Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Robert Greene on Power, Purpose, Struggle, and Love

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

What does it mean to develop mastery of self and mastery of craft? That’s a foundational question.Today, I’m really excited to welcome back to the podcast, one of the great minds of our time—Robert Greene. You probably know Robert as the author of some of the most influential books on human behavior—The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature. Today, we go beyond the pages to dive deep into his unique approach to understanding self-discovery, mastery, and love. We also dig into how he’s navigating his recovery from a major stroke in 2018. It is so inspiring. Robert’s wisdom is practical, sharp, and transformative. In this conversation, he unpacks some of the most important lessons from his life and his work—lessons that can help all of us better navigate the messy, exhilarating, and winding adventure to becoming our best selves._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. What does it mean to develop mastery of self and mastery of craft? That is a foundational question. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training, a high-performance psychologist. Today, I'm really excited to welcome back to the podcast, one of the great minds of our time, Robert Green. You probably know Robert as the author of some of

the most influential books on human behavior, like the 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, and the Laws of Human Nature. Today, we go beyond the pages to dive into his unique approach to understanding self-discovery, mastery, and love, and how he's navigating his recovery from a major stroke in 2018. It is so inspiring. Robert's wisdom is practical, it's sharp, and it's transformative. In this conversation, he unpacks some of the most important lessons from his life and his work. Lessons that can help us all better navigate the messy and exhilarating and windy adventure to becoming our best selves. So with that, let's dive into this week's conversation with the one and only Robert Green. Robert, I have been a student of your ideas and I love reading your books. Thank you for what you've introduced to the world. And I'm honored to be here with you

today. Well, thank you for having me, Michael. My pleasure. I'm honored to be here. How long ago was it when we did this? I think it was like 10 years ago. Yeah, it was early days for me in the pod, and it was a great conversation. Yeah, I had a lot of fun. Yeah. And I still get feedback from people who listen to it. I'm friends with some of the people who listened to that interview

who contacted me over the years, yeah. Oh, really? Great. Like yoga instructors and people like that. Nice. who contacted me. Oh, really? Over the years, yeah. Oh, great. Like yoga instructors and people like that. Nice. Okay, good. Yeah. It's one of the, when I think back of like the ones that sing at the high table for me,

definitely your conversation would be one of them. Wow, that's great to know. Yeah. Thank you. Well, I mean, our love affair with and our deep interest in mastery and the path of mastery, of course, it's going to make for some magic. But the things I want to talk to you about today, I want to talk about mastery. I want to talk about power, and I want to talk about love. Those would be the three things.

Yeah, pretty good subject. People might be interested in that. Yeah, good. So let's start at the top one um thank you for the gift this is an amazing um what how many years this is for the 25th anniversary anniversary of the 48 laws of power so thank you for your special gift and before we get to power i do want to talk about mastery if we we could start at the top about what is your working definition of mastery? Well, mastery is a process, and you have to love the process. You can't just be oriented towards the goal. Just think, I'm going to be so great. You have to enjoy the actual process of it.

So I spell out that process in detail in the book. But the reason I wrote it is when you reach that high level, which is the highest level of mastery, and I call it you have an intuitive feel for it, the thing that you're studying is inside of you. If you're a football player, the field is inside your head, right? If you're a piano player, you've internalized it. That is such an awesome feeling.

I've had moments of it like that in my work, in my writing. You reach this point where you don't have to think anymore and ideas come to you. And so that is what our brain is designed for. We have this insane instrument, the human brain, certainly the most complex organism in the universe as people say, the mathematical possibilities of connections in the brain are absolutely infinite. It is something that every day we should

just wake up and marvel at this thing that we've been given, this insane tool, but people don't use it right, they don't know how to use it, they don't understand the insanity, the marvelousness of this instrument, right? So I wanted to show you that if you understand it, if you move with it, if you develop it in the right way, you can have these powers that are incredible. And the pleasure that you have when you reach that level, because it takes a lot of hours of work, a lot of drudgery, a lot of tedium, you know, a lot of practice.

But when you reach that level, it's hard to explain how joyous the feeling is that you have. There's the magic that I know of you, is that you have this combination. I'm nodding my head for the audio listener to everything you said, but you have this way of being nearly dogmatic. And that's not quite the right word, but emphatic maybe is a better way of like, this is how it is. And then at the same time,

you leave space for me in this conversation to say, how do you see it as well? You have this way of doing those two things, which I think is really unique. I never thought of that. That's interesting. Thank you for that. Yeah, it is a high compliment, I think, because when I read and listen to your work, you are clear, concise, and emphatic about your point. And you made it, which is like, this brain is amazing, and people don't use it

right. I wholeheartedly agree. And then, so let me add one more piece to the bit of mastery. So you talked about the phases and it begins with an apprenticeship. And if we open that up a bit, before you start the path, people, I think, are disillusioned a bit about how long it takes to experience that embodied sense of mastery. We want it now. We look at others and we say, well, they have it. They must be born that way. We know at some level that we do need to put in work, but we're not sure exactly how to put in that work towards mastery. And so you've pointed at the apprentice phase. And so can you just open that up at the beginning of the apprenticeship? How does somebody better understand how to position themselves towards the path of mastery as opposed to

an apprenticeship to make money, an apprenticeship for an outcome that is also desirable? Well, we've skipped a step because the first phase of the process is discovering, when I say discovering your life's task, and that's the key to everything. It's the key to having a fulfilled life. It's the key to being happy in life. It's the key to reaching the goals that you want. Because what it is, is the process of self-understanding, self-knowledge. You have to become aware of what you were destined for in this life. You were born a unique individual. And it's a very interesting thought. It's the same kind of thought about your brain. There will never be another Michael Gervais. Your DNA is unique. The way your parents brought you

up, their DNA is unique. The way they brought you up their DNA is unique the way they brought you up is unique your early experiences you are a true individual right and that spark that individuality is I would compare to like a seed right it's been planted in you and your destiny your fate in life is to know what that seed is, to know who you are, what makes you different from everybody else, and to cultivate it. And if you don't understand that, the apprenticeship phase will be misery because you will start trying to learn and do things that aren't suited to your nature. Your brain has what I call a grain to it. And there's a book that I tell people that I like a lot called The Five Frames of Intelligence by Howard Gardner. And he basically shows that there are five different kinds of intelligence.

We tend to overemphasize the intellectual, the analytical skill. But there's musical intelligence, pattern intelligence, mathematical intelligence. There's social intelligence. There's kinetic intelligence, which has to do with the body and movement. There are five of them. I don't remember all of them. You have one of them. There's one of them that's do with the body and movement. There are five of them. I don't remember all of them. You have one of them. There's one of them that's stronger than the others, right?

It's where your brain naturally gravitates towards. And if you don't have the right fit, if you launch your career, you go into law because you think it's going to be making a lot of money. But in fact, your brain and that seed was made for something else. You're going to end up hitting a wall at some point. You're going to be burning yourself out and your life will take bad turns and things will, you know, you will never reach the goals that you want. And so if you don't know who you are, if you don't know what makes you different,

then the apprenticeship phase is useless. Yeah. and we're skirting the obvious is mastery of self and mastery of craft. And I am far more interested in mastery of self. The craft is just a unique working laboratory to better understand it. Where do you orientate, mastery of self or mastery of craft? Well, these are words, and really mastery is an organic whole, and it's kind of hard to separate the two, because yourself is the craft, and the craft is yourself. So the dividing line is very fluid. And so the craft is what's training you, you know? Like, writing books has changed me. I'm not the same person.

I am the person who writes the books, right? And yet I bring myself to it. And to reach that level, I've had to master myself. And it's been a very arduous, difficult process. It took me many years. I didn't have success until I was basically 38, 39 years old. I was up till then quite a bit of a failure. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true.

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My favorite flavor right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know, Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters, and that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus recovery for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash findingmastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash findingmastery. So the process of mastering myself was very, very difficult,

but you can't separate that from mastering the art of writing. So if you're just mastering yourself, but you're not doing it for something, it's not connected to a goal, it's not connected to something concrete, then it won't mean anything. We have to live in a physical world. We have to be concrete, physical creatures. And the craft has limitations. You can't do anything.

If you're mastering the piano, you can't just play anything. You have to learn the technique. You have to learn scales. There's a process, and it limits you. And working within those limitations develops you as a person, right? So the actual craft itself, the limits that it presents, and the process of mastering them is what will help you master yourself. You can't separate the two.

So I frame it as mastery of self through craft. Okay. So craft is, I like how you're saying there's limitations to it. I like that. And I agree in so much that I'm not that interested in what the craft is. It's almost like the excuse for the internal world that we all inhabit to be better understood. You pointed to the importance of self-discovery prior to apprenticeship. So let me just go back to that. How do you think that people ought to better understand who they are and or if you want to take it a second turn on it what their purpose in life might be well um you're working against a culture that is trying to make it harder for you to do that because it's everything is externally oriented social media what are other people doing all of your attention is focused outward on what's going

on in the culture what other people are sending signals through your phone. And so the ability to look inward at who you are is harder than ever before. It wasn't when I was growing up. I was an introvert, and it was kind of a natural process. If I were growing up now, I don't think I would have developed the same way, obviously. So you have to begin from the process of, I have to know who I am, and it doesn't come easily, because you're surrounded by voices. And the metaphor I give is, that seed that I talked about, that individuality that you have, it's like a voice in your head. The great psychologist Abraham Maslow, he called them impulse voices.

They're voices saying, this is what I like, this is what I love. And as you get older, you accumulate the voices of your parents, your teachers, your peers, the culture at large, and it drowns it out. You can't hear yourself anymore. You can't hear that impulse voice of what makes you an individual, of what makes you different, of what you love. So you have to understand that you're cutting through this vast cloud of smoke, this screen that has been put in front of you, that is preventing you from understanding yourself. So you have to look inward, and it takes time. It is a process like everything else. I do consulting with this, and a lot of people come to me with this problem,

and they're in a hurry. They're in a hurry to know what their life's task is. I'm saying you can't understand that in a day or a week or a month. It's going to take years. It took me 18 years to discover the kind of books that I wanted to write, right? So it's a process. You have to begin, like, journaling. You have to kind of books that I wanted to write, right? So it's a process. You have to begin like journaling. You have to kind of write down things.

You have to become aware of the things that you love and the things that you hate. And I bring it down to a basic level, the foods that you love, the kinds of things that you like to drink, the clothes that you wear, just understanding what makes you different from other people. You have to go through this process. I really appreciate the simplicity in the nuances. It's not simple.

And then I'll point to three practices that I think increase awareness. Journaling, to your point. Conversation with people of wisdom. Lucky me right now. And then the third is mindfulness, some sort of practice to be aware of how your inner world works and better aware of how the external works. So those three are like, those are the ones. I don't know another one. I could put an asterisk

to say, if you are in a life-threatening or near life-threatening type of experience, and that can be by choice or by accident or by chance, that those moments have so much to teach us as well, because we really meet ourselves in those consequential or perceived consequential environments. But for all practical purposes, journaling, conversation with people of wisdom, and mindfulness would be the three best practices. Definitely. And the conversation with people, not everybody has access to people of incredible wisdom. It used to be in our culture that you could, or in indigenous cultures. But what you do have access to are books.

You do have access to great writers from the past. I didn't really have a mentor growing up i was pretty much left to my own but i had writers and philosophers and thinkers and novelists that i gravitated to who taught me a lot who basically raised me and then when it comes to mindfulness i meditate every single morning i had to get up early to come here which meant i had to get up at six o'clock which which I don't normally do, to meditate. If I don't meditate every morning, I am in the worst mood. I am so desperately in need of it every single day. It's become a habit. But it's the most wonderful habit of all. I can't tell you the rewards that I get from it. And it's something very similar to mastery.

So I've been meditating for 15 years. You never really know if you're progressing because there's no signs of progress, right? But something is happening unconsciously. Something is happening in your brain that you're not even aware of. And you'll notice it when normally in the past, somebody says something that got under your skin and you go, that doesn't matter. Why am I even getting upset about it? You're not aware of it, but that meditating has done something to you. It has altered the connections in your brain. And that's what happens in the process of mastery. Yeah. Someone early on had shared with me that, because I was asking the same thing. So it was 1998-ish in that range

when I first was introduced to mindfulness. And I said, how do I know if it's working? And this was a long time Buddhist practitioner that said, you might know, but the people around you will know. Yeah, wow. That's a great way of putting it. Yeah, I remember like, yeah, that was cool. So you had mentioned that like the first two or three decades of your life were a struggle. You said the word failure. What happened? What do

you mean by that? You know, it's hard to say, because sometimes your memory kind of leads you astray. But I knew from very, I was a very ambitious young man. I'm still very ambitious. I don't deny it. And I like power, and I like controlling my life, and I like success. I'm sorry, but that's true. It's just who I am. And I was very ambitious, and I wanted to be a writer. But I couldn't figure out what it was that I was meant to write or what I was good at. I was a good writer, but there were bad fits, and I tried journalism. I lived in New York, and I wasn't very happy. I didn't like the fact that you wrote something, and it lasted like a week or a day,

and the next day it was forgotten. There was some new bit of news out there. I'm somebody that thinks in terms of decades, millennia, 5,000 years. What I studied in college was ancient Greek. That was my major. So thinking in terms of a day or two days, it just wasn't a good fit. I hated it. Then I went, I left New York and I went to Europe and I wandered around for four or five years. I worked in a hotel in Paris. I worked at a television company in London. I worked as a tour guide in Dublin. I taught Spanish in Barcelona. I worked in Greece on an island in Greece to get, I had to pay my way to get off the island. I got very sick. Anyway, I tried writing novels, wandering around, nothing fit. I was getting very depressed. Who am I? What is the success that I was intended for?

I came back to Los Angeles where I'm from to get into Hollywood and screenwriting because, well, I can make money and I can write screenplays and how glamorous. Another terrible, terrible fit because a writer has no control. They're like eight other people that come in, the producers, et cetera, it wasn't a good fit. So by the year 1995, I'm 36, 37 years old, very depressed. My wife can attest that I was even suicidal at that point. And I couldn't figure it out. I knew there was something I could do, that was something worthwhile, something important I had to communicate. And by luck, I met a man named Joost Elfers who packages books. And he asked me if I had an idea for a book. And I just kind of

improvised in the moment what turned into the 48 Laws of Power. But the lesson that I tell people was I never gave up. In my darkest moment, I knew that I could do, there was something in me that was worth communicating and I wouldn't give up. And I kept trying. I kept trying other things. I would, if it wasn't novels, I would write mystery stories. I would write short stories. I would write screenplays. I would do anything. I had to find it. I was desperate and I knew something would connect at some point. Can you put a word to the feeling of not giving up? You said, I never gave up, but is that word I fought? Is that word I craved? What was the emotional connection to the energy of keep going?

I knew that I was different, that I'm an oddball. I've always been very different from everybody else in high school. It's a very strong feeling. And the sense that I'm odd, that I'm different, means there's something inside of me that wants to come out, that's going to express the strangeness that is my experience of the world. Where did you get that idea? From very early on, I knew I was different. As I said, in high school, I was always an introvert. Where did you get that idea? very, very familiar with that feeling. And so, you know, you talk about impulse voices,

or I did. When I'm in New York and journalism isn't working, a lot of people either would have gone into law school and said, I give up, or they would have kept trying it. They would have tried, they would have stayed there, even though it wasn't a good fit. But there was that voice in me like, I could swear right now, it was so strong. Get the fuck out of this. This isn't you. It's not who you are. Get out. Most people don't get out. They're stuck in bad situations. They went to law school. They're on this one track. And I'm going to make it work. Oh, I'll take drugs. I'll take something to give me energy. I'm going to force my way. They don't understand.

You've got to give up. You've got to find out what it is that you were meant to do. And so to answer your question, it was a strong sense of I don't fit. Where do I? I know I fit somewhere. I know I have something to express. I can't give up. God, I love it.

Very cool. How do you point to the 20-year-olds, the 30-year-olds that are trying to figure out the path, maybe three feet, three steps into their path, what are early days, if you will, and they're like, yeah, I hear you, Robert. I feel kind of strapped. I feel like I'm going in a dead-end zone. What do you suggest they do? Well, they have to go through that process that

we were talking about. But I make it very clear that you're not going to learn something. You're not going to get good at anything unless you love it. So we're going to get eventually to this idea of love. But it's very important in the philosophy, in the whole mastery that I preach. And that is life's task. So when you love something, when you're emotionally engaged, you learn at a rate that's amazingly much faster than if you're indifferent to it or if it's a bad connection. And I give the analogy that I tell people. When I was in Paris, I had studied French in college for three years.

I got to Paris, I couldn't speak a damn word. I met a girl that I wanted to date. God damn it, I better learn French. She's amazing. I've got to be able to seduce her or whatever. And I learned in three weeks more French than I learned in three years of college because I was motivated. You have a lot of incentives and motivation. It's pretty funny what you can do. Yeah. Oh my goodness. But it has to be something you love. But in your 20s, I tell people, you have to have adventure. You have to have fun.

You can't be like, I've got to go to Wall Street. I've got to get a job at Goldman Sachs. You're going to waste your 20s. Your 20s, you're only young once. God, I wish I was in my 20s again. You don't know how much fun I had. It's only once. And it's an amazing,

it's the most incredible part of your life. You have all this energy. You look good. You're on top of trends. Everything's going for you. So you've got to have fun. It's got to be an adventure. But that adventure has to have a direction,

and that direction is heading towards something that you love, that excites you. So I tell people in that early step, by the time you're 30, it's all going to come together. You're going to be able to create something interesting that is you because you spent your 20s learning skills, but having some fun, some adventure, some excitement. Don't be so single-tracked because if you're single-tracked, you won't really discover what you're good at, because you won't try. It can't be that you try everything, but you have to try different things within that framework that you enjoy or love.

And in the process of trying things out, you will learn. You will learn about yourself. You will learn about what you love, about what you hate, about what you were destined for. So I tell people it's kind of a dance. You have to have a sense of direction, but you also have to have a sense of adventure and fun. And for folks that haven't figured that out in their 30s and 40s and they're just struggling, how do you pivot to that? Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you'refounder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for life. And to do that, they developed what they call the Momentus Standard. Every product is formulated with top experts and every batch is third-party tested, NSF certified for sport

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Life is okay. Yeah, it's okay. You have to make a living. We have to be practical in this world. So you can't just, you've been heading down a certain direction, you're in your 30s, but it isn't suiting you. You can't just give up and go try something completely different because you're older, it's harder to learn, it's harder to make those kind of changes. So evolve. Don't try and change, but evolve, adapt. Find a way. I have an example of a woman who studied law and it was a bad fit and she was getting very depressed. She'd always wanted to be a writer. And what she did was she went into writing about law. And through that, she discovered that she was good at it. And through that, she discovered that she could write mystery novels and detective stories, et cetera. But it

was a process. She evolved and she adapted towards something that would fit her better. She didn't give up law and become a poet because she had to make a living. But that means you have to know who you are even in your 30s, and it gets very difficult. You can still do it in your 30s. By the time you're in your 40s, it's getting really, really hard. And so the message I want for young people is don't get to that point. Avoid that point. Make sure that you figure it out more or less when you're in your 20s, because then life kind of unfolds naturally for you in a good way. But when you're older in life, you have to kind of be practical and realistic. The other example

that I often have, because I do get a lot of consulting and people that ask me these questions. So a typical scenario would be a young man or woman in their 20s stuck in a dead-end job. They have kids, they have a family, they have to support themselves, but they're just deeply, deeply unhappy. What do you do?

Okay, and I say, you have to take a simple step. So you go through this process, and I go through it with them over emails, of what it is that you love, what it is that excites you. Just doing that first step, they're already less depressed. All right, I'm thinking about myself instead of my family, instead of all these problems. I'm enjoying this process. Okay. You figure it out to some degree. All right. You can't quit your dead-end job because you need to support your family. All right. But you can study at night. You can go to night school. You can get on the

internet and study these things. You can pick up a book. Start that process at night. And you have no idea how just a simple thing where you are giving them hope, where they're heading in a direction, it changes the whole picture. Now this job that they hate isn't so bad. And I say, you can learn from that terrible job. Everything is a learning experience. You're learning how things that you don't like, you're learning how to deal with people because you're going to need social skills wherever you go. You've got a boss that you hate't like, you're learning how to deal with people because you're going to need social skills wherever you go. You've got a boss that you hate, you're going to learn how to not let that boss get under your skin,

how to not be emotional. Learn, learn, learn, learn while you're at this job and at night go somewhere else. Suddenly the cloud that has been hanging over them is lifted just by those simple steps. There's a small intimate gathering with the Dalai Lama. This was like maybe 2013 in that range. And it was locally in California.

And it was right, well, I can mark it by the year that it was, I don't know, two months, maybe just a handful of weeks after Osama bin Laden was killed. And someone in the, I don't want to call it crowd, it was just a handful of weeks after Osama bin Laden was killed. And someone in the, I don't want to call it crowd, it was just a handful of folks said, what do you think about the people that are celebrating his death? And he looked over at his translator, made sure he understood it right, paused,

and came back to the room and said, I feel sad for those people who think that their adversary needs to go away. And it was a really deep, like deep take on our relationship with other people that we think are evil. Maybe he is left to be undetermined by me. But the corollary here is that this relationship with this other person that we're celebrating the death of them, they're gone away, that now we're better. The same is the relationship with this quote unquote dead end job. If that would go away, then we'd be better. If we could play the piano all day or guitar all day or paint or write, then we'd be better. Yes. And if you bring into that new environment, your mindset that led you to the dead end job, you will not unfold it in the way that you are hoping. I could talk to you about mastery for a very long time.

Yeah, I'm sure we could. It would be fun. Yeah. But I also want to shift to, and maybe we'll come back to a couple ideas towards the end, but I do want to shift to power. And I think that the segue here is that you mentioned it earlier, that you like success. You like to have power, feel powerful. And I mean, you wrote a book that I would be surprised if anyone in our audience didn't recognize the 48 Laws of Power. And I know that you've gotten some blowback and some adulation. You've got both about the book and about how the laws are used. And I see the grin. So I feel like that's probably a good place to start. But before we get into that, I want to honor that your deep, rich commitment to really understand

humans is to be celebrated. And it's an honest, earnest, deep, I don't even want to, do I use the word like self-torturing? Like you've really gone in to understand and to share. So the segue, the not so elegant segue here is that last time we met, you were just in the beginnings of the rehab of your stroke. This is like five or six years ago, I think. Not the podcast, but last time we met. And so can you kind of bring us through your journey there? Because you had mentioned that this is, to me earlier, that this is one of the hardest things you've been through.

By far the hardest. Well, you know, I'm somebody prior to the stroke who was extremely independent. I traveled a lot. I exercised every day. I swam or I mountain biked or I hiked or I did yoga. Every single day, it was part of my personality. I liked adventure and I liked trying different things, right?

It's what kept the drudgery of my riding routine. I could keep my sanity. Suddenly, in one fell swoop, all of that is taken away from you. Now, I'm not to bitch or complain because people have far worse things. They have terminal illnesses. I nearly died. I came very close to dying. My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, basically saved my life.

What happened? I was driving here in Los Angeles when the stroke happened. She saw something very strange going on with my face, like a whole sod in my face was dropping. And she started yelling, pull over, pull over. And I'm going, no, everything's fine. And I'm driving. And she forces the car over.

And then I'm not even aware of this i start getting out of the car like i'm gonna do something she pulls me back in and then the next thing i know i'm unconscious i'm in a coma she called 9-1-1 right away so basically recognizing it and taking quick action and not getting confused saved my life she called 9 911. She pulled me back in the car. She saved my life. But I was very close to dying. If the ambulance had come a minute later, I would have suffered so much brain damage that I wouldn't be here talking to you.

If it had been on my own or two minutes later, I would have gone in an accident. I would have died. So I became very lucky. But at the same time, everything that all the supports in my life that kept me sane, that kept the writing okay for me were gone, okay?

So on a basic level, I can't type. My left hand is useless. So you're used to writing with two hands. I'm going to be writing a book now because my first thing was my mind is more important than my body and I have to be engaging. I have to start writing a book. So almost right after my stroke, I went back into that, but I can't type. When I would get blocked in my writing, I would take a hike and get my mind out of it. I couldn't take a hike. I was stuck in

my office. Okay. So everything that I used and was used to was gone from me. And I had this idea that, oh, okay, in a year I'll be swimming again, I'll be walking again, but it didn't work out that way. You do, normally when you go to the gym and you try something new, you lift weights, you see results in a couple of weeks, and it keeps you excited and you go. This you see results in eight months, a year, if at all. You hardly ever see results. Other people might notice a slight

change, but you don't feel it in your body. How do you keep going? I do therapy every single day. I either ride my recumbent bike up in the hills or the other two days I do an hour and a half to two hours of physical therapy. How do you keep going when you don't see results, right? You just have to be patient because, as my wife explained to me, if I didn't do that hour and a half therapy, I would have degraded. I would have lost. I wouldn't have kept at least a level of stasis. So you have to learn a whole new life skill, which is patience, which is not getting down on yourself. I'm somebody who's very self-critical by nature. So the stroke was probably one of the worst things that could happen to somebody with that particular characteristic because, damn it, Robert, why can't you do this? Why can't you

bend your knee like you've been practicing? Get down on yourself. You swear you get really angry. You can't live like that, right? It's hindering you. It's making things worse. It's also making you miserable. You have to learn to be patient with yourself,

be more forgiving with yourself, which is not a quality I had. You have to be patient on the level of not seeing the results that you have. You have to be patient on the level of I can't type, so I have to find another way of doing it. And the other processes are insane, what I have to do to write my book right now. I have notebooks and I handwrite in them, and then I have to edit them with handwriting.

So I have two notebooks, and each is like cross-referenced. It's like I would look like a madman if you saw my notebooks, right? Okay. I have to learn a whole different level of skill. I have to think in a different way because I'm writing a book about the sublime, which means something intensely exciting. I have to feel that excitement or I can't write about it. But how do I feel that excitement when I'm stuck in my office, right? Well, I look at my cat, who's a marvelous creature, and I admire the animal.

I've got nature there in my office. I look out my window, I see the birds. And the mindfulness part of it, the meditating, makes you go down into the basics of life and kind of feel it in your hara, in your belly, in your gut, a certain connection to things. I can go on and on and on. I've had to learn a whole new set of skills,

and they're all psychological, and it's a work in progress because sometimes I still get into that kind of Tourette syndrome phase where I'm going, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Damn it, why can't I do that? I'm so frustrated. I can't button my shirt, right? I can't cut with a knife. I'm getting better, but it's so slow. So it's a work in progress. But one of my models in life is amor fati, love of fate. So it happened for a reason. This stroke happened for a reason. I would have died if I didn't have this stroke is how I look at it. Because I was kind of an adventurer, I took a lot of risks in life.

And when you get into your 60s, which I am, it isn't going to work so well. I probably would have died in some accident somehow. Okay. It's also taught me these skills. Also, the last thing I'll say is I had always intended to write a book on the sublime. It's been something in my bloodstream since for like 18 years ago. I had intended to write it, but I got derailed by other projects. And my idea was I was going to go to the Gobi Desert. I was going to go travel to Antarctica, go through the Cape of Horn. I was going to swim with dolphins. I was going to do this, that, and through the Cape of Horn. I was going to swim with dolphins. I was going to do this, that, and the other to write a book about the sublime.

And now I can't do anything. I can barely get on a plane. I can't even walk outside my goddamn office. So I have to make this book about the sublime all in my head. It's a thought. It's not necessarily adventures. Because realistically, 98% of the people out there can't do that anyway. They have something similar. They have lots of restrictions on it. They can't go to

the Gobi Desert. So how do you find the sublime in your office, staring at a spider that's crawling across the floor, or the ants marching in line, or the birds in the sky? That's what I've had to do with this book so it happened for a reason and I'm embracing it thank you what do you what are the emotions that come with what you're saying right now well it's good to get it out because I don't get to express it very much because um my wife has to take care of me she has to do a lot of things she didn't have to do I mean I'm not that bad I don't need you know I can do a lot of things myself but she does more than she used to do and so i try not to complain i try not to tell her what i'm going through because i don't want to add to her burden

she's got a lot of problems herself she's a film director she's dealing with all the agitations that that horrible business has so i don't want to add on to it so i keep it to myself so sometimes it's kind of a relief a release for me to be able to express it actually yeah i could feel it but i could see it i could see if you allow me to share the honesty here um you know is like i see you, the emotions flooded in you and then you working to hold them in or back. Could you, is that an honest assessment? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. You were just articulating the radical change that you've experienced and the way that you're working through it. And there's a lot of emotions. This is your intellect is obviously ridiculous and probably your emotional intelligence

is deeply formed in other ways but still not developed in the way that you would want in other ways yeah and i say that with all compassion and regard of course yeah so i think that there's and there's dimensionality to each of the intelligences so if you took that complaining off the table why keep why why keep it together and there's dimensionality to each of the intelligences. So if you took the complaining off the table, why keep it together and not share it? Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep.

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but i i kind of keep it in doses but yeah so she's probably gotten bits of it over the years but i'm just dumping it all on you right now yeah so the dumping process is what's releasing a lot of emotions but i would say there's actually sorry to interrupt i'd say there's probably i don't know 10 times more to dump yeah there is yeah there is but um you know it's it's good because it's lessons for other people. Unfortunately or fortunately, I'm somebody that's always oriented towards helping other people, and I don't like feeling like it's just about me. So the only reason I would dump or say it or express it is to help other people. So I never had a feeling of being helpless in my life. Yes, I was frustrated in my 30s and I was sort of helpless in my career, but I've had a direction.

And physically, I never felt helpless. To suddenly feel helpless, and in the early stages, I was completely dependent on others, was an overwhelming emotion. And what it made me, part of it was, it made me understand other people on another level. So a lot of people feel helpless psychologically. They're trapped in a bad job. They're not making enough money. They've got a family that they can't support or whatever it is. They feel helpless. I can now empathize with them.

I can now understand what that feeling is. So in the last election that we went through, I am, I have to say, I'm a Democrat, so I'm not a Trump supporter. But a lot of Democrats were like, oh, come on, inflation is going down. Why are people so upset about the economy? No, people were upset for a reason, that sense of helplessness. I can now identify with them, that sense of fear about the future where you can't put food on the table. I have a fear that I can't walk. I can't, you know, like there's a fire in my table. I have a fear that I can't walk. I can't, you know, like there's a fire in my house. I can't escape.

I can't walk. I know I empathize with the general metaphor of helplessness now on a level that I never did before. And I know that other people have to go through the same kind of process of dealing with life skills. First of all, you have to get practical and you have to try and make more money because it can't all just be psychological, but also you have to work on yourself. So I like to frame it like these are lessons that anybody could have.

It's not just about me. I think that you are in this really unique position right now that because you are dialed in and tapped into the helplessness experience in life, which is like so remarkable because your commitment to power and understanding it has been such a thrust in your life, that you are going to have something very important to say

about the sublime and the inner world and the harmony that can come with not relying on the external world to deliver something or to make available to you. And I think one of the marks of modern leadership is to be able to align emotions, feelings, with thoughts. And I saw you do it here. And if I could just speak to the listener, like, please show us how to deal with emotions better. Show your family how to deal with emotions better, to work with them.

That is the calling in this topsy-turvy world is to work from the inside out. Yeah. Period. Yeah. And you are a leader, Robert, in that. And so I hope that I can do the same to make that commitment to be flooded with emotions, to go to the edges,

to be able to still find faculty in thinking, and to do that over and over and over and over again. So thank you for showing that level of power even in this conversation. So with the political uncertainty or the conflict that people are going through, like at the time of the recording, just yesterday was the inauguration.

Yeah. And can you maybe apply some of the laws of power that you've written about? And some people might not have read your book. So name some of the laws as you're applying them would be helpful. But apply some of the laws of power to both yourself through this really radical shift in how you're operating. And also maybe for what the Democratic Party did wrong. You choose your adventure here. Well, yeah, I mean, people often ask me what laws of power did Trump use,

and I can't deny that he's good at some, otherwise he wouldn't have gotten to where he is. And I mentioned law number six, court attention at all cost. He's a master at courting attention, at holding attention. And I don't mean to denigrate that. That is a very important part of power, is communication skills. And it's something that Democrats are absolutely dreadful at. So he's mastered that.

And I see never outshine the master as he's formed a court around him. The 48 laws of power, the metaphor there is the aristocratic court of like Louis XIV and how a power figure tends to form a court around him or herself, right, of courtiers. And Trump is very much in that group. And the people around him have to be very careful never to outshine the master, or they're going to get fired, they're going to be lost. It's a risk that Elon Musk is running. At what point is he outshining Trump, and will he be gotten rid of, pushed aside like so many others? I could go on and on and on about these lost parties. Do you want to say something?

Yeah, I love your point there, because when I was watching the inauguration the fear is that uh our president will be used by the the traditional brokers of power and then the next and then now we've got financial power embedded in a way that we've never seen before we've always known that it's there we saw it in the 1890s we saw it in the gilded Age. We saw it in robber barons. That's right. That's 19th century. Rockefeller was, yeah. But it's different.

It just has a different feel to it. And then so Trump leaves, fingers crossed. And I know people are thinking I'm crazy even suggesting that. Some would. Some definitely don't. And now we've got this different type of institutional power that's more overt. That would be a fear that I would have. And how do you think about that? Well, I'm not a seer, I'm not Nostradamus, but if you look at other countries, some people say,

well, our institutions are very strong, they'll rebound. It's America. We've been through this before. Okay, that's possible. But you don't know. You don't know. These institutions have never been tested in this way before. We're in a new order. We're dealing with technology that has never existed before, with powers that vastly eclipse anything in the 19th or 20th century. We are in new waters and we've seen the playbook in other countries where the institutions of democracy have very slowly been eroded and

chipped away. We've seen it in Hungary, we saw it partially in Poland, we've seen it in Turkey, we saw it in the Philippines, although they shifted back, we've seen it in India, on and on and on. There's a trend around the country. When people feel helpless and afraid, they're much more prone to looking towards a strong man or a strong woman. So it's a worldwide trend. So we don't know. And it's ridiculous for people to predict and say, oh, America's institutions are strong enough. Maybe they are. We don't know how they will be tested. And it is possible that we're going to see a different form of democracy, what is known as an illiberal democracy in our country. We'll have to see. And we have to be wary. This is what my beef with the Democratic

Party is. I'm a lifelong Democrat. My icon in politics has always been Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who my parents deeply admired. They grew up in the Depression. And I also, John F. Kennedy, when I was four years old, when he was five years old, when he was assassinated, had a deep effect on me. I had tremendous love for him when I was a kid. Those are the kind of Democratic icons I have. And the party that I grew up with has completely lost its soul. It doesn't fight for anything. It doesn't believe anything. It's a patchwork of different special interests, right? And so people are saying, well, maybe we just have to accommodate ourself with Trump and we have to try and make deals with him.

And I'm saying that is precisely the problem. That is precisely why you lost. It's precisely why you're in the wilderness, why you will be in the wilderness for 10, 20 years. It's because you're not fighting. The public does not see you as strong, as tough, as standing for something simple. A simple thing like we're for the working classes, which is what you used to be. We're not for special interests. We're not for the moneyed. We're for the average person out there. This is the America we believe in. Articulate it, have a vision, and fight.

And even if what you fight for is unpopular, it's okay if you lose. There are Pyrrhic victories and there are Pyrrhic wins. A Pyrrhic victory is when you win, but the cost was so high that it's really a loss. But there are losses that are actually wins because it shows the public that you stand for something that you're willing to fight. And if you're a leader, if you're a teacher, if you're a football coach, a baseball coach, a CEO, the idea that you're willing to be tough to take a stand and to fight for something is what energizes the group, the crowd, the company, the team. They've completely lost

track of that. So no, they do not have to bend over and become accommodating. They need to get a spine and get a soul and fight back. And the thing that was the turning point for me was when Merrick Garland was nominated for the Supreme Court by Obama and the Republicans and Mitch Connell blocked it in a way that we've never seen before that was legal but was nothing America had ever been through before. And they didn't fight back and they didn't do anything about it. When you show weakness to somebody who is like a Putin, and I'm not comparing Trump to Putin, don't get me wrong, but to somebody who's very strong and who's the opposite of that, that only makes them more emboldened. You have to deter them. You have to show strength.

You have to show a spine. And that's the lesson I've taken from this election. I'm very disillusioned with the Democratic Party right now. I think we could also apply, if the listener, if you rewind what Robert just said, and you listen to it and apply everything that he just said to your personal life. Be clear, articulate it, and then know what you stand for and go fight for it. That's at the individual level as well. That's who the most powerful individuals are. They know their first principles. They know the virtues that are the style of how they're going to go about trying to make these first principles true. And then they go compete, they fight, they bring it day in and day out with

that unique style about it and which law are you just referring to about like not show weakness or or like when you have the opportunity to fight for it which law is that oh boy um it's it's like a hybrid or combination yeah it's actually um there is there is a law um pardon me for not remembering which one i'm so glad you're saying this because i felt like if like I don't know the four. I love the book. Well, there's the 33 Strategies of War has a chapter on this.

And I talk, I have a section on defensive strategies, and there's a strategy on deterrence. And it's, a lot of warfare is asymmetrical. And what they mean is one side has more resources one side has more power you know a classic example of asymmetrical warfare is the vietnam war the united states with all its technology with all its fighter jets and the vietnamese army basically fighting on the level of a 19th century army and yet the 19th century army defeated the bigger one they leveraged asymmetrical warfare in a way where the weaker was able to become the

stronger but asymmetrical warfare is not just on the level of resources it's also on the level of ethics so if one side is willing to do anything to gain power, to win, as I can definitely say with Putin, and you're not because you're a democracy, you have ideas, you have values, he is at a continual advantage. And you have to find a way to not lose all of your values but to fight back. So if you're in a situation where you're facing an enemy or another party that is willing to do anything, you have to be able to have, you can't, you know, there was the old thing of when they go low, we go high. Throw that in the toilet, please, and flush that down. That is a stupid philosophy. When they go low, maybe we go a little bit lower than we normally have, but we're going to fight. You have to show them that you're going to fight and do something equal to what they're doing so that they back off. You don't necessarily have to do it, but you have to show, give a demonstration that you're going to be tough,

that there's a line in the sand that they cannot cross, or you're going to make them pay for it. If they never have a sense that they have to pay consequences for what they're doing, they'll go further and further and further and further. It's a deterrent strategy. And so if the Democratic Party had shown some spine back then with Merrick Garland, and they said, all right, you're blocking it, it's legal, we're now going to do something equivalent to that. Well, we're going to do something to you.

Then they're going to go, well, maybe next time we shouldn't take that step because we're going to pay a price. The other side, the enemy, the rival, has to feel that they're going to pay a price for doing something unethical or against the rules. So if we play that out, you know, Dr. King Jr. had, Martin Luther King Jr. had a powerful quote which is or insight is that um something like you you can't fight hate with hate you have to fight it with love something to that effect and i don't know the exact quote you might have it at the top of your

mind um and i hear you saying like okay when they go low let's say that they are taking people captive and torturing them as a tactic do you suggest we no okay no it's not we can't think simple simply about this we have to think of their capturing people and torturing them what's something else we can do where we're not capturing torturing people that's going to to hurt them below the belt economically or wherever their weakness is? Economic trade or some sort of – I mean, to take Martin Luther King Jr. as an example, he was organizing a protest in the city of Birmingham. He was asked to join it. I can't remember exactly which one this was.

It was in the 60s at some point. It was a very major protest that he organized. And the movement wasn't going as well as he wanted. There were some setbacks. And Kennedy wasn't passing the legislation that needed to pass. Things weren't looking good. And in the middle of this protest, the Birmingham police were being extremely violent. They had a man named Bull Connor, who is known for putting vicious attack dogs and doing anything he could to stop the protests. And this protest in Birmingham, the blacks in Birmingham were actually very reluctant to join it because they saw that they were going to get the terrible

consequences they were facing. And somebody came, an advisor came to Martin Luther King Jr. and said, look, I know this is something you've never done before, and you're probably not going to like the ethics of it, but we have hundreds, we have thousands of junior high school students and high school students who are eager to join this protest. They are very angry and they're not afraid. Let's get them involved. And people around Martin Luther King Jr. go, there's no way you can do that because these kids are going to get beaten up.

He agreed to it because he was flexible and he understood something. If he unleashed these students out there, and on national television, people in their living rooms were seeing young children being beaten by Bull Connor and his men, it would make immense progress for the movement. So that's an example of fighting on that level. He didn't go and start beating up policemen doing the equivalent. He found a way of adapting his ethics, his values, for a greater purpose, which was the movement. You have to be strategic in life.

And sometimes that means your morals are going to get in the way. Just being pure and ideological and moral, if it means you're going to lose and the consequences are terrible, it's not necessarily worth it. So you have to adapt a little bit. A lot of people are too ideologically pure about it. So you're so pure about the Democratic Party and now you've got Trump in power and look what's going to happen to our environment and climate change and all of that. Look at the results. So sometimes you have to be strategic in life. The story that you're pointing to is,

I think most of us have it seared in our head, which is the high-pressured hoses and the dog attacks that really was the eruption for the civil rights movement. And so thank you for taking us into that story in a very different way would you consider dr king a pacifist non-violent pacifist yes of course he was in the gandhi tradition so he didn't have his his students doing any kind of violence he was against violence so he didn't compromise his fire his non-violence okay so my i just want to make sure we're on the same page there and then have the in your

best understanding of change do does passivism work yes it's a very very powerful technique but it is a strategy and you can't just simply apply it you have to apply thinking and strategy to the to each circumstance so gandhi who initiated it, we don't give him credit, but he was actually a very strategic person. He understood that this was a war against the British. It was a war for independence. And in a war, his strategy of choice was nonviolence, was pacifism, but it had to be used in the right way. He did something very similar to what I'm talking about with Martin Luther King. He had a salt march in which he wanted the British to be attacking the marchers and the protesters who were trying to, because there was a tax on

salt, they were going to march to the sea and they were going to get their own salt. And the British came and they beat the hell out of them, the crap. And people in England who are also liberal-minded and think, well, we're superior to everyone because we're English, were reading in their newspapers of people having their skulls crashed in. It was a turning point in the nonviolent war. He knew when to apply it, how to apply it, and exactly the right circumstances. He was very strategic about it.

So pacifism is a very powerful strategy, but it has to be used as a strategy. Beautiful. Okay, transition, slight transition. No, from crushing skulls to love. Yeah. Okay, so sublime and love. At the surface, we could talk about you need to love who you are and what you're doing. That's foundational. Knowing how to love yourself needs to precede loving a craft, in my mind. It's not an easy thing to do. And so as a student of love, what would you want us to understand and know?

Well, you have to know that you're embedded in other things, that you're not alone, that you are part of something great, of some magnificent, strange, wild, marvelous experiment. You have to wake up in the morning and go, it's actually very strange to be alive. It's actually very strange to be conscious. You know, snails aren't really conscious as far as we know, but humans are. What a strange, wild experiment this is. You are part of something that is absolutely immense, that goes back not a thousand years, not a million years, but billions of years. You and your brain were formed out of the explosion of stars, right? That's formed the universe. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore.

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at lisa.com plus an extra $50 off when you use the code finding mastery at checkout. That's lisa.com. The promo code is finding mastery for 25% off and then plus an extra $50 on us because quality sleep is just too important to leave to chance. We haven't found life on any other planet so far as we know, and we've been searching pretty hard. There probably is. Maybe there isn't. But the fact that there was a sun that illuminates this one planet

just far away enough from the sun so that the weird experiment of life could begin three or four billion years ago, and that the evolution of life took all of these strange twists and turns that could have never ended up with humans. If you follow evolution, the chances of humans evolving was very, very slim. Our species nearly died out 80,000 years ago in a plague. The fact that you and I are here talking in the English language with this technology is absolutely, the odds against it are mathematically almost impossible, but it's real.

So you, Michael, and everyone out there, you're part of this. You are not alone. Your atoms inside of you are atoms that are in everything. The energy inside of you is in everything. Your mind is not just simply inside of you are atoms that are in everything. The energy inside of you is in everything. Your mind is not just simply inside of your head. It's actually enveloped in the universe, in the cosmos. So you're not trapped inside of your body. You are part of something much more immense.

And so the feeling that you're part of something much more immense is a very enlightening feeling, right? So sometimes when people, you know, in therapy go so deep into themselves that they actually get worse because they become more and more self-absorbed. It's all about themselves, my feelings, my problems, my trauma. And I often said the best therapy is getting outside of yourself, is caring about other people is putting your mind into your work we were talking about that earlier when you put your mind into your craft that is an act of love you're uniting with the work I said at the one

point that the highest point of mastery is that great piano the piano you're playing is inside of you the chessboard Bobby Fisher the great chess master the chessboard was inside of his head That's why you could see so many moves in advance you are united you are connected to the thing that you're studying Which is an act of love its connection. It's a union, right? So the best therapy in the world is to get outside of yourself and to see The webs of connections that are enveloping you in your work, in your family, in your country, in the environment, in the cosmos. That's to me what I'm trying to explain in the sublime. The sublime is something that kind of crushes the ego,

which is a great thing, you know? So the first chapter is about just facing what I just talked about, the cosmos. How insanely insignificant you are in a way, you know? You're like a grain in the sand. You're no more than that, right? And yet you're part of this insane, immense experiment. So that's a form of love love it's a sense of connection that takes you outside of it's what they used to call or Freud would call the oceanic feeling that you're part of this great ocean yeah and collective consciousness yeah so that's how I

look at love and sublime I have a chapter in the book about love and I talk about love between two people as a kind of a model of immersing yourself in another person so deeply that you almost become one but you don't lose yourself, your soul, but your minds are kind of on the same level is the kind of paradigm for these other forms of love. And we live in deeply unromantic times where people don't think of that love as being something elevated, sentimental, it's sick, oh, it's like chocolates and Valentine's Day, yuck, you know, we're not into that. It's not a romantic culture anymore. But romance between a man or a woman or between two people of the same gender, whatever it is, is actually a beautiful high form of it, right? We shouldn't degrade it. We shouldn't look down upon it. We shouldn't think that there's something

somehow superior to that because it's just sentimental and gooey. No, it's a profound statement. It's getting outside of your ego i call that chapter escape from the prison of the ego and this is through love so oh that's your question i hope i'm answering yeah you did to draw on a point my wife and i um you would not know this but we met really young we got married young how old i met my wife when I was 16. Whoa. Really young. Where was this? In Southern California. Really?

Yeah. We were in the same high school? Yeah, we went to the same high school. Whoa, that's a good story. Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah, we loved how we fit and how we worked together. We got married really young. And then seven years into our marriage it fell apart and it fell apart um

because we had grown so close it's like two trees that were planted too close to each other that the roots never formally developed yeah and then the trunk started to wind around each other that we started to um compromise our growth because you know it was like a stunt stunted you know experience and the the more eloquent form is the the two trees have strong roots and strong trunks and they touch at the branches yeah and so um and they love to sway with each other yeah you know so she had the courage to say, this doesn't work. And it was a disaster because she was right. And I fought and I fought and I fought.

And then we agreed to separate. And then we agreed to do some work together. And that work was to redefine and recalibrate who we were as individuals. And we were able to detangle and to do that work was to redefine and recalibrate who we were as individuals. And we were able to detangle and to do that work. And if you don't know who you are, it's so easy to get swallowed up in the external world and the external, you know,

and in the desire to be, take care of yourself while pretending to partner well. And so you have to, we're coming back full circle. You have to really, really, really, really investigate and study who you are and what makes you you. And I don't have a shortcut, a hack, a secret, seven steps, like you've got to do that work daily. So thank you for talking about the beauty of love.

And to round the story out, my wife and I, we figured it out. We're married 30 some years now. Wow, how many years? Yeah, 30 some. So it was 1995. So I should know the exact number, but yeah. That's a great story. Yeah, it's really good.

But we had to do all of that work to detangle. Yeah, I've done through something similar. Yeah, it's really good. But we had to do all of that work to detangle. Yeah, I've done through something similar. Yeah, it's really hard. But we give what we have. So part of love is that it's a verb, and there's a giving nature to it. And if we are self-critical, to your point earlier, we give that. If we are hard on ourselves, we give that. If we are demanding, we give that. If we are exhausted, we give that. If we are anxious and frustrated, we give that. If we are hard on ourselves, we give that. If we are demanding, we give that. If we are exhausted, we give that. If we are anxious and frustrated, we give that. So we have to first fill our bucket with the virtues that we want to be able to share. And developing that bucket of virtues, that energy to be able to share with others takes time.

You know, it's renewable, but we only can give what we have so when i think of love i think uh of it in a very simple way is that i have to fill up in some way i have to know who i am hold the container fill up with the the virtues that i want to be able to to share and then do that in the most honest intimate way yeah the thing weird thing is life is very fluid and it kind of overflows our labels and our words. It's bigger than our language. And I remember when I was younger, I would fall in love with a woman and it would be so intense. It was like there was nothing else in the world. And I don't have that anymore

you know i mean so you lose something when you get older but you gain something else you know so it's not all black and white like that you do lose something as you get older even with our wisdom and our intelligence we lose some of that intensity. We lose that ability to just like go absolutely crazy for another person. So it's not like one is better than the other. You know, it was certainly a wonderful thing to be 18 and to feel that because I'll never feel it again. It's gone, that sense of if I don't have her, I'm going to die kind of thing, right? And I just, I hope, I wish young people would have that. So I don't want them to feel like I'm 18 and I have to have this perfect kind of love. No, you can have desire, you can fall

crazily in love and it can only last a year, but it's going to set the seeds for something greater as you get older. You need to go through that. And the feeling of falling in love is letting go of your defenses and being vulnerable, right? And the problem I see, and I hate to sound like such an old, cranky person, but I see a lot of younger people afraid of being vulnerable, afraid of letting go of their defenses and just falling. We say fall in love, fall, fall, fall. And if you get hurt, it's okay, because it's going to be a lesson that you're going to learn and you're not going to get skittish.

You're going to go into another relationship, into another one, and then eventually, hopefully, you'll find one that fits. But I don't want to have like a single label of what it should be for you because there are many different kinds of love and they all kind of have a purpose behind them i can't wait to read your new book well so can i yeah i can't wait to finish this book yeah it has been five and a half years of living with it, and I want other people to read it. I don't want it to be all in my goddamn head. Where do you think you are in the process?

I'm trying to finish up chapter 10, and there are 12 chapters. Keep pushing. Okay, so just a few quick hits, if you don't mind. Sure. If you could master anything, what would it be? Oh, there would be so many things. I mean, I love music. I wish i had

stayed with the piano and then mastered that i wish i was playing chess like i did as a kid and was doing that and i was a sports junkie and i wanted to be an athlete which was a bad fit because i wasn't gifted but i wished i had mastered some sport that you I could keep playing. I don't care what that was. That's a pretty big list. It's a pretty big list. Look, Robert, I could go on and on and on. I want to respect your time. Thank you for all that you've given.

Oh, you're very welcome, Michael. Yeah, it's been great. I'm so glad. I can't wait another 10 years to do the next one. Let's do it before that. Let's do it right before the book comes out. So yeah, I would love a sneak peek of it. And if there's anything I can do in service of you and your

mission and your purpose, please let me know. Just fix my brain, get my stroke totally recovered. If you can do that, if you have a hack for that, please let me know. There are no hacks. But there are some things. We can talk about some of the best practices that are supporting regeneration. We can do that

in a little bit but there's some technology there's also good old nutrition and maybe like nad drips and hyperbaric chambers probably doing a lot of that right i wish no i haven't i should be we've partnered with oxy health and i'm going to put you together with them wow for folk for the listener like if you're interested in it we source the best um the best chamber i use it every day every day yeah almost every day two people can sit in it but it's built for one and um it's something that athletes use it to get a competitive advantage for for rejuvenation but um i want to put you together with them and see what we can do oh god yeah yeah geez that'd be amazing oh and the science around it's ridiculous before you go if you could sit with any master

with us dead or alive who would that master be and what one question would you want to ask them i guess i would um i would pick out leonardo da vci because he is sort of the icon of the book mastery. Our conference room here at the Master Lab is called the da Vinci Room. Ah, okay. Very well done then. And he's known for mastering several things and finding the connections between them. And I guess I'd like to ask him, at what point did you feel like your brain was moving on to another level? So I was very interested in his process, in his evolution.

Because if you look at it, he lived into his 60s and then died. And he was basically working for 40 years. I do this math sometimes and I'm absolutely astonished. 40 years of work, you could do the math and come up with how many days that is. I mean, if I did that in my head, it's like close to 18,000 days or something like that. Please, no, it's more than that. I don't know. I'll figure it out.

But anyway, it's not much. And yet to reach that level, how do you get there? Day by day by day, you don't know it. You don't understand it. You don't see the progress. But I want to know like when he felt like there was something different going on in his brain. Because I studied him deeply. And I studied his childhood. And I studied the process and how he thought. But it still remained a mystery to me, how he was able to reach that level,

where he could draw up flying machines, and figure out heavy hydraulic problems, et cetera. I can't understand it. And I'd wanted to ask him about the details of how his brain worked and when he reached this point of mastery. That would be the question. That is awesome. Yeah. I got to go to, in Florence, I got to go to his museum, if you will.

I didn't know there was a museum there. Yeah, it was awesome. I loved it. And so maybe it's a traveling museum. I don't know if it's a permanent residency. But what he was able to do is remarkable. Yeah. Yeah.

I wish that for all of us. I don't know. I've studied him as well. I don't know if he's happy or not. I don't know if he had a joyful not. I don't know if he had a joyful life, but he certainly had a rich understanding. Yeah, happiness is a strange word because it's never just a pure feeling of happiness. And happiness can actually be a very ephemeral state. And he had a famous quote that I used in the book, like somebody who's worked hard

all day, and at the end of the day, they felt satisfied that their day was good. I have that feeling now, a person who's done that their whole life, when they're ready to die, they have that same feeling. So he had that feeling when he was very old, that he had a very fulfilled life, that he had accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. That's a meaningful way to go through life. Yeah. And you can practice it today by when your head hits the pillow, like, today was a good day.

I got after it. Yeah. Robert, what a treat. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Michael. I really enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun. Me too.

Next week on Finding Mastery, Serge Tankian, the legendary frontman of System of a Down, takes us on an emotional journey from his childhood amidst the chaos of the Lebanese civil war to his fight for justice for the Armenian people. He reveals how activism and spirituality intersect, why hope is essential even in the darkest of times, and the cathartic power of music. This episode is filled with raw honesty and profound wisdom. Tune in on Wednesday,

March 5th for this deep dive into the mind of a revolutionary artist. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of finding mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show

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