The Power Expert: "Nothing Is Real, And I Can Prove It!" Your Brain Creates A Fake World | Jack Neel

Explore power, influence, and reality with Robert Greene on Jack Neel's podcast, discussing death, the sublime, and the fake world our brains create.

Key Takeaways

Powerful people fear being forgotten more than death itself.
True engagement with reality requires disconnecting from virtual distractions.
Adversity can deepen creative expression and personal growth.
Society is experiencing a collective mental strain influenced by external pressures.
Understanding death and mortality provides deeper meaning and purpose to life.

What the video covers

Robert Greene, expert on power and influence, discusses the fear of oblivion among the powerful and the addiction to attention.
The concept of the sublime is explained as deep engagement with reality beyond virtual distractions.
Greene shares his personal struggle writing his latest book after a stroke, emphasizing perseverance and accomplishment.
The discussion covers the mental state of society, likening it to collective insanity influenced by external factors.
Near-death experiences and the perception of death are explored, including Greene’s own out-of-body experience at his funeral.
The interview touches on how technology and social media contribute to mental deterioration and disconnection from reality.
Greene reflects on the creative process differences between handwriting and typing his book.
The podcast delves into the nature of human consciousness, memory, and sensory experiences.
Themes of love, loss, and the human condition are addressed in relation to power and influence.
The episode concludes with reflections on mortality, meaning, and the legacy one leaves behind.

Chapters

What does Robert Greene say about the fear of powerful people?

Robert Greene explains that powerful people fear losing attention and being forgotten, which they equate with a form of death or oblivion.

How does Greene define the concept of the sublime?

Greene describes the sublime as deeply engaging with the material world beyond virtual distractions, immersing oneself fully in reality and sensory experience.

What challenges did Greene face while writing his latest book?

After suffering a stroke, Greene had to handwrite his entire book due to physical limitations, which made the process slow and difficult but ultimately more meaningful.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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What Jeffrey Epstein was was a master middleman. He could connect you to anything you wanted. He knew your weaknesses, appealed to people's self-interest. Today's guest is the number one expert in the world on power, seduction, and the law of the sublime.

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It's not that the sublime is something spiritual and invisible or something that you can't see. You start seeing things as they are. The brain loses that functioning. It's no longer able to construct this kind of matrix world that

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we're living in. It's totally fake. One of the bestselling authors alive, he's taught a generation of founders, rappers, and world leaders the hidden laws of influence. But after a wasp sting nearly killed him, he's written the final book of his career on death. I

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try to take you through a death ritual in which I lead you through feeling your own body dying.

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Can you walk me through my own death? In this episode, we'll explore why the most powerful people are obsessed with living forever, reveal the habits in your life that are keeping you asleep, and question if he really believes he died.

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What exactly did he see at his own funeral? I was up above, like in the sky somewhere, like a drone, looking down, and there was my girlfriend and my mother, and they were attending my funeral. And all I can remember was

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saying to myself, Robert Greene, welcome to the Jack Neil podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Jack. My pleasure.

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Yeah, it's great to have you back here. Uh, Robert, a good place to start here. You spent the last 30 years of your career studying the most influential, powerful people that have ever lived.

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What do the most powerful people in the world fear the most? I think they fear losing their attention and becoming kind of forgotten and neglected, you know? So being powerful and being in the limelight is kind of like a drug and

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you get addicted to it and then when it disappears, like let's say you were president and then you're no longer the president, you go into your private life, you miss that excitement, that jolt, the adrenaline, the intensity of it, and the

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fact that people aren't really paying attention to you anymore. I remember I'm not in that league, so don't get me wrong, but I remember I would be like early on with my books.

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I'd be on national television and it'd be kind of exciting, the glamour and, you know, meeting famous people and being interviewed and then I would go home alone to my hotel room and I would feel so depressed

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like it was gone. It was just all that attention. Now it's nothing. I think they fear most of all oblivion, of being forgotten, and that is sort of like a slight intimation, a slight hint of death itself, but I think that's what

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they fear most, right? I guess, and when you think about death versus the material world, like mastering seduction, power, control, uh, you have a new book, The Law of the Sublime. What has that taught you about the

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material world versus, uh, this other world you describe? Well, it's not that the sublime is something spiritual and invisible or something that you can't see or that it's different from the material world. In fact, it is very much about interacting

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with the material world on a very deep, concrete level. Getting outside of your smartphone, getting outside of all of your virtuality, getting outside of social media, and actually encountering life itself, the blood flowing through you, the air that you're breathing,

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people, and being kind of immersed in reality, right? And so it's not like a dichotomy between the spiritual and the material. But the book, you know, it was a very difficult book to write because I had so much to overcome

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and it made me kind of confront myself a lot. All my books do that. Like my Human Nature book, I had to kind of come to terms with the fact that many of the negative qualities in the book that I

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describe about human nature, I had. So, but this book I had to confront my own limitations. I had a stroke. I couldn't physically do the things that I love doing because I'm a very physical person. I love movement. I love sports.

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I love, you know, doing activities, climbing, hiking. To have that, all of that taken away from you like overnight and then to try and write a book and have that discipline and to get deeply into the material. It was so difficult.

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It was a struggle day in and day out. And what the book taught me is that I have resources. I can do whatever I want, whatever I put my mind to. It was an incredible sense of accomplishment.

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That's what the book taught me. It taught me that whatever I put my mind to, I can do. Because at moments I wanted to give up, I just couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't take the fact that I had to handwrite the entire

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book. I couldn't type. It was a very tedious process. And at moments I just, I just can't do this anymore. But I kept going. I kept going. I kept going. And I started developing momentum. And it was, it was a hard book to write. But in the

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end, the feeling was incredibly sublime that I actually made it there and that I have this. And I feel like I could die tomorrow, which could happen to anybody, but particularly, you know, with what I went through, but I

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accomplished something and I expressed something very deep inside of me and so kind of gives my life sort of a meaning and a purpose, right? And this is just my own curiosity, but, uh, do you feel like you

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produced a different piece of art, like a different piece of writing given that you handwrote it instead of typed it?

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It's a great question. Um, in my other books, I often would handwrite the first draft and then I would type it in and it would be kind of quick. Here I handwrote, but when I came time

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to editing it because my first drafts of everything I write is absolutely terrible, it's just horrific. I would never want anybody to see it, very poor, poor writing, not organized, but I had to rewrite it and so I used to like type

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really quickly and edit. Now I had to take one notebook with my writing and then rewrite it in the other notebook looking at it and rewriting it that way. Slow, slow, slow. Right. This book took seven years. If I could have typed, I

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think it would have taken five, five and a half years. So, it added almost two years to the process. But the slowness, I think, had an effect on the book, how it reads. I had to be much more careful.

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I had to think more deeply. I had to go through every sentence and look at it and then redo it with my hand. It was tedious. But I think it made a different kind of book. It made it, in some ways, it

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made the book a little bit more alive, at least to me, because I had to be so slow with it. I think it definitely feels that way. Uh, when reading it in an interview this April, you said something

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that I think is particularly relevant to kind of how everyone feels right now. You said, quote, "Sometimes I feel like I'm living in an insane asylum. People are literally going mad and I include myself in that.

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Why do you think everyone's going insane right now? Well, I, I, I remember I had the thought when I was on one of my bike rides. I have a very weird special recumbent bike that I can use. It's like my therapy.

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And I remember looking out at the world and there were people playing golf on this golf course next to where I ride my bike. And I just got a sense of people feeling unhappy, feeling kind of miserable by the way the world is right

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now. And it's kind of making everybody insane. And there's a famous Sufi tale where there's a man who, um, everybody, he realizes that everybody's drinking this water that's making them insane, and he's the only sane person. And he

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decides to take fresh water that isn't contaminated and go up into a cave and live. And he realizes at some point that being the only sane person is horrifying. He's so alone. So he goes back into town and he drinks it and

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becomes insane so he could be with other people. And so the feeling is I don't want to feel like I'm different from others. I understand that I've drunk the

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The world is a crazy place right now. We're all like, we don't know where we're going. We're like in a car that's like careening around on a road. We have no idea where the direction is. We might fall off a cliff. With AI, with the

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economy, with way the world is going, with politics, with everything so damn turbulent, where nothing stays the same.

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If you could actually quantify the rate of change in the world in 2026 versus the world that I kind of grew up like let's say the early 1970s when I was like in school and stuff. It's just astronomical how much faster things are

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trends nothing lasts. People are interested in something for a couple months then it's on to something else. I think it's making us crazy because the human animal, because we're the only creature that we know of that is aware

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of our own mortality, wants a sense of permanence, wants a sense of stability in our world, even if it's a fault, even if it's an illusion.

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And to feel like everything is just like madness, like everything's moving so quickly, I think has a very strange effect on us psychologically.

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And I read something in the New York Times a couple weeks ago that kind of stunned me, which is it was a article about anti-depressants and it said one in six Americans are in anti-depressants.

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That's a shockingly high number. Now people in the 40s and 50s um and I can remember my parents in the 60s, they were drinking a lot. So it's not like anti-depressants or medication is something new. People were medicating

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themselves even back then. But I think there's a different feel to it now. And it's not just people on anti-depressants. I just feel we're all afraid. We don't know where we're headed, right? And and I particularly get that sense from young people

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who have a sense of they don't feel like there's a future. And when you feel like the future is bleak or dark or chaotic, I think it has a powerful psychological effect on you. not a not necessarily a

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healthy effect on you. I definitely get that sense right now uh as well that there's so much uncertainty and I I do want to touch on your thoughts on therapy and your thoughts on AI later in this interview.

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Sure. I think a good place to start as far as the book. Uh, on August 17th, 2018, you were walking in Griffith Park when a wasp stung you on the neck. A week later, that sting became a blood clot,

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and that blood clot became a stroke. In the opening pages of your book, you reveal something you haven't fully talked about before in any interview.

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As your brain prepared to die, you felt your bones dissolving and watched your own funeral.

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Yeah. What'd you say at your own funeral? Well, it's weird because uh when I had the stroke there, I was sort of acting very strangely. My girlfriend was sitting next to me in the car. I was driving, you know, I was slurring my speech. I'm

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not aware that I'm having a stroke and I started getting out of the car and uh I was acting very strange and then I'm unconscious. And obviously in my state of unconsciousness, I'm not really seeing or feeling anything. Some people

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who have a near-death experience, they're actually somewhat aware when they're unconscious of things happening.

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I can't say I was, but I woke up probably an hour later after my stroke in a room. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know what happened to me. I was in a gurnie and there were all these

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other gurnies. I was alone. And I felt like I was abandoned. I thought I was like in some weird nightmare. I didn't know what had happened, right? And I remember feeling that sense of my bones dissolving as if

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it had happened while I was unconscious. And it stayed with me. It was like your bones are becoming liquid. And as they were becoming kind of liquid, it gave like this strange taste in my mouth. So I knew that it it was something that

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probably happened while I was unconscious, but it was very real. And then the image came to me of my own funeral. And I don't know for sure whether it's something that happened once I awoke, but I had the sensation

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that it was something I was remembering from when I was unconscious. And all it was was I was up above like in the sky somewhere like a drone looking down and there was my girlfriend and my mother and they were attending my funeral. And

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all I can remember was saying to myself, "Everything's going to be okay." You know, like life goes on. They're going to be okay. They're going to take care of each other. They'll be all right.

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I've died, but the world goes on. I mean, I can't really say much more because so many of these things are sensations. They're feelings, and they're not something you can easily verbalize. But I do remember hearing in my head, "Everything goes on.

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everything's going to be okay. And I knew it was my own funeral because it was at a cemetery where my father was buried. And so I knew that that was the location.

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So you didn't feel sadness. It was just the feeling of everything's going to be fine.

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You there was no sadness at all attained to it. It was very very peaceful. A lot of people who've who've had near-death experiences, and as I I have to qualify, I can't really say I had a classic near-death experience, but a lot of

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people who have had the very powerful, intense version. Some people have a hellish experience, and they've documented maybe about 10 15%. Most people have an incredibly positive experience, which is very strange if you think about it. But there's often a sense of peacefulness

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and calmness and like tranquility and like oneness like you're you finally gotten rid of all of your anxieties and fears and this is just it's just natural. It's just happening. So there was no sadness at all. And in the first

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week that I was in the hospital, I was laughing. I was joking. I never had a sense of loss. I had a feeling of God, I'm so happy I'm alive. I was exhilarated. So there was never the sadness came later when I had to deal

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with my loss of physical powers. But the first week and that first day and minutes after the stroke, I was frightened cuz I didn't know where I was, but I wasn't sad.

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Were you just like did you have some kind of like peace about your future death and that kind of gave you like this sense of bliss? I don't know if I was thinking so much. Um, it was just like

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I was here in this hospital room with all these people rushing about, doctors and everything and I was just laugh my my girlfriend who's now I'm now married to was like they the nurses actually thought there some I had brain damage. I was so happy

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and I was laughing so much. I was making all of these jokes. It wasn't conscious.

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I wasn't aware of why or what that was happening. But later when I thought about it, it must have been the idea like you know people don't realize death is actually something very physical.

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It's not we for us for those who have not had the experience it's an idea.

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It's a thought, but it's actually a very physical visceral sensation that you go through, right? And so, it kind of changes you, but you're not aware of why or how. It changes your body. It changes your neurology. It changes your your

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physiology. It changes your brain. And you're not aware of why, but that feeling of exhilaration just came naturally to me, like I'm alive. You know what else matters?

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Nothing. You know, we worry so much about things. We're always so worried about what people think about us. Like, did I say the right thing at that party?

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And does she like me? Does he like me? When you die or you come close to death, I don't give a, you know, f-word at all about any of these things. It's a feeling of freedom, of liberation. I

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don't care. It's a feeling of I don't care. It could be a very negative thing.

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You have to care. But at the moment it was like totally exhilarating. In chapter five of your book, you talk about Jill Bolt Taylor, a Harvard brain scientist whose own stroke felt blissful. The left hemisphere of her brain shut down and

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she experienced her ego offline and spent the rest of her life trying to get back to that nirvanaike blissful state. Do you feel like you've been trying to get back to that feeling? That's a very interesting question. I never thought of it that

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way, but it probably in some sense, yes. So, I remember being in the hospital like maybe the first hours or so and looking out the window of the hospital room and like, wo, how beautiful, how intense things are.

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And it wasn't like in comparison to what was before. It was just like, God, the sky is so blue. It's so beautiful. and trees and clouds. How I remember thinking, God, how weird clouds are. If you think about clouds, what are they?

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You know, it's they're strange, you know? I I thought since then, probably on no other planet are there like sky, blue sky and clouds. And so, I was sort of struck by things. And then I get back to my house. And then I have to

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deal with therapy and I can't walk. And I realize all that I've lost and I start to get depressed. started to get very depressed, you know, like I was somebody who swam every three days and swimming just cleansed me and to be like I can't

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go back into water now. It's like it was terrible. I was very depressed and so I had to go back to that feeling that you're talking about. I had to recover it and the book kind of got me there cuz

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I can't write a book unless I feel what I'm writing. I I don't know why all of my books have been like that. Even the 48 laws of power. I I felt deeply what I was writing. I had to feel the sublime in

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order to write about it. But how do you feel the sublime when you can't take a hike, when you can't go anywhere? I had to find it in my office looking out a window in my backyard and just having

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the food that I was eating and looking at the food. And so it forced me to like discover the sublime. So as you say, I was kind of recovering what I initially had felt but I had lost in that period

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of deep depression which probably lasted about a year and a half. H your book also talks about Carl Jung uh famous psychologist in his near-death experience. Essentially, he floated above the earth, reached a stone temple in outer space before his doctor

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appeared at the threshold or entrance uh and sent him back to a hospital bed. And he woke up devastated, saying, "Life back here felt quote flat and fake like theater props." Yes. Yes. Do you think when we die,

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podcast. Do you think when we die, we're actually waking up? Uh, I think so. I think so very much. Um, there was a really interesting book by a woman who's quite skeptical of near-death experiences, and I read it for that

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purpose. Book is called Dying to Live. Uh, her name is Susan Blakemore, I believe. I don't remember exactly her name. It's a really good book, but she's a hardcore scientist. And what she tries to demonstrate is the brain,

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as you saw in the Jill Bolty Taylor, our brains construct reality for us. And we're not aware of that. So we don't realize that our brains construct the visual world in a very particular way.

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So how we see the world isn't how a cat sees the world, how a bat encounters the world. Our brains literally construct what we see. They also construct our reality. Language constructs our reality. We don't see trees growing out

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of the ground. We just see the word tree. We're not seeing things as they are.

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When you die, the brain loses that functioning. It's no longer able to construct this kind of fake world, this kind of matrix world that we're living in. It's totally fake. It's a fake human world. And as the brain dies and all of

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these things dissolve, you start seeing things as they are. That's what happened to Jill Bolty Taylor. She started seeing the world before the brain constructs it visually. like pixelated dots. She sensed that the brain constructs the fact that you have a body that's

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separated from other people, separated from the world. As the brain dies, she felt herself becoming one with everything around her. She was taking a shower. She felt herself dissolving into the shower.

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On and on and on. As the brain dies, as things shut down, you are suddenly seeing the world as it actually is. And in the Tibetan book of the dead which is a really amazing strange book particularly book 12 I think it is that

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talks about this the dying process the consciousness that you have as you're dying they believe these Tibetan Buddhists that that is the world as it is as I describe you're seeing the world as it is pure consciousness without words

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without all the human things that we ascribe to the world around Their whole goal in in Tibetan Buddhism through meditation is to achieve that same state that you have when you're dying while you're alive.

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And that's the point of my we're talking about my 12th chapter in the book about death and the death sublime. I'm trying to get the reader to go through death before they die so that they can have some of what I'm talking about of that

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sense of actually waking up to the world as it is. I mean, you describe it very well because the whole book to me is about waking up to the world as it actually is instead of the fake version

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of it that we all believe. But very much so in the final chapter just to make this really easily understandable for the audience eye. Would you say that that state where the left hemisphere is offline of your brain and you felt like

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you were seeing the clouds and thought they were strange and the sky felt more blue? Is that something people have in childhood more? Yeah. I mean ju just to reiterate my my stroke was on the right side of the brain which affected the

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left side of my body. Jill Bolty Taylor's stroke um is what's called a hemorrhagic stroke where blood just suddenly floods your brain and it just takes over the entire brain.

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And so I just wanted to make that distinction because if I had a stroke on my left side, I wouldn't be here talking to you right now because I wouldn't be able to speak my language. The left side

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of the brain um determines your language and cognitive abilities. I would lose a lot of my cognitive abilities and my speech abilities. We don't remember our earliest years for various reasons because they were before we had the power of language. And so if we don't

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have words, we don't really have memories of them. So when you're first born, you're just this crying, muing little bundle of nerves and needs and you're just you just have all these needs that people have to supply for

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you. And then maybe around 9 months old, 10 months old, you calm down. You don't have all you're not all so needy. You don't always have to have things done for you. And you start observing the world. You start looking around. You're

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in your crib. You're on your back and you start noticing things that you you couldn't because you were so nervous.

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You start noticing colors. You have maybe a mobile over the crib and you're seeing motion and the world starts to fascinate you and it's pure. It's not have it's not you're not seeing words.

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You're seeing things as they are. And then you get a little bit older and you're able to walk and you go outside and you see, you know, how strange it is to be alive. How strange it is to see

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plants, mountains, humans walking around, animals, pets. Everything is fascinating and weird. It's like you're a space alien that's landed on planet Earth. You're seeing things for the first time and the world is strange and it's wondrous and it's

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amazing. And then you start learning words. And when you start learning language, even words are kind of fascinating. They're they're weird and you're wondering what that word means.

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But then you learn the word I and you learn I and ego and this is me and the sense of oh, I'm different from everybody else. When you were in your first months, you didn't have that sense of separation like I was talking about

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when you have a stroke. You don't feel separated. And now it's like, hm, I have an eye. I can look in the mirror and I can see myself. How strange it is to actually see yourself in a mirror as if

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you're looking at an object. Slowly you develop an ego and you go deeper and deeper and deeper into that eye. You start worrying about what people think about you in school, on the playground, in high school. You start

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becoming obsessed with the social world. And you go so far deep into that eye that you lose what you had in childhood.

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So that waking up feeling that I'm trying to give you in the book is actually a return to your childhood. In fact, one of the chapters is called return to your origin, the childhood sublime. So you're actually waking up.

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People feel kind of insane. They feel upset. They feel depressed. They feel like something is missing in their lives. Right? We all do. I do. You know, uh Elon Musk does. It's human nature.

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You can't avoid it. Even if you have trillions of dollars, you feel like something's missing, like there's an emptiness.

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I am trying to say, and I'm I'm just speculating, that some of it comes from the fact that you once knew when you were a child of a different reality, of a different way of looking at the world.

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And it's you've lost it. And it's back deep, buried deep in your mind. And you that feeling that you've lost it, you want to go back to it. If you had never had that childhood, you would never know

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what you had lost and you wouldn't feel so upset. But you once knew what it was to be connected to things, to not feeling separate. And so childhood has a deep impact on us in that we were constantly wanting to go

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back to it. And what I try and do in that chapter is it's not nostalgia. It's not looking at photographs. It's not seeing films from when you were a child.

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It's experiencing the world as you once did without all these filters, seeing things directly as a child experienced it. Going back to that original experience. That's what I'm trying to get you to do in this book.

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That's fascinating. I can't remember the exact study, but uh I think psychologists had taken a group of several men that were in their 50s and they sent them all to like a house or like a camp or something and they put

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all the items and magazines and articles and TV shows like it was 20 years earlier. And they did test on the guys and like their testosterone was higher.

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Uh really they were able to like have more energy throughout the day like they were smarter and they just like felt more like vibrant because they'd gone back in time. Uh wow.

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That's really fascinating. But you tell a story of Pamela Reynolds uh who was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm that could kill her at any moment. And the only way to save her life was I can't remember the exact surgery, but

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they essentially had to kill her to do the surgery. Yeah. Right. Tell me the story of that one. How did a dead woman hear music during her surgery?

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Well, it's one of the strangest. So, there's a vast growing literature on near-death experiences because since the 60s, more and more people are being revived and telling their story. But there are a lot of skeptics around who believe that that's, you know, it's just

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hallucinations. There's nothing real. But the Pamela Reynolds Lowry story is often quoted because it's very very hard to explain it away. Okay. So essentially, although people have tried, so essentially she had that brain anorism that could pop at any moment and

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kill her. But in order to operate on it, if you try to operate through the brain while she's conscious, it's very likely that you'll pop that anorism. So the only way they could do the surgery was to freeze her whole body and bring it to

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a temperature where everything stopped. And the reason is if there was no activity going on in her brain, no no activity at all, then the surgeon could they were saw through the top of her brain could see all the way down to the

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stem because her aneurysm was on the stem which was made it the most dangerous of all. It was very deep down.

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he could see all the way down through because there wasn't any activity to like disrupt that have a clear picture and then he could put a clamp on the anerism and save her life essentially.

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Okay. But it meant pumping into her body, taking all of her blood out and putting at a temperature like in the 40s Fahrenheit and pumping it back in to such a degree that everything in her body would stop. Her

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heart would stop beating. They had to put her on a heart monitor to keep her and and had they had to artificially do her breathing for her.

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She would be completely unconscious. There were things put in her ears to stop to monitor her brain activity to make sure nothing was going on. But at the same time, she couldn't hear anything, right? Um her eyes were taped

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shut. Okay. But more than that, she was in a state of death. There was no brain activity. and they could see on their monitors, no brain activity. Okay, so she becomes unconscious. They wheel her in to be to have surgery and suddenly in

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the middle of it, she wakes up and she purchases herself on the shoulder of the surgeon who's doing the surgery and she sees the instruments that he's using and she she remembers they look very strange. It looks like an electric

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toothbrush that she's he's going to saw into her skull with. Okay. She sees the people, the other nurses, they're trying to find some uh I I forget the word into into her thigh to kind of monitor her.

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All these things she's seeing. And then she kind of floats into this other realm where it's everything is light and she starts communing with her dead a her dead cousins and uncles and grandparents.

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And then finally at the end of all of that, she comes back into her body like as if she's she's pushed into back into her body. It's like it's all freezing and it's like she dove into a pool of

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like a you know one of those cryogenic pools, right? And as she's back into her body, she hears the music, this eagle song, Hotel California, right? Blaring.

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and just going, "That's not very nice of them because the lyrics are, you can check in, but you can't check out as if she's going to check out of life." And then it all goes dark. She wakes up in a

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hospital bed and she tells the the doctor's assistant what she saw with the electric toothbrush, the instruments, what she heard about the what the nurses were saying, a few other details like that.

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She tells them that she heard the song Hotel California and that when she was finally resuscitated, she jumped twice. She didn't know that it was that they were resuscitating, but she remembers jumping twice.

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That's impossible. How could she known anything? She was dead. She was completely unconscious. She could not hear Hotel California. There's no way in hell. She can't see the instruments because her eyes are shut, right? And they were playing the song in the room,

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right? They played at the end. She knew exactly when they were playing it after surgery was over, right? She saw the instruments. She heard the song. She knew that she had jumped twice, which was how many times it took to

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resuscitate her. People have tried to explain rationally how it could have happened. But even the doctor who operated on her was who is a specialist who's like the only person in the world who does this kind of surgery who is a

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very skeptical man. He says I can't for the life of me figure out any explanation for this.

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It was totally strange. So the point is and people have struggled with it since and maybe at some point there is a rational explanation but I I don't no one has come up with it yet. Maybe um the brain, the physical brain is not

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what consciousness is. That there's something conscious that is separate from the brain. So that you can actually see and hear without the brain operating. What would that be? I don't know. But it makes you think that consciousness itself isn't dependent on

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something physical on the actual brain itself. It opens up all sorts of very strange questions. But the amazing thing about Pamela Lowry uh Reynolds after she got back to life, she was very depressed because her death experience was so blissful.

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The world was like paradise and now everybody was so ugly. And she became psychic. So in her near-death experience, she could hear people talking without them moving their lips.

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And now she's back to life and she has the same power. She can hear your thoughts. And her children and her father would corroborate that she was literally hearing their thoughts. And it was depressing her because the thoughts

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were so stupid. They were not sublime. And she ended up wanting to go back to dying. She ended up dying in in 2010 after like 18 years after the surgery.

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But it's a very strange story cuz it just opens up all of these questions.

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And a lot of near-death experiences open them up. They kind of get a little bit woo woo in a way that makes me a little bit uncomfortable because I don't really feel that's not how I look at the world.

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I don't see things as that mystical and I'm not I don't believe that you know God is controlling all of this. But it it opens up ideas that we can't explain.

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mysteries, things, something about our consciousness is very strange and very mysterious and we don't know what it is yet and maybe in a hundred years we'll figure it out.

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I found that one particularly fascinating because it seemed hard to for her to be making it up. You know, there was no possible way she could have made it up because it was right after she woke up. She didn't hear anybody

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talking about it and uh there there was there's no ex possible explanation. Some people said maybe when she entered the room she saw the instruments, but the doctor said the instruments were hidden away. Even at that point she was unconscious. But even

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if she wasn't, the instruments were hidden away. She couldn't have seen what they looked like. So there there are other stories that will blow your mind about near-death experiences even weirder than hers. I just didn't want to go into them necessarily.

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On uh near-death experiences over the last eight years, decade of you doing podcast, whenever an interviewer asks you about the afterlife, you often don't have a clear-cut answer or have said something along the lines of quote, "I'm not going to go there." But with the

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release of this book, I just want to ask Robert, what do you think happens when we die?

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Well, I don't know. You know, I simply don't know. Um, I find it hard to believe that there is like an afterlife that is how we imagine it, where there's a a hell and a heaven or we're meeting

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our ancestors, our pets, and all of that stuff. I have a hard time believing in that because I've always been kind of a hardcore realist and I don't know and and the sense of not knowing I think is the most is the point

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of it all. I try to say in the in that chapter on death that we like to talk about everything. We like to and here I am talking about everything on your podcast. We like to talk and analyze

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everything. Right. Right. But when you reach that point of death, there are no more words. You can't explain it. You don't know what's happening. It is a total mystery. Right.

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And so I don't think anybody can say that there's an afterlife. Nobody has come back to tell us that there is an afterlife. Of the 80 billion human homo sapiens who've died since we've been a species, I'm just throwing that number out. Not a

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single person has come back and to say there is an afterlife. We have no evidence of it. People with near-death experiences believe they have evidence, but there is no hardcore evidence that we can actually point to. So, I'm

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agnostic. It could exist. There could be some form of afterlife where I get to see my cat who died in the '9s and I get reunited with him and I see my father again.

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Or more likely it is the end of all things. But there is a sense of death is actually transcendent because before you were born you were essentially dead, right? You didn't exist. And coming into life is like coming out of death when you were born.

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Okay? And so it's a cycle. Nothing lasts. Everything lives and then dies. And your dying is part of that cycle.

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And it's part of something universal. It's part of something cosmic that's been going. Stars and sky die. And so you're actually a part of some something tremendous and huge. And one thing that I experienced in my near-death uh experience that I don't

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talk a lot about is this feeling that death is this power like probably one of the most immense powers in the universe.

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And for a moment that power is inside of you and it feels very strange and different than anything else. And so I have more questions than I have answers about something like the afterlife. But um I guess I'd have to

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say I I don't know. And and I will die not knowing. And maybe I'll come back and tell you on on a future podcast, but I at the moment I really still don't know. I like to say that um you know

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there's some people who say, "Oh, there's no such thing. You die. Okay. So, but h how how did how do they know?

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How does anybody know? You mentioned seeing your cat and your father. What do you hope happens when you die?

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Well, it it would be great to to to be, you know, I don't think if there was such a thing where you do see these people and in the near-death experiences like Pamela Lowry Reynolds, um, she actually saw like her her uncle

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Jean who she loved who had died and her grandmother and her mother and all these other things, but it's not like she saw them in paradise or heaven. They were like weird spirits. They were like beams of light that were like communicating to

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her without saying anything. Maybe there's something like that where the energy that was my father I somehow re-enounter would be amazing. I mean I I you know I miss my father deeply. You know it was very of the worst experiences of my life

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that everyone goes through most everyone does with the death of their parent. It's it's it's traumatic. It would be would be fantastic to somehow be reunited with that spirit, you know, but what one wishes isn't necessarily what happens, you know, but and it would be

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great to see my cat Boris, who was my cat in the '9s, who was there when I wrote the 48 Laws of Power. My girlfriend had to build a special table for me because that cat was so attached

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to me that he would never let me work. He was always on top of the computer.

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She built this special table that he couldn't get on so I could write the 48 laws of power. But of course, he did manage to get on. Anyway, he's wrapped up in all of these cherished memories of mine. It would be

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wonderful to see Boris again as well. I know this might be a similar answer, but what do you feel like deja vu is?

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You know, there's a lot of people have tried to explain it and Jung tried to explain it um with a sense of simultaneity as if our sense of linear time is incorrect and that things can happen at the same time. And so you're

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experiencing the past as if it's the present. But the thing about a deja vu is it's what I call the uncanny.

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So, it's this passing sensation that you know this experience before that it happened before, right? But you can't quite seize it. You can't quite grasp it. It like it's like something that just eludes your it's in your hand

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and then it's gone. And what was that? So what it was the feeling was of something kind of familiar like you remember that moment but then it's gone and that sense of something being familiar but unfamiliar at the

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same time is the uncanny is what makes it so powerful and dreams are very much like the uncanny. Dreams are kind of like a deja vu.

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The only thing I could say about it is I try to explode in my book some of our hard-h the past can become the present and the future can become the present. It's a strange power that the brain has, but we

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don't see it. We don't understand it. And it's very rare that it occurs, but it shakes up our concept that time is just this arrow from the past to the present to the future, on and on and on.

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And so deja vu is like that kind of sensation like the past and the present are almost the same. You know, you kind of mentioned this earlier, uh, that we live in a fake world, but do you think we

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might literally live in a simulation? No, I don't I don't go that far. I know some people believe that like it's something from aliens who are beaming this or some kind of inorganic thing that is projecting the world that we're

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seeing. No, I I I think there's a more rational explanation for it, which is basically the human brain constructs, our world constructs a reality for us, protects us in many ways. So, Aldos Huxley in his book Thors of Perception, he

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calls it big mind. And so small mind is the brain is trying to control what you see because if your brain let in all the visual stimuli, you would go crazy. There's too much. So it tries to narrow things down so that you

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don't have all this happening at once. It's also trying to protect you. And so if you'll notice like if you meditate or anything, your thoughts tend to constantly circle around the same things over and over and over again. The brain

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is constantly repeating things to you to give you a sense of comfort to slow things down to make things easy and digestible for you.

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When you take drugs and how those huskly talks about this like measculine or Iawasa or LSD that narrowness that brain mechanism suddenly opens and you're starting to see the world as it is and if you've ever done a hallucinogenic drug and I

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did a fair amount of it in my early 20s you have that sensation. You're starting to see the world as it actually is. It's an incredible experience. You're not hallucinating. You're actually seeing the world as it is when the brain isn't

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filtering everything. And so the fake simulation part is the fact that the brain filters everything for you and gives you constructs the world that you take for granted and it's not the real world. And when you go through a

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near-death experience or you take an hallucinogenic drug or you go deeply into the sublime, as I try and allow you to in the book, because the book gives you exercises to go into it, you're getting rid of all that

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filtering and you're seeing what's outside of the simulation. I compare it to a circle and inside that circle is the simulated world that we live in. a world of language, of words, of social conventions, of codes and and

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and other things. The sublime is everything outside that simulation, everything outside that circle. And when you touch it, it shakes you up and it and it can literally change you. It can really transform you.

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Right. Would you consider like a dja vu experience to be within the sublime uh dreams? I know you've given the comparison of like looking at some grandeur mountain and feeling a sense of awe, but like would those things be

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outside of the circle? It's a very good question. The thing about deja vu is what's so maddening about is it's just like a sense for like two seconds, maybe even less than a second passes through your your brain, your consciousness. And

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often the sublime I tell people and I have talk about in the introduction to the book is similar for just a few seconds you sense what that what the world is as it is perhaps something from childhood comes back to you or you look at an

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animal and suddenly you you you're aware of of this other reality that it has or or things strike you as strange because normally you walk around and everything is familiar. here and you don't pay attention and suddenly something feels strange. It feels out of

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place in this world and it's like a deja vu. It's it's so elusive. It only happens for a couple seconds and then you forget about it and I want to be able to hold on to such moments.

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Um you know we have things called involuntary memories. So we don't remember many things before we learn language as I said earlier like when you're 2 years old or even before that because we don't have words to describe them but

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sometimes a smell will bring back a memory from very early childhood and it's so fleeting and you can't connect the smell but you know that it's something familiar right and you if you go deep enough into it and you have this

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happen often enough, you can capture some of the feeling of childhood, not the thought of it, but the actual feeling. Cuz that smell actually has that inside of it, the the actual experience that you had, right? I sometimes smell things that like bring

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me back to my childhood. And I used to think that it was me remembering my childhood and like being like, "Oh, I was so happy I was a kid. I didn't have problems. But is it more so I'm putting

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myself in the state that I was when I was a child where I'm seeing the world for what it really is? Like how do you view that? There's a famous story of the writer Marcel P. He was obsessed with

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involuntary memories because he viewed his childhood as this paradise that he was forever separated from. Now I don't want to give the impression that childhood is pure paradise.

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All of us had fears. Some of us had traumas and abuse, but there was generally something intense about it.

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I'll say that childhood was very intense, much more so than our adult life. And so he was obsessed with it.

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And he had he describes in his novel of they had this biscuit in France that people eat a lot called a meline. It's like a little cookie and you dip it in tea and then you eat it. and he's like

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in his 30s and he dips the tea and he eats it and suddenly the memory of when he was four or 5 years old and he first tasted the Meline comes back to him and it's alive and he

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experiences it as if he were there, right? And it's very very intense. So to answer your question, the actual physical sensation is what's triggering it. It's not like you can consciously go, I'm going to remember what that thing tasted like because you won't be

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able to. It comes unconsciously and it's embedded in objects. So your childhood and that kind of exciting intense feeling is not just bunch of thoughts.

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It was in colors, it was in smells, it was in tastes, it was in motion, how the world looked, right? And when you get back into those physical concrete things, childhood comes back to you not as a thought, but as actually something

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you're living through. And it's very exciting, right? We often don't remember our oldest thoughts in the first place.

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We remember like settings, tastes, smells. Can you remember your earliest childhood memory? Cuz you're not that you're you're still quite young.

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Yeah, I can. Uh it it was uh at Disney World in Florida, I think.

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I don't know if you know Buzz Lightyear, but there was like this Buzz Lightyear game. I remember playing it, but I'd say that's probably the earliest thing I remember. What?

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How old were you? I think I was four. Yeah. Uhhuh. So, uh don't really have anything before that.

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Uh-huh. How about you? Do you remember your earliest? Well, my earliest childhood memory is with I'm playing with my childhood friend. I remember his name.

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And we were like walking around an abandoned building. I must have been like four years old.

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In those days, your parents were four years old. They wouldn't let you go do things like that, right? Um, and I remember like the shadows and the darkness kind of like scaring me and how weird it was. this abandoned building in

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all the shadows. That's like my earliest memory. That's a funny one. Abandoned building when you're four years old. Um, you've kind of danced around this concept, but what can you learn by looking into your pet's eyes?

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I mean, most people I I don't know. I don't know the percentage have like a dog or a cat or a bird or something. And first of all um like a cat um is not completely domesticated right and they are related DNA genetically

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very much to large cats right and to the cats that we know from millions of years ago. I don't know the exact date of the age of how long cats have been around, but you're when you look at the eye and

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you look at it and you try and go inside it and because I have cats and it's spirit, you're looking at something that is pretty much the same as it was millions of years ago. A consciousness that predates human beings, predates

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many, many things. And it's very exciting, strange thing to confront something so old. human beings we can't say the same thing for I mean they're primates but primates haven't been around as long as at least the chimpanzees and gorilla as long as as

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large cats when you look into the dog's eyes you're seeing a wolf right they're descended from wolves and like when a dog licks your face that is actually wolf behavior because The pups of wolves would lick their mother's mouth until it would

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vomit food into its mouth. And so it's literally recreating behavior from wolves. And dogs live in a world of smell, of scent. So what you're doing when you're looking into their eyes is you're seeing that what we're talking

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about. Our world is constructed by our brains. Their world is a very different reality.

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So if you look a cat, everything is motion and movement. That's how it hunts. It's constantly aware of motion, right? It's obsessed with it. Okay, that's a different way of looking at the world than what we normally have. Dogs

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live in a world of smell and scent. That is their intelligence. We think we're so intelligent, but we can't know what a dog knows about.

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Somebody comes into a room, they can smell the chemicals on their shoes, where they came from, the direction, you know, they can sense your emotions from these chemicals that you're these things that you're emitting, right? They have this uncanny sense. You're confronting

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an intelligence that is different from your own that goes back thousands, millions, tens of millions of years. And it should make you totally in feeling of awe that you're surrounded by these things that you can that we're human.

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We have our own weird brains, but that we can put ourselves inside of the world of a cat or a dog or a bird or a bat or a spider. You know, if you went around looking at the world

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that way, it would change a lot of your consciousness. You would feel much differently if you just looked at a squirrel and started having these chain of thoughts or a butterfly. You know, butterflies are absolutely insane if you

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thought about what happens. But we don't that's that's our that's how we need to wake up. That's the simulation. We're not experiencing this even with our own pets, right? We just look at a dog and think dog or cat. We think cat.

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You know what we do is we turn them into humans. We anthropomorphize them. We think that they're just feeling and thinking the same things we are. And I'm trying to say try and get into their world, into their reality. And I have a

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whole chapter. I go into like 12 different kinds of animals and what their worlds are like. Like hawks, you know, I have a story of a hawk and their world is sane.

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High predators like that or dolphins and whales or wolves. We like to look at science fiction movies with space aliens, but we're surrounded by space aliens.

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Snails, spiders, elephants, they're all aliens and they have a very different reality than our own. Right. Before this interview, we talked a tiny bit about social media and uh we'd gone to a philosophy event together recently where you had

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talked about the concept of brain rot. Uh how is social media making us dumber?

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And do you think brain rot is a real disease? Really quick, if you or your child grew up watching social media and have noticed that you have some kind of mental health issue from it, anxiety, depression, or body dysmorphia, you're

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How is social media making us dumber? And do you think brain rot is a real disease? I've noticed it in myself. So if I can notice something in myself, I don't have to feel like I'm superior to everyone else. And it makes me

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understand what people are going through. And I've noticed in myself levels of distraction that I didn't have before. And so I I for instance Instagram.

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Now only in the last three or four years have I started really paying attention to Instagram.

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And the feed is is unbelievable. You know, these videos are are addicting. They're they're amazing.

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animals, comedians, you know, exercises that you didn't know about, things like that products and you get addicted and you watch more and more of them, and it cuts off your ability to focus deeply on something because your mind is split up into 30

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second little bits here and there and there and there and there. And I realized the reason it works is because it operates on your emotions. It's not a conscious cognitive thing. They know how to operate on your emotions. They know

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what hooks you, things that are pleasant, things that are entertaining, things that are make you angry, things that are informing you of something that you never thought of before. They hit your emotions and they hit the most vital emotion of all, which is

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loneliness. You feel like you're a part of something. You're not so alone, right? Okay. You're in some kind of virtual community.

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But the human brain was designed for focus. That's our power. That is our superpower.

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It's what made us who we are. The fact that unlike an animal, and I believe me, I think animals are incredibly intelligent. But they're always distracted. They're always looking around. Where's the predator coming next? When am I going to get

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eaten? You know, how do I protect myself? Where do I get food? We develop the ability to be able to be safe first of all and then to focus deeply on things like a rock that we can now turn

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into a weapon or a tool. Right? Our brains developed out of our ability to focus without distractions for a minute, for 2 minutes, for 5 minutes, for 30 minutes. When our ancestors tracked large game in order to hunt and kill

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them, they had to focus for hours and days tracking that game. That's what developed the human brain. That's how we're able to write books, create music, design buildings that don't fall down, build things, create things that are beautiful, that are useful.

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These constant distractions, these constant sense of what are other people doing that I'm not doing, what am I missing is continually breaking that focus. It's like a a circuit. The circuit is being shortcircuited, you know, 20 times in the space of a

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couple minutes. Whereas if that 2 minutes where you're like getting all these little bits of feedings from your social media, if you were to take those two minutes and focus on a problem, focus on yourself, focus on your life,

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something very different would be happening. So it is literally deteriorating our brains. It is literally diminishing and neutralizing the power of the human brain. And I don't say that from a position of superiority and judgment because I see it in myself. I see it and

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I understand it very deeply and it's very human and these people who are programming us and they are literally people who are programming us with their algorithms they understand the power that this has they know what they can do

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with it and they're completely have no consciousness about conscientiousness about it. They take no responsibility for what they're doing to young people with their in their brains and how young people can't read a book anymore. They can't go through a 300page book because

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it's too long and they're too distracted, right? They can't write an essay anymore because, well, they can get AI now to write the essay for them.

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But, and once again, I'm not preaching. I understand it. If I were 20 years old and growing up in this world, I would be like that. And it's already infecting me. But it is rotting our brains. And anybody who argues against that, I I

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don't know. I mean, the evidence I think is overwhelming that this is actually happening. But I wrote in my book, Mastery, literally, it's a manual about how the human brain operates. And it's based on on science and studies. And I'm showing

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you that this is the brain that we all inherited. And we are literally now in the process of trying to rewire our brains in a way that is not human, is not effective, is not powerful. H and as far as the mechanism that makes us

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distracted and kind of takes us away from our roots of being able to focus on problems for an extended period of time.

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Is it just we're not built to experience all these different emotions back to back so quickly or is it all these different novel dopamine stimuli? Like what is it exactly? Well, as I said, it's emotionbased.

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So, if it were just thoughts and ideas, if they were just posts about Plato and Nietze and philosophy and, you know, all that stuff wouldn't have the power that it has. We'd be able to control it. In fact, we probably wouldn't be very

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interested in it. But because it plays on our emotions, we have to pay attention and because we are we think of ourselves as rational beings, but we are really emotional beings to the core and we have very deep

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rich emotions and they play on those emotions. And when you get something that excites you, you see on your feed something that excites you, you can't ignore it.

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And and and it becomes an addiction. you go down this hole. So, so people are getting addicted to like experiencing a bunch of emotions essentially. I guess you could put it that way. They're addicted to the experience of being

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taken outside of their day-to-day life and into this alternate realm where everything is interesting, right?

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Okay. So, I love animals. That's like one of my passions. And I see I don't really do Tik Tok, so I'm mostly on Instagram and and I know there's a whole bunch of other things that people are Instagram's kind of pass probably, but

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um I noticed there's like things about elephants or about tigers. Gee, I can't ignore that. They're so well done. They're so interesting that I have to watch it. Right. And then now that I've watched one of them, now 10 of

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them suddenly appear. They flood. I noticed like I started I'm trying to like get my posture better because of my stroke. I saw one uh of post about how to correct your your shoulders and loosen them up and now hundreds of them

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and I have to watch them because I'm something I'm interested in. They know how to hook you. They know how to you're addicted to the experience of social media itself of being entertained, diverted, distracted. I I think that's

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the source of it and that itself is kind of like can be a fake version of the real thing sometimes like watching a video of an animal versus like seeing the animal in person like you're getting well yeah I mean it is exciting it is

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interesting I am learning about some things but it's not the same thing as reading a book it's not the same thing as thinking about it and so yeah I'm learning exercises to help my shoulders and back. But I could have

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gotten that from a physical therapist or I could have seen one video, but now that there are hundreds of them and I'm like hooked on it and I'm trying to see if there's something better, I'm like drawn into this other world. This world

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that they have created for me, right? It's not my world. The point I'm trying to do in the law of the sublime is stop being programmed.

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have experiences that are completely your own. So if you go and hike up a mountain and you leave your phone behind and you're just interacting with the sky with, you know, the the view all around you. It is your experience. Nobody's

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programming it for you. Nobody's in your ear telling you what you should think, what's interesting, what's exciting about it. I want you to get out of this world that's being programmed. get out of the algorithms and into your own

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brain and into your own world, which is to me more exciting than all the feeds that they're actually giving you. It's kind of like a sugar high. It's like eating, you know, it's eating like sugared cereal after a while, right? In

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chapter one, you tell a story about a rich man whose life feels empty but all.

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And after months of therapy sessions, the only thing that makes him feel better is climbing I think it's the tallest mountain in the Americas. Uh with his therapist and the whole experience nearly kills him, but he eventually felt better like his life

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wasn't so benol anymore. Jinzy goes to therapy more than any other previous generation, but Jinzie struggles with pretty much every mental health ailment more than every generation.

Speaker A

Do you think modern therapy is making this generation worse? Like why does your brain need pressure?

Speaker A

Well, some uh there's a famous uh psychologist named James Hillman. He thinks that and he's a psychotherapist.

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Do you think psychotherapy is making people sick? Um, I don't know if I'd go that far, but what I'm trying to talk about in that chapter is that we live in a world of words, of language, and talking about things just imshes us

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deeper and deeper and deeper into that world of symbols and words and language and into ourselves. So, if I'm in therapy and I talk about myself and my childhood and my mother and what I went through when I was 7 years old and all

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the terrible things in high school and how people bullied me, all I'm doing is I'm getting further deeper and deeper, deeper imshed into me, into myself, into my world, into my problems. And what I'm trying to say in that chapter is the

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best therapy is to be taken outside of yourself. is to be taken outside of that narrowing little ego and I with all of your traumas and all of your pain which we all have had from our own childhoods

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and from our own early experiences, right? We live in a world that's cosmic, right? That's that's insane that we live in in a universe with planets and stars and science has told us the whole story of that. And we live in this insane

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landscape of mountains and oceans and deserts, right? It's just visually and and emotionally and it's just so stirring and beautiful. And to be taken into that kind of world outside and and to experience kind of the most primal

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landscapes and the most primal experiences has to me greater power over you than all the talking talking talking about me me my problems my problems my problems just get deeper and deeper and deeper into your hole and I'm trying to take

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you out of that hole into something large and and vast and in that story the therapist had a man who had a wonderful wife, a great job, loving children. He had all the cars that he wanted, a beautiful house. He felt something

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missing. He felt something empty. And that's why he turned to therapy. And the therapist after point just felt like they were going in circles and it just wasn't going anywhere. And he finally he's had the idea that they were going

Speaker A

to train together and climb the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. a very difficult climb that could possibly kill you. And exposing himself to the dangers of nearly dying, of the wind, of the storms, of the height of this

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mountain, of the age of it, of the stars in the sky. He was taken out of his the benalities of his life and he was totally stirred and transformed.

Speaker A

And I'm not saying that's for everyone. I'm sure therapy can have some value, but I'm just worried that people are so are getting deeper and deeper into their self-absorption and that therapy in some ways is kind of exacerbating that and then what you

Speaker A

need. And what religion used to give people was a sense of the transcendent of something much larger than you, much larger than your problems. And that can really really heal some of the wounds that you have.

Speaker A

Right. Which part of the mountain experience was the thing that made him better? Do you think it was like the awe the climb itself? Do you think it was like the pressure of death? Well, first of all, um, they stopped talking.

Speaker A

The therapy was no longer talking. It was training. It was, you know, running, hiking, and getting ready for it. So in that his mind is taken outside of all of his problems and all of his feelings of emptiness. And then you're climbing up a

Speaker A

mountain and and as you climb a mountain, if you don't have your tech, your smartphone with you and if you're not talking, you're feeling the elements.

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You can't help it. You're feeling the cold air. You're feeling the the ground that's full of rocks that the path isn't smooth, right? You're feeling the changes in temperature as you go higher and higher and higher. Your senses are

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opening up to this world that is filled with all sorts of things to look at and to feel. You're becoming like a bird as you almost like flying in the air.

Speaker A

You're getting higher and higher higher. This is a mountain that's I don't know about 19,000 ft high. They were trying to get to the summit and I think they got to maybe 14 15,000. You get to that height, the oxygen level is changing. If

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you've ever been in an environment where there's less, the oxygen is thinner. It has a strange effect on your brain.

Speaker A

It was a physical experience that was transformative and a physical experience that transforms you, transforms your emotions, transforms your thoughts, transforms your moods. I think that's what it was is it was a complete immersive ex experience.

Speaker A

That's fascinating. It reminds me of uh for her birthday, she wanted to go on a nature retreat.

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Um and I had a good place picked out, but I wanted her to wake up in nature the day before. So I booked two locations. Surprise.

Speaker A

Uh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh so the second one was like some farm with a bunch of animals. Very nice uh family that lived there. And then the first one I went to like this place really high up

Speaker A

in the woods. I can't remember what part of California it was in, but there was like electric fence all around it and they had bear spray there. And it was like black bears everywhere. Um I think they said there was even brown bears or

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something. You saw them and we didn't see any. But it would we we get there at like 11:00 p.m. at night and we were just terrified. We had to walk up this huge staircase and I was like, I am so sorry. This is the dumbest thing

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I've ever done. This is the most stressful situation. But when I look back at it, I I really enjoyed that experience because it was like we're so afraid of a bear killing us.

Speaker A

Like we feel like we're living again in that moment. But um yeah, I just it reminded me of that. But yeah, in chapter 7, you write about love.

Speaker A

Yeah. saying, "The most powerful zone of the sublime is the quote dissolving of boundaries between two people, the fusion of two bodies and souls." Why do you think this generation struggles to actually love another person?

Speaker A

Well, it's hard for me to say because I'm not of your generation. I'm speaking of your because it is your generation.

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Um, so everything that I have is from the outside and is comes from what I read and what people tell me. So it's not something I feel, but I I try and put myself in your place. And I think um

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the insecurities that you feel about the world and about the future and about how hard life can be and how maybe you can't get a home and you can't get this and that other things and you don't feel

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secure about your career and your job makes you feel very vulnerable. Makes you feel very insecure.

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And a relationship with another person is opening yourself up to the possibility of being hurt, of being vulnerable, of the other person leaving you. Uh the other night I had this dream of being like left and I think it was by

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like my wife or somebody like that. And I was like waking up and I was almost like crying. It was such a powerful nightmare and it made me feel like the sense of abandonment is probably the worst feeling that a human could sense

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of being alone. It's like being like dying. So, a lot of young people want to build a wall inside of themselves where they don't have to feel anything. They don't have to experience pain and trauma and being hurt and being vulnerable.

Speaker A

They want like, you know, those kind of relationships where they can find people for a date, maybe for some sex, etc., or maybe a relationship for a few months.

Speaker A

But as the relationship deepens and you get closer to someone, the possibility comes up that they could leave you.

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And the longer you get involved with someone, the more painful that is. And so if you just do the marketplace version of loveum dum dum dum dum, you don't have to have to go through that.

Speaker A

You don't have to feel, yeah, it might hurt a little bit after a couple months they break up, but it's not like being with someone for 2, three, four, five years and breaking up, but that's very painful, right? So I think people don't

Speaker A

want to go through that. And I say in the book that we use the language falling in love. And it's a really beautiful metaphor. And to me it's like you're here and you start falling and falling and falling. And the

Speaker A

deeper you fall, if you fall all the way, what is all the way? All the way is that sense of kind of fusion with the other person where you're so deeply in love with them that the boundaries between you disappear. And it's not

Speaker A

forever. It's just at moments, but you fall that deeply. All right, but what happens is you fall a little bit and you get worried. Uh-oh, I could get hurt.

Speaker A

All right, I'm not going I'm going to stop falling. I'm going to find someone else. Because you're addicted to the feeling of love of the first few months cuz that's what you want over and over and over again. But you won't let

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yourself fall far enough to go deep enough into that love experience. And the reason I think that it's such a powerful experience is that the human animal is a strange creation.

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We're like a hybrid. We're like part animal, part human. We have very physical sensations. We have very powerful sexual desires and attractions.

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But we also are psychological and spiritual. We want something larger in life. We want something kind of transcendent. It's the source of all religions.

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But religion doesn't give us that powerful physical sensation. And that physical sensation doesn't give us that kind of powerful spiritual sensation of being attuned to connected deeply.

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Love is combines the two of them and it's deeply satisfying for the human animal. It combines the physical, the physical attraction, the the closeness, the intimacy that the physical brings with something spiritual and deeper and an actual sense of love that is deeper

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that transcends your your your individuality, your yourself and your self-absorption. I say it's like escaping from the prison of the ego. And I feel it's what everybody wants. But if you won't allow yourself to fall, you're going to be trapped in your ego

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for the rest of your life. And to understand how important that particular experience is, I kind of wanted to tie this to a study from last year. It said one in three young men have chatted with an AI built

Speaker A

to act like a romantic partner. Yeah. When you think about the future of AI, do you think humans can fall in love with a machine?

Speaker A

And like why is it so important to love a real person? You kind of said the ego dissolving, but I'd love your thoughts on this. Well, as far as I know, you can't have sex with an AI bot. Not yet,

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at least. You know, they haven't gotten that far. And if they get that far, then then all bets are off. But it's only titillating you and it's frustrating. I mean, I don't know about young men today, but when I was young,

Speaker A

you wanted the physicality, right? Your hormones were churning like crazy, you wanted the the the physical touch. You wanted to immerse yourself if you're straight in a woman's body, right? It was very powerful attraction. It was a need that was so powerful, it drove you

Speaker A

crazy at times. as those hormones are turnurning up. And so what you're getting from your AI bot is just lots of affirmations and validation and feeling comfortable and secure and and they're telling you all these great things about yourself. And they're

Speaker A

mimicking what ideal woman would be like, who never argues with you, who's never who never has a period, who's always like wonderful and warm and sweet.

Speaker A

And it it's like such an an illusion that how are you ever in your life going to be able to relate to the physical person when you're just so wrapped up in this little pastry that they're providing for you. It's so frightening.

Speaker A

I can't even begin to go there. I mean, I'm sorry. uh I I I'll start to lose my mind if that's what's happening cuz the physical aspect when you're young of of another person of feeling that powerfully is one of the most joyous

Speaker A

experiences of your life. You'll you'll never have it you'll never return because as you get older it's not as powerful. But that attraction, that need for the touch, the feel, the warmth of another body, it frightens me. I can't tell you how

Speaker A

frightening that is. And and if you if that's going to be the pattern for the rest of your life. Oh god.

Speaker A

Fortunately, I'll be dead before this goes this goes too far. How many young men? You said one out of three. Yes.

Speaker A

Right. In what age group? So I don't have that age group. I think that was maybe uh 24 and below. But I do know that the most popular age group for people that talk to it like a friend is

Speaker A

13 to 17. Well, a friend is a little bit different, right? Um but even that uh my wife uses AI a lot um for questions like about law and medicine and things.

Speaker A

I'm not into it. But I It always is telling her what she wants to hear. And that's what these things do. They're very smart. They know how to do things.

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These people who create these things are masters of marketing, are masters of human psychology.

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And they know that if you're going to get addicted to their AI bot, it has to validate you. It has to say things that you want to hear. And it's very addictive because people don't provide that for you in your life. Do your

Speaker A

parents ever tell you what you want to hear? Often it's the opposite, right? Or even your friends. So, it's very addicting because you don't get that from other people. But it's also very dangerous.

Speaker A

Honestly, I can't imagine like you usually shouldn't tell people that you deeply care about what they want to hear. Like even if you kind of agree with them, like I think the most useful thing to do is take the other side of it

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to let them really think it out. Uh but on AI do you think AI will kill us all? Well, that's the the doomsday scenario, the kind of singularity where it reaches this point of power that it can destroy

Speaker A

us. We're already destroying the planet as it is uh with climate change, with what we're doing to the world, and we're seeing the world burn itself up right now, right? So, we're already destroying the world with our technology. So, that's not what

Speaker A

frightens me. Uh I mean, it is frightening, but it's not what particularly frightens me. What frightens me is that we're losing a sense of what it means to be a human being. And so what it means to be a

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human being is to be flesh and blood and bones and to be involved in things physically and active and encountering the world in a concrete way. What is human is to use our brains in a disciplined fashion to create something

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beautiful to master a skill. take years and weeks and whatever it takes to design a beautiful building or create a beautiful piece of music or artwork or whatever. These are things that make us human. Also, our spiritual yearnings

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which are very much a part of us and our relationship to death itself. If you slowly erode that so that a generation arises that doesn't want to read a book, that can't write an essay, that can't go deep enough into thinking,

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that can't take the time to create something, that doesn't want to be physically involved with someone in a relationship for a long period of time, that doesn't want to get outside and and see like the reality of death and

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spiritual things. you're no it's not human anymore and it's very frightening and that's more scary to me than all the doomsday scenarios.

Speaker A

Right. You've talked about how that humans have an internal need for worship and in modern society we put that energy toward celebrities, politicians.

Speaker A

Do you think the anthropomorphization of AI is dangerous in that people might put that worship toward artificial intelligence?

Speaker A

Yes. I mean, um, yeah, I I I mean, we're already seeing that. Um, but what people worship nowadays is technology itself. That's our religion. And it is a religion because people who believe that technology can solve all of our problems, can solve

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global warming, can solve warfare and everything else, can solve disease, can do the Peter Teal thing and believe that we can conquer death. You know, that is not based on evidence. That's not based on science. That's based on a wish, a

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desire, because it feeds the greatest desire of us all. Right? With just magic, with a few brilliant engineers, we can solve all of our problems. That isn't reality. That isn't truth. That is a religion. That is a belief system,

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right? And that is what people worship. And you know what we really should be worshiping is the fact that we're alive.

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The fact that evolution happened. The fact that the world was created the way it is. The fact that we understand what the big bang is and we have all this connection. We're able to understand the world of animals and etc. That's

Speaker A

mindblowing. But technology doesn't to me have have that awesome feeling. I don't feel when I go through AI of oh my god. Now, I must say that when you have a a problem that you want to look up about something

Speaker A

very uh esoteric and you type it into AI, it is kind of magical. I won't deny it that all of this large language model, this consumption of vast amounts of material can answer any question that you want, right? You know,

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even the most detailed question I I I got a new car and it has a computerized system of navigation, all these things that I can't understand. I asked AI a question, very specific question about it. It answered it. It is incredible. I

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must I must say and in a in a certain way, you go, "Wow, we were able to create that." But on another level, it's just information. It's just data. It doesn't really fill me with the same sense of awe as like nature.

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I will say that in the early years of the internet, there was a feeling of the sublime. I believe in that we could be connected to the other 8 billion people on the planet in a way that was very direct that we

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could communicate with everybody, share our likes, find people who like the same things that we liked and and kind of instantaneous. It was a it was beautiful and then it got changed into something very different. And AI has a side of it

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that that is a little bit awesome in how much knowledge it has. But on the other side, the frightening aspects of it like are we aware of what criminals are going to be doing with AI?

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Do you realize that there's a dark side of human nature that people have criminal tendencies?

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You know, I just know like as a writer, I get these fishing emails that say I represent a Goodreads community of 80,000 engaged readers. And what struck me about the 48 laws of power, blah blah blah blah. It's these cookie cutter

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things that AI have devised that are very clever. that just marketing things that are trying to get me to give my money up.

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Can you imagine what criminals on a large scale are going to do with this?

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The weapons that they're going to be able to learn how to make from AI. So for that awe moment I have about my new car, there's this side of, yeah, people are going to be able to use it to build

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their own nuclear bomb or their own biological weapon. What are we creating? It seems from the conversations I've I've had that some of the people building AI like see it in a almost religious way that they are like bringing about some

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type of super intelligent deity or something. Uh do you get that sense? Yes. And um you know uh there's a sense I mean what it can do for medicine it is could be incredible. It could it could, you know,

Speaker A

diagnose cancer well before and and and let you live longer, you know, but a lot of people doing AI are very frightened of it at the same time. And they're very aware of the dangers that can come because they see they know what China is

Speaker A

developing with AI, the totalitarian powers that it can give a government, right? There was an article in the New York Times today about how the first completely AI drone attacked the Ukraine and killed three people. It was it was

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just wasn't even directed by a human being. It was completely on its own. It flew on its own on its own impetus and it you know that's the future of warfare. If these people who are developing these things can't see the

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dark side of human nature and what they're going to do with it, I don't know what kind of stupidity or irrationality is or what kind of blindness that they have. At the beginning of this year, we had the

Speaker A

release of the Epstein files which suggested that several well-known scientists celebrities politicians were a part of Jeffrey Epstein's network.

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Why do powerful people get away with evil? In my laws of human nature book, I have a chapter on what I call grandiosity.

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And what that means, what I what I describe it is normally, let's say we humans live on the ground. Our feet are on the ground. And that ground is reality. It's actually who we are. all our wards, all our good sides, our bad

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sides. We live generally about eight feet above ground because we think of ourselves as being better than we actually are. We think of ourselves as smarter, better looking, more moral and nice and virtuous than we actually are, but we're only like 8t off the ground,

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which isn't too bad. Mhm. You start having success, you start having some power and that 8 ft starts turning into 80 ft, into 800 ft, into several thousand miles above Earth. You think that you are great, that you have

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the magic touch. Everyone around you is saying how wonderful you are. You get you're fil surrounded by yes people. You know, Elon Musk, he's not surrounded by people who are telling him, Elon, you're going a little too far. or you should

Speaker A

stop taking these drugs. You need to be more realistic. You need to do this. No, they're all feeding his his ego, his sense of grandiosity.

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And when you get to that point, you no longer are aware of consequences. So, if you're only like 8 ft off the ground and you start seeing that there's something that you do that could be wrong or that could hurt you or that

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could come back and and bite you, you might not think of it too deeply, but you it'll stop you from doing this behavior because you're aware of it. But when you get that high, you start losing any sense of responsibility, any sense

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of consequences because you've never had to pay any consequences. You can get away with anything. And you know, it's the famous quote of Bill Clinton, you know, why did you do that with Monica Lewinsky and sabotage your entire

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career? Because I could. I was able to. I could. I could do it. If you feel like you can do something, then there are no sense of consequences.

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And you know, I sometimes consult with people who are very very powerful. I was on the uh board of directors of a company American Apparel and the uh CEO of the company Dove Charnie. He was a brilliant entrepreneur, but he had a

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side of him that was uncontrollable and it was becoming abusive of his employees and he was basically u sexualizing the environment and we we slowly became more and more aware of that. But nobody had ever chastised him. Nobody had ever stopped

Speaker A

him. He had lawsuits. He won every single one of his lawsuits. And he got a sense of being invulnerable.

Speaker A

When you get that sense of being invulnerable that you can beat anything through a lawsuit, then what's to stop you? You know, and look at it. I mean, you've got Bill Gates caught up in this scandal. So, it's not a question of

Speaker A

intelligence. I imagine Bill Gates has a very high IQ, right? As as do some of these other people. The Nam Chsky was caught up in it for God's sake. These people have very high IQs, but that's not what

Speaker A

tripped them up, right? That's not what got them involved. It's that sense of I'm bigger than anything. I'm not going to pay any consequences. I can get my way out of anything I want to.

Speaker A

That's an interesting take. Yeah. I I'm not sure how much you read into the files or have looked into the story as a whole, but I wanted to ask about the character of Epstein himself.

Speaker A

Which of the 48 laws of power would you suspect Epstein mastered? Appeal to people's self-interest.

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So, what Jeffrey Epstein was was a master middleman. He could connect you to anything you wanted, right? He knew your weaknesses. So, uh, you wanted, uh, front row tickets to the Knicks, I can get you that because I've been

Speaker A

befriended with with Mr. No D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D N D Nolan who's

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who owns the New York Knicks. You want this for your daughter to get into Harvard? Well, I'm connected to this man who's donated who's been one of my donors. I can get your daughter into Harvard. So he knew what people's

Speaker A

self-interest was, right? So maybe it was funding for your particular cause, for your university. Maybe it was travel to some exotic island on one of his private airplanes and being relaxed.

Speaker A

Maybe it was having sex with underageed young women. You know, he knew what was your interest, what your weakness is.

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also the the law about finding your thumb screw but more about what it is that you were missing what you needed in life and he would be the one to supply it and it's a very compelling argument you

Speaker A

know like let's say me for instance I had a stroke and I can't do certain things and what if Jeffrey Epstein contacts me and he goes Robert I know the finest neurosurgeon at Harvard who's developed this incredible new um I I forget what the word is

Speaker A

peptide or whatever um one of those baby things that they get from you that that they put inside your body.

Speaker A

Oh, stem cells. Stem cells. I know the guy who's developed the most advanced stem cells.

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You're going to be walking again. What do you say to that? Sure, Jeffrey. I'll do that. Okay, we'll come to a party here at my townhouse in Manhattan and I'll connect you to him. All right.

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I take the next plane and I meet him there and now I'm involved in Jeffrey Epstein's world and now it's publicized and now my reputation as Robert Green is ruined because of that. I could see myself falling for that. I mean maybe my

Speaker A

weariness would have done some research about Jeffrey Epstein and by the time it was past 2008 or nine he had already been arrested and imprisoned in Miami.

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a slight bit of research would have said "Well I had a stroke, but maybe maybe it's not worth it." You know, maybe I'll just find this Harvard guy on my own. But I could see where that would work, right?

Speaker A

Because he knew what my weakness was, what I needed most. And he was going to be the man who supplied it. And that was his power. He was connected to so many people in so many different branches in

Speaker A

war, in politics, in culture, in in sex, in in business, in in education that he could connect anybody to anybody that they needed to for for any problem they had. That was the source of his power.

Speaker A

I think that's a great assessment. And which of the 48 laws of power do you think led to his downfall? Epstein in victory know when to stop. Law number 47 I believe when you've had some success uh which I mean if you could call that

Speaker A

success I guess. I mean let's just I I wouldn't but that let's just say that you know step back. Okay you're addicted to young women. It's terrible. It's dangerous. It's been incredibly You've ruined so many lives. You've been

Speaker A

arrested and you've spent time in prison. Stop. Stop at that point, right? And now give charities to young women. And now completely reform yourself and go off into the last 30 years of your life of a different person. In victory, know when

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to stop. Know when things are going to turn around. When success seems like it's it's inevitable that everything you do is great, you're headed for a downfall because the next thing that happens will probably be a bad thing

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because inevitably that is how things happen. Your trajectory in life is never straight up. And in fact, the more time you have victory, the less cautious you become and you're going to find yourself tripping over yourself at some point.

Speaker A

So that was the law essentially that he violated. I'm sure there are others, but that would be the one that sticks out.

Speaker A

And do you think it's possible? I'm not sure if there's a law that correlates to this or if that is the one that correlates to this idea. But just that he became so influential and was doing so much that someone else wanted to

Speaker A

usurp whatever position he was in. You mean envy? I guess so. Like I like I'm not sure exactly what people classify him as. I don't think anyone really has a clear idea of what his role was in the world,

Speaker A

but like if maybe someone else wanted to make them money in the way he was making money or have the opportunities and connections that he had, I guess that would be envy.

Speaker A

Yeah. I I just think um he made so many enemies among young women and the women who were the victims of his abuse that at some point it was going to bite him. You couldn't get away with that.

Speaker A

You can't keep all that quiet. It It is a fascinating thing that people of high intelligence, of high IQ like him or Bill Gates, don't think like that. They don't think like there are now roaming around the planet hundreds

Speaker A

of women who hate my guts, who want to kill me, who who I I know that I have a even though I won't admit it, I'll think that they were willing or something. How come you can't think that at some point

Speaker A

they're going to gang up? That they're going to get revenge on you, right? People who don't think of consequences fascinate me because how do you go through that? How how is that? I'm someone who's always thinking about consequences.

Speaker A

You know, I'm always aware of my reputation of something I could say or something I could do that would ruin the whole thing. you know, how is it that there are people in power that just aren't aware of any of that? It it's

Speaker A

it's a fascinating subject, but I I don't necessarily have the answer. Right. It's kind of like what you said earlier, but it's they surround themselves with people who don't believe in consequences. Maybe in your life, you surround yourself with people who

Speaker A

believe in consequences. In regards to power and powerful people, we kind of touched on this a bit earlier, but Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Alman, Brian Johnson, they're all spending hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions of dollars on cellular reprogramming, blood

Speaker A

work biohacking. Like, why do you think the most powerful people on Earth are obsessed with living forever? Well, uh, I don't know. They get a feeling that like we talked about it earlier like technology can solve everything, right? And so who deep down in their

Speaker A

heart wants to die unless you're like suicidal, right? Uh we all we all would like to live and not maybe not forever but longer. So I have the money. I'm in a tech business. I can fund whatever and

Speaker A

I'm different from other people. It's like a mark of distinction of of superiority. Uh you know the average joke out there can't afford these things can't try to live forever but I can because I have all this power. You know Vladimir Putin

Speaker A

is in that group. He's trying he's believes in all that stuff really. You know Brian Johnson I just read an article. He's now come down with some disease that I don't know if it's going to kill him, but it's like making him

Speaker A

aware that all of his interventions are coming at a cost in a way. So, it's a belief that I've done so well, I can solve everything and why not solve the problem of death itself, you know, and then if I live longer, I can make more

Speaker A

money and I can do all these other things. It's so empty. It's so devoid of anything.

Speaker A

That's why it's like how could people who were so smart and intelligent be so incredibly stupid, you know? I mean, first of all, so my mother, God bless her, is 99 and in two and a half months she's going to turn 100 and she's going

Speaker A

to make it the way she's going. But every single one of her friends has died, right? You know, she has me and my sister, but that's about it, right? All of her friends are gone. All of her relations are gone. She can't hear very

Speaker A

well. Her seeing's going, she's doing okay, but she's your body's going to decay at some point, and you're going to have to deal with it. And even if you prolong your life for another 10, 20, 30 years, you're going to be alone. You're

Speaker A

not going to have any of your friends around. Your wife will have died, you know, well before you unless she's also taking the same things as you. It's like it's not intelligent. It's not thinking at at all. You know, I can understand

Speaker A

the impulse to be healthy. I feel like that and I'm doing things so that I can live a good life. What matters is not living forever. What matters is living well. And living well is to have energy to you know to have

Speaker A

your senses still there to have your brain still functioning to be able to exercise and move that I can understand and that's part of a deep movement and today there's so many things available that can help you live well but to live

Speaker A

forever I I just don't understand it. I mean at some point we you have to die and at some point you're going to welcome the sense of death. you're going to welcome not having to deal with anything anymore, being free of

Speaker A

everything. It can come as a relief. And so, I don't know. I I don't get it. I find it deeply stupid and in some ways kind of repulsive because it goes against nature. It goes against everything dies, everything passes. And the impermanence

Speaker A

of the world in in in the Buddhist Zen sense of the world is what makes the world beautiful.

Speaker A

You know, like there's the famous cliche in Japan of the cherry blossoms. The cherry blossoms bloom for 10 days in the year. I don't know, something like that.

Speaker A

And those 10 days, all the Japanese go and and witness the cherry blossoms cuz they're so beautiful. But if they bloomed 365 days a year, nobody would be interested in them. It's the impermanence of things that makes us

Speaker A

love people, that makes us love our pets, that makes us love our spouse, that makes us love being alive.

Speaker A

I can't understand it. It It baffles me. It's arrogant. Yeah. It's It's interesting cuz if you live forever, uh it kind of makes life feel mundane. And it's like, why do anything at all when you can do it a million years from now?

Speaker A

Um, it's fascinating what you said about Brian Johnson there. It reminds me of chapter nine in your book. You talk about the concept of the Damon, a second self inside of you that watches you and sometimes can punish you for straying

Speaker A

off your path. It's funny reading that chapter because last time we'd spoke with each other, I told you about a paralysis that I had uh where my body had taken over. The doctors couldn't find a reason for it and I kind

Speaker A

of had hinted that I thought it was connected to something spiritual like maybe I was doing something wrong in my life at the time.

Speaker A

How old were you? This was when I was 19 and 21. Wow. So I thought it was going to come back recently, but it didn't. Um, and and what is it? Do you know it? Does it have a name? They tried to give it a name the

Speaker A

first time. The second time I didn't even go to the doctor, but I was paralyzed for like I want to say 18 days. Uh, really?

Speaker A

Like paralyzed as in needed help to get up and walk and I could stand, but I would walk very slowly. Uh, but I couldn't like lift my arms, that kind of thing. And I'd felt it come back recently. Uh, but

Speaker A

I think I like I don't I don't know how to explain this maybe embraced whatever I thought it was that was causing it and it kind of faded away which was interesting.

Speaker A

Yeah. But I want to ask on the concept of the Damon, what do you think is the spiritual significance of your stroke?

Speaker A

Maybe the non-physical answer. Well, it's it's it's weird because um it's irrational, but it feels like it it happened for a purpose.

Speaker A

So, I I can explain how I go through some details. So, the stroke occurred on August 18. Um and I had finished the laws of human nature in May and it took me five six years. It was very intense

Speaker A

book and it exhausted me. I remember afterwards feeling like I could die. I'm so depleted. I slowly recovered and then I went to New York for a meeting about the publicity for the book. I forgot my blood pressure

Speaker A

medication at home for some reason and I was drinking coffee and which I don't normally don't drink. And so I got back from New York and my blood pressure was getting higher. I wasn't aware of it.

Speaker A

And then as you say, I was taking a walk in Griffith Park and that wasp stung me right here. Now if you know like you're walking up a hill and there's a wasp, if there had been just a slight gust of

Speaker A

wind, it would have gone it would have missed me, right? But for it to hit me like that, that's, you know, the odds are against it. It hit me there. Then a week later, I developed this insane rash. Everything turns red like an

Speaker A

allergic reaction. I unbearable. I can't sleep. They give me a drug which has a steroid in it which raises my blood pressure yet again. And then of course the stroke happens a week later in exactly the point where the wasp had

Speaker A

stung me. Now I can't say for sure that one caused the other. It could just have been a coincidence, but it seems very suspicious. Anyway, the point of my story is I was driving my car when I had

Speaker A

my stroke. My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, was sitting next to me. Okay, 95% of the time I'm not with her. I could have been asleep in bed. I could have been swimming. I could have been

Speaker A

hiking. I could have been in my office working on my own. I could have been driving by myself.

Speaker A

The fact that she was actually there saved my life. So if it had happened at any other moment, I would be dead right now. Okay. Then it affected the right side of my brain which left my ability to speak to have language. It left my

Speaker A

brain reasonably intact so that I could write another book. So you start getting the eerie feeling that somehow these things lined up for a purpose. Now as I said it could be completely irrational. It doesn't you can't explain it. But the fact that it

Speaker A

happened in that sequence where it was all lining up because my girlfriend, my wife now often would say she was often worried that I was going to die because I lived kind of recklessly with my hiking, my adventures, the things that I

Speaker A

would do my for physical and you know distraction. You know I could have easily been dead and I wouldn't been able to write this book. It seemed to line up for me to write the damn book, you know, and I had that feeling

Speaker A

in the ambulance that took me home from the hospital where I decided to write the book. I felt this is a sign that you were meant to write this. You were given another life so that you could share

Speaker A

these ideas. And it's kind of grandiose of me, I suppose. But I really feel like the book has a purpose to help people to help people who feel lost, who feel kind of tight and closed inside themselves, who

Speaker A

need a feeling of something greater to engage them with them. You're only alive once. And to feel that intensity that I felt after my stroke, I felt like there was a purpose behind it. And the book has a mission.

Speaker A

And so it's not like any of my other books where I felt that so deeply. And so in an odd way, I do feel like there was some kind of strange purpose for me to write the book. Did you feel as

Speaker A

though your Damon was punishing you? Or did you feel as though perhaps it was setting up you to have the type of experience that would allow you to write something like this for people to understand? Well, the don is for me is

Speaker A

something that um so the concept of it to to for the audience is that listeners according to the ancient Greek tradition when you were born the gods have given you this damon which is kind of like a soul that's crafted for you as an

Speaker A

individual that marks who you are as distinct from anybody else. And they gave it to humans because humans have no direction, no purpose. They don't know what they're doing. They're crazy. And this damon is going to guide you through

Speaker A

life. And it's a voice. And when you hear that voice and it tells you this is right, great things happen to you. But when you don't hear the voice, terrible things will happen to you. It's what makes you

Speaker A

different from anybody else. So my demon since I was a child was about words and language and being a writer and I didn't have success until I was about 39 maybe even 40 with my 48 loss of power. I had

Speaker A

gone through many years of no success of being kind of a failure of wandering through life of never knowing how what I really was meant to do. But I never gave up because the demon was always telling me you're a writer. You're a writer.

Speaker A

Eventually something will happen. It made me not give up. It was telling me this is my purpose in life, right? And then as I start writing the books, the dayon is kind of guiding me towards different ideas. And so you could say in

Speaker A

some ways I'd always been interested in the sublime. You can say in some ways that this was the moment that it was telling you now you need to write this book because it's very important. So in some ways I don't know if it you can't say it

Speaker A

set up the accident but it was guiding me to writing this book in a moment of deep pain and deep drama. That's fascinating. Yeah. I like looking at all the different religions and religious traditions, it seems like there's a common theme of

Speaker A

like a voice inside the head guiding you. That's right. Uh chapter 3 of your book, you cover the bestkept secret of the ancient world. Great philosophers like Plato, Cisero, Marcus Aurelius were initiated into a religious group and faced death if they revealed what was

Speaker A

happening inside. Why did the greatest philosophers in history practice dying? Well, um there's a belief Socrates had this idea that death is the origin of all philosophy because being aware of your mortality makes you question why. Why am I alive?

Speaker A

What is the meaning? What is the purpose behind my life? But in the book I say that to think about death is not the same as to feel death.

Speaker A

So in the 18th chapter of my human nature book I talk about death as a concept the philosophy of how to confront your mortality how to live better by being aware of it. But it was a thought and then I had the experience

Speaker A

of death which was not a thought which was very powerful and emotional. So, I don't think you can think your way into confronting your death in a way that's powerful and meaningful because we're we're emotional creatures and it

Speaker A

our thoughts just keep changing in our stream of consciousness. And you might tell yourself, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. But then you're distracted by a million other things. But when you feel death, there's

Speaker A

no more distraction. It's in your body and it changes you. The Elucinian mysteries was this very it's a it's a mystery and people who were initiated it goes it's a very ancient ritual that goes back to probably a th000 BC

Speaker A

uh in ancient Greece it was originally an agricultural ritual but it was a mystery and to reveal the mystery you would be punished by death so to this day we don't know exactly what happened in fact we don't know much at all but I

Speaker A

through a lot of research, I and other people have been able to recreate what probably happened. But the point of the mystery was to make you feel like you were dying, to take you to the brink of death and to make you feel like you

Speaker A

were then reborn. And everything that it was done was engineered in that fashion. And I describe in the story how it does that.

Speaker A

How the walk to the actual palace, the temple where you're under undergo the ritual and how that was designed to make you feel emotional and weak and vulnerable and how at some point you were there was a hood placed over you

Speaker A

and you were in this darkness and you felt like you had entered the underworld. They did everything to make you feel like you had died and then at some point they gave you a drink that was probably laced with a drug. Some

Speaker A

people speculate it was some kind of hallucinogenic drug, but it was probably a poppy seed, probably opium.

Speaker A

Anyway, it made you feel like something so powerful had happened to you that when you came out of the mystery, you felt like I am reborn. The world is not the same. Right? And so Marcus Aurelius and Romans and and all famous most

Speaker A

famous ancient Greek writers went through this mystery and they felt like it was the most powerful experience they have ever been through and they will describe it that way but they won't tell you what happened. So the puzzle for me

Speaker A

was everybody who went through it says it was the most profound experience but they don't tell you what it was. So I tried and other people have tried to kind of get a sense of what that could be. But the point is

Speaker A

in the ancient world there were a lot of rituals that were designed to make you feel like you had died. Indigenous cultures have initiation rituals particularly for young men at the age of 18 or 19 something. I don't know exact

Speaker A

age changes. And they would literally make you feel like you'd been buried alive, that you had been abandoned, that you were thrown into a pit, that terrible things were going to happen to you. They would physically torture you

Speaker A

and bring you to the point, put you in freezing cold water to the point where you felt like you were going to die.

Speaker A

They would take you out. You felt like you were superhuman and you'd been now been initiated into a new world, into a new spiritual realm. So this idea of a ritual that literally makes you feel like you're dying is much more powerful

Speaker A

than philosophizing about death. It literally changes how you see everything. And I tell people my stroke altered my brain and my physiology in a way where I don't see things the same way. The world looks differently to me.

Speaker A

It feels differently to me probably because of the damage to the right side of my brain. I'm also less in control of my emotions which is something that happens to people with bright brain strokes. But the feeling of death

Speaker A

changes you physically. The world looks differently. It feels differently. And that's what people said who'd gone through this mysteries. Everything looked differently. Everything felt differently. The experience of death changed me. Right. And it's it's very very powerful. And in my final chapter

Speaker A

of the new book on death itself, I try to take you through a death ritual in which I I lead you through feeling your own body dying. It's the very end of the book and I from all of my research, from

Speaker A

my own experience, all the sensations that you could possibly have. I give you an exercise where you can lie down in your in a room and literally go through the whole process.

Speaker A

Can you do it for me? Can you walk me through my own death? You basically have to lie down in a room by yourself and it should be somewhat dark. It can't be completely dark, but the shades should be drawn, right? You can see

Speaker A

things around you, but it's dark. Um and then I take you through this feeling of your body sinking and how things are leaving. So the world you can feeling like things are disappearing. The things that are near you are getting further and further

Speaker A

away, right? And then you feel this heaviness in your body and you feel like you're being pushed into the ground and it's very powerful force and it's pushing you deeper and deeper and deeper and it's like you're entering this dark

Speaker A

sack that you're that you're being thrust inside of and at a certain point um you feel like you've separated from something, right? And then I have you kind of imagining because all of this is in your imagination, mind you, right?

Speaker A

But you are lying on the ground, but you're imagining these things. You're imagining looking at yourself from above down on your own body like you've left your body. I take you through a process where I'm trying to get you to leave

Speaker A

your body. You're leaving. It's getting the sensations are so heavy and deep that your mind leaves the body itself, right? It separates and as you look down on your body, you see yourself as somebody who has already died. Okay? And

Speaker A

then I I'm missing some of the steps. So, excuse me, Jack. I I can't remember everything that goes on, but at some point it's over and then I have you walk outside, but you are still thinking that you're

Speaker A

dead right? You've you're you're now alive, but you're a ghost. You're dead and you're walking in the world and you're seeing the world for the last time and you're seeing it through the eyes of someone who is dead or dying and you're seeing

Speaker A

the birds and the trees and the people for the last time and then finally you return home and you realize that you are still alive.

Speaker A

I try and design it so that it feels very powerful and emotional. you taken inside of it. And if you follow the instructions and you let yourself feel the things that I'm telling you to feel, you will reach a moment where you will feel that

Speaker A

powerful sensation of being pushed down, which is something I experienced. You will feel that sense of separation of the body and the mind splitting. You will feel that sensation of of looking at things in with a transformed eyes

Speaker A

that things don't look and feel the same. And then I'm hoping that in the days to come it will linger in your head and then the beauty of it is that you can go through this again and again and again

Speaker A

whenever you need to whenever you need to remind yourself of this process. Other writers have have written similarly and I could suggest some books that you can read that can take you through that process as well. But that's

Speaker A

how I ended the book so that you can have the real experience instead of just the thought and and make it as as alive.

Speaker A

Of course, it's frightening and it's meant to be very frightening. You know, my wife when she read it, she goes, "Ah, I almost can't read it. It's almost too strong." But the point of it is is that at the end of this whole thing,

Speaker A

everything looks different. Everything looks transformed in your eyes. If you can imagine going outside and looking at the world knowing that in an hour you're dead, everything will look differently to you, right?

Speaker A

Suddenly you'll be noticing things. It'll have a charge. It'll have an intensity. Well, you have the power to do that now while you're still alive.

Speaker A

And that's what I'm trying to give you. That's beautiful. That was I I know you don't have that material in front of you, but I think that was a great explanation. And it was interesting hearing your spoken version

Speaker A

of it. I know it's more about the feeling but what's the one thing you can only experience after pretending that you're dead? So, it was based on my own experience, then based on a lot of my research of commonalities that people

Speaker A

experience as they're dying. And so every time I wrote about something, I was trying to to feel it in a way and and get inside of the the emotion. It didn't bring me back to my own stroke only in that

Speaker A

to be able to write something. You have to have a little bit of distance.

Speaker A

Um, so but I don't need to go through that exercise because I h I live it, you know. Uh I know that I was given a reprieve uh able to live again and I know that I so every morning I meditate and at the

Speaker A

end of every meditation I look up and I go I've been granted one more day of life.

Speaker A

This could be my last day but look how insanely beautiful it is and how lucky you are. And so I go through it every single morning with my meditation and I'm aware of it every single day as I

Speaker A

aware of how how lucky I am just to simply be here. Do you fear death at this point?

Speaker A

Well, I I what I fear is being incapacitated and feeling like I'm I have no more control, like I'm in a hospital.

Speaker A

And uh you know I don't have my brain functioning the way it functions. I fear that um and I want to keep my levels of energy and stuff but I don't I don't fear death itself. At at some point

Speaker A

sometimes I feel like God it would be such a relief and I could almost welcome it. Um because life could be so difficult sometimes and uh it's hard to explain but uh I have it takes me like 20 minutes to

Speaker A

get dressed in the morning. I can't do certain things with my left hand. To go walk from one side of the house to the other side takes like minutes as opposed to a few seconds.

Speaker A

And it makes you like, "Oh god, I have to do that. It takes me forever to button a shirt. Oh god, you get so impatient." And then moments you go, "It'll end.

Speaker A

All their problems will end." That doesn't seem so bad at such moments like that. But I don't I'm not I'm not somebody who ever would commit. I'm not at that point at all. It's just it doesn't seem like something to fear

Speaker A

anymore. It seems like ah it's like a rest. I get to rest. Of course, I'll be resting forever, but wow. Yeah, it's not so bad to feel it like that way. So, I don't fear, but I fear being uh

Speaker A

dependent and losing, you know, the little bit of independence that I have. Robert, you've been working on your book for, you said seven years.

Speaker A

Yeah. and have called it your swan song. The the last fulllength book uh you'll be known for. Is that right?

Speaker A

I think so. I think so. If this is the last thing Robert Green ever teaches the world in this way after 30 years and tens of millions of books being sold, read by people worldwide. I want to ask

Speaker A

if all you had was just the next 3 minutes, what's the one thing you want people to know about being alive?

Speaker A

Well, I have a chapter called um awaken to the stranges of being alive. And you think it's you don't you take it for granted, you know, like I took for granted my life being able to swim and hike and

Speaker A

everything. But being alive is actually very very strange. And I want you to awaken literally to that sensation of how strange it is to be alive. When I was a child, and still to this day, I always go, "How did the

Speaker A

world end up the way it is? You know, we live in a world of technology and we're so far removed from nature that we don't think of of how strange it is that there are plants and trees. As I mentioned, we live with a

Speaker A

blue sky with clouds which who knows may not exist on any other planet. That something like giraffes evolved on planet Earth. that there are things that fly in the sky that defy that level of gravity, right? That we look up at the

Speaker A

stars in the sky, the same stars that people were looking at 10,000, 20,000 years ago.

Speaker A

It's strange. It's like a journey. It's like a drug trip that you're on. That to be alive is like being drunk. It's like being on a drug. It's so strange and so weird that the world looks the way it

Speaker A

is. that you have a body that has blood circulating through a heart. All these things operate without your controlling them. They just operate naturally.

Speaker A

How did that ever evolve? Do you ever stop to think how the eye, how the optic nerve evolved, the first animal that could see something, and that how intricate our eyes are in the relationship of our eyes to our brain.

Speaker A

Do you ever think about your body about how strange it is that it can do all these things that it can repair itself after a wound? You can have a cut and then the cut disappears. You can break a

Speaker A

bone and then the bone heals itself. It is goddamn strange all these things happen. So stop taking it for granted and look at your life as this weird, wondrous, awesome thing. And every day should be like that. every day should

Speaker A

strike you as I'm alive. It's like the weirdest thing in the world. You know, that's what I want people to take to actually begin to look at the world in that way because it'll change your experience of everything.

Speaker A

Right. What was interesting to me about your book was at the end it didn't end with your words. It ended with a quote. Uh who was that quote from again? It's like a Persian poet.

Speaker A

Kabir, I wanted to ask if you could write one quote from everything you've read on your gravestone, what would it be? The quote that just came to my brain right now is a quote from Shakespeare called The Rest Is Silence.

Speaker A

Um, and I think it's from Hamlet. And it just is like all that's left is silence. There's nothing else you can possibly say. That's all there is. Um because I've always been fascinated by things that kind of surpass or transcend

Speaker A

language, the ability to put them into words. And so the idea that all that's left is silence, there's nothing else to say would be an appropriate thing to be on my tomb. There's not a lot to say.

Speaker A

Uh, but yeah, Robert, where can uh people find this book? Well, I believe it it comes out on November 10th. Um, so that's 2 and 1/2 months away. Um, but you can pre-order it on Amazon. I encourage people to

Speaker A

pre-order it, but uh and there will be coming up. We'll we'll be giving you bonuses for pre-ordering the book. Um, but it'll be available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and bookstores as well, but starting on November 10th. And I can

Speaker A

say one thing. I worked on it for 7 years alone and in my head and now I'm so anxious and excited for other people to react to it and read it. And it'll be weird for me, but even if you hate it, I'll be

Speaker A

very excited for people to be actually exposed to this thing. I really don't delight it, but that's might be my bias. Uh, well, everyone, uh, this has been your guest, Robert Green. This is the Jack Neil podcast. I appreciate you coming

Speaker A

on. Thank you so much for having me, Jack. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much.

Speaker A

Thanks. I appreciate.

Topics:powerinfluenceRobert GreeneJack Neelthe sublimedeathnear-death experiencemental healthcreativityreality perception

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