are changes, but it's also like a continual struggle. It sounds like you know what I'm talking about. I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm now finally at a point where I, again, I won't say 100% every day, but almost every day, I will do a form of meditation practice in the morning. For me, if I don't do it in the morning, it just doesn't happen. I never seem to find those 10, 15, 20 minutes. I can find it for other things, but I can't find it for meditation later in the day. So it is something that I've had that struggle with. I feel I'm in a good place with it. But for me, Robert, and I,

you know, as I think about your work, cultivating this deep level of self-awareness is essential. For me, it's a central theme. Like if you're going to know how to interact with the world around you, if you're going to better yourself, do more with your life, turn your life around, whatever it might be, you have to be honest with yourself. You have to know yourself better. And I've spoken about this on the show before. I think everyone needs a daily practice of solitude of some sort. Now, you do meditation. I do meditation, but there can be other forms of it. But I feel solitude, intentional solitude each day is how we take the pulse on our own life. So for example, on those mornings where I just can't calm and I'm going through my to-do list and it all feels really busy and crazy,

I also make a mental note to myself now, hey Rangan, you're not at your calmest today. When you're interacting with your wife, when you're interacting with the kids later, just be aware of that. And I think that really speaks to your work. I think that's, it doesn't mean I'm suddenly not reactive. It just means I'm intentionally knowing that I may not behave as my optimal self today. And by knowing that, in those moments, I can actually go, yeah, I'm not going to choose to react to it. I'm going to stay calm. Does that make sense? Oh, that makes incredible sense. I can completely understand what you're talking about. And this would happen all the time, particularly initially when it was first getting in the most important period of the process, where normally I would find myself reacting and getting angry and upset. And then suddenly the same situation would come up

and there would be a step, a half a step back. And that half a step back was all the difference in the world that made me go, oh, I kind of feel what's going on here. I kind of see what's happening in the moment. I'm not going to react, right? It gave me that slight little bit of distance, the ability to step back and say, I can control this to some degree. And it's immensely powerful and immensely liberating. And, you know, it doesn't mean that you don't get emotional. Yeah. Now, I'm dealing with an issue where with a stroke, and this is quite common with patients like this,

is that you get very, your emotions get kind of heightened and i had mine was in the right hemisphere of my brain which is where more it's the brain isn't totally by i mean things cross the hemisphere it's a bit of a myth but there are more emotional control is in the right hemisphere and people with my kind of stroke tend to say we have less control of our emotions. And what that means is I get so deeply frustrated. Like I can't tie my shoes. I can't button my shirt. It takes so long.

And the meditation has really, really helped me. I still some days get so angry I can't help it. But most of the time I can go, you're being foolish here. It's irrational to behave like that. You're alive. Life goes on. The birds are chirping. The sky is beautiful. Things are happening. There's no need to get so frustrated, right? And it's just that little half step back is what can save you from so much drama and turmoil in your life. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. You've said before that we are deeply irrational as humans and we are governed by our emotions.

And of course, you just mentioned how you feel you perhaps have become more emotional since your stroke. more emotional since your stroke. And throughout this conversation, we've been talking about nonverbal communication, how so much of how we interact with the people around us is not through words. Could you talk us through the development of the brain, the way you see it as to why that is the case? Why, you know, we can't always translate these emotions into our words, why there's a conflict there. Because I think that sort of evolutionary case of how our brain develops is super interesting, in particular that language and emotions are primarily in different parts of the brain. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my

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and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal, and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal.

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completely free, on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. Well, you know, I'm not a neuroscientist but i'm reading a lot about it i'm researching it so i have to put that caveat there so i hope there are not neuroscientists out there going god that guy is so stupid but basically um you know emotions begin as simply a chemical process i'm afraid to say i'm afraid to demythologize it but that's what they are your brain is reacting to certain stimuli chemicals are released or electrical signals are sent that are then felt in the body somewhere, and that we pick up, and that we then, through our thinking, translate into a word, like I am depressed, I am anxious, I am happy, I am sad, etc., right?

Okay, but the disconnect is profound. So it's not a word that started, it's something in the brain that picked up that you're not even in control of, right? You don't will your own emotions. The limbic system and the temporal lobes that kind of govern emotions are among the most ancient part of your brain. They're things that go back to reptiles, to the earliest forms of nervous systems, right? And the chemical response is the release of adrenaline for the fight and flight response. You're not in control of that. Your brain is doing that. It's releasing these chemicals. And these chemicals, they last in your bloodstream.

Some people have said for 19 seconds. I don't know if that's the accurate actual number that sticks in my mind, but they're not permanent. They just rush through your bloodstream. You pick it up and you go, I have a tightness in my chest. You're not thinking this, but that tightness in my chest immediately is anxiety. I'm anxious about something. You don't realize that it began in your chest or in your brain,

but you think of it as I'm anxious about something, right? You think about it, you think about it, you think about it, and you turn it into this hard set reality that isn't really there. Your emotions are not words. They're not these simple little categories, this continual flux of moods. So the moment you feel anxiety, with that word anxiety, you're also feeling other things going on. It's never like a static one thing. It's this constant flux of your brain producing chemicals, of your body reacting and your mind thinking about them. But you're holding onto this one word, isolating it over this one moment and giving it a reality that it simply doesn't have, right? And then because emotions aren't words, right? We don't really know how to think about them.

We can't get at the source of it. So you wake up this morning and you're angry, right? Now, the first thing you have to do is, am i angry you don't want to have this idea that it's just something that happened to you it's just this bodily process going on you have to find a reason you have to ascribe it to something okay my wife said something this morning that really got under my skin etc etc and then you glom onto that and you're kind of it holds on to you for like hours and you mean it's the next day. But what you don't realize is that feeling of anger isn't what you think it is. First of all, there's a habitual pattern here. You're responding to things that probably go

back to your childhood. The chemicals that are released from emotions that you think about are literally chemicals that you can become addicted to you become addicted to the feelings of certain kinds of pleasure you become actually addicted i'm afraid to say to anxiety you can even become addicted depression unfortunately and you're not even in control of it so your anchor is not something that you control that you will it's because of her it's because of you because you're thinking even in control of it. So your anger is not something that you control that you will, it's because of her. It's because of you, because you're thinking and your thinking process isn't actually getting at the core of what triggered the emotion in the first place. It is a tremendous problem. It's a problem that our brains are, the way our brains are wired because emotions

weren't designed for thinking. They weren't designed for consciousness. They were designed for animals to help them to survive in their environment, right? But as I'm writing about this right now, oddly enough, in this chapter, I'm writing about consciousness. It doesn't have to be that way. The thinking about emotions can be an incredibly positive thing, just like I said about the Internet. emotions can be an incredibly positive thing, just like I said about the internet. You could take your emotions, you could say, I know what the feeling of awe and astonishment is because I'm kind of writing a book about the book, The Feelings of Awe and what I call the sublime. I know how it feels. I'm going to actually make myself feel this way. I'm going to make

myself. So we have these tremendous powers through our thinking to literally learn how to drop our emotions to drop that thing in our bloodstream and say i'm not going to think about it so thinking can be used for actually positive purposes instead of the negative purposes yeah so so interesting. One of my favourite chapters is chapter six, Elevate Your Perspective, The Law of Short-sightedness. And the start of that chapter has just a beautifully concise setup. Avoid entangling yourself with those who cannot see the consequences of their actions, entangling yourself with those who cannot see the consequences of their actions, who are in a continual reactive mode, they will infect you with this energy.

I haven't stopped thinking about that since I read it. I think it's really, really powerful. Of course, this idea that someone else can infect us with their energy, that these emotions can be, I guess, contagious and can spread to us, I think is really, really powerful. Of course, it's not always that easy, is it, to avoid these kinds of reactive people. It could be someone in our family, it could be our boss at work, it could be one of our work colleagues. I just love this chapter. I love the idea that we can elevate our perspective. I think in many ways, a lot of the work I've read of yours, Robert, is talking about you can choose the way you look at this, actually. You can choose your perspective. Although this is one of many laws, I kind of feel this in some ways is a, I wouldn't say a higher law, but it's a law that

has such application, certainly the way I read it, to many of the other laws. Is that fair to say? Yes, yes. I mean, the book was written as kind of this interconnecting web where they're all sort of weave inside of each other and all of them have aspects that kind of feed into that you know so the last chapter is about overcoming your fear of death and mortality and the first chapter is about your irrational emotional tendencies well those two number one and 18 are actually inextricably interwoven but yeah yeah, I think that's fundamental. The other law, though, that's similar to what you're talking about is the law about your attitude towards life, how you look at the world. And I say, if you alter this attitude, you can literally alter

your circumstances, right? And it's the same thing sort of in elevating your perspective, right? It's training yourself to always have a degree of detachment to the events that are going on around you. And to be able to say, this is how things will look a year from now. I mean, look at your own life. When an event happened, you have this one reaction. Oh my God, it's so dramatic, so important. And then a year later, you haven't even remembered or you have a much different take on it, right? Imagine if you could have that perspective of a year later in the present moment, you could go, this isn't going to matter. This doesn't matter to my life in general. This isn't something that's a priority to me, right? Why get wrapped up? Why get sucked into people's negative energy right now?

I could have that elevated approach. I could look at it as if I'm standing on a mountain, looking down a year later on this argument going on. I'm going, how trivial, how unimportant. The power in that is immense. Getting there is the hard part, right? Because we are not animals trained to elevate our perspective. We're animals trained to react, react, react, react. We go on the appearance of things. If things look golden and glittering,

we grab for them, not realizing that there's consequences to pay for it. for them, not realizing that there's consequences to pay for it. So it's almost unnatural to elevate your perspective. It takes a lot of practice, right? And meditation can be extremely important for it. But you know, I know like people I deal with, I have tendencies to feel a lot of anxiety, quite honestly. I've dealt with it my whole life and I've gotten a lot better at it. But when I'm among anxious people, goddamn, I can't control it. I can't control it. I'm getting angry. I'm getting upset. They're making me feel nervous and their worries become my worries. I tend to be a little too open to the emotions of other people, right? into the emotions of other people, right? So what do I do?

Well, A, if I can, I avoid their presence because I know just being among them is going to infect me with that nervous, anxious energy. B, if I can't avoid them, I do all kinds of strategies. I like, I'm listening to them, but I'm distanced. I'm not really listening to them. I'm thinking about what it's going to be like a week from now. I'm also thinking about why they're anxious and why they're upset and how silly it is. And it's silly it is for me to get wrapped up in it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I go through these various strategies.

Oftentimes I'm unsuccessful, I have to admit. but I know very well that infecting power because it has a tremendous effect on me personally. Yeah. You write about how affected by the group we are, by the people around us. You've just spoken to that. And we've spoken a lot about self-awareness, cultivating a deep level of self-awareness. Is there a conflict at all in the fact that we are social animals? We want to fit in with the people around us, right? We are influenced by the group and we are also, I guess, influencing the group and the people around us. You talk about culture being more important than the individual. As an individual, if the culture around us is pushing a certain way, it's very, very hard for us. So how do we really get to know ourselves? Is there even such a thing as an

individual when we are so affected by the people around us? I'm trying to get to that point, you know, if we're trying to discover who we are, well, we only exist in many ways in relation to other people in the world around us. So it seems as though there's a little tension there as to you know the group around us and also us finding who we really are well i mean it's very it's very apt it's very appropriate and you're totally correct but i'd like to think of things aren't black and white yeah i'd like to stop getting out of the polarity tendencies in our brains to think things are either the individual or the culture, nature or nurture. Damn it, it's a combination. Life is fluid. It's a mix of things, okay? Yes, I happen to be thinking in English language, right? And my thoughts aren't really my own thoughts because hundreds through hundreds of years, ideas have been developed that I then

assimilated in my education. The patterns of English that determine my thoughts are not my own. So my consciousness goes roots back to the very sources of language, et cetera, et cetera, right? Culture, and I'm a product of my culture and the time that I live in. I have a chapter in the human nature about generations and how you're a product, the time that you're living, as well as the time that I live in. I have a chapter in the human nature about generations and how you're a product, the time that you're living, as well as the culture that you're in. To deny that quality is absurd.

On the other hand, you, Rangan, were born with a DNA that has never happened in the past and will never happen in the future. It marks you as unique, okay? That uniqueness is not in banal things like, you know, it's even hard to put into words. It's to say, and we can even look at this evolutionarily,

like mutations in nature, people who are different and how important they are to the evolution of a species and how we need variety and change etc so your uniqueness through your dna marks you as someone an individual as different from everybody else and the um great american psychologist abraham maslow he talked about impulse voices and i like that because it gets out of the idea of I'm an individual, I'm a self, I'm this kind of American credo of the individual, et cetera, which is kind of bullshit. And looking at it on a physiological level. And so he was noticing like infants, one, two years old, how they're drawn to certain

things. Some infants will love potatoes. Others will spit it out. Oh, I hate that. Some two-year-olds will love certain kinds of music. Others will put their ears to it, right? Some love cats. Some love dogs. Where does that come from? Is it genetic? What makes two brothers with the exact, almost very similar DNA, one likes this thing and the other hates it, right? It's what he called impulse voices. You have these voices that make you attracted to certain things

and repulsed by other things. And when you're four years old, three years old, they're very strong, those impulse voices. And as you get older and older and older they get weaker and weaker and weaker until you can barely hear them um started do some method acting there but you can barely hear them okay because they're drowned out by your teachers by your colleagues by instagram by all that's going on in the environment. You're hearing a thousand voices in your head. And that little voice when you were four years old, say, I like this.

I don't like that. You don't hear it anymore. And that voice was who you are that marks you as somebody different. And your tastes become part of the culture, become part of the group. I remember years ago, I gave a talk at Microsoft in Seattle or near Seattle. And at that campus, whatever they called it, there's like 15,000 employees, right? I was shocked, man. These people all look similar. They all kind of dress in a similar way. They all have the similar mannerisms. Okay, there are a lot of differences, et cetera,

et cetera. But there was a culture that was so strong. It was so apparent. And it had infected thousands of people. I went to Google many years later, and I had the same impression. But the culture was vastly different. It was playful, fun, et cetera, people laughing, smiling. But you're infected by the group and you lose a sense of who you are, what makes you different. So the game is, since things aren't black and white, is connected to those impulse voices, knowing what makes you unique, but also being attuned to culture, to society, to other people, to being empathetic. They don't contradict each other. Being an individual, bringing out your uniqueness in your career, which is to be the most important thing you can do, doesn't mean that you're an asshole, that you have to treat people badly. It's all just about you. You can be unique and think very deeply about what makes your own interests and be empathetic at the same time.

Stop this kind of polarizing thinking that kills us. You can dance. You can move your feet two different ways at the same time. You can do this dance. You can be both attuned to what makes you different so you find a career path that matches your desires and you can be empathetic to other people at the same time. I love that. So, so powerful, Robert. I agree. We need to get out of this polarity. It's either black or it's white. It's either this or it's that. You've been writing about human behavior for many, many years now. Are you still fascinated by it? years now are you still fascinated by it well yeah i mean um you know there are things that you can master somewhat easily because there's a logic to it and um and i always like mental challenges so learning french for instance or playing, or playing chess, or playing like

billiards or pool, etc. You learn the logic of it, you get better and better and better and better at it. People don't have a logic almost. They're so different. Every moment is different. There's never like a consistency to it. It's almost like mass insanity. And to master that is like the ultimate challenge. And so it kind of really royally pisses me off, this idea that economists and people who write algorithms have is that they can detect the patterns in behavior. They can predict that people are these rational actors that act A, B, and C, and we can design our programs to meet that A, B, and C, right? Or we economists can predict what's going to happen a year from now because people buy these products. And of course, it's all nonsense because economists

are the ones who are 98% of the time completely wrong about their predictions. It's the most absurd profession ever created. It's because humans are irrational. You can't figure out the logic. Each person operates in a way that's unfathomable in a way and it's to me it's the ultimate challenge it's like the ultimate puzzle to try and understand a little bit of why people have done what they do you know and probably i'm wrong most of the time probably i'm only hitting a tiny little percentage but that tiny little percentage gives me a greater grasp of reality than if i didn't have it. But that's sort of, I'll be endlessly fascinated with it. Yeah. I mean, it is endlessly fascinating, isn't it? You can never know too much about human behavior. And as you say, we're irrational. We need to embrace that

irrationality. And there was a moment in one of your books, Robert, which I think you were talking about the shadow within us and you said something like, in ancient cultures, you know, they thought they'd have to sort of deal with the shadow with some sort of, I don't know, chanting or some sort of medicine or something like that, whereas we now buy into the myth that, oh, something came over me. It was so powerful. Something came over me. Something came over me. It's almost, we've missed an opportunity. Like if we blow up at

something, we blow up at our partner for some reason, or we get really annoyed at work and we put our hands up and go, oh, something came over me. As you write in your book, it is a myth. It's a myth. And one of your tweets the other day, I think speaks to this. Everything that happens to you is a form of instruction if you pay attention. I completely agree with that. That's something I feel I've adopted in my own life for about five years now. Like everything in life, certainly anything you don't like is an opportunity to self-examine and figure out why that might be. And you can learn. So, you know, on this quest to learn about human behavior, I think that quest to learn about our own behavior is the best quest that exists. I don't think I've

found a better quest to engage myself with. But perhaps you could explain that tweet, you know, everything that happens to you as a form of instruction, if you pay attention. You know, it could be that you're wrong, that things just happen randomly. But the point is, you're going to learn from it. And learning from every little experience has incredible value to you, right? So what we're trying to focus in here is, are you active or are you passive? And that is the dividing line between people who can be healthy and people who can't. If you're continually in the passive mode, oh, something came over me. Oh, it's their fault. Oh, it's because of my parents. Oh, this is what happened

to me. Whoa, it's me. I can't do anything about it. That's the world that you're going to create for yourself. But if you're active, you go, maybe there's something about me that's partially responsible for this happening. Now, I don't mean to ever, ever blame a victim. So if you're a victim of some horrible thing, it's not that you're responsible for it, but even those situations, you can learn from that. So you become active, you're learning, you're saying, I can avoid some of these negative situations, right? So everything, look at everything is having a purpose and something you can learn from and something that's active that you can actually change and learn from so for instance i mean i i'm gonna sound like a great narcissist which i can't help but i had my stroke

it's just it's easier to deal with personal examples. I'm inside my own body and I know what it's like. The worst thing that can happen to you, it's not my fault, but maybe it was. Maybe I pushed myself too hard. Maybe I was working too hard. Maybe I was going to die some other way and the stroke was a way of saving my life. Maybe the fact that I can't walk really very well is teaching me something about it. I wanted to write a book on the sublime, right? It's a book I've been wanting to write for 20 years, but I kept putting off.

And my original idea was I was going to jet off to Madagascar and hang out with lemurs in the forest. I was going to go to Tierra del Fuego. I was going to swim with dolphins. Now I'm writing the book and I can't do any of that. All I can do is sit in my office and write. But what it means is I have to extract the sublime like a bee extracts honey from everyday things. I have to see the sublime in my cats, in my wife, in what I see outside and the little things I can get.

And it's making a better book because most people don't have the money to jet off to Madagascar. They're in circumstances not like mine, but maybe somewhat similar. They're a little bit trapped. They're a little bit imprisoned. So I have to look at it.

It was a blessing in disguise. It's taught me something. And when I think that way, it's incredible therapy because it gets me out of my own self-pity and my own self-misery and it makes me realize that I can learn from everything, particularly from bad circumstances. Bad things are the best education that could ever happen to you. I guess what other choice do we have, Robert? Because if we're not,

then we become a victim to life. Life is happening and we're just the recipient of what life is handing out to us. I've spoken to Edith Eger on this show before, one of the most powerful conversations I've had. She was in Auschwitz for many years, but the forgiveness, the compassion with which she speaks, the things that she has learned from that experience and how she is this loving, forgiving, beautiful, beautiful 93, 94 now, I think, year old lady. It's taught me so much. I think, well, if she can learn from that, I can learn from these small things, these relatively small things in my life, right? It gives a sense of autonomy to us. And again, I think that's a big theme in all of your work is giving us that sense of personal autonomy. You know, are you just, is life happening to you or are you in some way able to engage and be responsible for how your life plays out?

Well, yes, it's very powerful. I think of Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, who was in Auschwitz, was in concentration camps for several years. And he, you know, obviously that's the worst thing that can happen to a human practically. You have no control over that. It's not your fault in the least. But he observed in those horrific circumstances

that some people did better than others, right? And he created a whole philosophy around it, what he called logotherapy, and wrote a book about. The people who did better were the ones who had meaning in their life. They had a purpose. I have to get through Auschwitz, this horrific experience, because I need to write a book. I need to create a work of art. I need to be there for my kids, my parents, et cetera, et cetera. I have a purpose for living. It's going to make me deal with this awful circumstance in a better way. Right.

And he ended up writing a book about that. So, you know, sometimes things happen that you cannot control it the worst. But if you look at it the worst thing but if you look at it like what is the meaning what is the purpose behind it what can what is it that i can use out of the situation it's immensely enlightening and therapeutic at the same time yeah thank you robert robert i think what you have put out in the world for over two decades now is pretty incredible. You've clearly influenced how many people around the world think about their lives, the actions they take. There's no question that you have had a significant influence on a lot of people around the globe. I want to acknowledge you for that. And you clearly have that drive to keep writing, keep investigating, keep exploring. I'm very much looking forward to

your next book, which I know you're toiling with at the moment. So look after yourself whilst you're toiling with it. Make sure you take it easy. Robert, this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of our lives. For people who are struggling right now, for people who feel stuck, they want to make a change, but they don't know where to start. Have you got any final words for them?

Well, the thing is, change doesn't happen from within unless you're highly motivated right so um i have a chapter in one of my books that i call the death ground strategy when you feel your back is against the wall when everything is against you that it's either get out of this or you're going to die you call up all of your energy, all of your spirit. You have a sense of urgency, a sense of desperation. When you're in that mood, a human being can accomplish absolute miracles and history has shown that.

So the worst situation is to feel like you're miserable, you're unhappy, you feel blocked in what you're doing, but you don't have the requisite energy to change yourself. You try different things, but you're kind of half-assed about it. You meddle here for a few weeks. You consider changing your career. You maybe start thinking about some new skills, but you're not emotionally deeply

deeply engaged in what you're trying to change right you you're you're trying to have it bet both ways you're trying to have it easy and trying to get something that you want but nothing in life comes easy and it had you have to have that intense emotional energy, urgency, welling up from within you to say, damn it, I don't want to live like this anymore. Okay. And you've got to push yourself into that feeling, I'm afraid. So if you're unhappy with your job, go through a process and go. happy with your job go through a process and go it's if you're 25 or 26 it's easy because you go oh well i've got time things will change all right but stop that and go five more years of this i'm 30 and i'm and i'm not going to be even more unhappy and i'm maybe you're going to start i'm going to

get into some bad habits i I might even become addicted. You know, life will pass by quickly. You have to tell yourself, time is of the essence. You have less of it than you think. You could die tomorrow. It's not going to come easily, right? So you have to be energized and motivated and excited to actually make the change. So don't tell yourself, don't give yourself an out like, well, maybe this job, maybe I can be okay with it. Maybe I can just, you know, I'll

get by. I'll read some books. I'll go home. I'll get on the internet. It's okay. I'll deal with it because I don't want to deal with the alternative. You have to confront it if you are truly unhappy. Maybe you're not truly unhappy. Maybe you're just whining and you think you want something better, but you don't really know what you want. But you have to reach a point where it's either make this change or something bad is going to happen, right? And then tell yourself, I don't have all of this time. I want to make a career change. It's important to me. I'm 26, but youth goes by really quickly. All right, what do I need to do? Well, instead of kind of wasting time, I've got to go and I've got to learn a new skill set. I've got to go back to school. I've got to spend all of my free time, not all of it, but as much as I can, with a plan

for how I'm going to escape this corner that I'm in. And I'm going to get out of it. I'm going to get out of it with energy and motivation. And then if you even think that for one day, if you go through the process, I'm telling you, I don't have time. I can't wait a few more years for this to happen. I have to make a change. I have to take steps and you start writing them down. You'll already make a change within yourself. You'll start to feel the difference. You'll start to feel that energy coming up. And I have many examples in my books of people who are in impossible situations and get out of them because they go through that process. Right. And so it's your level of degree of want and energy that will get you out of your rut. And sometimes you have to feel desperate and urgent in order to really get the requisite energy.

And so my lesson to you is, you can't just, it just won't happen. You have to create it sometimes. You have to go through a process where you have to think, time is short. I'll be 40 years old at some point. Where do I want to be when I'm 40? Do I want to be where I am? No. I want to be doing something that I love. I want to be when I'm 40? Do I want to be where I am? No. I want to be doing something that I love. I want to be making some money. I want to be comfortable. I want to be in a relationship. I don't want what I have now. I've got to hurry. I've got to hurry. I've got to have that energy. That's to me, knowing what I know about human nature, that's to me the most important lesson I would give people. Robert Green, thank you.

Well, you're very welcome, Ranga. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say say in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving.

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