“This Is The Most Important Subject I’ve Ever Covered” - Robert Greene: transcript

People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that. Me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left and you can get yours now at chriswillson.live. This is a customuilt live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over a year working on it. So, if you're a fan of everything Modern Wisdom, come and see me on stage this October around the UK and Ireland. Chris Williamson.Live. This has taken you 20 years to do this book. [laughter] >> Wow. That would be a long time. I would be beat Robert Carol.

>> Uh, no, seven years. >> Seven. >> So, so back in like 2000, I read a book on the sublime and I got really excited. I thought this is this is really interesting, but I knew there was no market for it. It was kind of a weird book. >> And I intended after the war book, this was going to be my next book with Sublime. I was going to shock my readers. Was something totally unexpected. I hired a researcher. I started doing it. And then 50 Cent trotted along and said, "Let's do a book together." And so I pushed Sublime aside. I made the 10th chapter of the 50th 50 Cent book about the Sublime about how he nearly died from the gunshot wounds and you know his near-death experience. And then I from 50 Cent book there was a chapter about mastery. So I turned that into the book mastery and then I don't know human nature was anyway I just got totally sidelined and then you know I had my quote unquote near-death experience

and suddenly you know God was telling me this is the time you need to write a book on the sublime no more putting it off because it was a it was a sublime experience to come that close to dying you know >> a lot of your work is focused on power seduction manipulation human nature. >> Why get interested in writing about the sublime at all? >> Well, um, a lot of what happens with humans and what goes wrong with them is on a deep psychological level and level of consciousness. So, the first three books are kind of the social game, the surface game that we all play, right?

because we're a social animal and nobody really instructs us. Even though we're a social animal, nobody even teaches us how to be social and we make all these mistakes and we suffer. So, that book came out of my experiences in Hollywood and all the suffering I had and all the 50 different jobs with the psychotic bosses that I had and all that. All right. Um, but there's something deeper going on with human. It's something more than just the social game. It's how we experience life itself and how we relate to the world around us. And I'm just noticing a kind of deadness in people's experience, a kind of flatness, >> like everything has been flattened out by social media in a way, you know, and people aren't experiencing anything on a deep level. And there's nothing surprising anymore, you know. I I look at my Instagram feed, it's interesting, and I see cat videos and they're great.

And and the first time I see it, it's wow, that cat's doing incredible things. And the second, the third time, it's all the same. It really there's differences, don't get me wrong, but in the end, it's all programmed. It's all algorithms. It's all the same. >> And I think people are suffering, suffering deeply from it. I was taking a bike ride the other day in Griffith Park. I just had this epiphany that I'm living in a mad house. Everyone's going insane and I'm I'm going insane as well.

And why is that? Why do people feel so cramped and so restless and turning to all these different things and our politics and and technology? Everything is just going haywire. I feel like there's something deep deeper happening deep in our consciousness and a kind of disconnect from what it means to be alive. you know, when you come close to dying, you know what it really means to be alive. And so, I don't know if I'm being too grandiose, but I'm really want to help people in their suffering and give them a road map for how you could possibly experience life on a deeper level. It has nothing to do with manipulation, has nothing to do with power or seducing. It's on a deeper psychological level that I'm trying to to reach you. It feels like you're talking about life having the color stripped away from it in some ways, but the uh the amplitude of the waveform is just being compressed down and everything's

little wobbles. Nothing's that great and nothing's that that deeply felt. Yeah, that that's a good way of putting it. I mean, the way I look at it is we all went through childhood, right? And we all had it's a universal experience seeing the world for the first time. Everybody went through that. Everybody had to go through learning language and discovering that you had a eye that you were different from other people that you had discovering who your parents were. And in your childhood experience, even if you had a bad parents, even if it was abusive childhood, your eyes were opening. Everything looks strange and weird and different and unfamiliar. Now, that's shifting a little bit as adults are trying to introduce children into adulthood too early with technology, but it's still even then it's still you're looking at things for the first time and everything is exciting. And I read a book about the infant's brain and how

how different it is from our adult brain >> because the adult brain works by inhibiting by filtering everything down so you don't get too much information, right? So you can survive so you can walk through the streets and think about what you're doing tomorrow and plan and not get hit by a car and all these other things. It's inhibiting all the all your sensory information. The baby, the 2-year-old, the three-year-old has no inhibition. Everything is interesting.

Everything is exciting. Okay? And then slowly you reach a point as you get older and older and older that that that disappears from your experience. Everything looks familiar. Things don't seem strange to you. Things don't seem unfamiliar. You don't look up at the night sky and go, "Wow, stars. Wow, infinity. Wow, how weird. How interesting." Right? I remember I was a kid driving with my family on these road trips that were so boring. You know, I was going nuts with my sister next to me and I would look out the window and I would imagine all these things going on like I was imagining Indians on the hills and what they were doing and animals and stuff that our imaginations were so vivid. Everything was intense >> and then you lose it slowly. you lose it and you're in your 20s and your 30s and you're not really aware of it but you feel something missing in your life because you once knew this intensity

that you have lost right that's how I that's how I try to describe it >> yeah I I definitely resonate with the awe wonder sense of presence and excitement sort of feeling like it's being stripped a little bit and I it seems to me like you're saying the fact that we have a to-do list and responsibilities and the necessity to plan for the future. That executive function strips some of the fundamental relating between our brain and reality that we need in order to be able to experience the sublime. Is that right?

Like why why is it that we don't just naturally access this all the time? Why does our brain need to filter reality? >> Because um because there's too much information, right? And you have to you have to plan and you have to sk you have to have your life and that we're all so busy and there are so many things coming at us that if we were paying attention to everything like the baby does the child does we wouldn't be able to function in our day-to-day life. So the brain has to filter for us and the Aldos Huxley he calls it the small mind and the big mind and our minds get smaller and smaller and smaller as we focus on the things that we need to survive. I know it myself. I'll be meditating and constantly these thoughts coming up about what am I going to do in an hour.

What's going to happen? What I need to I didn't do this phone call. I didn't return this email. My mind is just doing it naturally. I can't help it. Right? The mind is trying to filter things down so you can survive, so you can get by. So you can schedule and plan your life. But it goes too far. It takes over our life. >> Everything becomes about survival. Everything becomes about getting by. And so you're missing. So now I I'm not saying this the sublime has to be part of your continual experience, right?

That you wouldn't be able to do your job. You wouldn't be able to get to work. It'd be too much. You have to have this filtering mechanism going on. But I look at people I I I ride my bike up into Griffith Park up into these hills that are pretty high up. >> There's no cars. It's incredibly beautiful, right? Peaceful. These people are like this. They're walking like this with their earphones on like, "God damn it, what the going on here, right?" You don't have to be living your life like that. When you're out in nature, you can put your phone away. You can start experiencing what life is.

When you're interacting with people, you don't have to be like this. You can try and get into their world, what their thoughts are, what what their life is like. When you're interacting with your pets, you can sort imagine like biology and evolution and the strange consciousness that your dog has or your cat has. You can be experiencing these things all of the time and it doesn't interrupt your ability to to get by in this world. >> Yeah. I I think a lot of the time people assume that the human brain is just built for survival and reproduction. Is it your suggestion that people in the past with fewer distractions and less need for executive function would have experienced life in a marketkedly different way?

>> Well, it's not because we're aware of our our death. We're aware of our mortality. And even if you don't think about it, it's in the back of your mind all the time. you're continually it's it's there that you're you're going to die some point and you see your your parents die, you see friends die, etc. And so the sense of our mortality weighs on us very much. And why spend 20 years building up modern wisdom and doing all of this work and working like a dog when you're going to die? What's the point? It's meaningless, right? Why go through all that effort? Why not just go out and enjoy yourself, Chris? Right?

So the sense of death puts poses a question on us. Why are we alive? What is the point of this? And our ancestors thousands of years ago were very much much more aware of death than we are now. Like death is is is hidden from us. We never see it. We don't see the animals that are killed for our food. People die in hospitals far away. We never we can go through our entire life and never see somebody who dies, right? But our ancestors, it was there before them. Most children died in childbirth. Mothers died in childbirth constantly, right? It was all the smell, the feel of death was all around.

>> And so >> what there must be some other reason must be some point to our existence. There must be something greater. And so the need for knowing about our mortality is what is greater than my individual existence that I can attach myself to and not feel so small and helpless and vulnerable that my death has no meaning. Okay. Well, I could connect myself to the cosmos, to the stars, to spirits, to gods. And I have a story in this in my book where these people go into a cave, these uh cave explorers in France in the 1990s and they come upon these cave paintings from the early Paleolithic period 37,000 years ago. The most insanely beautiful paintings you've ever seen. You can watch a documentary by Verer Herzog about that and you can see it for yourself. It's called the cave of forgotten dreams. this the Chauveet cave

in south of France and there are all these ritual these remnants of all these rituals that they're practicing etc. So 37,000 years ago they were trying to this was had nothing to do with survival. Being in these caves was dangerous. There were bears. It was dark. It to them represented like hell or like the underworld. There was no survival reason to go into caves and have these perform have shamans perform these dances, these rituals, these cave paintings. They were searching for something else. And so humans naturally are searching for something else besides the day-to-day existence that they go through. If you try to repress it, it will come out in other ways. And I talk about that in the book. You'll go through the false sublime. You'll try to get it through drugs. You try to get it through action movies, through Marvel movies. You try to get it through online porn, through addictions, through all sorts of through

drugs, etc. You know, stimulants. If you're not searching for it in this real way, something happens to the human spirit and you search for it in all these other counterproductive ways. If that makes any sense to you. >> Yeah. What do you mean when you talk about the sublime? Come to define that for me. >> Well, you're you're not aware of it, but you live within these limits. Your mind is li is is limited. So your culture that you live in patterns your thinking and you're not aware of that. What we think of as reality in 21st century America is not what ancient Egyptians thought was reality. So your culture that you live in ours is a technological culture. In 400 years it'll be something else. Our culture conditions what we think of and what we take. Whoa. Sorry.

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

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

things not as visual things but as little pixelated thoughts. At first the sensations are exciting. It's like I'm free from the restrictions of my brain and now I'm part of everything I see. >> It's like a mystical experience. She nearly dies. She somehow saves herself because she can't figure out how to even make a phone call. She somehow gets survives. She survives, but she's like a an infant in a woman's body. Now, when she comes out, she has no language. She can't speak. She can't understand what anybody's saying. And slowly, it takes her 8 years and she recovers her her cognitive abilities.

And she's depressed. She's going, "When I suffered my stroke and it shut down all those filtering mechanisms, I felt like I was in heaven. And I felt like it was the most blissful thing. And now I can think, I can write, I'm cog I have cognitive powers, but my life is hell. And she wants to go back to where she was during her stroke. And so she wrote a book about that called My Stroke of Insight about how she found her ways somehow logically as a as a scientist back to those sensations she had during her stroke. So my point is by a huge tangent, your culture is limiting your experience. Your brain is limiting your experience. Your brain is constructing what you think is real. But it is not real. It is like a red pill. You think it's real. What all this is? This is not what a bat's reality is. It's not what a fly's reality. It's not what a dog's reality is. Ours is no different. We think it's the only reality, but it's

not. The sublime are experiences that take you outside these limits. This take you outside this circle that we live in. You're experiencing what what alien like what animals are experiencing. You're experiencing what the cosmos it actually is like to be connected to something universal to have actually be part of the big bang because your body was formed the same components that came from the big bang. It's getting outside that circle and exposing yourself to things that the brain doesn't normally allow you to experience. And when you touch, so let's say that the sublime is like a doorway outside these cultural and brain limits.

And when you look at that doorway and you touch and you look through it, it's like a shock. It's like a shutter. Wow. You know, things are really weird. Things are strange. Life is amazing. And it changes you. like my my death experience changed me. There's no going back once I now had this blast of of death feeling inside my body. There's no going back. When you experience that, mountain climbers talk about this all the time because mountain climbers are continually experienced the sublime and I have several stories in there of people like that. But the supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back. Which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentos.

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beused at the fact that we're alive and how unlikely it is? Uh that was like one of the chapters I wrote in there and I said I I break it down this way. If you look at your body and what your body does, you don't have to think about breathing. You don't have to think about your heartbeat. If you have a a a scratch or a wound, your body heals itself. that has these antibodies. It's insane what the body can do. And when you're threatened with a life, like something's about to kill you or something or there's a tiger right in front of you, the body produces these hormones that save your life. If you're a long-distance runner, you get all this dopamine and all these other effects that help you keep running, running, and running.

The what the body can do is absolutely incredible, right? Where does this come from? Where does the brain come from? Where does consciousness come from? It's part of a evolution that goes back millions and millions and millions of years. And if you start thinking about this story about how you have your brain is actually part of has a reptilian part to it. There's a lizard brain inside you right now and that there's layers to your experience that go back millions and millions of years. You go back to how life almost never formed on planet Earth, right? And it almost formed with creatures that look different, totally different from ourselves. The main uh body form of all animals and all creatures is a a body and a head and limbs.

Back in the Cambrian explosion 600 million years ago, there were 10 different other body types that nearly took over. And they have pictures of them. They're the strangest. >> What like? >> Huh? >> What? Like, >> you can look it up, >> right? >> Opabinia, hallucinate. I I I write them down in the book. If you look at them, you go, my god, they're like something out of a nightmare, >> right? And it was just by an accident that our body type became the predominant one. And so all these little little bottlenecks in evolution could have occurred where we would nothing would be what we think what what looks like today. Then if the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct because of an asteroid hitting our planets 68 million years ago, dinosaurs would still be walking the earth and we wouldn't be here. Mhm.

>> If you think about this, if you think about how life will originate, if you think about the big bang and everything that happened, you can't take anything for granted. You can't take anything for granted, right? It's just an amazing story. I once manually, this is before AI, when I gave a TEDex talk, I had to try and reverse engineer what the likelihood was of you being alive. your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents all the way back for as long as you can.

>> And that's before you even factor in how many sperm there are. And that if only it had been, without getting too graphic, if it was the next pump and not that pump when your great-grandparents were having sex, it's a different kid. >> Yeah. Different gender, different everything. If you've got performance anxiety as a guy and you're trying to get your misses pregnant, one of the things to not think about is that each different microscond of how you finish will probably result in a different kid coming out. That's probably quite a reliable way I think of making [laughter] you feel a little bit uncomfortable about about what's going on. But yeah, it's it's unbelievably tenuous. And I guess it makes sense in one way because you think, well, if we were looking around just at wonder at all, like the the lady who was having the stroke, like me and the shower, the water from the shower head, we're one.

The separation that I have perceived is is a mere figment of the way that my brain constructs the world, but we are the same. Can you have a job? Can you drive through traffic whilst feeling like that? Maybe not. >> Yes, you can. Yes, you can. I mean, she's a functioning neuroscientist who writes books, who gives TED talks. She's world famous. She has a beautiful life. She lives on a housebo. She does swims on the in this lake. She gets lots of things done. She has a speaking engagements.

>> Why not? >> Is she still feeling that now? Has she managed to reaccess? >> Yeah. I mean, I talked to her for this book like four or five years ago, unless it's changed in the last four or five years, which I doubt. >> Yes, you can. you can go on functioning. So, you go through your life and and you you're functioning and you're getting things done and you're working and you're going through your schedule and you're and you're progressing in your career, right? But something is missing. Something is missing from your experience. You could go through your entire life like that and by the time and then you're going to die and you reach the point of death when you're in your 70s or whatever and it's a terrifying experience like because you've not prepared for it. You've not thought about anything. You've been sleepwalking through your entire life.

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

There's a lot of science in there. And so when you understand the science behind the formation of life on planet earth and you understand how multisellular organisms occurred by accident some 3 4 billion years ago, right? And how this body form how the Cambrian explosion created life as we know it with brains and senses and and a nervous system. If you know the science about how dinosaurs are the world looks different to you, right? But it's not like you're thinking about it all the time. It just means you don't take everything for granted, >> right?

Like I was talking to Ryan yesterday about this and how Marcus Aurelius has this quote about a glass of wine and he's talking about you know 200 AD or whatever and you drink your wine you're not aware that there were these purple grapes that grew that took this their time to grow and then ferment and then people pressed it then they created it and they did all this work. You don't see or feel the work that goes into everything. So, you're walking around, you don't know why they're glass buildings. You don't know anything about the food you eat. You're just walking around in a trance. You're not connecting to anything material.

Your senses are dead, I'm afraid. And this is about opening your senses. It doesn't make life impossible. It makes life that much richer. And you can still go on do your work. I wrote a book that's that's 450 pages after a stroke after I can experience the sublime. I got plenty of things done. I get a lot of things done every day. >> Right. >> Yeah. How does the ego work against us accessing the sublime? >> Well, so you're you're kind of trapped in your in in yourself, in your ego, in your own thoughts. And your thoughts kind of revolve around what are people thinking about me? Why did my parents do this to me? Why am I so angry? You feel envy.

You feel resentment. You have all these grievances. You feel excitement. You have hope and all these other things going on. But you're inside your mind all of the time, right? You're inside your own world. And you're not connecting to anything else outside of it. And so sometimes, you know, look, I think you can't deny the fact that a lot of people are very miserable right now and unhappy. One out of six Americans is on some kind of drug to deal with depression, right? Pretty high number.

And a lot of people are experiencing that are not taking these drugs, right? Something is missing in their life. And if you're So what do you do? Well, maybe I need to have therapy, right? Maybe I go talk to a therapist about or I talk to my spouse about my problems. And as you talk and talk and talk, you get further and further into yourself. You become the center of everything. That's all you think about. My childhood, who who who bothered me, who oppressed me, why didn't I get what I want? Why isn't the world more fair? You're locked inside your ego and it's like a prison.

And the sublime is taking you outside of your ego, taking you outside of that. And so I have a story in the book of a man, a therapist in Buenos, Aries, and he has a patient named Miguel. And Miguel has a wonderful life. He's got a great job. He makes a lot of money. He's got a beautiful house. He's got a gorgeous wife. He's got three kids. He has everything that you could want in life. But something is missing. and he's talking to the therapist. They talk and they talk and they talk and finally the therapist has had enough of it. We're not getting anywhere. Here's what I'm going to do. We're going to go climb the highest mountain in the southern hemisphere, Mount Akonagua in in uh Argentina in the a in the Andes, right?

The highest mountain in in in the southern hemisphere. We're going to train for 6 weeks to climb it because it's very arduous climb. And then we're going to do it. And and I'm not going to tell you why. just no more talking therapy. Just shut the up. We're just going to train and we're going to climb this mountain, right? They train. They start climbing the mountain and the, you know, the sight of the stars as you're climbing higher and higher. It's a it's a high desert mountain. It's spectacularly beautiful. And the snow and everything, it's just an insane experience. It's a cosmic experience.

They don't get to the top because it's there's storms and it gets very dangerous. They finally retreat. But the man is transformed by this experience more than all of the talking because he was taken outside of himself and he was exposed to something much greater. So he got out of his small little ego world with his wife and his problems and why he's miserable. >> How can you be miserable when you're ex you're seeing what the world that we live in, right? And so your ego is the actual impediment to experiencing the sublime. And this is a way of kind of getting outside of that. In in Zen Buddhism, they talk about ego attrition.

>> That means thinning the ego. And as the as the ego because it has a thickness to it. And as you get older, that your ego gets thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker and you have no control over that because you become more self-absorbed. Through zen, through meditation, you're you're getting that ego thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner to the point where it disappears, which most people don't ever experience. Only a few Zen masters experience. But as it gets thinner, the world feels and looks different to you, right? Ego attrition.

And so you can thin your ego at any age. And you can get and it opens your mind up to something else than all of your all of your petty concerns. And they are petty in the end. What is the role of the Damon? Because that at least as far as I can see is also residing inside of you to a degree but doesn't seem to be working against you connecting with the world or yourself. Seems to be working toward it. [gasps] Well, what I've tried to do is that the damon is an ancient concept, but it's in almost all ancient cultures. And the idea is you have a second self inside of you. And it's an interesting thought. So when I read about that, I'm going a second self. What is that second self?

Right? The first self is the one you take for being who you are. It's your social self. It's what people have told you who you are. I'm shy. I'm an introvert. I'm an extrovert. I'm dramatic. I'm a arrogant. I'm aggressive. You know, people define who you are as you get older. Right? Your parents define who you are. uh your teachers define who you are. You no longer you no longer are connected to who you actually are. You become a reflection of this social world that you live in and that's the self that you take for being who you are. But it's not it's false. It's fake. It's a creation.

It's a social creation, right? But at the same time, there's something very real inside of you. You have your you have your heartbeat. You have your particular moods. You have a temperament that's different from anybody else. and you can't verbalize it. Why am I attracted to this food? Why does this kind of woman always excite me and this other one doesn't? Why do I love this certain kind of books? What ex these weird things that excite me that I can't put into words have nothing to do with the social realm, right? There's something deep deep inside of you. And in the ancient world, they call that a damon or a second self. Al ancient cultures had other words for it. The ancient Egyptians had a different word for ka. I talk about another uh African culture that had a different word for it.

Sunsum. But the idea is that when you're born, there's there's something about you that's unique that's different from anybody else. It's what also is called your soul. And the don is like a voice inside of you that is who you really are. And when you start doing things in life that have nothing to do with what you love or what you like, the dame speaks to you and says that's not you're going in the wrong direction. Something is bad. You need to follow who you really are.

>> And if you listen to that voice like Socrates did or like a lot of artists do or people who are truly creative, they hear that voice even when they're in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. I hear it all the time. >> Something isn't right. Something doesn't fit. It doesn't fit my physiology. It's not who I am. When you connect to that voice, when you connect to that demon, wow, it's very powerful, right? And it it it is sublime because it's connecting you to who you were at the moment of your birth.

At the moment of your birth, you were something different about there was unique. You were born, which is a strange thing to be born into, thrown into this world. It's connecting you to the very first days of your life when the gods put a dayon inside of you. Okay, I know that's not the words we want to hear right now, but that's how the the legend is, right? And so what's sublime about that is that you have another self to you that is truly more authentic than the social self. And to explore it and to go into it is a very exciting and liberating feeling. You know, it's discovering something very primal about yourself that has nothing to do with what other people think about you. A quick aside, if you've wanted an eight sleep but can never quite justify the price, things just got very interesting. They've somehow managed to make it significantly better and cheaper at the same time. Introducing the brand new Pod 6. It's now 50% smaller, meaning it fits under most bed frames. And there

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Have you ever read his dark materials by Philip Pullman? Who? Philip Pullman. It's this kids book series called His Dark Materials. It had the subtle knife in it, the golden compass. Oh. Uh, so it's it must be 30 years old. The first book must be at least 30 years old now cuz I was listening to it when I was 11, 12, 13, and it had been around for a while. I remember I used to go to the library in Norton in the northeast of England with my mom and I would get the story tapes and this is a big book. So I'd be coming back with a stack of tapes like that, borrowing them from the library for two weeks and we'd have to take them back before else we'd have to pay a fine one or something.

And it's one of my favorite book series. And I actually read it, listened to it, I guess, in the wrong order. So I listened to The Subtle Knife first, which is the second book. And uh it kind of makes sense. The third one makes no sense at all. So you have to listen read the first two. Anyway, uh in this world, the children are born with demons, and the demons take the form of >> Does he use that word? >> Yes. >> Fantastic. I have to look this up. >> It's It's wonderful. And they take the form of an animal, like a little animals. to represent animals that are around. And when the uh kids are still children, the animals can change. They can cycle through. They can be a bird and fly ahead and go and do stuff or they can come back and and be a dog and and pet them or they can be a wolf and scare people.

>> Wow. >> But when children hit puberty, the Damon settles into a final form and it never changes again for the rest of life. And there's these themes of sort of Adam and Eve. There's a male and female protagonist, and they're both quite young, and they fall in love. And as they fall in love, they hit puberty. And as they do that, all of this stuff happens in the universe. And >> these two uh demons, these senses of self that were malleable, that were open, they're concretized, and they're locked in for the remainder of their lives. And this is what happens across across the universe. And it's so many of the themes from that series by Pullman and what you're talking about here.

There's you're young, you're innocent, everything is open, there's a kind of malleability, there's a flow that you have. And then over time, this rigidity comes in and things begin to look a little bit more sort of >> not stale, but rigid and and and structured and procedural in a way. And and why is that the case? And you have to sort of listen to this voice. And a lot of the time the animal sits on the shoulder of the person and it's sort of whispering whispering in their ear telling them what it is that they think they should do. >> It's cool. >> I'm totally I'm totally enchanted by this. This is fantastic.

>> Beautiful series, >> but it's also sounds kind of dark and depressing in a way because you you're giving children this idea that they're going to that this wonderful world is going to end and it's going to be concretized. It's going to become this rigid single form. >> Yeah. To some degree. Uh, I think capacities are unlocked when that happens though and a lot of the children want they're excited to see what form their animal will take. And I think this is maybe to do with um where are your values going to come from? Like who are you going to be? Cuz when you're a kid, like who are you? You're kind of a fireman one day and a postman the next day, an astronaut the day after that.

You're not a person yet. So yes, you have all of the advantages of being open and freely formed and flowing through the world. Oh my god. Look, I'm imagining the Indians playing in the trees over far side, >> but also like you're not a thing yet. You don't really have what do you stand for? Like you ask a kid what their core values are. Like what do you mean? >> Um but as an adult, you all right, there's going to be a degree of structure that I have and in some ways that gives me something to push off against when the world starts to push into me. >> Right. Right. >> Uh so I think there's I can see how it would be both sort of beauty and and challenge. I guess thinking about the Damon, Plato brought this up.

>> Yes. And then he was killed. >> Carl Young Socrates, sorry. Plato brought this up, but he was pushed back against at least I think for for using that as an analogy. Carl Young brought it up. >> Yeah. >> And then he went insane a little bit. >> Carl Young touched the edges of of sanity a couple of times. Would you not say? uh he had mystical experiences when he was in his like 30s and then he had a near-death experience which I t write about in his 40s >> and then he went you know if you consider going into into ancient cultures and his whole world that he creates in his booksim insanity maybe but he was a very high functioning psychoanalyst >> I would that's that's fair my my point being here I think that um a lot of people who go into the world of the Damon.

>> Yeah, >> it seems to be an arc. It seems to be quite a common arc for someone that is specifically interested in investigating human nature, psychology, [snorts] history, philosophy, that world. Why is that going from ignorance to knowledge to something deeper, something more transcendent? Is that do you think a a typical arc that a lot of uh thinkers go through? Well, uh, I use for one of the archetypes of the Don the story of Friedrich Nichzche. And if anybody went insane, he went insane. [laughter] So that fits what you were saying more than Carl Young.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> And the story of Nietze was he he's the son of a pastor who's extremely religious who plays the organ in church. And as a boy, Nichze is extremely religious. He loves his father. He's going to follow in his father's footstep. and his father dies of some neurological disorder and he his father kind of goes insane [snorts] >> and then his brother who's very young dies of the same disease. He's got some kind of neurological mishap going in on in his family and it's going to hit him at some point.

>> So he's going to study really hard. He's going to be a Greek scholar. He's going to become a biblical scholar. He's going to become a pastor. He plays the piano. He'll play in the church organ. But he's restless and something isn't right. And the little Don is speaking inside of his ear and saying, "There's something else to you." And he's attracted to poets who kind of went insane. And and and his teachers say, "Don't listen. Don't look at that poet that's going to infect you." And then he becomes a professor at the university. He's established. His mother and his sister think he's on to a great career. He's got that kind of rigid the thing that you talk about, the animal has transformed into something rigid. He's a professor now. He becomes friends with the most famous composer at the time, Ricard Vagner, and everything is looks great, you know, but then that little Don, that little animal in him is saying, "That's not you. That's not you, Friedri. That's not you."

>> And he quits his job and he quits the composer and he turns against everything and he just wanders through Italy and he's trying to find out who he is and he discovers that weather has an important part of him. So the weather >> climate >> climate >> this is like one of the most interesting things about this man. So Germany has this climate this coldness this dampness the sun doesn't shine and it's made him who he is. So he goes to Italy and he sees this bright intense light and these weird kind of storms and he realized that's who I am. I'm this is the climate that suits me. This is the geography that suits me. I become like an Italian and I change myself and books explode out of him. He's suddenly who he who he was meant to be. The some of the greatest most inspired books anyone has ever read. I know I read him when I was 18 and it changed my life. He's the most probably the writer that had the biggest

influence on me. And then he went mad. He literally broke one down one day as he's walking in Italy and he sees somebody beating a horse and he grabs the horse and he he feels so horrible. He identifies with the horse and then he collapses and he's insane for 10 last 10 years of his life. He's a madman basically. >> So the Don taken too far can be a little bit dangerous like that. You know, he went a little bit too far. But it's not just thinkers and philosophers and weirdos. I have a story in there about an actress who had a dayon, Ingred Bergman, the famous Swedish actress, and how she knew from an early child that she was she loved to act, she loved to perform. And people kept trying to change her, people kept trying to push her off that course. and she just was so strong and she just pushed back and she

became who she was and finally she uh she gets this reputation as being this perfect woman who's got a great husband who's beautiful and she just she leaves it all to go have an affair with an Italian director and now she's like this and everybody hates her and she's vilified >> but it's who she actually is. She actually never was this kind of perfect creature. So it's not just philosophers.

It can affect anybody. It's like something buried deep within you. And your question is does it lead to something like transcendent? I believe it does because why are you unique? Why was it why were you drawn to those stories when you were four? How old were you when you were reading them? >> 13. >> Oh, 13. You were older. >> Yeah. Y >> why were you so drawn to those stories? What is it about you that makes you like that?

>> I mean other children may be interested, but you were just drawn to it in some very powerful way. >> Maybe you you intuited back then that you were going to become something like who you are now, somebody very unique with your own podcast, your own style. You know, you I think I don't remember what you were doing before you did this. >> Running nightclubs. >> Running nightclubs, right? You weren't you. That was that isn't who you are. That isn't that animal that was on your shoulder that was changing shapes. It's like this, right? And now you get to be yourself, right? Who is that self?

You were born and something different about you. Your neurology, the way your brain is wired, how your body functions is different. Why is it different? What's the point? What's the purpose? The purpose was for you to be creating this podcast, modern wisdom, and teaching people and getting them outside of their narrow little worlds. Right? So, it does have a transcendent function in that it connects you with something greater than yourself. How does someone recognize the difference between the Damon speaking their truth forward, the logos being projected and impulsivity, short- termism, their more base instincts, their coping mechanisms, the paths of least resistance, their fears masquerading as wisdom but actually just being uh compensation coming up inside of them.

I can imagine in one world a person could convince themselves that this is actually their inner truth but is much closer to something like yeah impulsivity. >> Well I mean uh you people will ask well Hitler Hitler had a don right but I I make the point in there that in the Greek trai ancient um myth the don was planted inside of you by aeros the god of love. And so if what you use the dayon for has that element of love and excitement and something personal, then you have your soul, then you realize your damon. But if that is not connected to anything having to do with love, the demon turns into the demonic, the demonic.

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

>> You're going to smoke a pipe. >> It's a an e-pipe. When I feel like I'm pontificating and getting really close to something that's a a great highuting idea, I like to sit here and do this. >> Oh, please. >> So, my father smoked a Oh, is it actually have something in it? >> Yeah, >> it's vaping. >> Yeah. >> My father smoked a pipe and uh it has very deep memories for me. >> Okay. >> Like the smell of tobacco and the look of a pipe. I just >> I think this one is what? Peach and mango or something. It maybe a slightly different smell to the one that your father was smoking. Baron patriot.

>> Yeah, he was doing hardcore tobacco. It's what it's ended up killing him. But uh >> what a shame. Well, I'm sure this will kill me, too. >> No, it won't. No. Anyway, um >> so you're hearing the you're hearing things about you. This is what I want. This is what I love. But it's not you. It's the voices of of the culture. It's the voices of friends. It's the voices of peers. And so I talk in there how you can differentiate those kind of ancillary voices that are constantly playing in your mind of what you think you like, the movies you want to go see, the clothes you want to wear, the the women or men you want to date, on and on and on. It's not who you are.

It's a reflection of what other people other people's tastes. But your voice has a different feel to it, right? It's a different kind of excitement, right? So the things that you don't like, there are things that you hate but you do anyway, >> right? That's what life is about. A lot of social life is about, right? You have to do things that you don't really want to do, >> but you do them anyway. >> When you hear that day one, it tells you, "Fuck all that I just want to be myself. I don't want to go to that party. I don't want to have to cow town to this person. I don't want to have to do this horrible job as a as a club, whatever you were doing, right? It's an angry voice. It's a rebellious voice.

It's that childhood impedence. It's an impedent voice saying, "Fuck all that. Sorry, I don't know if I'm >> um >> I don't want It's not for me. It's not who I am." >> That's real. >> That is definitely real. Mhm. >> I mean, it could there's I'm sure yes, you could say other people are telling you you need to rebel and do this, that, and the other, but it has a different feel to it when other people pe when it's the voice of other people as opposed to you. It's like waking up.

It's like becoming who you were meant to become, right? M >> and so when you feel an excitement about something that you cannot explain like why am I Robert Green so excited by ancient cultures why am I so if I read a story about Neanderthalss who wow Neanderthalss are related to us they're very similar to us at the same brains but they were evolving a different kind of language a different kind of culture they had a different relationship to death. They had different rituals and they it's almost in by accident that homo sapiens survived and Neanderthalss didn't because we nearly went extinct. What would the world be like if So anyway, reading about Neanderthalss, I can't explain why it gets me so excited about our ancient ancient ancestors when it happens. I know that that is me. That's not somebody telling me to be interested in that because I've

been interested since I was 8 years old, 5 years old, you know, kind of thing. >> In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy, while some feel infinitely harder? >> Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store. >> Aren't you younger than me? >> Yeah, but my dad got a DUI. >> Anyway, the reality is most businesses just get the website wrong. And if your setup is messy, you lose a ton of sales, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Shopify. They power 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including brands like Gym Shark, Skiims, Aloe, and Mutonic. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best-in-class. Their checkout's 36% better on average compared to other platforms. And with Shop Pay, you can boost conversions by 50%. So upgrade your business and get the exact same checkout that we use at Newtonic with Shopify. You can sign up for a free trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com/modernwisdom.

That's shopify.com/modernwisdom. I spoke to David Dada, you know, way of the superior man author. So, uh, illustrious longtime author and I I did his first podcast interview in over a decade, I think, a few months ago. And I did a bit of research. I didn't know much about him before I sat down with him. and he just had this crazy, as far as I could see, illogical career.

Very illustrious, but totally illogical. He starts off in the 80s doing AI and computer science. Writes a ton of papers. >> What's his name again? >> David Da. >> Uh, writes a ton of papers. Data. Di. >> Okay. >> Data. Uh, Way of the Superior Man is a very, very, very popular book. um from about 30 years ago, 20 years ago. Uh anyway, he starts off computer science AI and then he decides he is going to leave that and he pivots into writing for a while. Then he goes into uh tantra and um reworking emotions through sex, right?

>> Then he moves into yoga for a long time. Then he gets into masculinity and men. Then he goes back into doing hard he does hardcore ma he does a decade of hardcore mathematics like pure mathematics. Wow. >> Then he gets back into some AI stuff. And I asked him on the episode this to me just feels like a kind of quite unwieldy meandering trajectory. Can you explain to me how you tie all of these threads together?

He said I have a very strong sense when something is no longer for me. >> Yeah. And so, okay, well, that's interesting, but a lot of people have that. And and it seems like you have just continually pulled the ejector seat button and fired yourself out the top of whatever aircraft you're in over and over again >> without fear that, well, I'm near the top of my industry in this one domain. Maybe if I leave it behind, I'm not going to be as good in the next one. I'm not going to be as respected. I'm going to do make a decision I regret in future.

Yes, it's interesting that you've followed your own instinct and you've been interested in stuff, but what's more interesting to me is the decisiveness and the conviction that you've got about it. Like that's what's rare, right? Not the meandering interests. Curious people are curious about lots of things. >> And he said something like, "When I'm out of alignment, the pain of no longer following what I know that I should be doing is so much greater than the fear of anything else." >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that just stuck with me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It really really stuck with me that he is >> I said it sounds like bravery, but the way that he frames it from the inside is a kind of fragility. His fragility is against being out of alignment with himself. It's like it is so painful like nails on a chalkboard at thousand dibels that I can't escape from. And if that feel for him, he says I can last about 5 days

and then I just need to change and do something else. >> Yeah. Well, I I believe that a lot of people would be going through something similar, but they're afraid. They're afraid that if they make such a radical shift, they'll look insane to people. They won't be able to make a living. You know, money becomes the primary interest. >> And I'm not as interesting as as this gentleman because it sounds fantastic. I I'd love to meet him. >> I'll send you the episode. >> Okay. No, but I'd also like to meet him. Where does he live?

>> Uh he's in Florida. He's very very reclusive. Interestingly enough, we had to do the episode. He wouldn't turn his video on. He wanted to just remain. He's like, "Chris, I'm going to do this. It's the first first episode I've done in 10 years, but you're only going to get my voice." So, we had to AI some beautiful landscape that was sort of an imaginary hymn. And we we put words over the title. So, for a full hourong episode, and people loved it. We still did. Really really people like, "Oh my god, I can't believe I get to hear David data." So, anyway, he's he's a kind of like a mysterious guy, which adds more to the kind of wow, what a nonfungeible human.

Yeah, very much so. Yeah. Well, I'm not as interesting as that, but I feel that myself. So, um, I wrote the 48 Laws of Power when I was 39 essentially, and I'd been, um, pretty much a loser up until then. Parents about to give up on me, their their son who can't seem to hold a job for more than a few months. >> I finally write this book. I get more money than I've ever seen in my entire life, right? Um, and things are looking up pretty good. And so now it's time to like write a second book. And the pressure on me is to kind of just kind of create the another version of the 48 laws of power.

>> Y >> and because it it is it's doing very well and people So I decide I mean seduction is is kind of related to it, but it's it's not what what my publishers wanted. It's not what my my partner wanted me to do. But it felt like something I it felt it connected to my soul. It connected to something deep in me because seduction has been a subject that's fascinated me since my 20s when I was a rake and I listen read a lot of books about literature of seduction and I met great seducers. So I had to write this book because it connected to me. All of my books have had that evolution where I don't repeat what was in the last book. I have to feel something very new, something very different, something very fresh. And when I don't, I have that painful feeling like this doesn't fit me. This isn't who I am.

>> And um I remember I got to do that book with 50 Cent uh which was, you know, an unusual uh opportunity to say the least. >> Yeah. >> And um the first version of the book was cancelled because it wasn't good. And uh it was also late, but I knew it wasn't good because the book was really about 50 Cent. It wasn't about me. It wasn't my taste, my interest, my desires. And I knew when I was writing it, I was uncomfortable with it. It was all about business and 50 negotiating this that and the other and what his what his empire was like. And it didn't feel comfortable me. I was I was feeling that pain that he's discussing there. And then finally the book was cancelled and I realized it was canceled because I wasn't in it. It wasn't something soulful for me. It didn't mean anything to me. And so we we pivoted and the book that became more my book,

you know, a lot of 50 in it, but there was much more of me being put into it, my way of thinking, my ideas, what excites me. Then the book took off. So every book has to feel like I'm deeply deeply engaged. like it has to be something new. And this this new book, which is probably going to shock people because they're used to me doing what is you said, books on manipulation and and psych human psychology. I had to do it even if it's even if it's an abysmal failure because my day was saying this is what you have to do. So I understand >> that sense of discomfort and pain. It doesn't fit me. It's not right. It's nails on a chalkboard. I can't do it. I just can't do it. What's your advice to people that wish they had more bravery when it comes to committing what they feel they know is true inside?

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

>> You're on then you're like it's too late, right? It's very very painful, very very painful to kind of wake up and realize that you headed in the wrong direction in life. >> And so what I tell people is particularly if you're in your 20s, you don't want that to happen to you. And so you think that money and stability is the only thing that matters, but it's not. You have to have a sense of adventure. You have to have a sense of exploring. You have to have some courage in this world to pursue something that suits you and isn't necessarily going to make you as big an income as this other career path, you know. And so you have to realize that you're going to pay a price for violating this law, for violating this need, this law of who you actually are. You're going to pay a price. And that is you're going to disengage from your work.

you're going to start having [snorts] habits and addictions and things because your body will your body tells you the truth. >> You know, I know physically I feel uncomfortable and and this man David probably would tell you the same thing. It's a physical sensation. Your body is going to rebel at some point. You're going to get illnesses. You're going to become diabetic. You're going to start gaining weight. You've disconnected from the reality of who you actually are. You will pay a price. I try and hit people in the brain with that and say, "Look, you you don't want that fate." I was talking, this is slightly related, I was talking to a man who's a basketball coach of a G-League team, uh, which is the league before you get into the NBA, very successful, and he was now offered the head coaching job of this NBA team because and he's in his 30s and he and he was expressing that fear of I have this really

comfortable job and I made all these great relationships and now I'm going to enter this world where people are everyone's going to see me, everyone's going to judge me, I can easily fail. You know, my reputation will be ruined and I won't have this chance to go back to where I was. And I told him, "Take the job. Don't look back. You're going to learn so much more. Being young and excited will be an advantage for you over all these other kind of retread coaches in the NBA. It's going to be the best thing you have. Don't be afraid.

Your fear is holding you back. Just go for it. He He did and and uh his team won the NBA championship. You >> No way. >> Yeah. Not last year, but the year before. >> Um it took him like five years to get there. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't like the next first season he they won a championship. But your fear is holding you back and your fear is making it seem like you're being reasonable, but in fact you're just afraid and you're just listening to the voices and you're just listening to your spouse or whomever who's trying to tell you to take the safe route. My wife can tell you this story. Years ago in the '9s, my mother I had cuz I told you I was a loser. I had I was jumping I couldn't hold a job for more than 5 months. I finally had a job in television in Hollywood, right?

Looked like stability finally landed on Robert's shoulders and I was I couldn't stand it. I hated it. It was like the most miserable period of my life and I was going to quit and my mother tried to convince my then girlfriend to tell Robert he's got to keep this job. I mean, what's he he's crazy. What's he doing? And um I you know I I had to ignore that completely and and and incur their disappointment and and everything else and just I quit cuz I couldn't stand it, >> you know. But I could have listened to my mother. I could have listened to voices that told me, "You're 35 years old. Time to settle down, Robert. Time to get into a job trying to get into that niche in Hollywood. Become a television writer.

And you make a good income. And yeah, I'll make a good income, but I'll kill myself in 10 years. [laughter] [gasps] >> All right, getting back to the >> sublime. >> Sublime, please. >> What's the importance of scale? How can vastness contribute to the way that we process life? Well, uh, the idea of scale is is very important to me because, you know, animals, God bless them, they have their their interesting, strange consciousness, but they're not aware of anything outside of their immediate environment. They don't know what's happening outside what they can see or smell, right? They're not aware of here, I'm in America and what's going on in China. Okay? No animal has that. We have consciousness and we're aware of things on the other side of the planet on the what's going on in the sky with our sun

and and beyond that, right? And so when you open your eyes to that and you literally take it in, the first thought is my god am I insignificant. I am so small. Right? The universe is 13.8 8 billion years. I live maybe, if I'm lucky, 80 years. You try and and divide 13.8 billion by 80 and you go, Jesus Christ, my life is like nothing. It's like a life of a fly. It's like passes by enough time. You think of the distances and how immense things are. You are so small. You also there are 8 billion people on Earth. You're one of 8 billion people. You're you're in you're you're meaningless. You're so small. Okay, that sense of scale and being aware of how small you are and how infantessimal, how you're like just a piece of dust has two effects on you.

Number one, it's kind of, oh my god, I feel horrible. On the other hand, that's insane that I am aware of this vastness, that I am aware of time, that I am part of this incredible drama, right? that I can be aware of endless time. I can be aware of a limitless universe kind of thing. Children have that sensation. It's kind of dizzying to feel that, to be aware of it, to be aware of the vastness of things. It puts everything in perspective. It makes you realize that the little bitty concerns that you have in the moment aren't really that important in the long scheme of things.

In fact, they're incredibly unimportant. When you're a child, that smallalness is very apparent because you literally are small. You literally are weak and vulnerable. And because of that, you're curious. You want to know. Everything seems interesting and exciting and weird. And you look up at the night sky and it like it has that sense of terror and excitement which is the sublime in essence a mix of these two powerful emotions >> and that's what gives you the intensity of your experience that sense of scale of of how small you are. But then you get older and your ego takes over and you you become the center of the universe instead of you being this tiny little insignificant ant, right? and everything revolves around you and your desires and your needs and and and all that. You don't you don't want to feel vulnerable. You don't want to feel that smallalness, that weakness, that

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

And so having a sense of scale of of what's truly matters of how truly small and insignificant you are to me is a very very important part of becoming conscious of being a human being and people lose that as they get older >> and you want to return to that sense of scale. Does that make any sense? >> It does indeed. I imagine as well you you mentioned your uh ponchant for history obsession with history. All of your books have got huge historical content.

Maybe not usually as far back as Neanderthalss, but still uh I imagine that reading history can give us greater perspective, access to the sublime as well. [gasps] Yeah. I mean, um so when you're history gives you several things. First of all, you think everything is new and everything is different and exciting like AI and social media. Yeah, they didn't have AI. I I grant you that. So that's new. But we've always had kind of versions of social media. People have always been gossiping about other people. People have always been sharing information.

It's just now on a much wider level. But nothing is ever news. History runs in these cycles and you see them over and over and over again. >> [gasps] >> I just read an article in the newspaper this morning about how there's this trend in Spain where all the young people in their early 20s are rebelling against the socialist government and they're wanting to become conservative and go back to the traditional Spain that they knew and they all dress like preppies. They wear khaki pants and white shirts and start shirts and very kind of English style of like English nobility kind of thing and loafers.

Loafers with little, you know, tassels and all that stuff. >> Yeah, I can get down with that. Hey, the more English the world becomes, I'm happy with that. >> Okay. >> They're called Cayanos because the name Cayotano is a very kind of uh, you know, upper class name that you give to a boy. And so they're all getting into this and the women are getting it's like being dressing traditional and loving bull fights and going to bull fighting and not liking immigrants and trying to go back and even interest in in Franco and in the fascist period of Spain. Well, it's a reaction. Young people are continually reacting against what is is fashionable from their previous generation. Right? When I was growing up, we were react. It was the 70s and 60s and we were rebelling. We were angry, hated every all the conservative stuff going on. We wanted to be hippies. We wanted to take drugs. We were reacting. So, every generation reacts to what happened before and goes

in this new direction thinking, "God, we're so subversive. We're so new." But it's not new. It's what has happened for thousands of years. And even in ancient Babylonia, they were complaining about how the young generation, there's a tablet, one of the earliest tablets, about how young people are ignoring their elders and wanting to go off in some new direction. You read history, you realize it's a cycle. It just continually happens over and over again. It puts things in perspective.

The other thing is, you don't realize, but you're walking around in a world of ghosts. Dead people are everywhere around you. They live inside of your brain. You don't you you don't Your language that you have was created thousands of years ago. It evolved. That's where your thoughts come from. Your thoughts aren't your own. They're built out of all these little mo these little moments and language as it as it evolved, right? Your brain is structured from all this evolution and things that happened earlier on. Your consciousness was something that was built over thousands of years. your values, what you value as a human being, the fact that you feel envy, the fact that you're wary of strangers. These are all things that people felt 10,000 years ago. And so you're not you're not you think that everything is new and fresh, but you're actually it's like a necropolis, I say, that we live in. The dead are everywhere. They're all around us.

They're in our values. They're in our clothes. They're in our systems. They're in our thoughts. They're in our music. They're in everything. Everything human is structured according to certain codes that have been invented have been around for thousands of years. >> Mhm. >> History makes you aware of all the dead that are around you. They're inside of you. It makes you aware that nothing is new. It's a liberating sublime feeling to to d into history. In other news, if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swoll, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for 20 years and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions of my life and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around one obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most sciencebacked effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, and weights that you need to do everything.

So, all that you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP app could wipe your ass for you, it probably would. and it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about training, it'll do the same for you, too. Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. How do you think that helps people to access a sense of reality around what their life is consisting of right now? [gasps] Well, I mean, sometimes not everything has to be um helping you in in in in your job or your career.

Sometimes there are things that you need to incorporate in your life that have nothing to do with your day-to-day survival. And that's why for thousands of years people were interested in religion and that's what the value that religion provided people you know a sense of something transcendent of something greater than your life the sense of a collective belief system sense of ethics something greater than your individual life and people hungered for that right >> you need that in your life so being aware of history is not going to make your career fear any easier necessarily. It's not going to make you more money. It's just going to make it's going to make you more human because we are creatures of history, right?

Everything that happens, it has context, comes back, goes back decades, hundreds of years. It's all part of a a chain that is continuous. It has a context. There are reasons why we think this way. There's a reason why Donald Trump is the president now. that you could explain going back to all sorts of other things happening in America, going back to the 18th century if you want, going back to ancient times if you want. It's all part of a single chain. And when I see people who have no sense of history, who don't realize who their only reference points are things that have happened since the year 2000, I think, God, you're not really human.

>> You're not really connecting to what it means. It's not like you have to be a deep student of history, but you have to be aware that history has formed you, that history has formed your values, it has formed the world around you. So, it's not going to make you more money. It's just I think it's going to make Yeah. Do people become easy to manipulate when they've got no historical context, do you think? >> Yeah, very much so. I mean uh so everything everything is in the present you know everything you you see it's all like what social media is telling you what the algorithms are saying and it's making you angry and it's making you fascinated you you know you you you see this thing on Instagram god damn it why is he doing it and if you had any kind of context if you had any kind of distance and if you had any sense of history you would know that people been have been playing on your emotions and they've been playing on

your emotions in the 1930s, you know, with Hitler that there's a trend for for for uh demagogues and propaganda. You would have some distance from your own reactions. You would be able to see that people are manipulating you because you're not so tied into the images that are flashing before your mind here. and you would step back and you would go, maybe there's something else going on here than what I'm actually seeing.

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

there are a number of ideological gravitational wells that have sucked in and these will be the patterns that are used over and over and over again and that um history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes thing like I think history just straight up repeats a lot of the time or at least individual actors and the tactics that are used to do the rapper that's around it. I remember seeing this uh concern that was written around the time of the printing press that if people were able to read more freely, especially in the common language, that this would be the undoing of the brains, people would be so lost in in books and and in reading these words that they would become completely disconnected from the world around them.

>> Right? And I guess the odd lie that everybody tells themselves, it's almost a little bit like a Pascal's wager that Yeah, but this time it's different. >> Oh, yeah. >> Yeah, but this time it's different. For some reason, and every single time, at least in my lifetime, smartphones felt different. The internet felt different. AI absolutely feels different. >> Yes.

But you have this very long illustrious record of people saying, "Yeah, but this time it's different." over and over and over again and it not being different. >> No. So, okay. So, let's say AI is not something we've ever seen before, right? And the smartphone was something we've never really seen before, but it's based on human psychology. Humans created it. It's something we have invented. And what I talked about in the laws of human nature is human beings have a shadow, have a dark side. Everybody has a dark side. Even you, Chris Williamson, has a dark side. I'm afraid to say >> British. No dark side.

>> What? >> I'm British. No dark side. >> I used to see pass by a theater um in in in London. It said something, >> please no sex, I'm British. Or something. [laughter] What was that? >> Do you remember what that was? It was like playing Forever on the West End. Do you don't remember what it was? >> I don't know what you're referring to, but it sounds it sounds incredible. >> I'm not interested in sex. I'm British or something. >> It's none for me. Thank you. >> Yeah. [laughter] Anyway, um we repress it. We don't want to be aware of it, but it's there. It's deep inside. It's all the anger and resentment we've had to bury because we have to smile and say, "I love you. You look great. Your screenplay is wonderful. I love what your ideas, boss." We bury all this anger and resentment. It's boiling inside. We have a dark side and it explodes. Right? That is a history that goes back thousands of years. So you invent the internet, it's something new and it starts out and it's all exciting and early 2000s. Wow, I can communicate with people in China. I can

use Amazon to find people who are interested in the same music I'm in. It's fantastic. It's this like new theater. It's amazing. Then slowly by slowly it get goes down. And it gets degraded and degraded, degraded until it just becomes like junk that nobody wants anymore. It's just a platform for selling things and for manipulating people. AI, wow, it's going to create all the solutions to cancer. It's going to we're going to solve all the world's problems. We'll be able to figure out how to end global warming because of these machines. And now it's like scammers and people creating biological weapons and it's going to take over humanity. It's going to destroy us because everything human ends up falling into this dark tunnel that we are part of our nature. So criminals are going to take over AI. Who are these morons who don't realize that criminals are going to get their hands on this weapon? And how are you going to control that? And how are you going to keep people? You

know, every single day, this isn't on the level of of anything apocalyptic. Every single day I get about 12 emails from scammers saying, "Uh, Robert, I read the 48 Laws of Power is wonderful. What struck me most about it was blah blah blah blah blah. I am the curator of a reading group in Greenwich, England, and I want to help get your spread your book to my 10,000 readers. Every single day I read a variation of that and it's like AI generates it, right? And it's a scam. Obviously, they're going to ask for money. But that's what happens with these things. Scammers, criminals, people of dark minds who don't have any inhibitions, they're going to use these tools and they're going to wreak havoc with it. Right? That's what's doesn't change.

>> AI might be different, but human nature doesn't change and it they're going to pervert this. >> Has rational and scientific revolutions made it harder to access the sublime and more primal emotions as well? >> No. No, not at all. Um, science actually should be able to do the opposite. So you look at some of the most interesting scientists of the past several hundred years and um like Darwin had a very poetic nature and he had learning about evolution and how all of life was part of a single chain was a very kind of almost religious experience for him. It was intense. Albert Einstein I have many quotes in the book about Albert Einstein saying when you study physics and you study the laws of the universe it should fill you with this insane sense of awe and if it doesn't then you are as good as dead right all these other physicists

shinger Heisenberg they all had this sense that they were uncovering something weird and strange about the universe and it made them shocked and it made them excited. Jane Goodall studying uh uh primates like how insane was that? The best scientists and there many many many of them even those neuroscientists are in awe of what they're discovering. So you know you you look in the paper uh like I read the other day that they're discovering the origins of black holes.

astronomers they see these red dots on all the telescope these teles powerful telescopes and they now decided that those red dots are the earliest form of black holes and that they were formed in the beginning of the universe. Now you can look at that and just say it's a fact and okay wow black holes. Yeah. Yeah. But then you could go with your imagination and go close to the beginning of the universe. You mean like like a few million years after the universe there are these things out there that they're seeing and that scientists are able to like take these red dots and extrapolate that they're actually black holes. And then what is a black hole? It's something so powerful that gravity uh is not powerful and light can't escape it. If you take the discoveries of science and you use your imagination, they're like, it's like insane. We're uncovering what our

ancestors were up to. We're uncovering the origins of life, how life might have been invented in in in the soups of oceans 4 billion years ago. It's it's absolutely mindblowing. But people aren't thinking like that. They're not going taking that next step and having a sense of awe about it. They're just facts. >> Yeah. You know how it would be obvious to maybe draw an analogy between scientism, rationalism, and a kind of sterility.

>> Yeah. Loss of the magic of life. And I think that's the sort of link that I'm I'm sort of trying to the thread that I'm trying to pull on because yeah, the color I think for many people maybe has been drained out of life and when they were to point at it maybe if the reality is yeah dude you're distracted all the time and you scroll easily forgettable largely gray homogeneous slop on a daily basis. And well put >> your body is made out of everything you put in your mouth and your brain is made out of everything that you put into your eyes and ears. And if you think about what that consumption pattern is like, you are basically feeding yourself fast food for your amydala on a daily basis.

Yeah. Yeah. >> There is still, you know, you talk about sort of pagan time, pagan religions, this sense of so much more wonder, so many more unanswered questions, the opportunity to use story and narrative and personification. It's the gods fighting that's made the the the lightning. How much easier it must have been to have been infused by life. Should we all become pagans again? Is that the answer? Can we just do that? I would love it if we would. I >> I'm down. If you want to make a If you want to make a pagan a pagan commune somewhere, I'll join. I >> I would because I I've always felt myself to be pagan.

>> Um I've always uh when I see when I go to the British Museum and I see that section on Assyria and I see some of those massive sculptures of like half human, half tiger lions. Whoa. I feel like it's expressing something so powerful in me. I've always been deeply deeply attracted to the designs to the things of like the um in the aboriges their their little paintings that they make of you know the waves inside of animals and >> it seems more alive. It seems like something so powerful and so direct.

>> I don't Yeah. >> What What do you think people get wrong when they think about pagan religions? Well, I studied this quite deeply and and I have to say that um my major in college was ancient Greek and so I've been studying ancient cultures as part of my my my past and part of who I am. And so we think of ancient Greece for instance, we think of Zeus and Aphrodite and Athena and Hera. These kind of comical figures in the sky. It's almost laughable like cartoons. They're like Marvel movies. They're arguing and bickering and how human and how silly they are. That's our modern projection on the past. It has nothing to do with the reality of of Greekness and what they thought the gods were.

>> I sort of researched that and the words for for gods was like a a flash of light. And so the gods were not these entities, were not these characters, not these human forms. They were forces in nature. They were these powers. They was waves of energy. >> And so when you felt sexually drawn to somebody, Aphrodite was like inhabiting your body. It was a force inside of you that came outside of you.

>> So in our modern sophisticated world, when I fall, when I'm sexually attracted to this woman, it's just my hormones are acting up, right? You know, it's just me, you know, and whatever. But in fact what your sense of desire comes from something much larger than yourself. Right? It comes from how we have to reproduce how biology is operating in this. It's something transcendent and the desire for atoms to to to meet and form matter. the uh I had this story in there of of parramium in the water and this scientist was seeing how the parramium had this desire for one to go inside the other. That's not how parramium reproduce. They reproduce by splitting. So it had nothing to do with reproduction. It was a desire to be combining with other parramium. And he was saying that this is a force in

nature that nature is built around this desire for things to be attracted and to kind of incorporate the other thing. >> And so so the sexual desire is actually you are being possessed by something greater than yourself. It could be Aphrodite. That might be the name you put to it 3,000 years ago. I still might even think that it could be Aphrodite. But the gods weren't like these funny creatures kind of laughable silly things. They were these forces that in that in that possessed you. And I describe in there one of the oldest mysteries, the Elucinian mysteries that went on for thousands of years and all the greatest thinkers were initiated in it and it changed them. They they spoke of it was the most incredible thing they ever been to. It makes Burning Man seem like nothing. Okay.

Sorry to say. >> Um and so it it was a way of making you feel that you had died and then were reborn just like the myth of Pphanie and Deer who's who has to go into the underworld her daughter >> and that's when winter happens then she reemerges and that's when spring happens. But the sense of feeling your your death and being reborn, that's what the these gods, that's what the religious experience was. If we could go back to that, if we could incorporate that into our 21st century mentality, it would be awakening of human consciousness, I would be all for it. I would start welling pelts and horns. I'd be pagan as anybody cuz [laughter] I'm all for the pagan world. Sorry.

And you and you know what to take it one step further. >> Yeah. >> Christianity which is the probably the most powerful religion on the planet earth >> is a pagan religion. It has roots in paganism that are extremely deep and a lot of the ideas and a lot of the rituals. Dionis was a Greek god who was who died and then was reborn. And there's so many parallels between the myth of Dionis and Jesus Christ. You can go on and on and on. The roots of Christianity are from paganism. So to make this sharp distinction between Christianity and paganism is totally bogus. There is no distinction.

>> Paganism is still within our belief system today. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's one flow. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. What was that story about the Russian explorer and the Siberian tiger? >> Yeah. It's one of my favorite stories. Um so and they made a great movie out of it. Uh the Japanese director Kira Kurasawa, I believe in the 80s, did a movie. It's called Deers Sua. I highly recommend you see it. This Russian explorer at the turn of the 20th century, his name is Arcenv. He's exploring the Siberian tiger, which is this vast kind of wasteland of snow and and um and you know, it's just there's indigenous tribes, etc. And he's exploring because they're parts of the Tiberian saiga. The Siberian tiger.

Sorry. >> Tiberian saiga. >> Got that wrong. I'm getting a little punch drunk here. The Siberian tiger that had never been seen before. So he's sent out there to map it, right? He's a scientist, right? Very good scientist, a cgrapher. So he's out there and he's going through this area that's that's very wild that no Russian has been before. And he's there's this man. They're they're having a camp they're sitting by their campfire and this indigenous man named Deruzula asks if he can sit by the fire with them and uh smoke his pipe. And he was a trapper, a hunter who's by himself. He belongs to this tribe called the gold.

Um but he's lives mostly on his own and and you know occasionally he meets other members of his tribe, but he's basically a hunter, a trapper. And our senive invites him to sit by the campfire and they share a meal. And slowly he falls under the spell of this man and he says, "Will you join us on our expedition? We need somebody like you." And the man agrees, okay? He'll be their guide. He'll show them, you know, where to go. And slowly he realizes that this man with his pagan beliefs is so much more powerful than they are.

His body, first of all, he's in his 50s or 60s. He has 20 times the energy that they have. He can do feats that they can't even imagine. Right? Because his consciousness isn't telling him you can't do this, you can't do that. He's just open to everything. He knows every little detail of the forest. He can read like you can read a book. He knows by the tracks on the ground what animal passed, what kind of mood they were in, whether they were in heat or not, and whether they were hungry. He can read everything by how branches are broken. He can see the sky and say a storm is coming even though it's like two days beforehand. He smells the temperature, the weather. He says that the the forest breathes and is alive and he knows how it breathes and he can feel it. One day they encounter a tiger.

They hear the the roaring of the tiger and Arcine is terrified. He can't believe it. Tiger's going to about to pants on them. And a Siberian tiger is, believe me, is something you don't want to encounter. So he picks up his rifle, he's about to shoot it, and and the Daru, the indigenous guy, put that away. And he walks right up to the tiger and he starts talking to it. And he starts telling it, he says that the tiger is the soul of the jungle. And if you mess with the soul of the jungle, you're going to pay a price. No, nothing in in the forest will ever uh cooperate with you. And he goes up and he talks to the tiger and he says," which is the name of the tiger to his group, "don't be mad.

We're here just walking around. We're not going to bother you. Please be okay." The tiger walks away. And Arcen is like, "My god, weren't you terrified?" He goes, "No, no, never. Never. If you if you shot him, I would never be your friend. you would have violated the Anyway, he comes to realize that this man has an intelligence and a spirit that humans have lost. >> That we once were so close to the environment that we could read everything that our senses were so alive, we could feel the weather, we could feel animals, we knew the spirit of everything around us. and and ends up that that Dar Su is murdered a few years later by people who who rob him >> and he's so sad that this is a world that's disappearing and he speculates if only we had kept some of this with our scientific spirit cuz he was a scientist.

>> How powerful would be because this man taught me everything about the jungle about the about the Siberian tiger. So that's the story. How much do you think of what humans call supernatural abilities are actually just natural to humans, but we've lost touch with our subconscious so much that we don't have access to them anymore? >> Well, um, we are capable of so much more than we think we are. Um, so I I have stories in there of of people kind of stretching the limits. So, there's a story about a mountain climber cuz I'm kind of very interested in mountain climbers in the sublime. And he climbs this mountain in Colorado and he gets to the top and he's elated and now he has to go back down. He can see that a storm is brewing, but he decides to go back down the other side and find some new uh areas that he hadn't climbed before. So, he's descending. The storm is coming. It's getting a little bit sketchy out there.

Suddenly, he's on this ledge and he falls. And as he's falling, his knee hits the rock and he cracks his knee open and he lands on a ledge that's like like a foot wide. Okay, maybe a foot and a half wide. And he lands on his krampons. So, he's bleeding. His knee is cracked. He's sitting on this tiny ledge. He's somehow very lucky that he landed there. He fell about 30 ft. The storm is coming. He's alone. He's I'm I'm about to die. And he starts crying.

He starts sobbing. [snorts] And then a voice inside says, "Try to get to your feet. Just try to get to your feet." And it's really painful. His, as I said, his knee is cracked. He somehow manages to get to his feet. Then all of a sudden, as he looks, he can see that there is a slight way that the ledge can lead to another ledge. It's very precarious. But then suddenly, he feels this rush of energy. This like he doesn't know what it is.

and he starts descending onto these tiny ledges, you know, whatever the word is. He finally finds his way back down the mountain and he's ecstatic. He's like, "My god, I was like a mountain goat the way I was suddenly able to descend this mountain. What happened to me? What were these powers that suddenly came to me?" Right? I can't make sense of it. And then he goes to a hospital and he it takes him months to recover and he's going, "What was that? What was that experience? I have to have it again."

Cuz it was so ecstatic. He spends the next 20 years of his life trying to have that experience again. And he fails and he fails and he fails. He climbs Mount Everest. It doesn't work. It's just, you know, uh leeches are eating at his knees and he's he's miserable and and there's, you know, storms, etc. He tries long-distance chron um long-distance running. He gets moments where there's some kind of ecstasy, but it's not the same. He reads about the neurology of the human brain and he goes into indigenous cultures and he realizes that shamans back then, people who had these initiation rituals would put people to the brink of death and then bring them back and that they would then have these experiences like he had. And he decided that they had mastered the neuroendocrine system. They could control their no their own hormones because what happened to him on that mountain was his body his hormones were creating these dopamines and these

adrenaline effects that gave him that mountain goat power. >> Okay. >> So anyway, the the the lesson here is he finally discovers that he creates this his own what he calls a mountain run. It's not the word, but he creates these runs. He takes a map and he makes a circle and he's going to run that circle. No matter what comes into his path, right, in in these wooded areas, even if a mountain or stream, he's got to create that circle. And in doing this, he comes upon a cliff that he has to climb, he gets that experience again.

Okay? But the point is our bodies have these insane powers that we have. A lot of it is from our physiology, right? from our our own hormone system for how things when we're in a sense of danger. So if you took any stock broker on Wall Street as rigid and tight and conservative and limited as anything else, as unsublime as any creature you can imagine on our planet, and you dropped him in the middle of an island alone, and he had to survive, his senses would start waking up. these some of these effects would happen >> and he would discover some of these quote unquote supernatural powers that he possesses because when your senses are dead, you're you're not connected to the to your own body. You're not connected to these immense powers that we have, right? And I sensed a little bit when I was this close to death and I

could feel I could feel like death inside of me. It was like something really powerful and really strong, not like anything else. And it was like a power that I can't even verbalize, but is out there somehow. And it's going to happen to everyone when they die. You're going to feel that. You're going to feel like you're connecting to something un cosmic, right? And so there's something and then when you emerge from that your physiology and your brain is slightly altered and you don't have supernatural powers but the world looks different >> and that you know it's not without I'm not taking LSD. I'm not taking uh you know uh why wosca or whatever you call it again. It's just there. It's my my own brain. Your brain has these weird weird weird powers that you're not even accessing because you're not even connected to your body anymore. You're not connected to your own mortality.

You're not connected to your senses. I have a friend who went to South Africa with one of the world's best rhino trackers. >> Whoa. and he was out in the planes off the uh van out of out of the jeep and he said they'd been tracking this animal for ages. I don't know whether it was a rhino or not. And they'd realized that they were really really close to it, but they couldn't work out where. They were next to this huge big bush and they're looking around and then they heard this little from the other side of the bush. They heard this sound and they realized that this animal that they'd been tracking, let's say it was a rhino, was 20 ft on the other side of a very large shrub.

>> And he talks about this sort of rush of adrenaline. He told me this story and it always stuck in my mind. And then I went to go and film a documentary series in Zambia. And the Zambesi River, I didn't realize runs between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Like it literally 5 miles, 4 miles, 3 miles maybe wide. You can see there's, hey, there's a different country on the other side of that thing. And I was taken out to do an old school style of safari. This is when from the golden era of safaris in sort of the '60s before some now are closer to sight of a sevenstar hotel experience that's in the middle of the Masamara or whatever. And this was if you want a shower, you need to warn them half an hour before so they can go and heat some water. It's a bucket that gets run through. You sleep under the stars.

You're in a glorified day. >> Is this when was this? >> Uh two years ago. Two and a half years ago. >> Oh, really? Wow. Very recent. Um so I mean you get a plane to Addis Ababa. uh Adis Sababa in uh Ethiopia and then from there you fly in and then from there you get a little >> wow 10 person plane less where I didn't realize this but the fuselage the bit or whatever it is the bit that's on the wing that I assumed was where the fuel went the sort of long bit where the wing goes over the top of it no that's where your bags go. So you put your luggage your luggage in the and I'm looking out of the window and I'm like that is half open like that latch is half open just pairs of pants and trousers and stuff flying behind us maybe if that happened.

It didn't. So we land and we get a jeep and then we get on a boat and the boat's an hour and a half and they find this one bend in the river and this is where they'd set up camp and they do it every single year and it's not too dissimilar to Burning Man that everything that they use while they're there is either from the local environment or gets taken away with them once they're done. So stuff's left to decompose and everything else just goes with them. And they build it and take it down each season. And I was there at the final weekend of season or the final week of season. It was about to start raining afterwards. Anyway, guy that's there uh Australian dude was the main operator of this. It was his main uh uh site that he was looking after and he's going to look after you. So typically with most safaris, you're in the truck and you're looking at the animals. And we did a little bit of that. I'd done that previously, but the reason for this being more um real is that you get to go and do it on foot.

But if you're on foot, you need big man with big gun. So, I think it's I think it's called an elephant gun and it shoots just big slugs. >> Uh anyway, so I'm with this and with the tracker and and the video guy and there's drones floating around cuz they're filming it and stuff which somewhat >> it's a documentary >> somewhat detracts from the experience, the fact that there's a film crew with you, but whatever. Mhm. >> And um we see I see a cheetah, lone cheetah walking down the trail in front of us. That was amazing. Wow. >> Um >> you weren't afraid. Well, you had the elephant.

>> I've got big man, big gun. And guy that said, but I mean it was forever away and they're alone, right? And the the >> jeep wasn't that far away. Anyway, we're getting toward the final day and one of the scenes they really wanted to get was of us canoeing because one of the things that you do as a part of this experience is you can go down the tributaries that just come off the Zambzi River. >> Wow. >> In order to get there, you need to be in a boat and these boats are a a massive engine on the back of an upturned bit of tin basically. So, it's a very very sparse uh and hippos everywhere. The zombies is filled with hippos. Filled with them. They're like >> like little rocks that sort of move like like like playing whack-a-ole but whacka hippo. And they're everywhere. Anyway, we're going along and I've got this thing in my mind. I'm getting up early.

I have no idea what time it is. My body clocks all over the place. We've been filming like 12 hours a day most days. Sleeping in a tent, hearing the hippos and the sounds of the safari world out there. As I'm trying to sleep, we're going along and this one hippo sort of pokes his head up and usually they have a little bit of a look and then as we go past it takes its head down. It misjudged how far away from the boat it was and as we went over the top of it, usually it's brought its head down, but it didn't bring its head down. >> You go over the hippos >> and we heard like and I was like, "Oh god." Well, I mean the boat is probably more damaged than the hippo was. But anyway, so I'm like, "Okay, there's hippos. There's hippos in the water. I'm kind of used to that. I I've seen a lot of elephants walking around, but the elephants are like they seem kind of chill. Hippos less chill. Not so keen on the hippos. Uh cheetah, he was quite nice. We saw lions, but we saw them from the jeep. I'm like, "All right, I'm feeling, you know, somewhat comfortable or whatever." But I had this I had this story in in my mind from my friend when he told me about the rhino thing. You know that you're walking around and >> even though this is similar to the

environment you were in in the past, you're kind of at the mercy of the the the wildlife. So, we pull up, we get into this canoe, and then the drones above us, and the drones sort of tracking along, and it's me and the guy uh that was leading it. And then there was the film crew in another canoe just behind us. And these tributaries are, >> you know, less wide than this, maybe a little bit wider than the table, like twice the width of this table. Yeah. Super super thin. And obviously the depth, it can be either this or it could be super deep, but for us, it doesn't really matter.

>> Going down this tributary. And at the end it kinks really hard to the left and then it sort of leads off into the distance and that's the way that we're going to go. And at the end is just a set of eyes and a snout. It's this hippo that's poking up toward the very very end >> and the guide says we're just going to dig in here. Just going to hold our oes in the ocean in the in the the river and we're going to let it stream away and he'll he'll leave at some point. Sure enough he does. But I'm like where's he gone? He's under the water. I'm so I'm like okay there's me in this tiny little canoe thing with a big bloke. The jeep with the big man with the gun is a kilometer and a half in that direction like because he's gonna pick us up from where we've come around. But >> the boat, they're no help. They're now back on the main Zambzi River. The guys with the cameras, they're no help either. The drone over the top, all I can imagine that's doing is pissing off and alerting all of the animals to where we are. So I'm like, all right, it's me and it's my mate and I'll canoe. That's it.

>> Okay, so we're going to keep going. I'm think I'm thinking all about the rowing. >> Yeah. Yeah. Just do a little canoeing on either side like this. Canoeing. >> Yeah. And uh I don't know the difference between canoeing. Paddling. Well, paddling. Thank you. Yeah, we're not doing that. >> Okay. >> So, facing ahead and there's four elephants. One of them's drinking in the stream from the stream where we're going to go to that's kinkedked around to the side. I'm looking at these elephants. Yeah. Just sort of marveling. And I haven't been on my I haven't had signal on my phone for three days. And I'm like really in it now. I kind of got used to the the sounds of the jungle of the I guess >> close to the plains.

We're watching these and then the elephants for me were like kind of chill, but I knew that they were very territorial and very protective of their young. And it's a two bigger ones and two smaller ones. I'm like, "Right, okay. This is interesting." >> They walk off and okay, they're they're now tracking 300 yards on the left and we're going to slowly row along and one of the elephants, the biggest of the elephants, starts to sort of look at us and veer toward us ever so slightly. It's just sort of looking and veering and looking and veering like that. And it's like starting to uh bisect where we're going.

It's looking as if it would come toward us. And I'm giving my guy that's in front of me a little bit of a nudge. I'm like, "Are we okay?" He's like, you know, 300 yards, >> 250, 200, 150, 100. I'm like, "Okay, that that is really big." And he's like, "That's the mom. She's just making sure that we're not going to go anywhere near to her kids. It's all okay. like everything's chill. And I'd learned that when looking at elephant body language, like head up, ears out is I see you. Stop what you're doing. And head down, ears back is sports mode. Like this shit's about to get real.

>> Yeah. >> So she's now 40 yards, 50 yards away from us. I'm like nudging him all the time like, "Mate," he's like, "Don't worry, mate. Nothing to worry about at all." I'm like that is seven tons of animal like whatever three tons of animal staring at us >> and um we've now dug in to stop moving so that we're less of a a threat. Yeah. So we've dug in but there's maybe 4 foot high of bank between us in the little stream and the plane. So a little bit of a plinth and then 30 yards 40 yards and then an elephant. And then there's the camera crew that's behind us and the drone that's still pissing everyone off above us. We've dug in and head up, ears out. And I was like, "Mate." He's like, "Don't worry, mate.

Nothing to worry about at all." Like, "Fucking like heart rate's through the roof, buzzing in my ears, like adrenaline skyhigh, and then head down, ears back, like starts towards us a couple of times, like kicks like this." And I was like nudging him. He's like, "Nothing to worry about at all. Jesus Christ." and then backs up like watching us and watching an elephant do that sort of reversing maneuver where she's still looking at us backing up and then puts her head down even further, ears back, just sets off full sprint towards us. I'm like, [snorts] "Fuck, fuck." And he's like, "Nothing to worry about." Like starts shouting it over the top of everyone.

The guy guys in the camera crew, they're they're shouting and screaming about what's going to go on. And she gets 10 yards away from us, like digs her feet in this big cloud of dust. It would have been her falling. She wouldn't, there's no way she would have jumped. It would have just been her like tumbling over the top of this 4ft dip into the thing. Looks at us and gives one look and like >> turns and walks away. And I like turned to look at myself and I had the awe in my hand like this. Like what am I going to do? It's me and this. I'm going to bop her on the nose. Like what am I going to achieve with this? The reason I say this, my friend that had tracked that rhino told me that after he'd been through that experience, for the next hour, 2 hours or so, he felt like he was super human.

>> He said his senses were so sharpened, and this is the only other friend I've had that's done a similar experience. So, that story from him was real formative for me. And I was thinking, wow, like I wonder if I'm going to notice something, this sort of like ancestral resonance between the environment that my ancestors evolved in for so long and this activation of a a a seinal moment that brings it all online. And sure enough, after heart rates calmed down, the guy, sorry, the camera guy behind us himself so badly that he turned it off. And I was like, man, that would have been so epic to have captured. The drone wasn't looking in the right direction. The bloke in the truck didn't see it. Like like it was the ultimate mom, watch this and mom wasn't looking. Anyway, um for the next >> hour and a half, 2 hours or so, I could it felt like I could hear >> everything. I knew the different birds from what direction they were coming in, how far away they were, the colors were

sharper, the lines were brighter. >> Oh, wow. And uh I was able it felt like I was kind of the center of this environment and everything was coming into me and it was this wonderful blend of like real formative experience super high velocity adrenaline and uh you know a resonant environment that I was existing in and it's just that was such a formative experience for me to go wow >> that's what we were built for >> that's what we were built for and all of that together is still now like thinking about it I can see that elephant and doing that. The scariest bit when it was when it did this, when it backed up, backed up, backed up, backed up, head down, ears back, set off, and ran. I was like, "Wow."

>> So cool. >> They can run fast. >> They can move. They can shift. Yeah. For a big girl, she can move. >> Wow. That's an incredible story. >> Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Wow. >> Yeah. So, that >> the opportunity for us to tap into uh skills that we don't know that we have, you know, that's my it's one of my experiences of that being the case. >> Did it do you still does it kind of change you? Are you still aware of it or did it have any longlasting effects on you? >> Uh, downtown Austin or New York is not conducive no >> to me taking in all of the sounds around me. You know, the the the yelling crazy person on the street corner and the police siren in the far distance.

>> Um, but it's it's certainly I mean I can see and still hear everything from that. You know, we talk about >> coasting through life and not really making memories about the passage of time seeming to speed up. passage of time slowed down for me. >> Yeah. >> I can tell you every single different memory increment all the way throughout that entire morning. >> Oh, really? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The whole thing was encoded like just tons of novelty, tons of intensity. And I can Yeah. I can tell you. But that particular >> You can remember what it felt like, what it it smelled like to be in the in the little boat. I can remember how shallow it was. Couldn't believe that we were dug in on this little stream, but a hippo was able to hide. just like he's so big and so tall and he was able to hide underneath.

>> These don't attack people though, do they? >> They're the second biggest killer of humans in Africa. >> What do they do? How do they kill? >> Uh biting, plumping, stamping on the second I think after mosquitoes. Can you have chat GPT this? What are the biggest killers animal killers of people uh in Africa? And where does the hippo rank? So the thing the hippos aren't aggressive. Their problem is they get scared. And the issue that humans have, hippos want to be in the water. In the water, they're nice and safe. Humans a lot of the time are in between a hippo and the water. And if the hippo thinks it can't get back to the water, it's just going to go straight through you to try and get back to safety because it doesn't it doesn't feel very uh very secure. So yeah, they they're vicious.

And um Oh, yeah. You Where are we? >> Where's the hippo? >> The hippo's 10. Hippos number 10. Okay, so mosquito, interestingly enough, humans come in at number two. Snakes, dogs, assassin, bugs, that doesn't count. Freshwater snails. [laughter] Okay, so like hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. So yeah, like mosquito, kissing bug, freshwater snail, seats flies, like and then okay, crocodiles and snakes, humans, I'm not counting that. So I'm elephants are second to dogs for me. Uh, sorry. Uh uh hippos is second to dogs. Aggressive attacks especially on boats. Goring. If you ignore direct disease transmission and count only animals attacking physic physically attracting people.

Crocodiles, hippos, elephants, snakes. >> Yeah. Yeah. They're scary. Don't get in the way. >> I had no idea. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Hippos kill far more people than sharks. >> Despite not being predators, they get scared. They're big scaredy boys. >> Wow. God. Still to see a hippo must have been pretty intense. >> To see 50 or 100 >> Wow. >> just out in the middle of this water. They're too hot. They don't want to be out. They can't cool themselves off very well. They get sunburned.

>> They get sunburned. They're so pink. >> That's why they have to be in the water. >> They helps to protect them. I think that might be part of it. But they still get sunburnt in the water as well. >> Fascinating. >> Uh what was your story? You said the >> Well, no, no, it's not a story. Uh this is something else. But I you're saying about not in New York or Austin, but I was in my early 20s. I was living in New York and um I was taking the F train back home. I lived in Brooklyn at the time and I fell asleep and I came to the end of the line and there were these four gang members surrounding me looking at me and one of them had a knife and it looked like this something was going to happen. And I didn't have much money on me. And I woke up and I see these people there. They're going to like either kill me or rob me. I don't know what's going on.

>> And for some reason, this insane feeling of calmness overcame me. I was so calm. I I guess maybe because I just woke up and I didn't I wasn't nervous or afraid. And I spoke to them in a very calm voice and I took out my wallet. I said, "Look, I'm sorry. I don't have this much money." And I gave them over the head and they they kind of looked at me and laughed and they left. But I'll never forget that feeling of insane calmness that overcame me, that protected my life basically in that moment. It wasn't >> a lion, an elephant, a hippo. It was a human predator, >> you know. I don't know if they were going to kill me, but there was a knife in the guy's hand and I felt threatened, >> but um something changed in in my body chemistry that allowed me. And there are hormones that actually calm you in face of danger that I forget which one it is.

I think I'm deficient in those at least in the face of an elephant. Whatever the opposite of those hormones were. I didn't get the calming ones. I got the try to attack it with an awe ones. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> But the point is even in the midst of a city in face of danger, some things like that could could pop into >> Yeah. Speaking tactically, how do you best advise people to access the sublime in their daily life more readily? like what's a what's a str a strategic way that people can do this?

>> Well, it's um I mean obviously reading my book is going to play a big role in this. >> It's the number one that's before anything else. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Because I'm going to the book is is um organized to be very practical. So it has stories. It has things that are kind of make you feel wow that's weird. That's I never thought of that before. But then I have exercises in each chapter about how to uh incorporate this into your daily existence. >> And then I have meditations that are a little bit weirder about how you can kind of make a sort of poetic way of accessing this.

>> Um and so for instance um you know it's easy for people to talk about thinking about your mortality and your death right. It's a kind of exercise that philosophers go through the stoics etc. But I always felt like it's kind of weak because you can't think about death. It's something beyond thinking. So I have an exercise where I literally take you through what it will feel like when you're dying. Based on my research and based on my own experience and I have you lie down and I have you feeling like the world is going distant away from you, that your body is sinking into the ground, that your skull is getting heavier, it's sinking in, that your bones are dissolving, that everything is kind of moving away from you. that maybe your mind is separating from your body at some point and then to feel that sensation and to make it as visceral as possible and then to take that feeling and then go outside and walk in the world and tell yourself this is what I I

I I died and this is what the world looks like after I've died, right? And how different the world looks like after you've been through that experience. If you take it seriously enough and you go through it, then you will be able to have that kind of strange moment of how different things look like when you sense that you won't be there anymore and how everything has an intensity that it didn't have beforehand. >> So the book is very practical but the main thing is as in everything in life you have to feel the desire for it. So, if your desire, if your priorities in life are just making money, getting by, doing your career, >> you're going to read my book and and it won't really have any longlasting effect. But I'm trying to hit you over the head. I'm trying to really make it clear to you >> that this is something that is going to have a very powerful impact on your experience of life. And I want you to

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

>> You have to have a desire for something else. Otherwise, this won't mean anything to you, right? Because we're emotional creatures. We're not. We think we're rational and cognition is everything. But really, it's emotions that that determine that that are the most powerful thing. Just like when you had the experience with the elephant, it wasn't your mind suddenly coming into place. Oh, I've got to do this, that, and the other. It was this powerful feeling that affected your emotions, right? You have to feel want to feel the sublime before anything else. You want to have to get rid of all of your baggage and just have like kind of >> I hate to use the word, but like a mental enema [laughter] >> and just like get rid of all this other stuff. If you don't have that desire, if you think your life is fine, the sublime won't have any appeal to you. But I'm trying to make it hit you over the head with the idea that there's something deeply deeply missing. And your life will have an intensity.

You will be experiencing things on a different level if you let this in. Once you have that, you've gone to that level where you say, you've had your come to Jesus moment. You go, "Yes, I need this in my life. Yes, it's important to me." Then the things that I try and sneak into your brain will have the effect because I'm I'm always trying to like instill a little bit of a poison into you and make you look at the world differently. >> But you have to have the desire and you have to realize that you're restless and you're bored for a reason. You're not getting something. And this world is making you passive. It's making you dependent on algorithms. It's making you dependent on food. It's making you dependent on what other things people are doing for you. The sublime is where you finally become active with your own experience. You take it over. You're the curator of your own experience. Not meta, not Google, not chat GBT, but you are now the agent of your own

experience. You're going to create curate your own experience. And this book is going to help lead you there. And so just feel that need to get outside of the kind of bubble and the emptiness that you're experiencing your daily life. How to feel alive again I think is a search term that more people would put into Google or chat GPT if they realized how badly they needed it. >> Yeah. There's this sense that yeah, life's amplitude's just been flattened for some reason. The colors been sapped out of things. They're a little grayer.

I'm not as deeply connected. I don't feel the highs quite so much. And even the lows, they don't have this sort of romantic, majestic, large quality to them. They're more sort of dow and sapping and sort of low and sluggish. [laughter] >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Um you know so for instance to take an example um I have I talk about childhood experience and uh the writer Russian writer Nabokov and how he tried to recreate his childhood as an adult and he remembers that when he was on a train as a child he felt the speed of the train in his body and the speed was in intoxicating >> and so you know I fly an airplane here to Austin and now we fly and we we're not even aware of flying We don't even feel, we don't understand what it is.

The the shades are drawn and we're on our computers. >> But the movement of the plane is an inconvenience to what I want to do while I'm on the plane. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But when you were a kid, you open that up and you look out, wa the Grand Canyon. Wow. These mountains. I'm flying. You're literally flying. Do you know what that would have felt like 200 years ago? You're literally in the air. It's like magic. >> And you can like Nab, you can feel that sense of speed and power inside your How to rediscover a sense of wonder again.

>> Yeah. And these are simple things. It's you're flying, you're in a it won't be in your car really, but or a train or climbing a mountain. How you can climb a mountain with a different set of priorities than how you normally do. And I take you through that in many numerous exercises. >> What do you think people will not pay as much attention to in the book as they should do? What is the most effective but uh initially unsexy insight or strategy that you think people might gloss over but actually you you think they should pay more attention to? It's a good question.

Um [sighs and gasps] well so a lot of the book uh I'm kind of criticizing as directly as I can uh the modern technological world that is flattening your experience and you're going to be kind of rebelling against them. You're going to be going, "God, Robert, you're so old-fashioned. What's your problem?" Yeah. Get with it, you know? >> Yeah. Get on TikTok. >> Huh? >> Get on TikTok. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Um, and they're going to be a little bit annoyed with that. And you know, why can't I just incorporate social media? Isn't social media sublime? Can't I incorporate that into my life? Why are you so critical of these things? >> I don't want you to stop all the technology in your life. That's not possible. And I'd be a hypocrite to say I don't I, you know, use chat GBT sometimes to look up certain things. But I want you to be aware of how it's it's deadening you, how it's having a negative effect on your experience of life. You don't have to get rid of it.

We are we think too much in black and white terms. It has to be either this or the other. You can still use the internet. You can still use AI if you have to. You can still be a modern person doing your modern things, but you can exist also at the same time in this other realm. You can explore it and you can see. So, I was thinking about myself the other day. I was meditating and I was realizing that um I'm kind of programmed. My ideas are kind of programmed and I'm following Instagram and it's kind of having an effect on me.

>> I could see the effect it has on me. >> What is that effect? >> Well, I watch one cat video because I have a cat. Wow, this is amazing. It's incredible. I happen to love animals. They have these videos of this man who has a tiger and he's like wrestling with the tiger and yet they're kind of >> You've already upgraded from cat to very big cat. >> Yeah. Yeah. Okay. >> And like wow, you know, and and I'm thinking it's not it's an emotional thing that it's playing on. that's playing on, you know, sort of raw basic emotions of not just fascination, but just kind of curiosity or just sort of images. And I'm weak. I'm car I'm falling into this trap.

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

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

Like have you given the mountain a crack? That might be that might be one way. So there's this recent um essay I read by Adam Mastriani who's wonderful. He runs experimental history on on Substack and he says incentives are for losers is the title of this new piece and what he's saying is uses this analogy of when he used to play baseball as a kid and the posh kids would have their own helmet and their own kit and it would be really shiny and really nice but if like him you didn't have your own helmet you'd be given one of the recck room helmets and it would be sweaty and smell like it was worn by 10,000 10 year olds before you because it had and it would put it on and it probably would disintegrate if it got hit by the ball or whatever. And he uses this analogy. He says if you don't arrive into the world with your own set of values, you are forced to put on somebody else's, you're forced to put on everyone else's in that same kind of a way. The reason he says incentives are for losers is that a and this is like

kind of I still don't know how I feel about this, but I'll put it to you. His position is standing at the bottom of a ladder or a number of ladders like status, respect, acclaim, money, and looking at the top, you assume that the people at the top got there by choice, not by necessity or blind uh faith that this is the thing that's going to fix it. But as you begin to kind of ascend it, you realize that these people are, as he says, spiritually chinless. says a lot of the people that have won the games that are widely accepted to be played have played the games that are widely accepted because they didn't arrive with their own helmet. They just put on the helmet that everybody else was wearing. So, he's quite critical.

He's not saying you can't try and achieve mastery in something or success and a claim and money, but that many of the people who do decide to make that their entire life's pursuit didn't choose to do it. That's his sort of that's his theory. And it makes me feel that almost like anarchistic middle finger rebellion thing gives me the same kind of sense as when you're speaking about your new book which is hey there's something deeper out there and it's not for most people that is a very kind of I'm sure large meaningfully large for selling books but like minority cohort of people that are like yeah I actually want to do this myself. if I'm pissed off enough at the fact that life feels flat and empty and gray that I'm going to go and decide to pursue this thing.

And it's the same with with Adam's insight around incentives. Most of the incentives are kind of puppeting you. They're not taking you towards something that you want. They're hijacking a reward system that you're not aware of. And uh yeah, I think people getting pissed off at the fact that their life isn't as colorful as they would like it to be is a good first step. Well, you know, uh, I wrote a book on on human nature, laws of human nature. It's about 560 pages, kind of dense, no imagery.

It's kind of first glance, it looks incredibly intimidating. And the point of the book is that you're an awful person. You've got these 18 dark qualities and you're not aware of. You are a narcissist. You are irrational. You have a dark side. You think in short term, you have tendencies to feel envy and grandiose, etc. Who's going to want to read that book? >> That book has sold uh one and a half million copies so far and it hasn't been out that long.

>> So, I think people are hungrier than we imagine for these kind of things because we're being spoonfed the same crap over and over and over again. I see so many self-help books out there that it's just >> that they're not going to change your life. They're just falling into the same grooves on the record that there's nothing new or different or surprising anymore in so many of aspects of our culture. Our films kind of look the same. Everything kind of feels the same.

>> I'm putting something out there that shouldn't feel the same, right? >> And maybe it'll surprise you and maybe it'll shock you because I tell you in the preface that the sublime is a shock. And there there's no shock, there is no sublime, right? You're awakening to something strange, exciting, weird, and even a little bit terrifying, right? And so you want that shock. You go and see horror movies that other people are playing around with your emotions and have you and have learned all the tricks for getting you a for doing all that, >> right?

>> And this is giving you that kind same kind of shock, but it's real. It's your own experience. You're your own agent. It's not somebody making a film to to kind of manipulate your mind, right? You're going to get these shocks, these surprises. Who doesn't want surprise in their life where everything is sort of the same? >> But you don't have to have surprise by necessarily going down the Zambesy River, right?

>> Yeah. I I couldn't I initially intended to write a book like that, but I can't because I can barely walk out my front door. >> But sitting in my backyard, I'm seeing hummingbirds. And I go, "Wow, what a strange creature that is, a hummingbird." And I started researching them. When I started looking into how their physiology and how they move and how they hover and how they go from flower to flower and what the flowers must taste like and feel like and what the world how their eyes and how the world must look like to a hummingbird and how Aztecs thought hummingbirds were gods and if a soldier died he was reborn as a hummingbird. M [snorts] >> I could have that experience of a shock of like this is in my backyard and how wondrous it is and how insane it is and how humming there's there's a million hummingbirds out there of different species you know so >> you don't have to go I mean I would love to go down the Zambzi River don't get me

wrong if I could I would but >> anyway >> Robert Green ladies and gentlemen Robert you're great I appreciate you I you were >> maybe episode 45 or 60 or something on the podcast 7 years ago and then >> I thought I was one of your first. >> You were? Well, I mean that was super duper early still for me. Or maybe it was in the 20s. I can't remember. Can you search when what was the first? >> Oh, it was before that because we got introduced by our friend, our common friend, and she was trying to get me on your This was like over Skype.

>> Abby. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember. I think it was It might have even been early. It might have been in the 20s. It was a long time. It was at least seven years ago. >> It was at the very least seven years ago. and I appreciate you and your time and your uh preparedness to stare into the abyss and have it stare back to you as you keep on writing these things. >> Oh, thank you. Thank you. Trying to survive. Um, where should people go to keep up to date with whatever it is that you've got going on? >> Um, well, uh, I have a website. It's kind of one I've had for God knows how long. It's called power seductionandwar.com.

The and spell it. powersandwar.com. There you'll find links to Instagram, Tik Tok, all the things I tell you not to pay attention to, I'm here guiding you to. And my YouTube channel and all that stuff. And then the book will be out. I don't know when you're going to post this, but the book will be out, I believe, November 10th. >> Amazing. >> So, look for it then. >> You're the best. Appreciate you, Robert. Until next time, >> Chris. Thank you so much. Can't wait. >> All right. Goodbye, maybe Dude. Yes. >> A quick note. Lots of people tell us that YouTube unsubscribes them from the channel even though they already pressed it. So just check down there and see if the subscribe button is pressed. You get access to episodes before anybody else.

If you do, supports me and the show helps me to bring you bigger and better guests and it makes me very happy. So just go and give it a tap for me. I thank you.