Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Today on The James Alteacher Show. This is part 2 of my discussion with Robert Greene, author of The Daily Laws, but also one of my favorite writers, as I mentioned before. He's the author of The 48 Laws of Power, another book called Mastery, another book called The Laws of Human Nature, books on war, books on seduction. He really has just a very deep insight into human nature, and he has so many stories to tell about it. And in The Daily Laws, he's more autobiographical than ever before. So we talk a little bit more about his personal story and some of the ideas from the Daily Laws. Part 2 is available today as well as part 1. So this is part 2. I'll ask you about my personal experience. I've gone from, let's say and this is just a a short list, but from being a computer programmer to a writer to an entrepreneur to hedge fund manager, comedian, on and on. And I do get that excitement that you're talking about. I do engage in that path towards mastery, but sometimes I feel like, maybe I'm a dilettante, jack of all trades, master of none, even though I do follow my heart on what's exciting me. I I that's my that's my rule. Well, you're you're very successful, and and you're very powerful in your own realm. So, I mean, I don't think it's nothing that's not working there. It's I think it's more important that you're able to explore and try new things. But the interesting thing that would happen possibly with you, and maybe it already has happened, is that you take some of these because I can relate to this having had 60 different jobs that are even more desperate than what you just described. I mean, I did construction work. I worked in a detective agency. I was a hotel receptionist. I mean, I could go on and on and on. But the thing that could be interesting is combining some of these things. I mean, you can't really combine comedy with chess, I don't think. But if you could combine, some of the other things that you've learned in some kind of new entrepreneurial realm, that would be very exciting. Yet there there's a lot of people, particularly younger people, who have a a problem now because there is so much information available. But they try something for a year or 2, and they move on to something else in another couple years. And they move on to something else, and they never really master anything. And then they're, like, 31, 32, and they've learned all of these different things, but nothing connects. Right? And so it's not that I want you to explore. I want you to try new things, but there has to be kind of a frame of reference. Right? It can't be, you know, you're trying out being a chef, and then you're trying out being a rocket scientist. You know? I mean, there has to be some kind of thing that, in a in a vague way, connects things. So for me, it was writing. I tried journalism. I tried novels. I tried theater. I tried film. Nothing quite worked. And then I tried books. But it wasn't you know, I know I worked in a detective agency. It sounds like a contradiction. But when you're a writer, you want all those kind of stupid, boring jobs because you're learning about people and you're accumulating stories. But you wanna have something that there's there's some kind of connection, right, between the things that you're doing that gives it a a a something where you later on, you can find common points that you can bring together, where you can create some kind of new business that no one has ever thought of before. And I have a lot of examples in mastery of people who did that, and then suddenly, a connection where they wake up one day and go, this is something that I'm gonna start that no one ever thought about. I talk in mastery about Paul Graham, who he'd studied. He was a hacker. He went to MIT. He studied artificial intelligence. And he ended up kinda getting very bored and frustrated with it. And then he decided to become an artist, and he went to art school. And he went in Italy, and he was living in Italy. Then he came back to New York, and he was living in a loft painting and not making very much money, but he was kind of loving it. And he heard an ad on the radio that was touting that the Internet this is 1994 or 5. It was saying the Internet is gonna be where we're gonna buy things in the future. No one had ever thought of that before. Right? There was no place to buy anything on the Internet. And he's sitting there painting in his loft, and he goes, with all of my skills with design now, with painting, and all I learned in Italy, and all of my skills with artificial intelligence and computers, I'm gonna design the most aesthetically pleasing and great store online where you could buy things, the first one. And he created it. Yahoo bought it for, like, $5,000,000, and that was the start of his incredible career. He went on to start, you know, a $1,000,000,000 businesses like Y Combinator. But he made that connection between these two things that you normally wouldn't connect, And then it kinda came this this sort of perfect storm there. I you know, and I think the key is connecting having the ability to connect ideas. Because you mentioned, like, it's hard to go from being a chef to a rock star. But even there, I think maybe it's hard or maybe the key is coming up you know, having the insight and coming up with the connection between the 2. I have no idea what it might be, but, you know, it's just like if you look at the the hierarchy of species, you know, humans are part of the hominids as part of the, whatever, the apes, and and on and on back to mammals and so on. Everything ultimately falls under some any two parts of the street fall under some umbrella no matter how broad. You mentioned com you know, it's hard to connect comedy and chess, but I'm thinking about it in a meta way. Like, you mentioned when Arthur Kessler said that comedy is about taking 2 very disparate things and somehow connecting them in a humorous way. So an example might be, Andrew Schulz who was a a once a a guest on this podcast. He has a joke. I won't tell the joke, but, I'll tell the idea, which is that he compares good international cooking to wherever women are mistreated the worst. What countries women like, no one ever says, hey. Let's go out for some Canadian tonight. They said, let's go out for Middle Eastern. So so right. So you you laugh because it's, like, even just a funny concept connecting these two things. And perhaps in chess, oh, this kind of attack works in this one type of opening. Maybe it'll work in this other type of opening somehow. Like, having the meta ability that you learn from mastering different things could potentially, I don't know, connect 2 areas somehow. I don't know. Because you you talk a lot about the connection between 2 ideas, and I think or or multiple careers and skills, and I think that's very important. Well, that's how the brain works. You know, I I meditate every morning. And when you start meditating, you try and shut the mind up and all the thoughts going on. Suddenly, all kinds of weird associations start happening between things. That's the natural flow of the brain. It's always connecting things together. And I I this I don't know if this is relevant or not, but, I remember the story in the 19 fifties. This writer, this friend of a writer, once challenged him saying, you know, you always choose stories for your novels that you you kind of know, but it'd be impossible for you to write something about anything. And the writer said, no. I could write a novel, a good novel about anything. It was like a challenge. The other guy says, okay. Alright. I'm gonna challenge you. Write a great novel that has to do with drapes. That's to do it's it's about the changing new drapes being put up. He goes, alright. I'm gonna do it. And he wrote a book about how in an insane asylum, they had to suddenly change the drapes and how it drove everybody crazy, and it created all of this drama and turmoil. And it became such a successful novel that they made a book a movie out of it called The Cobweb, which you can go look and see now in the 19 fifties with Lauren Bacall, all these famous actors. Very interesting movie. So, you know, that's how the brain works. You can connect anything. Right? That challenge, you can take 2 very disparate ideas and find some point of putting them together and making a great novel, a joke, a new business, or whatever. That's that's true creativity to me. Yeah. I I agree, and I I, you know and, again, I am I always wonder for myself. Like, I I really do like how you're creative, but you keep it under the umbrella of writing. And, you know, I might be an entrepreneur for a few years and then write a book about entrepreneurship, and so they're too disparate Which you did. Yeah. And and and but then but then again, I wonder, oh, would I have gone further as an entrepreneur if I didn't write a bunch of books, or would I have gone further as a writer if I didn't do years of comedy or whatever? And so sometimes I have I have regret, but, you know, I'm also I always stick to the rule, okay, I have to do what I love doing, and, unfortunately, for me, it's it changes a lot. Yeah. But but when you do the different things, you put you you go all in. Right? You actually Yeah. You know, I'm not as opposed to people who just learn these little things and then give up, you wrote a book. You actually produced a book. You started a business. You have a podcast. You are a successful comedian. You are a master chess player. There are plenty of examples I used in mastery of people like you, you know, more famous, I'm afraid to say, but like Benjamin Franklin. Although although we don't know what you'll be like in a 100 years from now, people will be talking about you. But like Benjamin Franklin, you know, he was he was a great writer. He wrote journalist pamphlets. He was a political figure. He was a scientist. You know, he was a great seducer. I don't know if you wanna say that that's part of a skill, but he was you know, had all these different things, and he was like you. You you get bored, and you wanna explore new things. And he wrote books, and he tried experiments, etcetera, and he traveled. He had a great life, and he was a master of many different things. So that's an equal path I think is very valid and very. It's what you have managed to carve out, and it's you and what makes you different, what makes you unique, and it's what makes you James as opposed to if you had stayed as a a a computer programmer your whole life. You know? I mean, look. Where would you be right now? You wouldn't be a very happy person. Probably that. No. And and thank you for saying that. You know, but it's interesting. You talked about Benjamin Franklin as seduction, you know, as a seducer, but persuasion, which you've written a lot about and and seduction and so on, this is also an important skill of not only mastering a particular domain, but, mastering life. Where do you think people mess up the most on persuasion? And you and you were in the book, you you also describe how one should stay above the fray. So so so the fray, I think of as, like, the massive arguing that happens 24 hours a day now on social media over issues that will be forgotten in weeks or months or whenever. And, you know, what what what are the what are the skills of persuasion that you personally have found most successful? Well, the the thing you wanna avoid is arguing or telling people directly what you want them to do. That is violating the most important law of human psychology. People have their own ideas. We're naturally resistant and defensive. We think that what we believe about politics, about ourself, about the arts, we think it's the most brilliant thing around. Right? We we have that, what I call a self opinion. Right? It's very natural. It's ingrained. And if you suddenly try and tell somebody, well, you're wrong. You're not real you do have the wrong opinion about politics. You're on the wrong side of things. They're not gonna suddenly go, oh, oh, yeah. You're right. I'm gonna think about that. You're right. They're gonna get angry and defensive and bitter, and you're gonna create the opposite effect that you wanted. Right? Unintended consequences. You're gonna make them more defensive and more entrenched and more bitter. So you don't preach at people. You don't yell at people. You don't argue. Anytime you you give into that, it's not because you have this sort of noble Gandhian idea that you were right and you're gonna convince people. Really, what's going on is you're a selfish person who believes that you are convinced of the truth and that other people are ignorant and you need to educate them. It stems from your own arrogance, your own ego. It doesn't stem from a a good place. So learn that when you try to argue and berate people and tell them what to do, it is not because you were suddenly trying to help them. It's because you're try you're giving into one of your your most selfish and weakest impulses. Right? So get over that, and then make the next step, which is if you're really interested in changing people because a lot of these people that shout on the Internet or whatever or or complain about some political thing, they really don't wanna change things. They just wanna whine and vent. Right? That's their main thing. Because if they really wanted to change, they would go through this process of, how do I influence people? How do I persuade them? Alright? So if your goal is actual influence, if you get over that selfish impulse to just yell and scream and berate people, well, I have to be more subtle. I have to think of where their mind is at. Why do they believe that that Donald Trump is the greatest president? I'm not saying that those people are wrong. I'm just just putting out a point here. Why do people believe that? Are there maybe some reasons that are that that come from their condition and circumstances? If I wanna change their opinion, maybe I have to understand where their opinion comes from, the roots of it. And then I can make little small little bites at it kind of indirectly and make them the only thing that you wanna do is with people let's say it's your your child who won't listen to you, right, and has become very rebellious, like a a 16 year old, etcetera. Telling him or her, this is what you need to do. Stop that. It's only gonna make them worse. We've all had that experience. You wanna go inside their mind, and you wanna sort of slowly push them in other directions and get them to think that maybe they don't have the right idea. But to do that, you have to be subtle, and you have to think inside the other person. Right? So that's the number one mistake people make. They think all they're entrenched in their own ideas, and they're not getting inside of their audience. They're not getting inside of the viewpoint of their customers. They're not getting inside of the viewpoint of the voters who were voting for them. They're not getting inside the viewpoint of the friends or children who have a different mindset. So just making that leap and saying, I'm gonna shut up my own ideas that I have, and I'm gonna actually try and understand their point of view, suddenly gives you the power to maybe alter it a little bit and maybe even alter your own ideas as well. And so let's take the example of when, you know, you were working on the book with 50 Cent, and you and, you know, you went from Simon Shuster to Harper, and the editor at Harper said, Robert, this is what you need to do. What if you disagreed with that editor? And what at what point do you know if you're being defensive or if you should listen? As I said earlier, you can listen too much to other people, and you could, you know, make a terrible mistake that way. So, you know, if you it all depends on the person who's criticizing you. So if you, you know, put something out on YouTube and you read the comments below and someone's saying, Robert, you're full of s**t, you're not gonna give credence to that person because who's that idiot who's just sitting in his room typing that out and doesn't make any kind of constructive comments. Right? I'm not gonna pay any attention to that. But if an editor at Harper's, who's been very successful, who's a very smart individual, and makes very salient points about the weakness of my book, then I'm gonna listen to him. And I did listen to him because, initially, what happens when when we're criticized is we get defensive and we get upset, and that's completely natural. It's happened to me many times. It's not like you suddenly ever go, oh, you're right. I'm wrong. There's always that first defensiveness. But then you calm yourself down, and you go through that process that we we're talking about, the the autopsy that you mentioned. And you go, well, maybe they're right. Maybe I have to listen. Are they actually coming from Are they attacking me out of politics because they're envious? No. This guy isn't envious of me. He's just a publisher. He's not trying to to be like me. He has no animus against me. So there must be some truth to it, and I'm gonna listen to him. That's the key is if the person criticizing you, it seems objective and there's nothing personal about it, then there's probably something you can trust. So you have to kinda look at the source of the criticism. This leads to another question which you write a lot about. Given the fact that there's so much duplicity and people wear whether they intend to or not, they wear so many different masks in front of their social groups. I find often a very poor judge of character. How do you think one gets better at that? Because, again, you point out some great things about character that they're not always sometimes nice people are not so nice. Sometimes mean people are insecure and could be nice. But how do you kind of meet a person and figure out, hey. What's underneath these masks? Well, the first thing you have to do is you have to have the realization that you don't take appearances for reality. So, you know, imagine that you're a child, you're 4 or 5 years old, and you have some quality that really irritates people. You're too pushy. You're too aggressive, or you're too nice and pleasing or whatever. And your parents and your teachers, they criticize you. And you learn that's very painful. So you develop a strategy that now it's the strategy of your entire life of disguising that irritating quality because it means you're criticized, and it means, you know, people aren't gonna listen to you. So you spend your your young your youth, your teen years and older kind of finding ways to disguise the fact that you're basically insecure or aggressive or or or insecure, etcetera. And so people never get to suspect that. Right? But underneath, you still remain the same person. Okay? So people are presenting a front to you, a facade, that is often not disguising the opposite. It can be disguised in the opposite. And I tell people, if somebody has a very strong quality that's so in your face, 9 times out of 10, they are disguised in the opposite. But sometimes people are just subtly disguising that irritating quality that they've learned to disguise. So get over this notion early on in your life so that you won't suffer, that appearances are not reality. So that person in the office who's always smiling, who's always, like, saying how wonderful you are and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and I don't mean this as a criticism. I'm just talking about reality, that there's probably something going on underneath. Now they might just be a very pleasant person, and there are people like that, and there's nothing against them. But they also might be this person who is very passive aggressive, who has actually learned the front of being pleasant and sweet and charming and saying all the wonderful things about you in order to, like, get you to lower your defenses so they can enter your life and then inflict some kind of pain on you. Right? And so you have to become a better judge of people and not trust the appearances and go through a process. Now you pay attention. We we're very good at we do we all have natural bulls**t detectors that we just don't listen to that get kind of worn away over the years. And that bulls**t detector is in nonverbal communication. So when people are talking to you and they're saying all these wonderful, sweet, wonderful things, but there's something a little bit dead in their eyes, It seems a little bit mechanical. You have the impression that they've said it to a 100 other people in the same way. You have an intuition about it, but you're not listening to that intuition. Right? So pay attention to these other things going on, Very good ways of judging people's character. But the most important thing of all is to always tell yourself the appearance that people present is, a, it is the reality, but that's pretty rare. B, it's not really the reality, there's something else going on, or, c, it's the opposite, there's something very dangerous going on here. Because if you have a toxic narcissist, and I've worked for people like that, and we've all been involved with them, they don't come in with a little sign saying I'm a toxic narcissist. They don't display it. They've learned to be very charming, very nice, very listened to. Then you get involved with them, and it comes out slowly. But I try and show in the laws of human nature and in the daily laws that there are always, always signs of those toxic people before you get involved in them. You're just not paying attention. There's one section I really loved, September 5th. Place yourself in she, s h I h. And it says basically, there's this one line where you say, the essence of strategy is not to carry out a brilliant plan that proceeds in steps. It is to put yourself in situations where you have more options than the enemy does. That's definitely important in war, but it's, like, even important in career or income. Like, there's the whole almost stereotype or cliche of diversify your income, have 5 sources of income. And if your only strategy was to rise up at General Motors, you might get fired or laid off, and you miss out on, you took too much risk. Have having options is the best way to succeed without risk than having clear goals in in just one path, and I thought that was just important to underline. Yeah. I mean, that comes from, from the 33 Strategies of War, the book I wrote, and I went heavily into The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which is a very famous, very interesting book about strategy. And I was reading the Sun Tzu, and I was thinking, this book is very it's brilliant, but it's kind of abstract. And I bet in Chinese, it's not so abstract. Right? Because there must be another layer. So I bought this version of The Art of War that was annotated, which explained the each character in the book and what it really meant and kind of explained it in kind of literal English. And, obviously, I didn't read the whole book that way, but there was this one word, and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing it. But it was this idea of placing the army in a position of power. And the metaphor that he used was when you have a bow and an arrow, and you've strung the bow and it's taught and you're about to release the arrow, that is s**t. That's a position of potential energy and power. Or if you have a boulder on top of a hill, a mountain, and it's teetering, etcetera, and it can fall, that is a position of incredible and potential energy and power. So s**t really meant potential energy. Right? It didn't say whether it could go here or there or where it would attack. It just meant it was in a position where this all this momentum and energy would suddenly come behind it. And that was what the original Chinese word meant. This is really interesting. And I I looked at some of the great generals and and particularly Napoleon Bonaparte and decided that that was his strategy. He wouldn't place his he wouldn't attack the enemy army straight on. He would find a position somewhere on the map where he would place 4 or 5 divisions of his army. They'd give him maximum options and potential to attack from many different directions depending on what the enemy did. So he was using that metaphor of the Todd bow and the boulder on the hill. He was putting himself in a position of tremendous energy and momentum. And I thought, as you point out, that this is analogous to life. Otherwise, I wouldn't have written about it. So when you know when you're looking at a career, you know, if you follow that straight line with General Motors, you're gonna end up being, you know, you the job won't exist or or or it'll be miserable, etcetera. You wanna find a career, a path that allows you options that has open ended. So you've learned something, and now you're working at a start up. And in that start up, you can now learn, things where you can maybe start your own business, or maybe you learn new computer skills on a high other level. You can learn about marketing. So let's say you're 20 years old. You have a choice of joining some immensely powerful Wall Street firm that's gonna pay you 6 figures or this small start up in, you know, in Brooklyn or or wherever, and it's gonna pay you $20,000, but you're gonna be among 8 people, and you're gonna see all of the little branches of that business. Putting yourself there is the equivalent of putting yourself in s**t because you're gonna you're gonna learn all these different things, all these different paths you can take in life depending on what pleases you. That's a potential position of power. So I think it applies to so many things in life. But Yeah. It's it's interesting. I I mean, my I I mentioned earlier, I played in my 1st chess tournament in 24 years last weekend, and I there was one skill which I sort of realized I had weakness in. And and the the weakness doesn't matter so much in, like, blitz chess, but in very slow chess where the games could last 5 or 6 hours, it was extremely important, which is that if I only had one plan and I calculated, you know, 20 moves, whatever, how many moves ahead, and I miscalculated. The game was over. And my weakness was I had to get used to or or get used to again having multiple plans at the same time or so I could always fall back and not, you know, not burn the bridges behind me. It's important in in anything. You know, we career even even writing, you have to give yourself outs in some ways. Like, if you're writing a story, there has to be many potential ways to to have a reader emotionally re respond to it. Yeah. And and I kind of write my books like that because if my book was just about one little aspect about power, I would get kind of bored, and I think the reader would get bored. But I take a subject like power, and I make it also about seduction. I also make it about the soft forms of power. I also make it about the violent side of power, etcetera. So every reader could kind of find what they want in it, and they can it kind of creates this sort of open endedness where you read into it what you wanna read into it. But, you know, speaking of chess, for for mastery, I kind of read about a lot about Bobby Fischer, probably one of the most brilliant chess players ever. And what happened with Bobby Fischer, and maybe it'll happen with you at some point, James, is he'd he'd played so many games of chess since he was, like, 5 years old. Right? Like Mozart or something. That he had internalized all of these different patterns, all of these different ways a game could proceed. So if you were in the middle of a game and it was unlike any board you'd ever see for a pattern, he had seen it before, and he remembered that in the 5 times he had seen it before, that he moved there, he moved there, he moved there, he moved there. This is the one that worked. Right? And maybe it won't work because he's playing a different opponent. Because he had internalized so many patterns in that moment, he could be incredibly creative, and he could come up with a move that nobody had thought of before. But it was never a rigid thing. He was never approaching it. Even in the moment where somebody made a move, it wasn't like, the next thing I have to do is this because I did it before. He was always like, no. No. This is a different I'm playing someone different. This is a different game. I'm gonna try something completely different here. So that was part of his brilliance, and maybe you'll you'll get there some time. Maybe. One one could hope, but he you know, it's interesting because what he's doing is connecting ideas. Like, he's taking the current position, connecting it to some other position that he either remembered or or bay you know, in intuited, like, from from something he had once seen, and and connected the dots there. I'll tell you an interesting Bobby Fischer story. At some point when he was a kid, I guess he was a little frustrated with his play, so he sort of disappeared for a while. He was known for disappearing throughout his career until his final disappearance, but he disappeared for a while. And this was when he was very young, like like 14 or 13 years old, something like that, and he studied all of the games of the 1800. And he studied them so and everybody thought and thought, oh, these are boring games. We're beyond how they played in the 1800. But he basically improved upon each game. And so he came back into play having improved upon all these games that people had discarded, and they didn't even remember anymore. And then he won the US championship, like, 11 to 0. He won his first US championship, and it was it was study and and discipline like that that really it's unclear or not how talented he was. I mean, I'm sure he had talent, but it was unclear whether he was the greatest talent ever. But he certainly was probably one of the top 3 or 4 hardest working players ever. He was incredibly hardworking. That drove him over the edge a little. I think there's a high level of creativity there. The other thing is the other thing that you'd have to say about the story you just related is that he approached it without an ego. So most people would say, the 9th 1800. They were so inferior to us. We're so much beyond that. He was open to it, and he said, other styles, other ways of playing might actually be better than what we're doing now. So I'm not gonna be so rich. I'm not gonna be so judgmental about the past. I can learn from people before me, you know, which is another brilliant thing. Yeah. And then this is related to your story on on Xi. He learned Russian as a kid in order to read their chess magazines. Right. Right. So because they were just better players than the Americans. Americans then were were very feeble. Now now America is is is one of the strongest countries, but not certainly not then. But, so let me answer this. What's, what's the law of sublime going to be about? I I love the title, and I and I'm still having a hard time picturing what what you're going to write about. Oh, okay. Well, I'll try and explain it, as well as I can. Basically, the idea is that, the essence of being a human being is that we're these social animals and that we have to follow these kind of rules and conventions that society imposes on us. These are ways that you behave in the world. Not just ways you behave, but ways you think. You're supposed this is our reality. You're supposed to think in this way about the world, etcetera. And this kind of time that we live in always comprises, like, I compare it to a circle. All those rules of conventions about behavior and thinking, they create this kind of limit. This is what how you're supposed to think. This is how you're supposed to behave to be an accepted member of our society. That's extremely human. That circle might change. It's not the same as it was 1000 of years ago for people in Pacific Islands to now 21st century America, but it's always a circle. And the thing about humans is the moment you put a create a limit about what we're supposed to do, we're fascinated by what lies beyond that limit, by what is supposedly taboo, by what we're not supposed to think about, what we're not supposed to to to do. Right? We're interested in it because we don't like the down deep down inside, we don't like the fact that we're not supposed to explore here or do that. There's a perverse side to human nature. So I say what lies just beyond that circle in any direction is what I call the sublime. You want to explore beyond what is accepted, beyond what people tell you you should think, beyond what people tell you you should do. And in exploring that realm, you're opening yourself to a new range of emotions, to a new range of ideas, and it's incredibly liberating and it's incredibly exciting. And the ultimate thing on the other side of that circle, the one thing that never changes, is death itself. And so the word sublime from Latin means up to the threshold up to the threshold of a door. So you're peering inside a door to the other side of the of that circle, and death is the ultimate door. Right? What lies beyond that? And so to have a kind of a brush with death and encounter with death is sort of the ultimate form of sublime because you're really going beyond the actual limits of life itself. Right? And so in the book, I will describe people with one of the aspects will be near death experiences. But the irony is is I've been intending to write this book 17 years ago or so. It's a subject that fascinated me. And then I got distracted by the 50¢ book, by mastery, by human nature. But my plan had always been that I was gonna go jet around the world, and I was gonna have all of these insane experiences, scuba diving in the Caribbean, going to Tierra del Fuego, climbing this mountain and having all these sublime moments. That had been my plan. And then in 2018, I finished the laws of human nature. The last chapter was about confronting your mortality, confronting your death. And I talk about in there about the sublime itself, just what I've described. Right? And then ironically, or I don't know how you wanna phrase it, but literally 3 months later, I had a stroke, and I came as you know, because when I last was on your show, I just had it. I was like, this I came as close to dying. Right? I had that near death experience that I had written about 2 months earlier but in an intellectual way. So I had had my own, like, near death experience. It isn't as strong as some people. It wasn't, like, you know, having outer body experiences. But I had weird visions and a weird feeling in my body and a sense of death that was kind of welling inside of me. And so now this book that was gonna be this thing where I was jetting off here and there and all these abstract ideas became something completely different. First of all, I really literally had experienced what I was going to be writing about. That having that moment changes how you look at the world, changes how you see the sky, changes how you see birds, changes how you see your wife or girlfriend or whomever in the world. Literally happened to me. But the second thing is because I can't jet off and do scuba diving and travel here and there, I have to make I have to find the sublime as I'm writing the book in my office here in this room that you're that you're seeing behind me. I'm in my chair. I can barely I can't even take a hike right now because I can't still can't walk very well. And so I have to find it in my mind. I have to experience it just by seeing things around me and thinking about them. And so now when I write the book, I think the reader won't have this impression, wow. I have to jet off to Kathmandu to have this book to do what he's doing here. No. You can have it wherever you are because that's how I had to write the book itself. So it sort of changed from my initial conception of it. And so I describe different forms of this experience. I describe the cosmic sublime, which has to do with the origin of our universe, and then I go into the biological sublime about life itself on our planet. I go into ancient religions and and the the kind of sublime experience that we can still have. I go into childhood. I go into the brain itself, etcetera, different angles from exploring outside that circle. That's sort of the idea. And how how can so it just sounds really beautiful, this book. Like, how can someone wake up tomorrow and practice experiencing the sublime in their life? Well, you know what? I don't like writing intellectual academic books. And every book so that's always been the story of my life. So people write books about seduction. They write it as if there's no juice or sexiness to it because it's written from this academic point of view. Right? It's so boring or power or whatever. So I'm not gonna write a book on the sublime like other people have written this very abstract thing. I'm gonna hit you and the reader with ideas about how you can go out and experience it. So in the second part of each chapter, I describe how you can have the experience, and and I try and make it as practical as possible. So, obviously, the cosmic sublime has to do with the big bang and the origin of our universe. Well, you can kind of experience it that just by walking outside your house and kind of seeing things about gravity, seeing things about mountains, etcetera, knowing that the planet you walk on, all the material and everything inside of your own body originated from the big bang. And I go into depth about that, and I go into depth about how you can think about your own body and think about the landscapes around you in terms of something rather cosmic. And I also describe how on the Internet, you have now the ability to look at things in the plant, in the universe, in the cosmos that are unbelievable. Like, they have actually filmed a black hole. They took a photograph of a black hole. And then I describe what a black hole is in that chapter. And the it's such a thing that you can't even conceive of it. They actually took a photograph of it. But these pictures that they've taken with the Hubble Telescope, etcetera, of our universe, of of galaxies far, far away, just looking at those photographs is gonna blow your mind. They've also recorded sounds from outer space. So you can kind of hear they even have somebody record what they think with the big bang sounded like. You know? So you can you can in your armchair, you can have these experiences. So every chapter, I go into depth about how you can have this kind of awareness and practice it. So I just wrote a chapter about what I call the pagan sublime, where I talk about how people looked at the world 4000 years ago, you know, in a much different context and their religion, etcetera, and how interesting it was. And I described in the last part how you can go around and walk around your city, your town, your neighborhood, wherever it is, and you can see the world momentarily through their eyes and how different that was and how exciting it is to try these experiments. And and let me ask this, although I I think the answer is almost obvious, but what is the benefit of it? What is the benefit of having sublime experiences? Well, on one level, it frees up the mind. So I have this feeling that when you go into your smartphone and you spend so much time, you're literally shrinking, shrinking down to the size to the size of a bit inside your phone like The Incredible Shrinking, whatever that movie was. You know? Mhmm. You're just getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Your thoughts are being programmed by Instagram, by Facebook. They're not your own thoughts. Your thoughts are shrinking. You're shrinking until you become this little dot. Right? And it's happening to a lot of people. So when you go out and you do the opposite, which is opening your mind up to all these things that I'm describing, you're expanding yourself. You're expanding your mind. You're expanding your consciousness. Number 1, that will make you a more creative person in life because you're not gonna be having this narrow little vision of the world. You're gonna be thinking, wow. This world could have been so much different. There's so many possibilities out there. Since this world might not have existed the way it is, since there might not be sunlight or color, maybe I should think differently about my plans here. Maybe there are other possibilities I never thought of. It's also gonna open you up to this reality. It's gonna make you appreciate things. So I I describe in the second chapter how how the world came about, the earth that we we we sit on here right now. And I and I and I create a picture of the insane odds, the astronomical odds against you and me, you and me, James, sitting here talking on squad cast or whatever it's called, is unbelievable that it ever happened. And I go through the list of how life almost never started on this planet 3000000000 years ago, how complex life was a complete accident. I mean, multicellular life was a complete accident, Almost never happened. How through evolution there were all these bottlenecks where where where how we evolved might never have happened. The dinosaurs might not have gone extinct 60000000 years ago. An asteroid, which had just barely hit the planet, if it had missed, there'd be still be dinosaurs walking around. How humans nearly went extinct 80,000 years ago. There was only, like, 10,000 humans on the planet left, and one and one virus could have wiped all of us out. And then what would have happened? Then there would be Neanderthal that'd be ruling the world. On and on and on. And then goes to this. Think of your parents when they met, how unlikely it was that they met and then produced you. Right? Now multiply that by 70,000 generations, which is how many there are going back to maybe the origin of Homo sapiens. So 70,000 times people connected, had sex, had children, and and they might very easily not have. And if they hadn't, you wouldn't be here who you are right now. So these kinds of thoughts kind of alter how you look at the moment right now. Yes. It's it's it's fascinating, and I think I think you're right. There is a lot of a lot of pleasure, and it's an interesting analogy of of just looking at it as the opposite of looking at the cell phone or the or, I mean, the smartphone. I mean, it's you used to be called a cell phone. Now it's a smartphone. And how it shrinks you literally, and I think that's really true. We get absorbed into these worlds without realizing it and not realizing that they're just screens and that they're not they're not real. And so I'm I'm looking forward to that book. When's it going to be when are you gonna publish it? Do do you take 6 years to write a book? You you take, like, a year or 2. It's good. Oh, it's gonna take more than that. Mostly because, I'm not complaining, but I can't type. Still can't type with my left hand. Mhmm. So I have to go through this weird Byzantine process of handwriting things out, of correcting it through handwriting with in 4 different notebooks and then dictating it through a dictation software, then trying to do so it's taking me longer than you do. So long story short, that's gonna be another couple years, I'm afraid. Do you think, like, obviously, you're you're doing physical therapy. How how well do you see yourself, recovering over time? It's been a it's it's it's been, up in a roller coaster because sometimes I think I'm on the way there. It's been 3 years now. I'm making progress. Then some days, I feel like I've not progressed at all. And so it's very emotionally, trying. Somebody will come up to me with some new therapy. I'll get all excited about it. Okay. I'll do it. I'll spend 1,000 of dollars on this. And then it doesn't really change anything. And and then begin to wonder, well, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the problem. These are all common things that people have when there are strokes. So I originally thought I'd be by now, I would be back to typing, swimming, hiking, none of which has happened. I still think I will get there, but it's gonna take I know the actress, Sharon Stone, had a stroke very similar to mine at a similar age, and she's written about it and didn't it took her 7 years to get back. Wow. So I might have 4 more years of this. I didn't know that about her. So she must have and then she had active physical therapy. Like, it probably takes a lot of is it work each day? I do, like, at least an hour and a half, sometimes 2 hours every day. You know, I have a special bicycle. It's called a recumbent bike. It's a like a fancy tricycle that allows me to go up in the hills and get all the exercise I used to get, which is my only form of therapy, but it's really been lifesaving. And then so I do that, and then I do physical therapy every night. I have new therapists who I think are really, really good, and I'm hopeful about that. And I'm following their exercises. I'm just you know, I I can't help it. I almost, know, I'm almost getting a little bit emotional. I can't help but feeling kind of disappointed in how slowly my progress is coming. So But at the same time, though, Robert, these books, your like, The Daily Laws, I found to be so wonderful and so beautiful. It's definitely something that I I as I was reading it, I was thinking, I'm reading it right now to prepare for this podcast. I need to read it also when I'm not and and I rarely say this. I need to read it now just for me. I I have to do a second reading so that I could just enjoy instead of be overthinking, like, which one's gonna lead which passage is gonna lead to questions and so on. Like, it's a different style of reading. And but I enjoyed it so much, and I thought this is gonna be so useful to me in my life. I need to read this, and I was speaking specifically of my my daughters and one son. I need them to read it, and I hope they do. So so it's such a valuable book. I mean, that's why also, when I saw you writing this book, the laws of the sublime, it it I was really curious, like, what it's going to be about, and and these are real masterpieces that that you bring into the world. So, you know, and I'm always so grateful to to have you on the on the podcast and and talk to you about these things. You basically you it's like I'm getting consult you're Robert Greene consulting for free. So it's, it's always an amazing thing because it it changes my life. So but thank you thank you for for coming on. Well, I I wanna see your next com comedy routine about chess. I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. I hope it's I hope it's a comedy and not a tragedy. So well, time will tell. Yeah. So failure's first, apparently. Yeah. Thank you so much, Robert. I really appreciate it, and I I really appreciate the books as well. Thank you, James. I really appreciate the opportunity. I'm really good. And by the way, I really loved your book as well.
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