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

Starting point is 00:00:00 People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that. Me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left, and you can get yours now at chris Williamson.com. This is a custom-built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over a year working on it.

Starting point is 00:00:14 So if you're a fan of everything, Modern Wisdom, come and see me on stage this October around the UK and Ireland, Chris Williamson.com. This has taken you 20 years to do this book? Wow. That would be a lot. long time. I would even beat Robert Carrow. No, seven years. Seven. So back in like 2000, I read a book on the Sublime and I got really excited and I thought this is really interesting, but I knew there was no

Starting point is 00:00:43 market for it. It was kind of a weird book. And I intended after the war book, this was going to be my next book with Sublime. I was going to shock my readers with something totally unexpected. I hired a researcher. I started doing it and then 50 cent trotted along and said, let's do it. book together and so I pushed sublime aside, I made the 10th chapter of the 50th, 50 cent book about the sublime, about how he nearly died from the gunshot wounds and, you know, his near-death experience. And then I, from 50-cent book, there was a chapter about mastery, so I turned that into the book mastery. And then, I don't know, human nature was, anyway, I just got totally sidelined. And then, you know, I had my quote-unquote near-death experience and suddenly, you know, God was telling me this is the time you need to write a book on the sublime. No more putting it off because it was a sublime experience to come that close to dying, you know.

Starting point is 00:01:43 A lot of your work is focused on power, seduction, manipulation, human nature. Why get interested in writing about the sublime at all? Well, a lot of what happens with humans and what goes wrong with them is on a deep psychological level and level of consciousness. So the first three books are kind of the social game, the surface game that we all play, right? Because we're a social animal, and nobody really instructs us. Even though we're a social animal, nobody even teaches us how to be social. And we make all these mistakes and we suffer. So that book came out of my experiences in Hollywood and all the things.

Starting point is 00:02:24 suffering. I didn't all the 50 different jobs with the psychotic bosses that I had and all that. All right. But there's something deeper going on with human. It's something more than just the social game. It's how we experience life itself and how we relate to the world around us. And I'm just noticing a kind of deadness in people's experience, a kind of flatness. Like everything has been flattened out by social media in a way, you know. And people aren't experiencing anything on a deep level. There's nothing surprising anymore. You know, I look at my Instagram feed, it's interesting, and I see cat videos, and they're

Starting point is 00:03:04 great. And the first time I see it, it's, wow, that cat's doing incredible things. And the second, the third time, it's all the same. It really, there's differences. Don't get me wrong, but in the end, it's all programs, it's all algorithms. It's all the same. And I think people are suffering, suffering deeply from it. I was taking a bike ride the other day in Griffith Park.

Starting point is 00:03:26 I just had this epiphany that I'm living in a madhouse. Everyone's going insane. And I'm going insane as well. And why is that? Why do people feel so cramped and so restless and turning to all these different things and our politics and technology? Everything is just going haywire. I feel like there's something deep, deep, having deep in our consciousness.

Starting point is 00:03:51 and a kind of disconnect from what it means to be alive. You know, when you come close to dying, you know what it really means to be alive. And so I don't know if I'm being too grandiose, but I really want to help people in their suffering and give them a roadmap for how you could possibly experience life on a deeper level. It has nothing to do with manipulation, does nothing to do with power or seducing.

Starting point is 00:04:18 It's on a deeper psychological level that I'm trying to reach it. It feels like you're talking about life having the color stripped away from it in some ways. Yeah. But the amplitude of the waveform is just being compressed down and everything's little wobbles. Nothing's that great and nothing's that deeply felt. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I mean, the way I look at it is we all went through childhood, right? And we all have it.

Starting point is 00:04:49 It's a universal experience. seeing the world for the first time. Everybody went through that. Everybody had to go through learning language and discovering that you had an eye, that you were different from other people, that you had discovering who your parents were. And in your childhood experience,

Starting point is 00:05:07 even if you had a bad parent, even if it was abusive childhood, your eyes were opening, everything looked strange and weird and different and unfamiliar. Now that's shifting a little bit as adults are trying to introduce children into adulthood to,

Starting point is 00:05:21 with technology. But it's still, even then, still, you're looking at things for the first time. And everything is exciting. And I read a book about the infant's brain and how different it is from our adult brain. Because the adult brain works by inhibiting by filtering everything down so you don't get too much information. So you can survive, so you can walk through the streets and think about what you're doing tomorrow and plan and not get hit by a car and all these other things. It's inhibiting all your

Starting point is 00:05:56 sensory information. The baby, the two-year-old, the three-year-old has no inhibition. Everything is interesting. Everything is exciting. Okay. And then slowly you reach a point as you get older and older and older that that disappears from your experience. Everything looks familiar. Things don't seem strange to you. Things don't seem unfamiliar. You don't look up at the night sky and go, wow, stars, wow, infinity. Wow, how weird, how interesting, right? I remember I was a kid driving with my family on these road trips that were so boring. You know, I was going nuts with my sister next to me, and I would look out the window,

Starting point is 00:06:37 and I would imagine all these things going on, like I was imagining Indians on the hills and what they were doing and animals and stuff. Our imaginations were so vivid. Everything was intense, and then you lose it. it. Slowly you lose it. And you're in your 20s and your 30s and you're not really aware of it, but you feel something missing in your life because you once knew this intensity that you have lost, right? That's how I try to describe it. Yeah, I definitely resonate with the awe, wonder, sense of presence and excitement, sort of feeling like it's being stripped a little bit. And I,

Starting point is 00:07:20 It seems to me like you're saying the fact that we have a to-do list and responsibilities and the necessity to plan for the future, that executive function strips some of the fundamental relating between our brain and reality that we need in order to be able to experience the sublime. Is that right? Why is it that we don't just naturally access this all the time? Why does our brain need to filter reality? because there's too much information, right? And you have to plan and you have to have to have your life. And we're all so busy and there are so many things coming at us that if we were paying attention to everything like the baby does, the child does, we wouldn't be able to function in our day-to-day life. So the brain has to filter for us. And Aldos Huxley, he calls it the small mind and the big mind.

Starting point is 00:08:13 and our minds get smaller and smaller and smaller as we focus on the things that we need to survive. I know it myself. I'll be meditating and constantly these thoughts coming up about what am I going to do in an hour? What's going to happen? I didn't do this phone call. I didn't return this email. My mind is just doing it naturally. I can't help it, right?

Starting point is 00:08:34 The mind is trying to filter things down so you can survive so you can get by, so you can schedule and plan your life. But it goes too far. It takes over our life. everything becomes about survival everything becomes about getting by and so you're missing now i'm not saying this the sublime has to be part of your continual experience right that you wouldn't be able to do your job you wouldn't be able to get to work it'd be too much you have to have this filtering mechanism going on but i look at people i ride my bike up into griffith park up into these hills that are pretty high up

Starting point is 00:09:11 there's no cars it's incredibly beautiful right peaceful these people are like this they're walking like this with their earphones are like god damn it what the fuck's going on here right you don't have to be living your life like that when you're out in nature you can put your phone away you can start experiencing what life is when you're interacting with people you don't have to be like this you can try and get into their world what their thoughts are what what their life is like When you're interacting with your pets, you can imagine like biology and evolution, the strange consciousness that your dog has or your cat has. You can be experiencing these things all of the time, and it doesn't interrupt your ability to get by in this world. Yeah, I think a lot of the time

Starting point is 00:09:57 people assume that the human brain is just built for survival and reproduction. Is it your suggestion that people in the past with fewer distractions and less need for executive, function would have experienced life in a markedly different way? Well, it's not because we're aware of our death. We're aware of our mortality. And even if you don't think about it, it's in the back of your mind all the time. You're continually, it's there that you're going to die some point and you see your parents die, you see friends die, et cetera. And so the sense of our mortality weighs on us very much. and why spend 20 years building up modern wisdom and doing all of this work and working like a dog

Starting point is 00:10:44 when you're going to die? What's the point? It's meaningless, right? Why go through all that effort? Why not just go out and enjoy yourself, Chris? Right? So the sense of death poses a question on us. Why are we alive? What is the point of this?

Starting point is 00:11:00 And our ancestors, thousands of years ago, we're very much, much more aware of death than we are now. Like, death is hidden from us. We never see it. We don't see the animals that are killed for our food. People die in hospitals far away. We can go through our entire life and never see somebody who dies, right? But our ancestors, it was there before them.

Starting point is 00:11:23 Most children died in childbirth. Mothers died in childbirth constantly, right? It was always the smell, the feel of death was all around. And so there must be some other reason, must be some point to our existence. There must be something greater. And so the need for knowing about our mortality is what is greater than my individual existence that I can attach myself to and not feel so small and helpless and vulnerable that my death has no meaning? Okay, well, I could connect myself to the cosmos, to the stars, to spirits, to gods. and I have a story in this in my book

Starting point is 00:12:02 where these people go into a cave, these cave explorers in France in the 1990s, and they come upon these cave paintings from the early Paleolithic period, 37,000 years ago, the most insanely beautiful paintings you've ever seen. You can watch a documentary by Werner Herzog about that and you can see it for yourself.

Starting point is 00:12:25 It's called the Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It's the Chauvet Cave in South. of France. And there are all these rituals, these remnants of all these rituals that they're practicing, et cetera. So 37,000 years ago, they were trying to, this had nothing to do with survival. Being in these caves was dangerous. There were bears. It was dark. It, to them represented like hell or like the underworld. There was no survival and reason to go into caves and have these perform, have shamans perform these dances, these rituals, these cave paintings. They were searching for something else.

Starting point is 00:13:03 And so humans naturally are searching for something else besides the day-to-day existence that they go through. If you try to repress it, it will come out in other ways. And I talk about that in the book. You'll go through the false sublime. You'll try to get it through drugs. You try to get it through action movies, through Marvel movies. You try to get it through online porn, through addictions, through all sorts of.

Starting point is 00:13:26 through drugs, et cetera, you know, stimulants. If you're not searching for it in this real way, something happens to the human spirit and you search for it in all these other counterproductive ways, if that makes any sense to you. Yeah, what do you mean when you talk about the sublime? Come to define that for me. Well, you're not aware of it,

Starting point is 00:13:50 but you live within these limits. Your mind is limited. So your culture that you live in, in patterns your thinking. And you're not aware of that. What we think of as reality in 21st century America is not what ancient Egyptians thought was reality. So your culture that you live in, ours is a technological culture. In 400 years, it'll be something else. Our culture conditions what we think of and what we take. Whoa, sorry. Behave yourself, Cain. All right. Our culture conditions what we take.

Starting point is 00:14:27 for being real okay and our metaphors now all have to do about technology and computers and AI but that's going to change at some point all right so our minds are kind of limited by the cultural moment we live in by the zeitgeist as an individual your brain is limited because your reality is limited because the brain constructs reality for you right I have a story in the book of a woman who's suffering a stroke she's a neuroscientist and her stroke, it's a hemorrhagic stroke in the brain different from mind, and the blood is shutting down her brain one by one by one, and she's experiencing what the world is like when the brain isn't filtering.

Starting point is 00:15:11 She sees what the world looks like before the brain constructs visual information. What's that like? Well, she thought at first it was kind of a little bit of what's going on here, but then as it's happening, it's like, this is insanely exciting. Right? She's dying. It's literally killing her. She takes a shower. You don't realize, but the brain constructs the fact that you are separated from everything else so that you can walk through a space and negotiate. It's a somal sensory, somatosensory part of the cortex. It kind of helps you deal with space and separates you from other things. It's shutting down and now the water and the shower are a part of her. And there's nothing separating her from anything. else. All that internal chatter shuts down that you don't realize but your brain is always chattering and hearing things. Her brain goes completely silent. What bliss to have your brain silent. The world is so interesting and weird. And then seeing things, not as visual things, but as little

Starting point is 00:16:16 pixelated dots. At first, the sensations are exciting. It's like, I'm free from the restrictions of my brain and now I'm part of everything I see. It's like a mystical. It's like a mystical. experience. She nearly dies. She somehow saves herself because she can't figure out how to even make a phone call. She somehow gets, she survives, but she's like an infant in a woman's body now. When she comes out, she has no language. She can't speak. She can't understand what anybody's saying. And slowly it takes her eight years and she recovers her her cognitive abilities. and she's depressed. She's going, when I suffered my stroke,

Starting point is 00:16:59 and it shut down all those filtering mechanisms, I felt like it was in heaven. I felt like it was the most blissful thing. And now I can think, I can write, I have cognitive powers, but my life is hell. And she wants to go back to where she was during her stroke. And so she wrote a book about that called My Stroke of Insight,

Starting point is 00:17:21 about how she found her ways somehow logically, as a scientist, back to those sensations she had during her stroke. So my point is, by a huge tangent, your culture is limiting your experience, your brain is limiting your experience. Your brain is constructing what you think is real, but it is not real. It is like a red pill. You think it's real with all this is? This is not what a bat's realities. It's not what a fly's reality.

Starting point is 00:17:48 It's not what a dog's reality is. Ours is no different. We think it's the only reality, but it's not what a bat's reality. it's not. The sublime are experiences that take you outside these limits, this take you outside this circle that we live in. You're experiencing what alien, like what animals are experiencing. You're experiencing what the cosmos that actually is like to be connected to something universal, to have actually be part of the Big Bang because your body was formed, the same components that came from the Big Bang.

Starting point is 00:18:24 It's getting outside that circle and exposing yourself to things that the brain doesn't normally allow you to experience. And when you touch, so let's say that the sublime is like a doorway outside these cultural and brain limits. And when you look at that door when you touch and you look through it, it's like a shock. It's like a shutter. Wow. You know, things are really weird.

Starting point is 00:18:48 Things are strange. Life is amazing. And it changes you. Like my death experience changed me. There's no going back once I now had this blast of death feeling inside my body. There's no going back. When you experience that, mountain climbers talk about this all the time because mountain climbers are continually experienced the sublime.

Starting point is 00:19:10 And I have several stories in there. There are people like that. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. Their co-founder, Jeff Byers, played in the NFL and saw firsthand, just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built Mementus around a higher standard. Every product for Mementus uses evidence-backed ingredients, transparent doses and independent third-party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sports. So what's on the label is actually what's in the tub.

Starting point is 00:19:38 It's why Mementis is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms. It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, Mementis offers a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they will give you your money back, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. Are heading to live momentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-M-T-O-U-S. dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Is it a surprise that humans aren't just walking around all the time perpetually bemused at the fact

Starting point is 00:20:16 that we're alive and how unlikely it is? That was like one of the chapters I wrote in there and I said, I break it down this way. If you look at your body and what your body does, you don't have to think about breathing. You don't have to think about your heartbeat. If you have a scratch or a wound, your body heals itself. It has these antibodies. It's insane what the body can do. And when you're threatened with a life, like something's about to kill you or something,

Starting point is 00:20:49 or there's a tiger right in front of you, the body produces these hormones that save your life. If you're a long-distance runner, you get all this dopamine and all these other effects that help you keep running, running and running. What the body can do is absolutely incredible, right? Where does this come from? Where does the brain come from?

Starting point is 00:21:09 Where does consciousness come from? It's part of evolution that goes back millions and millions and millions of years. And if you start thinking about this story, story about how you have, your brain is actually part of, has a reptilian part to it. There's a lizard brain inside you right now, and that there's layers to your experience that go back millions and millions of years. You go back to how life almost never formed on planet Earth, right? And it almost formed with creatures that look different, totally different

Starting point is 00:21:42 from ourselves. The main body form of all animals and all creatures is a bit of, a body and a head and limbs. Back in the Cambrian explosion 600 million years ago, there were 10 different other body types that nearly took over. And they have pictures of them. They're the strange. What like? Huh?

Starting point is 00:22:04 What like? Because you can look it up. Right. Opabinia hallucinate. I write them down in the book. If you look at them, you go, my God, they're like something out of a nightmare. Right? And it was just by an accident that our body type became the predominant one.

Starting point is 00:22:22 And so all these little bottlenecks in evolution could have occurred where we would, nothing would be what we think, what looks like today. And then if the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct because of an asteroid hitting our planet 68 million years ago, dinosaurs would still be walking the Earth and we wouldn't be here. If you think about this, you think about how live will be. originate. If you think about the Big Bang and everything that happened, you can't take anything for granted. You can't take anything for granted, right? It's just an amazing story. I once manually, this is before AI, when I gave a TEDx talk, I had to try and reverse engineer

Starting point is 00:23:06 what the likelihood was of you being alive, your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, all the way back for as long as you can. And that's before you even factor in how many sperm there are and that if only had been without getting too graphic, if it was the next pump and not that pump when your great-grandparents were having sex, it's a different kid. Different gender, different everything. If you've got performance anxiety as a guy and you're trying to get your miss is pregnant, one of the things to not think about is that each different microsecond of how you finish will probably result in a different kid coming out.

Starting point is 00:23:40 That's probably quite a reliable way I think of making you feel a little bit uncomfortable about what's going on. It's unbelievably tenuous. And I guess it makes sense in one way because you think, well, if we were looking around just at wonder at all, like the lady who was having the stroke, like me and the shower, the water from the showerhead were one. The separation that I have perceived is a mere figment of the way that my brain constructs the world. But we are the same. Can you have a job? Can you drive through traffic whilst feeling like that?

Starting point is 00:24:11 Maybe not. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. I mean, she's a functioning neuroscientist who writes books, who gives TED Talks. She's world famous. She has a beautiful life. She lives on a houseboat. She just swims in this lake.

Starting point is 00:24:26 She gets lots of things done. She has speaking engagements. Why not? Is she still feeling that now? Has she managed to re-access that? I mean, I talked to her for this book like four or five years ago, unless it's changed in the last four or five years, which I doubt. Yes, you can't go on functioning. So you go through your life and you're functioning and you're getting things done and you're working

Starting point is 00:24:51 and you're going through your schedule and you're progressing in your career, right? But something is missing. Something is missing from your experience. You could go through your entire life like that and then you're going to die and you reach the point of death when you're in your 70s or whatever. And it's a terrifying experience because you've not prepared for it. You've not thought about anything. You've been sleepwalking through your entire life. You maybe have made a lot of money, but you're not really happy, right?

Starting point is 00:25:20 Because your world is so limited. So it's not that you're always expanding and always looking at the sky and always like that, but you have moments like that constantly. You know, you go out into when you travel or you just look outside taking a walk. Everybody takes a walk, right? except for me because I can't walk. But when you're walking, you can look around yourself and be in awe of things and think about it. So some of the book, there's a lot of science in this book because I don't want to ground it in just your own emotions and your own imagination.

Starting point is 00:25:58 There's a lot of science in there. And so when you understand the science behind the formation of life on planet Earth and you understand how multicellular, organisms occurred by accident some three, four billion years ago, right? And how this body form, how the Cambrian explosion created life as we know it with brains and senses and a nervous system. If you know the science about how dinosaurs on, the world looks different to you, right? But it's not like you're thinking about it all the time. It just means you don't take everything for granted, Right? Like I was talking to Ryan yesterday about this and how Marcus Aurelius has this quote about a glass of wine.

Starting point is 00:26:48 And he's talking about 200 AD or whatever. And you drink your wine, you're not aware that there were these purple grapes that grew that took their time to grow and then ferment and then people pressed it, then they created it and they did all this work. You don't see or feel the work that goes into everything. So you're walking around, you don't know why they're glass buildings, you don't know anything about the food you eat, you're just walking around in a trance. You're not connecting to anything material. Your senses are dead, I'm afraid. And this is about opening your senses. It doesn't make life impossible.

Starting point is 00:27:25 It makes life that much richer and you can still go on and do your work. I wrote a fucking book that's 450 pages after a stroke, after I can. experience the sublime. I got plenty of things done. I get a lot of things done every day, right? Yeah. How does the ego work against us accessing the sublime? Well, so you're kind of trapped in yourself, in your ego, in your own thoughts, and your thoughts kind of revolve around. What are people thinking about me? Why did my parents do this to me? Why am I so angry? You feel envy. you feel resentment, you have all these grievances, you feel excitement, you have hope, and all these other things going on. But you're inside your mind all of the time, right? You're inside your own world.

Starting point is 00:28:14 And you're not connecting to anything else outside of it. And so sometimes, you know, look, I think you can't deny the fact that a lot of people are very miserable right now and unhappy. One out of six Americans is on some kind of drug to deal with, depression, right? Pretty high number. And a lot of people are experiencing that are not taking these drugs, right? Something is missing in their life. And if you're, so what do you do? Well, maybe I need to have therapy, right? Maybe I go talk to a therapist about or I talk to my spouse about my problems. And as you talk and talk and talk, you get further and further into yourself, you become the center of everything. That's all you think about, my childhood, who who bothered me, who oppressed me.

Starting point is 00:29:05 Why didn't I get what I want? Why isn't the world more fair? You're locked inside your ego and it's like a prison. And the sublime is taking you outside of your ego, taking you outside of that. And so I have a story in the book of a man, a therapist in Buenos Aires, and he has a patient named Miguel.

Starting point is 00:29:27 And Miguel has a wonderful life. He's got a great job. he makes a lot of money he's got a beautiful house he's got a gorgeous wife he's got three kids he's everything that you could want in life but something is missing and he's talking to the therapist they talk and they talk and they talk and they talk and finally the therapist has had enough of us we're not getting anywhere here's what i'm going to do we're going to go climb the highest mountain in the southern hemisphere mount akonagua in in argentine in the andes right the highest mountain in the southern hemisphere we're going to train for six weeks to climb because it's a very

Starting point is 00:30:04 arduous climb and then we're going to do it and and i'm not going to tell you why just no more talking therapy just shut the fuck up we're just going to train and we're going to climb this mountain right they train they start climbing the mountain and the you know the the side of the stars as you're climbing higher and higher it's a high desert mountain it's spectacularly beautiful in it the snow and everything it's just an insane experience. It's a cosmic experience. They don't get to the top because there's storms and it gets very dangerous. They finally retreat. But the man is transformed by this experience more than all of the talking because he was taken outside of himself and he was exposed to something much greater. So he got out of his small little ego world with his wife and his

Starting point is 00:30:50 problems and why he's miserable. How can you be miserable when you're seeing what the world that we live in, right? And so your ego is the actual impediment to experiencing the sublime. And this is a way of kind of getting outside of that. In Zen Buddhism, they talk about ego attrition. That means thinning the ego. And as the ego, because it has a thickness to it. And as you get older, your ego gets thicker and thicker and thicker.

Starting point is 00:31:25 And you have no control over that because you become more self-absorrected. through Zen, through meditation, you're getting that ego thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner to the point where it disappears, which most people don't ever experience, only a few Zen master's experience. But as it gets thinner, the world feels and looks different to you, right? Ego attrition. And so you can thin your ego at any age, and you can get, and it opens your mind up to something else than all of your, all of your petty concerns.

Starting point is 00:31:57 and they are petty in the end. What is the role of the Damon? Because that, at least as far as I can see, is also residing inside of you to a degree, but doesn't seem to be working against you, connecting with the world or yourself, seems to be working toward it. Well, what I've tried to do is that the daemon is an ancient concept,

Starting point is 00:32:21 but it's in almost all ancient cultures. And the idea is you have a second self inside of you. And it's an interesting thought. So when I read about that, I'm going, a second self, what is that second self, right? The first self is the one you take for being who you are. It's your social self. It's what people have told you who you are.

Starting point is 00:32:45 I'm shy. I'm an introvert. I'm an extrovert. I'm dramatic. I'm aggressive. You know, people define who you are as you get older, right? Your parents defined who you are. your teachers defined who you are you no longer you no longer are connect to who you actually are you become

Starting point is 00:33:02 a reflection of this social world that you live in and that's the self that you take for being who you are but it's not it's false it's fake it's a creation it's a social creation right but at the same time there's something very real inside of you you have your have your heartbeat you have your particular moods you have a temperament that's different from anybody else and you can't verbalize it. Why am I attracted to this food? Why does this kind of woman always excite me and this other one doesn't? Why do I love this certain kind of books? These weird things that excite me that I can't put into words have nothing to do with the social realm, right? There's something deep, deep, deep inside of you. And in the ancient world, they call that a demon or a second self.

Starting point is 00:33:53 All ancient cultures had other words for it. The ancient Egyptians had a different word for Ka. I talk about another African culture that had a different word for it, Sun Tum. But the idea is that when you're born, there's something about you that's unique that's different from anybody else. It's what also is called your soul. And the daemon is like a voice inside of you that is who you really are. And when you start doing things in life that have, have nothing to do with what you love or what you like, the day one speaks to you and says,

Starting point is 00:34:28 that's not, you're going in the wrong direction. Something is bad. You need to follow who you really are. And if you listen to that voice like Socrates did, or like a lot of artists do, or people who are truly creative, they hear that voice even when they're in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, I hear it all the time. Something isn't right. It doesn't fit my physiology. It's not who I am. when you connect to that voice, when you connect to that daemon, wow, it's very powerful, right? And it is sublime because it's connecting you to who you were at the moment of your birth. At the moment of your birth, you were something different about you.

Starting point is 00:35:08 There was unique, you were born, which is a strange thing to be born and to thrown into this world. It's connecting you to the very first days of your life when the gods put a demon inside of your, Okay, I know that's not the words we want to hear right now, but that's how the legend is, right? And so what's sublime about that is that you have another self to you that is truly more authentic than the social self, and to explore it and to go into it is a very exciting and liberating feeling. You know, it's discovering something very primal about yourself that has nothing to do with what other people think about you. A quick aside, if you've wanted an eight sleep but could never quite justify the price, things just got very interesting. They've somehow managed to make it significantly better

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Starting point is 00:36:49 Who? What? Philip Pullman. It's a kid's book series called His Dark Materials. It had the subtle knife in it, the golden compass. Oh. So it must be 30 years old. The first book must be at least 30 years old now because I was listening to it when I was 11, 12, 13, and it had been around for a while.

Starting point is 00:37:08 Remember, I used to go to the library in Norton, in the northeast of England with my mom, and I would get the story tapes. And this is a big book. So I'd be coming back with a steep. stack of tapes like that, borrowing them from the library for two weeks and we'd have to take them back before else we'd have to be a fine of one pounds or something. And it's one of my favorite book series and I actually read it, listened to it, I guess, in the wrong order. So I listened to the subtle knife first, which is the second book. And it kind of makes sense. The

Starting point is 00:37:34 third one makes no sense at all. So you have to listen and read the first two. And anyway, in this world, the children are born with demons and the demons take the form of Does he use that word? Yes. Fantastic. I have to look this up. It's wonderful. And they take the form of an animal, like little animals.

Starting point is 00:37:53 It represents animals that are around. And when the kids are still children, the animals can change. They can cycle through. They can be a bird and fly ahead and go and do stuff. Or they can come back and be a dog and pet them. Or they can be a wolf and scare people. Wow. But when children hit puberty, the Damon settles into a final form.

Starting point is 00:38:16 and it never changes again for the rest of life. And there's these themes of sort of Adam and Eve, there's a male and female protagonist, and they're both quite young, and they fall in love, and as they fall in love, they hit puberty. And as they do that, all of this stuff happens in the universe. And these two demons, these senses of self that were malleable, that were open, they're concretized, and they're locked in for the remainder of their lives.

Starting point is 00:38:42 And this is what happens across the universe. and it's so many of the themes from that series bipolar and what you're talking about here. There's you're young, you're innocent, everything is open, there's a kind of malleability, there's a flow that you have. And then over time, this rigidity comes in and things begin to look a little bit more sort of, not stale, but rigid and structured and procedural in a way. And why is that the case? And you have to sort of listen to this voice.

Starting point is 00:39:10 And a lot of the time, the animal sits on the shoulder of the person and it's sort of whispering in their ear, telling them what it is that they think they should do. It's cool. I'm totally enchanted by this. This is fantastic. Beautiful, beautiful series. But it also sounds kind of dark and depressing in a way because you're giving children this idea that this wonderful world is going to end

Starting point is 00:39:29 and it's going to be concretized. It's going to become this rigid single form. Yeah, to some degree. I think capacities are unlocked when that happens, though, and a lot of the children want, they're excited to see what form their animal will take. And I think this is maybe to do with, where are your value is going to come from? Like, who are you going to be?

Starting point is 00:39:47 Because when you're a kid, like, who are you? You're kind of a fireman one day and a postman the next day, an astronaut the day after that. You're not a person yet. So, yes, you have all of the advantages of being open and freely formed and flowing through the world. Oh, my God, look, I'm imagining the Indians playing in the trees over the far side. But also, like, you're not a thing yet. You don't really have that. What do you stand for?

Starting point is 00:40:07 Like, ask a kid what their core values are. What do you mean? But as an adult, all right, there's going to be a degree of structure that I have. but in some ways that gives me something to push off against when the world starts to push into me. Right, right. So I think I can see how it would be both sort of beauty and challenge. I guess thinking about the Damon,

Starting point is 00:40:26 Plato brought this up. Yes. And then he was killed. Carl Jung. No, no, Socrates. Sorry, Plato brought this up, but he was pushed back against at least, I think, for using that as an analogy.

Starting point is 00:40:37 Carl Jung brought it up. Yeah. And then he went insane a little bit. I don't know. Carl Jung touched the edges of sanity a couple of times, would you not say? He had mystical experiences when he was in his like 30s and then he had a near-death experience, which I talked right about in his 40s. And then he went, you know, if you consider going into ancient cultures and his whole world that he creates in his books, insanity, maybe, but he was a very high functioning psychoanalyst.

Starting point is 00:41:09 I would agree. That's fair. My point being here, I think that a lot of people who go into the world of the Damon, it seems to be an arc. It seems to be quite a common arc for someone that is specifically interested in investigating human nature, psychology, history, philosophy, that world. Why is that going from ignorance to knowledge to something deeper, something more transcendent? Is that, do you think, a typical? arc that a lot of thinkers go through? Well, I use for one of the archetypes of the dame on the story of Friedrich Nietzsche, and if anybody went insane, he went insane. So that fits what you were saying more than Carl Jung. And the story of Nietzsche was he's the son of a pastor who's extremely religious, who plays the organ in church. And as a boy, Nietzsche is extremely religious.

Starting point is 00:42:06 He loves his father. He's going to follow him in his father's footsteps. and his father dies of some neurological disorder. And his father kind of goes insane. And then his brother, who's very young, dies of the same disease. He's got some kind of neurological mishap going on in his family. And it's going to hit him at some point.

Starting point is 00:42:24 So he's going to study really hard. He's going to be a Greek scholar. He's going to become a biblical scholar. He's going to become a pastor. He plays the piano. He'll play in the church organ. But he's restless and something isn't right. And the little demon is speaking inside of his ear and saying,

Starting point is 00:42:39 there's something else to you, and he's attracted to poets who kind of went insane. And his teachers say, don't look at that poet that's going to infect you. And then he becomes a professor at the university. He's established his mother and his sister think he's onto a great career. He's got that kind of rigid thing that you talk about. The animal has transformed to something rigid. He's a professor now. He becomes friends with the most famous composer at the time, Ricard Wagner.

Starting point is 00:43:07 and everything looks great, you know. But then that little damele, that little animal in him is saying, that's not you, that's not you, Friedrich, that's not you. And he quits his job and he quits the composer and he turns against everything and he just wanders through Italy. And he's trying to find out who he is and he discovers that weather has an important part of him. So the weather...

Starting point is 00:43:33 The climate. Climate. This is like one of the most interesting things about this. this man. So Germany has this climate, this coldness, this dams, the sun doesn't shine, and it's made him who he is. So he goes to Italy, and he sees this bright, intense light, and these weird kind of storms, and he realized, that's who I am. This is the climate that suits me. This is the geography that suits me. I become like an Italian, and I change myself. And books explode out of him. He's suddenly who he was meant to be, some of the greatest, most inspired books anyone has ever read.

Starting point is 00:44:08 I know I read him when I was 18, and it changed my life. He's the most, probably the writer that had the biggest influence on me. And then he went mad. He literally broke down one day as he's walking in Italy and he sees somebody beating a horse, and he grabs the horse, and he feels so horrible. He identifies with the horse, and then he collapses. And he's insane for last 10 years. years of his life, he's a madman, basically. So the daemon taken too far can be a little bit dangerous

Starting point is 00:44:41 like that. You know, he went a little bit too far. But it's not just thinkers and philosophers and weirdos. I have a story in there about an actress who had a daemon, Ingrid Bergman, the famous Swedish actress, and how she knew from an early child that she was, she loved. to act, she loved to perform. And people kept trying to change her, people kept trying to push her off that course. And she just was so strong and she just pushed back and she became who she was. And finally, she gets this reputation as being this perfect woman who's got a great husband, who's beautiful. And she just, she leaves it all to go have an affair with an Italian director. her and now she's like this whore and everybody hates her and she's vilified.

Starting point is 00:45:35 But it's who she actually is. She actually never was this kind of perfect creature. So it's not just philosophers. It can affect anybody. It's like something buried deep within you. And your question is, does it lead to something like transcendent? I believe it does. Because why are you unique?

Starting point is 00:45:58 why were you drawn to those stories when you were four, how old were you when you were reading them? 13. Oh, 13, you were older? Yeah, yeah. Why were you so drawn to those stories? What is it about you that makes you like that? I mean, other children may be interested in it,

Starting point is 00:46:15 but you weren't just drawn to it in some very powerful way. Maybe you, you intuited back then, that you were going to become something like who you are now, somebody very unique with your own podcast, your own style. you know, I think, I don't remember what you were doing before you did this. Running nightclubs. Running nightclubs, right? You weren't you.

Starting point is 00:46:35 That wasn't who you are. That isn't that animal that was on your shoulder that was changing shapes. It's like this, right? And now you get to be yourself, right? Who is that self? You were born and something different about your, your neurology, the way your brain is wired, how your body functions, is different. Why is it different? What's the point?

Starting point is 00:46:56 What's the point? purpose. The purpose was for you to be creating this podcast, modern wisdom and teaching people and getting them outside of their narrow little worlds, right? So it does have a transcendent function in that it connects you with something greater than yourself. How does someone recognize the difference between the Damon speaking their truth forward, the logos being projected, and impulsivity, short-termism, their more base instincts, their coping mechanisms, the paths of least resistance, their fears masquerading as wisdom, but actually just being a compensation coming up inside of them. I can imagine in one world a person could convince themselves that this is actually their inner truth, but is much closer to something like impulsivity. Well, I mean, people will ask, well, Hitler had a day, Maen, right? But I make the point in there that in the Greek ancient myth, the daemon was planted inside of you by Eros, the god of love.

Starting point is 00:48:07 And so if what you use the daemon for has that element of love and excitement and something personal, then you have your soul, then you realize your demon. But if that is not connected to anything having to do with love, the daemon turns into the demonic, the demonic. people who listen to that voice and they acquire power and they hurt people and they manipulate and they destroy and they're evil, they are truly demonic because their demon is not connected to something kind of playful and spiritual and transcendent. But to answer your question, you hear all these voices in your head, right? We don't call them voices because we just think of it's just hard minds or, talking to us or they're saying things to us, right? You're going to smoke a pipe? It's an e-pipe. It's when I feel like I'm pontificating and getting really close to something that's a great

Starting point is 00:49:05 highfaluting idea, I like to sit here and do this. Oh, please. So my father smoked, oh, does it actually have something in it? Yeah. It's vaping. Yeah. My father smoked a pipe and it has very deep memories for me. Okay. Like the smell of tobacco and the look of a pipe, I just... I think this one is what, peach and mango as something. It may be a slightly different smell to the one

Starting point is 00:49:28 that your father's smoke. Yeah, bear and peach. Yeah. He was doing hardcore tobacco. It's what I did. It ended up killing him, but... What a shame. Well, I'm sure this will kill me too.

Starting point is 00:49:38 No, it won't. No. Anyway, so you're hearing the... You're hearing things about you. This is what I want. This is what I love. But it's not you. It's the voices of the culture.

Starting point is 00:49:49 It's the voices of friends. It's the voices of peers. And so I talk in there how you can differentiate those kind of ancillary voices that are constantly playing in your mind of what you think you like, the movies you want to go see, the clothes you want to wear, the women or men you want to date on and on and on. It's not who you are. It's a reflection of what other people's tastes. But your voice has a different feel to it, right? It's a different kind of excitement,

Starting point is 00:50:18 right? So the things that you don't like, there's things that you hate between. you do anyway, right? That's what life is about. A lot of social life is about, right? You have to do things that you don't really want to do, but you do them anyway. When you hear that day, it tells you, fuck all that shit, I just want to be myself.

Starting point is 00:50:40 I don't want to go to that party. I don't want to have to cowtow to this person. I don't want to have to do this horrible job as a club, whatever you were doing, right? It's an angry voice. It's a rebellious voice. It's that childhood impudence. It's an impudent voice saying, fuck all that.

Starting point is 00:50:58 Sorry, I don't know if I'm... I don't want to... It's not, for me, it's not who I am. That's real. That is definitely real. I mean, it could... I'm sure, yes, you could say, other people are telling you you need to rebel and do this, that, and the other.

Starting point is 00:51:14 But it has a different feel to it when it's the voice of other people, as opposed to you, it's like waking up. It's like becoming... who you were meant to become, right? And so when you feel an excitement about something that you cannot explain, like, why am I, Robert Green, so excited by ancient cultures? Why am I so, if I read a story about Neanderthals,

Starting point is 00:51:41 whoa, wow, Neanderthals are related to us. They're very similar to us at the same of the brains, but they were evolving a different kind of language, a different kind of culture. They had a different relationship to death. They had different rituals. And it's almost by accident that Homo sapiens survived and Neanderthals didn't because we nearly went extinct.

Starting point is 00:52:05 What would the world be like? So anyway, reading about Neanderthals, I can't explain why it gets me so excited about our ancient, ancient ancestors. When it happens, I know that that is me. That's not somebody telling me to be interested in that because I've been interested I was eight years old, five years old, you know, kind of thing. In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder? Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store.

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Starting point is 00:53:07 So upgrade your business and get the exact same checkout that we use at Newtonic with Shopify. You can sign up for a free trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom. Shopify.com slash modern wisdom. I spoke to David Dada, way of the superior man, author. So, illustrious, long-time author. And I did his first podcast interview in over a decade, I think, a few months ago. And I did a bit of research. I didn't know much about him before I sat down with him. And he just had this crazy, as far as I could see, illogical career, They're very illustrious, but totally illogical.

Starting point is 00:53:49 He starts off in the 80s doing AI and computer science, writes a ton of papers. What's his name again? David Data. Right to a ton of papers. Data. Data. Data. Data.

Starting point is 00:54:02 D-E-I-D-A. Okay. Data. Way of the Superior Man is a very, very, very popular book from about 30 years ago, 20 years ago. Anyway, he starts off computer science, AI, and then he decides he is going to believe that, and he pivots into writing for a while. Then he goes into tantra and reworking emotions through sex. Then he moves into yoga for a long time. Then he gets into masculinity and men. Then he goes back into doing a decade of hardcore mathematics, like pure mathematics.

Starting point is 00:54:42 Then he gets back into some AI stuff. And I asked him on, the episode, this to me just feels like a kind of quite unwieldy, meandering trajectory. Can you explain to me how you tie all of these threads together? And he said, I have a very strong sense when something is no longer for me. And so, okay, well, that's interesting. But a lot of people have that. And it seems like you have just continually pulled the ejector seat button and fired yourself out the top of whatever aircraft you're in over and over again without fear that, well,

Starting point is 00:55:16 I'm near the top of my industry in this one domain. Maybe if I leave it behind, I'm not going to be as good in the next one. I'm not going to be as respected. I'm going to make a decision that I regret in future. Yes, it's interesting that you've followed your own instinct and you've been interested in stuff. But what's more interesting to me is the decisiveness and the conviction that you've got about it. Like that's what's rare, right? Not the meandering interests, curious people are curious about lots of things.

Starting point is 00:55:43 And he said something like, when I'm out of the... alignment, the pain of no longer following what I know that I should be doing is so much greater than the fear of anything else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that just stuck with me. That's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It really, really stuck with me that he is, I said it sounds like bravery, but the way that he frames it from the inside is a kind of fragility. His fragility is against being out of alignment with himself. It's like it is so painful, like nails on a chalkboard thousand decibels that I can't escape from. And if I'm in a situation that I don't feel aligned with,

Starting point is 00:56:21 some people may be able to spit and sawdust and grip their way through this thing and just keep going. And for him, he says I can last about five days and then I just need to change and do something else. Yeah. Well, I believe that a lot of people would be going through something similar, but they're afraid. They're afraid that if they make such a radical shift, they'll look insane. to people, they won't be able to make a living. You know, money becomes the primary interest.

Starting point is 00:56:50 And I'm not as interesting as this gentleman, because this sounds fantastic. I'd love to meet him. I'll send you the episode. Okay, but I'd also like to meet him. Where does he live? He's in Florida. He's very, very reclusive.

Starting point is 00:57:03 Interestingly enough, we had to do the episode. He wouldn't turn his video on. He wanted to just remain, he's like, Chris, I'm going to do this. It's a first episode I've done in 10 years. but you're only going to get my voice. So we had to AI some beautiful landscape that was sort of an imaginary hymn and we put words over the top and stuff.

Starting point is 00:57:21 For a full hour long episode and people loved it. We still did really, really. People are like, oh my God, I can't believe I get to hear David Data. Anyway, he's kind of like a mysterious guy which adds more to the kind of, wow, what a non-fungible human. Yeah, very much so. Well, I'm not as interesting as that,

Starting point is 00:57:37 but I feel that myself. So I wrote the 48 laws of power when I was 39 essentially, and I'd been pretty much a loser up until then. Parents about to give up on me, their son who can't seem to hold a job for more than a few months. I finally write this book. I get more money than I've ever seen in my entire life, right? And things are looking up pretty good. And so now it's time to write a second book. and the pressure on me is to kind of just kind of create another version of the 48 laws of power. Because it's doing very well.

Starting point is 00:58:20 And people, so I decide, I mean, seduction is kind of related to it, but it's not what my publishers wanted. It's not what my partner wanted me to do. But it felt like something I, it felt connected to my soul, it connected to something deep in me because seduction has been, a subject that's fascinated me since my 20s when I was a rake and I read a lot of books about literature of seduction and I met great seducers. So I had to write this book because it connected to me. All of my books have had that evolution where I don't repeat what was in the last

Starting point is 00:58:57 book. I have to feel something very new, something very different, something very fresh. And when I don't, I have that painful feeling like, this doesn't fit me. This isn't who I am. And I remember I got to do that book with 50 cent, which was an unusual opportunity to say the least. And the first version of the book was canceled because it wasn't good. And it was also late, but I knew it wasn't good because the book was really about 50 cent. It wasn't about me. It wasn't my taste, my interest, my desires.

Starting point is 00:59:37 and I knew when I was writing it I was uncomfortable with it. It was all about business and 50 negotiating this, that, and the other, and what his empire was like. And it didn't feel comfortable. I was feeling that pain that he's discussing there. And then finally, the book was canceled, and I realized it was canceled because I wasn't in it. It wasn't something soulful for me. It didn't mean anything to me.

Starting point is 01:00:03 And so we pivoted, and the book became more my book. you know, a lot of 50 in it, but there was much more of me being put into it, my way of thinking, my idea is what excites me, and then the book took off. So every book has to feel like I'm deeply, deeply engaged. Like it has to be something new. And this new book, which is probably going to shock people because they're used to me doing what you said, books of manipulation and human psychology, I had to do it, even if it's, even if it's an abysmal failure, because my daemon was saying,

Starting point is 01:00:41 this is what you have to do. So I understand that sense of discomfort and pain. It doesn't fit me. It's not right. It's nails on a chop where I can't do it. I just can't do it. What's your advice to people that wish they had more bravery when it comes to committing what they feel they know is true inside?

Starting point is 01:00:59 Well, I talked a lot about that in the book, mastery. So what I tell people is, you could go on through your 20s and your 30s following a career path that makes you money that gets you a family that gives you stability but isn't quite you

Starting point is 01:01:19 and then you get into your 40s and that sense of discomfort kind of grows and maybe you get a little disengaged from your work and maybe you go have an affair with your secretary and some kind of drama happens maybe you start taking this kind of drug or something or you gain a lot of weight. Then you're in your 50s and you're kind of locked into this

Starting point is 01:01:41 and Jesus Christ, where am I going? Well, it's too late to change. I'm just going to settle into it. Then you're like, it's too late, right? It's very, very painful, very painful to kind of wake up and realize that you headed in the wrong direction in life. And so what I tell people is,

Starting point is 01:02:02 particularly if you're in your 20s, you don't want that to happen to you. And so you think that money and stability is the only thing that matters, but it's not. You have to have a sense of adventure. You have to have a sense of exploring. You have to have some courage in this world to pursue something that suits you and isn't necessarily going to make you as big an income as this other career path, you know. And so you have to realize that you're going to pay a price for violating this law

Starting point is 01:02:34 for violating this need, this law of who you actually are. You're going to pay a price, and that is, you're going to disengage from your work. You're going to start having habits and addictions and things because your body tells you the truth. You know, I know physically I feel uncomfortable, and this man, David probably would tell you the same thing. It's a physical sensation.

Starting point is 01:02:59 Your body is going to rebel at some point. You're going to get illnesses. You're going to become diabetic. You're going to start gaining weight. You've disconnected from the reality of who you actually are. You will pay a price. I try and hit people in the brain with that and say, look, you don't want that fate. I was talking, this is slightly related.

Starting point is 01:03:20 I was talking to a man who's a basketball coach of a G-League team, which is the league before you get into the NBA, very successful. And he was now offered the head. head coaching job of this NBA team because, and he's in his 30s. And he was expressing that fear of I have this really comfortable job. And I made all these great relationships. And now I'm going to enter this world where people are, everyone's going to see me, everyone's going to judge me. I can easily fail. You know, my reputation will be ruined and I won't have this chance to go back to where I was. And I told him, take the job. Don't look back. You're going to learn

Starting point is 01:04:04 and so much more. Being young and excited will be an advantage for you over all these other kind of retread coaches in the NBA. It's going to be the best thing you have, but don't be afraid. Your fear is holding you back. Just go for it. He didn't, and his team won the NBA championship. No way. Yeah, not last year, but the year before. It took him like five years to get there. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't like the next first season. they won championship. But your fear is holding you back, and your fear is making it seem like you're being reasonable,

Starting point is 01:04:43 but in fact, you're just afraid, and you're just listening to the voices, and you're just listening to your spouse or whomever who's trying to tell you to take the safe route. My wife can tell you this story years ago in the 90s. My mother, I had it, because I told you I was a loser, I couldn't hold a job for more than five months. I finally had a job in television.

Starting point is 01:05:04 in Hollywood, right? It looked like stability finally landed on Robert's shoulders. And I couldn't stand it. I hated it. It was like the most miserable period of my life. And I was going to quit. And my mother tried to convince my then-girlfriend

Starting point is 01:05:21 to tell Robert, he's got to keep this job. I mean, he's crazy. What's he doing? And I had to ignore that completely and incur their job. disappointment and everything else and just I quit because I couldn't stand it you know but I could have

Starting point is 01:05:40 listened to my mother I could have listened to voices that told me you're 35 years old time to settle down Robert time to get into a job trying to get into that niche in Hollywood become a television writer and you make a good income and yeah I'll make a good income but I'll kill

Starting point is 01:05:56 myself in 10 years all right getting back to the sublime Sublime, what's the importance of scale? How can vastness contribute to the way that we process life? Well, the idea of scale is very important to me because, you know, animals, God bless them, they have their interesting, strange consciousness, but they're not aware of anything outside of their immediate environment. they don't know what's happening outside what they can see or smell right they're not aware of here i'm in america and what's going on in china okay no animal has that we have consciousness and we're aware of things on the other side of the planet on the what's going on in the sky with our sun and

Starting point is 01:06:50 and beyond that right and so when you open your eyes to that and you literally take it in The first thought is, my God, am I insignificant? I am so small, right? The universe is 13.8 billion years. I live maybe, if I'm lucky, 80 years. You try and divide 13.8 billion by 80, and you go, Jesus Christ, my life is like nothing. It's like a life of a fly. It's like passes by enough time.

Starting point is 01:07:24 You think of the distances and how immense things are. you are so small. You also, there are 8 billion people on Earth. You're one of 8 billion people. You're meaningless. You're so small, okay? That sense of scale and being aware of how small you are and how infantasmal, how you're like just a piece of dust has two effects on you.

Starting point is 01:07:49 Number one, it's kind of, oh my God, I feel horrible. On the other hand, that's insane, that I am aware. of this vastness, that I am aware of time, that I am part of this incredible drama, right, that I can be aware of endless time, I can be aware of a limitless universe kind of thing. Children have that sensation. It's kind of dizzying to feel that, to be aware of it, to be aware of the vastness of things. It puts everything in perspective. It makes you realize that the little bitty concerns that you have in the moment aren't really. really that important in the long scheme of things. In fact, they're incredibly unimportant.

Starting point is 01:08:32 When you're a child, that smallness is very apparent because you literally are small. You're literally are weak and vulnerable. And because of that, you're curious, you want to know. Everything seems interesting and exciting and weird. And you look up at the night sky and it Like, it has that sense of terror and excitement, which is the sublime, in essence, a mix of these two powerful emotions. And that's what gives you the intensity of your experience, that sense of scale, of how small you are. But then you get older and your ego takes over and you become the center of the universe instead of you being this tiny little insignificant aunt, right? and everything revolves around you and your desires and your needs and all that you don't you don't want to feel vulnerable you don't want to feel that smallness that weakness that helplessness but the price you pay for

Starting point is 01:09:29 reversing the true scale of things is that life loses that intensity it loses that little extra thing that happens when you're aware of how short your life is when you're aware of how immense things are and you pay a price and things get kind of flat, right? Because everything revolves around you. When you go out, take a hike in a mountain, and you're just thinking about your own problems and your own world, and you're not seeing things. You're not seeing the vastness of the landscape around you.

Starting point is 01:10:03 And so having a sense of scale, of what truly matters, of how truly small and insignificant you are, to me is a very, very important part of, becoming conscious of being a human being and people lose that as they get older and you want to return to that sense of scale. Does that make any sense? It does indeed. I imagine as well, you mentioned your punch on for history, obsession with history, all of your books have got huge historical content, maybe not usually as far back as Neanderthals, but still, I imagine that reading history can give us greater perspective, access to the sublime as well.

Starting point is 01:10:42 Yeah, I mean, so when you're of history, it gives you several things. First of all, you think everything is new and everything is different and exciting, like AI and social media. Yeah, they didn't have AI. I grant you that, so that's new. But we've always had kind of versions of social media. People have always been gossiping about other people. People have always been sharing information.

Starting point is 01:11:08 It's just now on a much wider level. But nothing is ever new. History runs in these cycles, and you see them over and over and over again. I just read an article in the newspaper this morning about how there's this trend in Spain where all the young people in their early 20s are rebelling against the socialist government, and they're wanting to become conservative and go back to the traditional Spain that they knew, and they all dress like preppies. They wear khaki pants and white shirts and starch shirts and,

Starting point is 01:11:40 very kind of English style of like English nobility kind of thing. And loafers, loafers with little, you know, tassels and all that stuff. I can get down with that. Hey, the more English the world becomes, I'm happy with that. Okay. They're called Cayetanos because the name Cayetano was a very kind of, you know, upper class name that you give to a boy. And so they're all getting into this and the women are like being dressing traditional

Starting point is 01:12:07 and loving bullfights and going to bullfighting. and not liking immigrants and trying to go back, and even interest in Franco and in the fascist period of Spain. Well, it's a reaction. Young people are continually reacting against what is fashionable from their previous generation, right? When I was growing up, we were reacting. It was the 70s and 60s, and we were rebelling,

Starting point is 01:12:32 we were angry, we hated, all the conservative stuff, shit going on. We wanted to be hippies, we wanted to take drugs. We were reacting. So every generation reacts to what happened before and goes in this new direction thinking, God, we're so subversive, we're so new, but it's not new. It's what has happened for thousands of years. And even in ancient Babylonia, they were complaining about how the young generation, there's a tablet, one of the earliest tablets, about how young people are ignoring their elders

Starting point is 01:13:02 and wanting to go off in some new direction. You read history, you realize it's a cycle. It just continually happens over and over again. and it puts things in perspective. The other thing is, you don't realize, but you're walking around in a world of ghosts. Dead people are everywhere around you.

Starting point is 01:13:22 They live inside of your brain. You don't, your language that you have was created thousands of years ago. It evolved. That's where your thoughts come from. Your thoughts aren't your own. They're built out of all these little moments

Starting point is 01:13:38 in language as it evolved. right? Your brain is structured from all this evolution and things that happened earlier on. Your consciousness was something that was built over thousands of years. Your values, what you value as a human being, the fact that you feel envy, the fact that you're wary of strangers. These are all things that people felt 10,000 years ago. And so you're not, you're not, you think that everything is new and fresh, but you're actually, it's like a necropolis, I say, that we live in. The dead are everywhere. They're all around us.

Starting point is 01:14:12 They're in our values. They're in our clothes. They're in our systems. They're in our thoughts. They're in our music. They're in everything. Everything human is structured, according to certain codes that have been invented,

Starting point is 01:14:23 have been around for thousands of years. History makes you aware of all the dead that are around you. They're inside of you. It makes you aware that nothing is new. It's a liberating sublime feeling to dip deep into history. In other news, If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength App is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for 20 years, and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that.

Starting point is 01:14:50 Actual scientists built this thing around one obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps and weights that you need to do, everything. So all that you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP app could wipe your ass for you, it probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about training, it'll do the same for you too. Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below, heading to RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom

Starting point is 01:15:28 at checkout. That's RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. How do you think that helps people to access a sense of reality around what their life is consisting of right now? Well, I mean, sometimes not everything has to be helping you in your job or your career. Sometimes there are things that you need to incorporate in your life that have nothing to do with your day-to-day survival. And that's why for thousands of years people were interested in religion. And that's what the value that religion provided people, you know, a sense of something transcendent of something greater than your life, the sense of a collective belief system, sense of ethics, something greater than your individual life. And people hungered for that, right? You need that in your life.

Starting point is 01:16:25 So being aware of history is not going to make your career. any easier necessarily. It's not going to make you more money. It's just going to make you more human. Because we are creatures of history, right? Everything that happens, it has context, comes back, goes back decades, hundreds of years. It's all part of a chain that is continuous. It has a context. There are reasons why we think this way. There's a reason why Donald Trump is the president now. You could explain going back to all sorts of other things happening in America, going back to the 18th century, if you want, going back to ancient times, if you want.

Starting point is 01:17:12 It's all part of a single chain. And when I see people who have no sense of history, who don't realize, their only reference points are things that have happened since the year 2000, I think, God, you're not really human. You're not really connecting to what it means. It's not like you have to be a deep student of history, but you have to be aware that history has formed you,

Starting point is 01:17:36 that history has formed your values, it has formed the world around you. So it's not going to make you more money. It's just, I think it's going to make, yeah. Do people become easy to manipulate when they've got no historical context, do you think? Yeah. Very much so.

Starting point is 01:17:53 I mean, so everything is in the present, You know, everything you see, it's all like what social media is telling you what the algorithms are saying. And it's making you angry and it's making you fascinated. You know, you see this thing on Instagram. God damn it, why is he doing it? And if you had any kind of context, if you had any kind of distance and if you had any sense of history, you would know that people that are playing on your emotions and they've been playing on your emotions in the 1930s. you know, with Hitler, that there's a trend for demagogues and propaganda, you would have some

Starting point is 01:18:37 distance from your own reactions. You would be able to see that people are manipulating you because you're not so tied into the images that are flashing before your mind here and you would step back and you would go, maybe there's something else going on here than what I'm actually seeing. It is interesting to think, hey, human psychological bias hasn't changed that much over the last few thousand years. There are many, but not an unlimited number of ways for people that want to control you or manipulate your opinion or constrain what you think that you can do with your life or make you feel a certain thing, even though you're kind of maybe not that justified in feeling it, or stop you from feeling a thing when you are justified in feeling it. there are a number of ideological gravitational gravitational wells that have sucked in

Starting point is 01:19:28 and these will be the patterns that are used over and over and over again and that history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes thing like I think history just straight up repeats a lot of the time or at least individual actors and the tactics that are used to do the rapper that's around it I remember seeing this concern that was written around the time of the printing press that if people were able to read more freely, especially in the common language,

Starting point is 01:19:58 that this would be the undoing of the brains. People would be so lost in books and in reading these words that they would become completely disconnected from the world around them. Right. And I guess the odd lie that everybody tells themselves, it's almost a little bit like a Pascal's wager,

Starting point is 01:20:17 that, yeah, but this time it's different. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but this. this time it's different. For some reason, and every single time, at least in my lifetime, smartphones felt different. The internet felt different. AI absolutely feels different.

Starting point is 01:20:36 But you have this very long, illustrious record of people saying, yeah, but this time it's different over and over and over again. And it not being different. No. So, okay, so let's say AI is not something we've ever seen before. right and a smartphone was something we've never really seen before but it's based on human psychology humans created it it's something we have invented and what i talked about in the laws of human nature is human beings have a shadow have a dark side everybody has a dark side even you chris williamson

Starting point is 01:21:10 has a dark side i'm afraid to say british no dark side what i'm british no dark side oh right i used to see a passed by a theater um in in in in london it said something please know sex, I'm British or something. What was that? Do you remember what that was? It was like playing forever on the West End? Do you don't remember the West End? I don't know what you're referring to, but it sounds incredibly British.

Starting point is 01:21:34 I'm not interested in sex, I'm British or something. It's none for me, thank you. Yeah. Anyway, we repress it, we don't want to be aware of it, but it's there. It's deep inside. It's all the anger and resentment we've had to bury because we have to smile and say, I love you, you look great, your screenplay's wonderful, I love what your ideas, boss. your idea is boss.

Starting point is 01:21:52 We bury all this anger and resentment and it's boiling inside. We have a dark sign. It explodes, right? That is a history that goes back thousands of years. So you invent the internet. It's something new and it starts out and it's all exciting. And early 2000s, wow, I can communicate with people in China. I can use Amazon to find people who are interested in the same music I'm in.

Starting point is 01:22:16 It's fantastic. It's this like new theater. It's amazing. and then slowly by slowly it goes down, it gets degraded and degraded, until it just becomes like junk that nobody wants anymore. It's just a platform for selling things and for manipulating people. AI, wow, it's going to create all the solutions to cancer. It's going to, we're going to solve all the world's problems.

Starting point is 01:22:40 We'll be able to figure out how to end global warming because of these machines, and now it's like scammers and people creating biological weapons, and it's going to take over humanity, it's going to destroy us. Because everything human ends up falling into this dark tunnel that we are part of our nature. So criminals are going to take over AI? Who are these morons who don't realize that criminals are going to get their hands on this weapon? And how are you going to control that? And how are you going to keep people, you know, every single day, this isn't on the level of anything

Starting point is 01:23:14 apocalyptic. Every single day, I get about 12 emails. from scammers saying, Robert, the 48 laws of power is wonderful. What struck me most about it was blah, blah, blah, blah. I am the curator of a reading group in Greenwich, England, and I want to help spread your book to my 10,000 readers. Every single day I read a variation of that.

Starting point is 01:23:41 And it's like AI generates it, right? And it's a scam. Obviously they're going to ask for money. But that's what happens with these things. scammers, criminals, people of dark minds who don't have any inhibitions, they're going to use these tools and they're going to re-caffic with it, right? That's what doesn't change. AI might be different, but human nature doesn't change, and they're going to pervert this. Has rational and scientific revolutions made it harder to access the sublime and more primal

Starting point is 01:24:14 emotions as well? No, no, not at all. science actually should be able to do the opposite. So you look at some of the most interesting scientists of the past several hundred years, and like Darwin had a very poetic nature, and he had learning about evolution and how all of life was part of a single chain was a very kind of almost religious experience for him. It was intense.

Starting point is 01:24:42 Albert Einstein, I have many quotes in the book about Albert Einstein saying, when you study physics and you study the laws of the universe, it should fill you with this insane sense of awe. And if it doesn't, then you are as good as dead, right? All these other physicists, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, they all had this sense that they were uncovering something weird and strange about the universe and it made them shocked and it made them excited. Jane Goodall is studying primates, like how insane was that?

Starting point is 01:25:12 the best scientists, and there are many, many, many of them, even those neuroscientists are in awe of what they're discovering. So, you know, you look in the paper like I read the other day that they're discovering the origins of black holes, astronomers. They see these red dots on all these powerful telescopes, and they now decided that those red dots are the early, form of black holes and that they were formed in the beginning of the universe. Now, you could look at that and just say it's a fact. Okay, well, black holes, yeah, yeah. But then you could go with your magician go close to the beginning of the universe. You mean like a few million years after the universe, there are these things out there that they're

Starting point is 01:26:06 seeing and that scientists are able to like take these red dots and extrapolate that they're actually black holes. And then what is a black hole? It's something so powerful that gravity has not powerful and light can't escape it. If you take the discoveries of science and you use your imagination, they're like, it's like insane. We're uncovering what our ancestors were up to. We're uncovering the origins of life, how life might have been invented in the soups of

Starting point is 01:26:38 oceans four billion years ago. it's absolutely mind-blowing, but people aren't thinking like that. They're not taking that next step and having a sense of awe about it. They're just facts. Yeah, you know how it would be obvious to maybe draw an analogy between scientism, rationalism, and a kind of sterility, a loss of the magic of life. And I think that's the sort of link that I'm sort of trying to,

Starting point is 01:27:09 the thread that I'm trying to pull on because yeah the color I think for many people maybe has been drained out of life and when they were to point at it maybe if the reality is yeah dude you're distracted all the time and you scroll easily forgettable largely gray homogenous slop on a daily basis and your body is made out of everything you put in your mouth and your brain is made out of everything that you put into your eyes and ears you think about what that consumption pattern is like you are basically feeding yourself fast food for your amygdala on a daily basis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is still, you know, you talk about sort of pagan time, pagan religions,

Starting point is 01:27:48 this sense of so much more wonder, so many more unanswered questions, the opportunity to use story and narrative and personification. It's the gods fighting that's made the lightning, how much easier it must have been to have been infused by life. Should we all become pale? pagans again? Is that the answer? Can we just do that? I would love it if we would. I'm down. If you want to make a pagan, a pagan commune somewhere, I'll join. I would because I've always felt myself to be pagan. I've always, when I see, when I go to the British Museum and I see that section on Assyrian, I see some of those

Starting point is 01:28:29 massive sculptures of like half human, half tiger lions, whoa, I feel like it's expressing something so powerful in me. I've always been deeply, deeply attracted to the designs, to the things of like the, in the Aborigines, their little paintings that they make of, you know, the waves inside of animals,

Starting point is 01:28:50 something. It seems more alive. It seems like something so powerful and so direct. I don't, yeah. What do you think people get wrong when they think about pagan religions? Well, I studied this quite deeply, and I have to say that

Starting point is 01:29:06 my major in college was ancient Greek, and so I've been studying ancient cultures as part of my past and part of who I am. And so we think of ancient Greece, for instance, we seek of Zeus and Aphrodite and Athena and Herod, these kind of comical figures in the sky. It's almost laughable, like cartoons. They're like Marvel movies. They're arguing and biguring and how human and how silly they are. That's our modern projection. on the past, it has nothing to do with the reality of Greek myths and what they thought the gods were. I sort of researched that and the words for gods was like a flash of light.

Starting point is 01:29:51 And so the gods were not these entities, were not these characters, not these human forms. They were forces in nature. There were these powers, these waves of energy. And so when you felt sexually drawn to somebody, Aphrodite was like inhabiting your body. It was a force inside of you that came outside of you. So in our modern, sophisticated world, when I'm sexually attracted to this woman, it's just my hormones are acting up, right?

Starting point is 01:30:24 You know, it's just me, you know, and whatever. But in fact, your sense of desire comes from something much larger than yourself, right? It comes from how we have to reproduce, how biology is operating in this. It's something transcendent. And the desire for atoms to meet and form matter, I have this story in there of paramecium in the water,

Starting point is 01:30:54 and the scientist was seeing how the paramecium had this desire for one to go inside the other. That's not how paramecium reproduce. They reproduce by splitting. So it had nothing to do with reproduction. It was a desire to be combining with other paramecium. And he was saying that this is a force in nature, that nature is built around this desire for things to be attracted

Starting point is 01:31:17 and to kind of incorporate the other thing. And so the sexual desire is actually, you are being possessed by something greater than yourself. It could be Aphrodite. That might be the name you'd be. put to it three thousand years ago. I still might even think that it could be Aphrodite. But the gods weren't like these funny creatures kind of laughable, silly things. There were these forces that possessed you. And I described in there one of the oldest

Starting point is 01:31:49 mysteries, the Elysinian mysteries, that went on for thousands of years, and all of the greatest thinkers were initiated in it and it changed them. They spoke of, it was the most incredible thing they ever been to. It makes burning man seem like nothing, okay? Sorry to say. And so it was a way of making you feel that you had died and then were reborn, just like the myth of Persephone and Demeter, who has to go into the underworld, her daughter, and that's when winter happens, then she reemerges, and that's when spring.

Starting point is 01:32:27 happens, but the sense of feeling your death and being reborn, that's what these gods, that's what the religious experience was. If we could go back to that, if we could incorporate that into our 21st century mentality, it would be awakening of human consciousness. I would be all for it. I would start wellering pelts and horns. I'd be pagan as anybody, because I'm all for the pagan world. Sorry. And you know what? Take it one step further. Christianity, which is probably the most powerful religion on the planet Earth, is a pagan religion. It has roots in paganism that are extremely deep and a lot of the ideas and a lot of the rituals. Dionysus was a Greek god who died and then was reborn. And there's so many parallels between the myth of Dionysus and Jesus. And there's so many parallels between the myth of Dionysus and

Starting point is 01:33:24 Jesus Christ, you can go on and on and on. The roots of Christianity are from paganism. So to make this sharp distinction between Christianity and paganism is totally bogus. There is no distinction. Paganism is still within our belief system today. Yeah. Yeah, it's one flow. Yeah. What was that story about the Russian explorer and the Siberian tiger? Yeah. That's one of my favorite stories. And they made a great movie out of it. The Japanese director Kirukurasawa, I believe in the 80s did a movie. It's called Der-Suhuselah. I highly recommend you see it. This Russian explorer at the turn of the 20th century, its name is Arseniev. He's exploring the Siberian Taiga, which is this vast kind of wasteland of snow and, you know,

Starting point is 01:34:17 it's just, there's indigenous tribes, etc. And he's exploring because there are parts of the Tiberian Saiga, the Siberian taiga, sorry. Tiberian Siga, got that wrong. I'm getting a little punch drunker. The Siberian taiga that had never been seen before. So he's sent out there to map it, right? He's a scientist, right? Very good scientist, a cartographer.

Starting point is 01:34:40 So he's out there and he's going through this area that's very wild that no Russian has been before. And there's this man, they're having a camp, they're sitting by the campfire and this indigenous man named Der Sousula asks if he can sit by their fire with them and smoke his pipe. And he was a trapper, a hunter who's by himself. He belongs to this tribe called the gold, but he lives mostly on his own. And occasionally he meets other members of his tribe, but he's basically a hunter, a trapper. And Arsenio invites him to sit by the campfire and they share a meal. and slowly he falls under the spell of this man

Starting point is 01:35:23 and he says will you join us on our expedition we need somebody like you and the man who agrees okay he'll be their guide he'll show them you know where to go and slowly he realizes that this man with his pagan beliefs is so much more powerful than they are his body first of all he's in his 50s or 60s he has 20 times the energy that they have he can do feats that they can't even imagine right because

Starting point is 01:35:50 His consciousness isn't telling you can't do this, you can't do that. He's just open to everything. He knows every little detail of the forest. He can read like you can read a book. He knows by the tracks on the ground what animal passed, what kind of mood they were in, whether they were in heat or not, and whether they were hungry. He can read everything by how branches are broken. He can see the sky and say a storm is coming, even though it's like,

Starting point is 01:36:20 two days beforehand. He smells the temperature, the weather. He says that the forest breathes and is alive and he knows how it breathe and he can feel it. One day they encounter a tiger. They hear the roaring of the tiger and Arsenia is terrified. He can't believe it. Tiger's going to about to pants on them. And a Siberian tiger is, believe me, is something you don't want to encounter. So he picks up his rifle, he's about to shoot it and the, Dersu, the indigenous guy gets put that away and he walks right up to the tiger and he starts talking to it and he starts telling it he says that the tiger is the soul of the jungle and if you mess with the soul of the jungle you're going to pay a price nothing in the forest will ever cooperate with you and he goes up and he talks to the

Starting point is 01:37:07 tiger and says umbub which is the name of the tiger to his group don't be mad we're here just walking around we're not going to bother you please be okay the tiger walks away And Arsenia was like, my God, weren't you terrified? He goes, no, no, never, never. If you shot him, I would never be your friend. You would have violated. Anyway, he comes to realize that this man has an intelligence and a spirit that humans have lost. That we once were so close to the environment that we could read everything, that our senses were so alive.

Starting point is 01:37:44 We could feel the weather. We could feel animals. We knew the spirit of everything around us. And it ends up that Dersou was murdered a few years later by people who rob him. And he's so sad that this is a world that's disappearing. And he speculates if only we had kept some of this with our scientific spirit, because he was a scientist, how powerful would be, because this man taught me everything about the jungle, about the Siberian tiga.

Starting point is 01:38:15 So that's the story. How much do you think of what humans, called supernatural abilities are actually just natural to humans, but we've lost touch with our subconscious so much that we don't have access to them anymore? Well, we are capable of so much more than we think we are. So I have stories in there of people kind of stretching the limits. So there's a story about a mountain climber because I'm kind of very interested in mountain climbers in the sublime. And he climbs this mountain in Colorado. and he gets to the top and he's elated and now he has to go back down.

Starting point is 01:38:56 He can see that a storm is brewing, but decides to go back down the other side and find some new areas that he hadn't climbed before. So he's descending, the storm's coming, it's getting a little bit sketchy out there. Suddenly he's on this ledge and he falls. And as he's falling, his knee hits the rock and he cracks his knee open and he lands on the ledge that's like a foot wall,

Starting point is 01:39:20 Okay, maybe a foot and a half wide. And he lands on his crampons. So he's bleeding, his knee is cracked. He's sitting on this tiny ledge. He's somehow very lucky that he landed there. He fell about 30 feet. The storm is coming. He's alone.

Starting point is 01:39:36 He's going, I'm about to die. And he starts crying. He starts sobbing. And then a voice instead of says, try to get to your feet. Just try to get to your feet. And it's really painful. As I said, his knee is cracked. He somehow manages to get to his feet.

Starting point is 01:39:53 Then all of a sudden, as he looks, he can see that there is a slight way that the ledge can lead to another ledge. It's very precarious. But then suddenly, he feels this rush of energy. This like, he doesn't know what it is, and he starts descending onto these tiny ledges, you know, whatever the word is, he finally finds his way back down the mountain. And he's ecstatic. He's like, my God, I was like a mountain goat, the way I was suddenly able to descend this mountain. What happened to me? What were these powers that suddenly came to me?

Starting point is 01:40:29 Right? I can't make sense of it. And then he goes to a hospital and he takes months to recover. And he's going, what was that? What was that experience? I have to have it again because it was so ecstatic. He spends the next 20 years of his life trying to have that experience again and he fails. and he fails and he fails.

Starting point is 01:40:49 He climbs Mount Everest. It doesn't work. It's just, you know, leeches are eating it with his knees, and he's miserable and there's storms, etc. He tries long-distance running. He gets moments where there's some kind of ecstasy, but it's not the same. He reads about the neurology of the human brain,

Starting point is 01:41:11 and he goes into indigenous cultures, and he realizes that shamans back then, people who had these initiation rituals would put people to the brink of death and then bring them back and that they would then have these experiences like he had. And he decided that they had mastered the neuroendocrine system.

Starting point is 01:41:32 They could control their own hormones because what happened to him on that mountain was his body, his hormones, were creating these dopamine and these adrenaline effects that gave him that mountain goat power. Okay? So anyway, the lesson here is he finally discovers that he creates this his own what he calls a mountain run

Starting point is 01:41:53 that's not the word but he creates these runs he takes a map and he makes a circle and he's going to run that circle no matter what comes into his path right in these wooded areas even if a mountain or stream he's got to create that circle and doing this he comes upon a cliff that he has to climb he gets that experience again. Okay, but the point is our bodies have these insane powers that we have. A lot of it is from our physiology, right?

Starting point is 01:42:25 From our own hormone system for how things, when we're in a sense of danger. So if you took any stockbroker on Wall Street as rigid and tight and conservative and limited as anything else, as unsublime as any creature you can imagine on our planet, and you dropped him in the middle of an island alone, and he had to survive, his senses would start waking up, some of these effects would happen, and he would discover

Starting point is 01:42:56 some of these quote-unquote supernatural powers that he possesses, because when your senses are dead, you're not connected to your own body, you're not connected to these immense powers that we have, right? And I sensed a little bit when I was this. close to death and I could feel like death inside of me. It was like something really powerful and really strong, not like anything else. And it was like a power that I can't even verbalize, but it's out there somehow. And it's going to happen to everyone when they die. You're going to feel that. You're going to feel like you're connecting to something cosmic, right? And so there's something and then when you emerge from that,

Starting point is 01:43:44 your physiology and your brain is slightly altered, and you don't have supernatural powers, but the world looks different. And that, you know, it's not without, I'm not taking LSD, I'm not taking, you know, YOSCA, whatever you call it again. It's just there, it's my own brain.

Starting point is 01:44:04 Your brain has these weird, weird, weird powers that you're not even accessing because you're not even connected to your body anymore. You're not connected to your own mortality. You're not connected to your senses. I have a friend who went to South Africa with one of the world's best rhino trackers. Whoa. And he was out in the planes off the van out of the Jeep. And he said they'd been tracking this animal for ages. I don't know whether it was a rhino or not. And they'd realized that they were really, really close to it, but they couldn't work out where.

Starting point is 01:44:42 They were next to this huge big bush and they're looking around. And then they heard this little, from the other side of the bush, they heard this sound. And they realized that this animal that they'd been tracking, let's say it was a rhino was 20 feet on the other side of a very large shrub. And he talks about this sort of rush of adrenaline. And he told me this story. And I always stuck in my mind. And then I went to go and film a documentary series in Zambia. and the Zambizi River, I didn't realize, runs between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Starting point is 01:45:14 Like, literally five miles, four miles, three miles, maybe wide. You can see, hey, there's a different country on the other side of that thing. And I was taken out to do an old school style of safari. This is when, from the golden era of safaris in sort of the 60s, before some now are closer to side of a seven-star hotel experience that's in the middle of the Masaymara or whatever. And this was, if you want to shower, you need to warn them half an hour before so they can go and heat some water. It's a bucket that gets run through.

Starting point is 01:45:44 You sleep under the stars. You're in a glorified. What is this? When was this? Two years ago? Two and a half years ago. Oh, really? Wow.

Starting point is 01:45:51 Yeah, very recent. So, I mean, you get a plane to Addis Ababa, Adis Ababa in Ethiopia. And then from there, you fly in. And then from there, you get a little 10-person plane less where I didn't realize this. But the fuselage, the bit, or whatever it is, the bit that's on the wing, that I assumed was where the fuel went, the sort of long bit, where the wing goes over the top of it.

Starting point is 01:46:14 No, that's where your bags go. So you put your luggage, your luggage in the way, and I'm looking out of the window, and I'm like, that is half open. Like, that latch is half open. Just pairs of pants and trousers and stuff flying behind us, maybe if that happened. It didn't, so we land,

Starting point is 01:46:27 and then you get a Jeep, and then we get on a boat, and the boat's an hour and a half. Then they find this one bend in the river, and this is where they'd set up camp, and they do it every single year, and it's not too dissimilar to Burning Man, that everything that they use,

Starting point is 01:46:38 while they're there is either from the local environment or gets taken away with them once they're done. So stuff's left to decompose and everything else just goes with them. And they build it and take it down each season. And I was there at the final weekend of season or the final week of season, it was about to start raining afterward. Anyway, guy that's there, Australian dude was the main operator of this. It was his main site that he was looking after and he's going to look after you. So typically with most safaris, you're in the truck and you're looking at the animals, and we did a little bit of that. I'd done that previously, but the reason for this being more real is that you get to go and do it on foot. But if you're on foot, you need big man with big gun. So I think it's called an elephant gun and it shoots just big slugs.

Starting point is 01:47:26 Anyway, so I'm with this and the tracker and the video guy and there's drones floating around because they're filming it and stuff, which somewhat. It's a documentary. somewhat detracts from the experience, the fact that there's a film crew with you, but whatever. We see, I see a cheetah, lone cheetah walking down the trail in front of us. That was amazing. You weren't afraid?

Starting point is 01:47:47 Well, you have the elephant. I've got big man, big gun. And guy that said, but I mean, it was forever away, and they're lone, right? And the Jeep wasn't that far away. Anyway, we're getting toward the final day, and one of the scenes they really wanted to get was of us canoeing,

Starting point is 01:48:01 because one of the things that you do as a part of this experience is you can, go down the tributaries that just come off the Zambezi River. Wow. In order to get there, you need to be in a boat. And these boats are a fucking massive engine on the back of an upturned bit of tin, basically. So it's a very, very sparse and hippos everywhere. The Zambisi is filled with hippos, filled with them.

Starting point is 01:48:26 They're like little rocks that sort of move, like playing whack a mole, but whack a hippo. And they're everywhere. Anyway, we're going along and I've got this thing in my mind. I'm getting up early. I have no idea what time it is. My body clocks all over the place. We've been filming like 12 hours a day most days. Sleeping in a tent, hearing the hippos and the sounds of the safari world out there as I'm trying to sleep. We're going along and this one hippo sort of pokes his head up. And usually they have a little bit of a look. And then as we go past it takes its head down. It misjudged how far away from the boat it was. And as we went over the top of it, usually it's brought its head down, but it didn't bring its head down quite a night. You go over it. You go over the boat. the hippos. And we heard like, pung. And I was like, oh, God. Well, I mean, the boat is probably more damaged than the hippo was. But anyway, so I'm like, okay, there's hippos in the water. I'm kind of used to that. I've seen a lot of elephants walking around, but the elephants are like, they seem kind of chill. Hippo's less chill. Not so keen on the hippos. Cheetah, he was quite nice. We saw lions, but we saw them from the Jeep. I'm like, oh, I'm feeling, you know, somewhat

Starting point is 01:49:24 comfortable or whatever. But I had this, I had this story in my mind from my friend when he told me about the rhino thing. You're walking around and even though this is similar to the environment you were in in the past, you're kind of at the mercy of the wildlife. So we pull up, we get into this canoe and then the drones above us and the drones sort of tracking along and it's me and the guy that was leading it and then there was the film crew and another canoe just behind us. And these tributaries are, you know, less wide than this table, maybe a little bit wider than the table like twice the width of this table. Yeah, super, super, super thick. in. And obviously the depth it can be either this or it could be super deep, but for us it doesn't

Starting point is 01:50:02 really matter. Going down this tributary and at the end it kinks really hard to the left and then it sort of leads off into the distance and that's the way that we're going to go. And at the end is just a set of eyes and a snout. It's this hippo that's poking up toward the very, very end. And the guide says, we're just going to dig in here. I'm just going to hold our oars in the river and we're going to let it stream away. And he'll leave at some point. Sure enough he does. But I'm like, where's he gone? He's under the water. So I'm like, okay, there's me in this tiny little canoe thing with a big bloke. The Jeep with the big man with the gun is a fucking kilometer and a half in that direction.

Starting point is 01:50:39 Because he's going to pick us up from where we've come around. But the boat, they're no help. They're now back on the main Zambizi river. The guys with the cameras, they're no help either. The drone over the top, all I can imagine that's doing is pissing off and alerting all of the animals to where we are. So I'm like, all right, it's me and it's my mate and our canoe. That's it. Okay, so we're going to keep going.

Starting point is 01:50:58 I'm thinking all about the hip- You're rowing? Yeah, yeah, just a little canoeing on either side like this. Canoeing, okay. Yeah, I don't know the difference between canoeing. Padowing. What, paddling, thank you. Yeah, we're not doing that.

Starting point is 01:51:09 So, facing ahead, and there's four elephants. One of them's drinking in this stream from the stream where we're going to go to that's kinked around to the side. I'm looking at these elephants, you know, just sort of marvelling, and I haven't been on my phone, I haven't had a signal on my phone for three days, and I'm really in it now. I kind of got used to the sounds.

Starting point is 01:51:27 of the jungle, of the, I guess, close to the plains. We're watching these. And then elephants for me were like kind of chill, but I knew that they were very territorial and very protective of their young, and it's two bigger ones and two smaller ones. And like, right, okay, it's interesting. They walk off and, okay, they're now tracking 300 yards

Starting point is 01:51:49 on the left, and we're going to slowly row along. And one of the elephants, the biggest of the elephants, starts to sort of look at us and veer toward us ever so slightly. And it's just sort of looking and veering and looking and veering like that. And it's like starting to dissect where we're going. It's looking as if it would come toward us. And I'm giving my guy that's in front of me a little bit of a nudge. I'm like, are we okay?

Starting point is 01:52:15 It's like, you know, 300 yards, 250, 200, 150, 100, 150, 100. I'm like, okay, that is really big. He's like, that's the mum. She's just making sure that we're not going to go anywhere near to her kids. It's all okay. It's like, everything's chill. And I'd learned that when looking at elephant body language, like, head up, ears out, is I see you, stop what you're doing. And head down, ears back is sports mode.

Starting point is 01:52:42 Like, this shit's about to get real. Yeah. So she's now 40 yards, 50 yards away from us. I'm like nudging him all the time. Like, mate, he's like, down, worry. mate, not going to worry about at all. I'm like, that is for seven tons of animal, like, whatever, three tons of animals staring at us. And we've now dug in to stop moving so that we're less of a threat.

Starting point is 01:53:07 Yeah, so we've dug in. But there's maybe four foot high of bank between us in the little stream and the plane, so a little bit of a plinth, and then 30 yards, 40 yards, and then an elephant. And then there's the camera crew that's behind us and the drone that's still pissing everyone off above us. We've dug in and head up, ears out. And I was like, mate, he's like, don't worry, mate. Nothing to worry about at all. Like, fucking calm.

Starting point is 01:53:32 Heart rates through the roof, buzzing in my ears, like adrenaline sky high. And then head down, ears back. Like starts towards us a couple of times, like kicks like this. And I was like nudging him. And he's like, nothing to worry about at all. Jesus fucking Christ. And then backs up, like watching us. And watching an elephant do that sort of reversing

Starting point is 01:53:53 maneuver where she's still looking at us backing up and then puts a head down even further, ears back, just sets off full sprint towards us. I'm like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. And he's like, nothing to worry about. Let's start shouting it over the top of everyone. The guys in the camera crew, they're shouting and screaming about what's going to go on and she gets 10 yards away from us, like digs her feet in, this big cloud of dust. It would have been her falling. There's no way she'd have jumped. It would have just been her like tumbling over the top of this four foot dip into the thing. Luxidus, it gives one look and they're like, turns and walks away. And I like turn to look at

Starting point is 01:54:29 myself and I had the awe in my hand like this. Like what am I going to do? It's me and this. I'm going to bop her on the nose. Like what am I going to achieve with this? The reason I say this, my friend that had tracked that rhino told me that after he'd been through that experience for the next hour, two hours or so, he felt like he was superhuman. He said his senses were so sharpened. He said, his senses were so sharpened. And this is the only other friend I've had that's done a similar experience. So that story from him was real formative for me. And I was thinking, wow, like, I wonder if I'm going to notice something, this sort of like ancestral resonance between the environment that my ancestors evolved in for so long and this activation of a seminal moment that brings it all

Starting point is 01:55:16 online. And sure enough, after heart rates calmed out, the fucking guy, sorry, The camera guy behind us shit himself so badly that you turned it off. I was like, man, that would have been so epic to have captured. The drone wasn't looking in the right direction. The bloke in the truck didn't see it. It was the ultimate, mum watch this and mum wasn't looking. Anyway, for the next hour and a half, two hours or so, it felt like I could hear everything. I knew the different birds from what direction they were coming in, how far away they were.

Starting point is 01:55:49 The colors were sharper. the lines were brighter. Oh, wow. And I was able to, it felt like I was kind of the center of this environment and everything was coming into me. And it was this wonderful blend of like real formative experience, super high velocity adrenaline and, you know, a resonant environment that I was existing in. And it's just that was such a formative experience for me to go, wow, that's what we were

Starting point is 01:56:14 built for. Right, right. That's what we were built for. Right. And all of that together is still now, like thinking about. it and see that elephant doing that the scariest bit was when it was when it backed up backed up backed up backed up head down ears back set off and ran i was like wow so cool they can run fast they can move they can shift yeah for a big girl she could move wow that's an incredible story thank you yeah yeah wow yeah so that

Starting point is 01:56:38 the opportunity for us to tap into skills that we don't know that we have yeah you know that's my it's one of my experiences of that being the case did it do you still does it kind of change you or do you aware of it or did I have any long-lasting effects on you? Downtown Austin or New York is not conducive to me taking in all of the sounds around me. No, no. You know, the yelling crazy person on the street corner and the police siren in the far distance. But it's certainly, I mean, I can see and still hear everything from that. You know, we talk about coasting through life and not really making memories about the passage

Starting point is 01:57:16 of time seeming to speed up. Passage of time slowed down for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can tell you every single different memory increment all the way throughout that entire morning. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The whole thing was encoded, like just tons of novelty, tons of intensity. Yeah, yeah. And I can, yeah, I can tell you.

Starting point is 01:57:32 But that particular, you can remember what it felt like, what it smelled like to be in the little boat. I can remember how shallow it was. Couldn't believe that we were dug in on this little stream, but a hippo was able to hide. It's like they're so big and so tall and he was able to hide underneath this. The hippos don't attack people, though, do they? They're the second biggest killer of humans in Africa. What do they do? How do they kill?

Starting point is 01:57:55 Biting, plumping, stamping on. The second, I think after mosquitoes, can you have a chat GPT this? What are the biggest killers, animal killers of people in Africa? And where does the hippo rank? So the thing, the hippos aren't aggressive. Their problem is they get scared. And the issue that humans have, hippos want to be in the water. In the water, they're nice and safe.

Starting point is 01:58:16 Humans a lot of the time are in between a hippo and the water. and if the hippo thinks it can't get back to the water, it's just going to go straight through you to try and get back to safety because it doesn't feel very secure. So yeah, they're vicious. They are? Oh yeah, where are we?

Starting point is 01:58:33 Where's the hippo? Hippo's number 10. Okay, so mosquito, interestingly enough, humans come in at number two. Snakes, dogs, assassin bugs, that doesn't count. Freshwater snails? Okay, so like, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. And so, yeah, like, mosquito, kissing bug, freshwater snail, zitzi flies, like, and then, okay, crocodiles and snakes, humans, I'm not counting that. So elephants are second to dogs for me.

Starting point is 01:59:03 Sorry, hippos are second to dogs. Aggressive attacks, especially on boats. If you ignore direct disease transmission and count only animals attacking physically attracting people, crocodiles, hippos, elephants, snakes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're scared. Don't get in the way. I had no idea. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:59:21 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Despite not being predators. They get scared. They get scared. They're big scaredy boys. Wow. God, it was still to see a hippo. This has been pretty intense. To see 50 or 100. Wow.

Starting point is 01:59:36 Just out in the middle of this water. They're too hot. They don't want to be out. They can't cool themselves off very well. They get sunburned. They get sunburned. They're so pink. That's why they have to be in the water. It helps to protect them, I think. That might be part of it. But they still get some burnt in the water as well. Fascinating.

Starting point is 01:59:51 What was your story? You said the other. No, no, it's not a story. This is something else, but you're saying about not in New York or Austin, but I was in my early 20s. I was living in New York. And I was taking the F train back home. I lived in Brooklyn at the time. And I fell asleep.

Starting point is 02:00:11 And I came to the end of the line. and there were these four gang members surrounding me, looking at me, and one of them had a knife, and it looked like something was going to happen. I didn't have much money on me, and I woke up and I see these people there, they're going to either kill me or rob me. I don't know what's going on.

Starting point is 02:00:32 And for some reason, this insane feeling of calmness overcame me. I was so calm, I guess maybe because I just woke up, and I wasn't nervous or afraid. And I spoke to them in a very calm voice and I took out my wall. I said, look, I'm sorry. I don't have this much money. And I gave them over the head. And they kind of looked at me and laughed and they left.

Starting point is 02:00:53 But I'll never forget that feeling of insane calmness that overcame me that protected my life, basically, in that moment. It wasn't a lion or an elephant, a hippo. It was a human predator. You know, I don't know if they were going to kill me, but there was a knife in the guy's hand. And I felt threatened. But something changed in my body chemistry that allowed me. And there are hormones that actually calm you in face of danger there. I forget which one it is.

Starting point is 02:01:21 I think I'm deficient in those, at least in the face of an elephant. Whatever the opposite of those hormones were. I didn't get the calming ones. I got the try to attack it with an awe once. Yeah. But the point is, even in the midst of a city in face of danger, some things like that could pop into. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:01:38 Speaking tactically, how do you best advise people to access the sublime in their daily life more readily? What's a strategic way that people can do this? Well, it's, I mean, obviously reading my book is going to play a big role in there. It's the number one. That's before anything else. Yeah, yeah. Because I'm going to, the book is organized to be very practical. So it has stories, it has things that are kind of make you feel, wow, that's weird. I never thought of that before.

Starting point is 02:02:13 But then I have exercises in each chapter about how to incorporate this into your daily existence. And then I have meditations that are a little bit weirder about how you can kind of make a sort of poetic way of accessing this. And so, for instance, you know, it's easy for people to talk about thinking about your mortality and your death, right? It's a kind of exercise that philosophers go through stoics, etc. But I always felt like it's kind of weak because you can't think about death. It's something beyond thinking. So I have an exercise where I literally take you through what it will feel like when you're dying, based on my research and based on my own experience.

Starting point is 02:02:56 And I have you lie down and I have you feeling like the world is going distant away from you, that your body is sinking into the ground, that your skull is getting heavier, it's sinking in, that your bones. are dissolving, that everything is kind of moving away from you and that maybe your mind is separating from your body at some point. And then to feel that sensation and to make it as visceral as possible, and then to take that feeling and then go outside and walk in the world and tell yourself, this is what I died and this is what the world looks like after I've died, right? And how different the world looks like after you've been through that experience. If you take it

Starting point is 02:03:36 seriously enough, when you go through it, then you will be able to have that kind of strange moment of how different things look like when you sense that you won't be there anymore and how everything has an intensity that it didn't have beforehand. So the book is very practical. But the main thing is, as in everything in life, you have to feel the desire for it. So if your desire if your priorities in life are just making money, getting by, doing your career, you're going to read my book and it won't really have any long-lasting effect. But I'm trying to hit you over the head. I'm trying to really make it clear to you that this is something that is going to have a very powerful impact on your experience of life. I want you to take all of your

Starting point is 02:04:26 emptiness, all of your restlessness, all your feelings like you're missing something in life. And I want you to bring them up like you're vomiting them and that you're feeling them coming up from the bottom of your and into your throat and you sense how what you're actually missing in life and you're not diluting it in any way and I want you to feel the kind of ugliness that exists in the world with the social media, the pettiness, the polarization and you want something else. You have to have a desire for something else otherwise this won't mean anything to you, right? Because we're emotional creatures. We're not, we think we're rational and cognition is everything,

Starting point is 02:05:08 but really it's emotions that determine, that are the most powerful thing. Just like when you had the experience with the elephant, it wasn't your mind suddenly coming into place. Oh, I've got to do this, that and the other. It was this powerful feeling that affected your emotions, right? You have to feel, want to feel the sublime before anything else. You want to have to get rid of all of your baggage

Starting point is 02:05:30 and just have like kind of, I hate to use the word, but like a mental enema, and just like get rid of all this other stuff. If you don't have that desire, if you think your life is fine, the sublime won't have any appeal to you. But I'm trying to hit you over the head with the idea that there's something deeply, deeply missing. And your life will have an intensity. You will be experiencing things on a different level if you let this in. Once you have that, you've gone to that level where you say, you've had your come to Jesus moment, you go, yes, I need this in my life.

Starting point is 02:06:06 Yes, it's important to me. Then the things that I try and sneak into your brain will have the effect, because I'm always trying to like instill a little bit of a poison into you and make you look at the world differently. But you have to have the desire and you have to realize that you're restless and you're bored for a reason. You're not getting something. And this world is making you passive. It's making you dependent on algorithms. It's making you dependent on food. It's making you dependent on what other things people are doing for you.

Starting point is 02:06:40 The sublime is where you finally become active with your own experience. You take it over. You're the curator of your own experience. Not meta, not Google, not chat GPT, but you are now the agent of your own experience. You're going to create, curate your own experience. you're going to create curate your own experience and this book is going to help lead you there and so just feel that need to get outside of the kind of bubble and the emptiness that you're experiencing in your daily life how to feel alive again i think is a search term that more people would put into google or chat gpt

Starting point is 02:07:16 if they realized how badly they needed it yeah there's this sense that yeah life's amplitude's just been flattened for some reason. The color's been sapped out of things. They're a little grayer. I'm not as deeply connected. I don't feel the highs quite so much. And even the lows, they don't have this sort of romantic, majestic, large quality to them. They're more sort of dour and sapping and sort of low and sluggish. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so for instance, to take an example, I talk about childhood experience and the writer, Russian writer Nabokov and how he tried to recreate his childhood as an adult. And he remembers that when he was on a train as a child, he felt the speed of the train into his body and the speed was intoxicating. So, you know, I fly an

Starting point is 02:08:06 airplane here to Austin and now we fly and we're not even aware of flying. We don't even feel, We don't understand what it is. The shades are drawn and we're on our computers. The movement of the plane is an inconvenience to what I want to do while I'm on the plane. Yeah. But when you were a kid, you opened that up and you were looking at, whoa, the Grand Canyon. Wow, these mountains. I'm flying.

Starting point is 02:08:29 You're literally flying. Do you know what that would have felt like 200 years ago? You're literally in the air. It's like magic. And you can, like Navocampo, you can feel that sense of speed and power inside your body. It's like how to rediscover a sense. of wonder again. Yeah. And these are simple things. You're flying, you're in a, it won't be in your car, really, but or train or climbing a mountain. How you can climb a mountain with a different set of priorities than how you normally do. And I take you through that in many numerous exercises. What do you think people will not pay as much attention to in the book as they should do? What is the most effective, but initially unsexy insight or strategy that you think people might gloss over, but actually you

Starting point is 02:09:19 think they should pay more attention to? It's a good question. Well, so a lot of the book, I'm kind of criticizing as directly as I can the modern technological world that is flattening your experience. And you're going to be kind of rebelling against it. You're going, God, Robert, you're so old-fashioned. What's your problem? Yeah, get with it, you know. Get on TikTok.

Starting point is 02:09:49 Huh? Yeah. Yeah. And they're going to be a little bit annoyed with that. And, you know, why can't I just incorporate social media? Isn't social media sublime? Can I incorporate that into my life? Why are you so critical of these things?

Starting point is 02:10:04 I don't want you to stop all the technology. in your life, that's not possible. And I'd be a hypocrite to say, I don't. I, you know, use chatGBT sometimes to look up certain things. But I want you to be aware of how it's deadening you, how it's having a negative effect on your experience of life. You don't have to get rid of it. We think too much in black and white terms.

Starting point is 02:10:28 It has to be either this or the other. You can still use the Internet. You can still use AI if you have to. You can still be a modern person doing your... modern things, but you can exist also at the same time in this other room. You can explore it, and you can see. So I was thinking about myself the other day. I was meditating, and I was realizing that I'm kind of programmed. My ideas are kind of programmed, and I'm following Instagram, and it's kind of having an effect on me. I could see the effect it has on me.

Starting point is 02:11:07 is that fact? Well, I watch one cat video because I have a cat. They're like, wow, this is amazing. It's incredible. I happen to love animals. They have these videos of this man who has a tiger and he's like wrestling with the tiger and yet they're kind of... You've already upgraded

Starting point is 02:11:23 from cats to very big cat. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And like, wow. And I'm thinking it's not, it's an emotional thing that it's playing on. It's playing on you know, sort of raw basic emotions of not just fascination, but just kind of curiosity or just sort of images. And I'm weak, I'm carrying, I'm falling into this trap. It's part of me.

Starting point is 02:11:50 I can feel, I can sense the intoxication, the addiction, and why it works. And it worked on me. And being able to look at myself and see that it was happening to me that I was falling into these traps now allows me to kind of step back and have some distance from it and control it and not fall into that and stop watching these videos. So you're probably going to be a little bit repulsed by how I look at the modern world and you're going to think, I can't live like that. I'm not telling you to change your life. I'm telling you to expand your life, to expand your mind and get outside of these little bubbles that you exist in. So much of what people are trying to achieve is using the modernly socially accepted

Starting point is 02:12:42 and rewarded modes of reward, accomplishment, status, respect, money, commercial opportunity, access, materialism, in an attempt to feel the way that you're trying to give them a more direct source of access to. like the wonder that you feel when you finally sell the business for a billion dollars or something might be more easily accessible might be more easily accessible by going for a long hike up a very difficult mountain without your phone yeah it might it might be and if you were to look at the amount of time that at least in the modern world people have apportioned their efforts out to tens of thousands of hours trying to build the business for this one moment.

Starting point is 02:13:31 Have you given the mountain a crack? That might be one way. So there's this recent essay I read by Adam Masriani, who's fucking wonderful. He runs experimental history on Substack. And he says incentives are for losers is the title of this new piece. And what he's saying is he uses this analogy of when he used to play baseball as a kid. And the posh kids would have their own helmet. and their own kit and it would be really shiny and really nice. But if like him, you didn't have

Starting point is 02:14:02 your own helmet, you'd be given one of the rec room helmets and it would be sweaty and smell like it was worn by 10,000 10 year olds before you because it had been. And it would put it on and it probably would disintegrate if it got hit by the ball or whatever. And he uses this analogy. He says, if you don't arrive into the world with your own set of values, you are forced to put on somebody else's, you're forced to put on everyone else's in that same kind of a way. And the reason he says incentives are for losers is that, and this is like kind of, I still don't know how I feel about this, but I'll put it to you. His position is standing at the bottom of a ladder or a number of ladders like status, respect, acclaim, money, and looking at the top, you assume that the people at the top got there

Starting point is 02:14:44 by choice, not by necessity or blind faith that this is the thing that's going to fix it. But as you begin to kind of ascend it, you realize that these people are, as he says, spiritually chinless. So he's a lot of the people that have won the games that are widely accepted to be played have played the games that are widely accepted because they didn't arrive with their own helmet. They just put on the helmet that everybody else was wearing. So he's quite critical. He's not saying you can't try and achieve mastery in something or success and acclaim and money, but that many of the people who do decide to make that their entire life's pursuit didn't choose to do it.

Starting point is 02:15:21 That's his sort of, that's his theory. And it makes me feel that almost like anarchistic middle finger rebellion thing gives me the same kind of sense as when you're speaking about your new book, which is, hey, there's something deeper out there. And it's not for most people that is a very kind of, I'm sure, large, meaningfully large for selling books. But like minority cohort of people that are like, yeah, I actually want to do this myself. I'm pissed off enough at the fact that life feels flattened. empty and gray, that I'm going to go and decide to pursue this thing. And it's the same with Adam's insight around incentives. Most of the incentives are kind of puppeting you. They're not taking you towards something that you want. They're hijacking a reward system that you're not aware of. Yeah, I think people getting pissed off at the fact that their life isn't as colorful as they would like it to be is a good first step. Well, you know, I wrote a book on human nature, laws of human nature it's about 560 pages kind of dense no imagery it's kind of first glance it looks

Starting point is 02:16:28 incredibly intimidating and the point of the book is that you're an awful person you've got these 18 dark qualities and you're not aware of you are a narcissist you are irrational you have a dark side you think in short term you have tendencies to feel envy and grandiose etc who's going to want to read that book that book has sold up a one and a half million copies so far. It hasn't been out that long. So I think people are hungrier than we imagine for these kind of things because we're being spoon-fed the same crap over and over and over again. I see so many self-help books out there that it's just that they're not going to change your life. They're just falling into the same

Starting point is 02:17:11 grooves on the record that there's nothing new or different or surprising anymore in so many of aspects of our culture. Our films kind of look the same. Everything. it kind of feels the same. I'm putting something out there that shouldn't feel the same, right? And maybe it'll surprise you and maybe it'll shock you because I tell you in the preface that the sublime is a shock. And if there's no shock, there is no sublime, right? You're awakening to something strange, exciting, weird,

Starting point is 02:17:43 and even a little bit terrifying, right? And so you want that shock. You go and see horror movies. that other people are playing around with your emotions and have learned all the tricks for getting you, for doing all that, right? And this is giving you that same kind of shock, but it's real. It's your own experience. You're your own agent.

Starting point is 02:18:09 It's not somebody making a film to kind of manipulate your mind, right? You're going to get these shocks, these surprises. Who doesn't want surprise in their life, where everything is sort of the same? But you don't have to have surprise by necessarily going down the Zambezi River, right? I couldn't, I initially intended to write a book like that, but I can't because I can barely walk out my front door. But sitting in my backyard, I'm seeing hummingbirds. And I go, wow, what a strange creature that is a hummingbird. And I started researching them and I started looking into how their physiology and how,

Starting point is 02:18:51 they move and how they hover and how they go from flower to flower and what the flowers must taste like and feel like and what the world how their eyes and how the world must look like to a hummingbird and how Aztecs thought hummingbirds were gods and if a soldier died he was reborn as a hummingbird. I could have that experience of a shock of like this is in my backyard and how wondrous it is and how insane it is and how humming there's a million hummingbirds. out there of different species, you know. So you don't have to go, I mean, I would love to go down the Zambizi River, don't get me wrong. If I could, I would. Anyway. Robert Green, ladies and gentlemen.

Starting point is 02:19:33 Robert, you're great. I appreciate you. You were maybe episode 45 or 60 or something on the podcast seven years ago. I thought I was one of your first. You were? Well, I mean, that was super duper early still for me. Or maybe it was in the 20s. I can't remember.

Starting point is 02:19:49 Can you search what was the first? Oh, it was before that because we got introduced by our friend, our common friend, and she was trying to get me on your, this was like over Skype. Abby, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember. I think it was, it might have even been early. It might have been in the 20s. It was a long time. It was at least seven years ago. It was at the very least seven years ago. And I appreciate you and your time and your preparedness to stare into the abyss and have it stare back to you as you keep on writing these things. Oh, thank you. Thank you very nice. Trying to survive. Where should people go to keep up to date with whatever it is that you've got going on? Well, I have a website. It's kind of what I've had for, God knows how long. It's called Power Seductionandwar.com. The and spell of power seductionandwar.com.

Starting point is 02:20:32 There you'll find links to Instagram, TikTok. Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. things I tell you not to pay attention to. I'm here guiding you to and my YouTube channel and all that stuff. And then the book will be out, I don't know when you're going to post this, but the book will be out, I believe, November 10th. Amazing. So look for it then. You're the best. Appreciate you, Robert.

Starting point is 02:21:06 Until next time. Chris, thank you so much. Can't wait. All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude, yes.

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

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