Seduce & Influence Anyone: How To Build Confidence & Become Powerful | Robert Greene

[Music] robert greene welcome back to the show thanks for having me tom sure i am super excited i love your work beyond all reason and measure i have loved everything of yours that i've ever read what i like about the approach that you take is you and i are obsessed with a very similar idea which i think is critically important for people to understand which is deal with the world the way that it actually is and not the way that you wish it were and i think there are a few people that are able to look unflinchingly at both sides of the human experience the sublime which you're getting into in your new book which you certainly touch on in this one and then the dark side the you know the power struggles and all of that um help us understand what the world is really like what what do you think is that key thing that people misunderstand well the key thing is it goes back to our nature and how we evolved as as conscious animals the key thing is there's an animal part of our nature which is we completely take appearances for reality that's sort of the source of our problems and our misery to be honest with you in life so the front that people present the way they look the way they talk to us their words we sort of take at face value and although we might think or we might know from reading a book or whatever that you can't always trust appearances is kind of a cliche we can't control ourselves so it makes us extremely vulnerable to charming people to charlatans to con artists to politicians who say one thing who do another to relationships terrible relationships where we fall in love with exactly the wrong person to the worst kind of hires you know i do a lot of consulting work i've been doing it for over 20 years now the number one problem i deal with is i hired the worst person in the world and they're making my life hell right and why did you hire the wrong person because you judge them on their charming smiles their appearance their their smooth talk their resume which you can conceal a lot with your resume you didn't look behind the facade and look at what's underneath the character so this is kind of ingrained in our nature it goes back thousands and thousands of years it's extremely difficult to overcome right and i have the problem too i deal with it all the time and and i have to go through a process where i i step back and i say i don't want to be paranoid but this person is so nice and pleasant is there something else going on behind behind the curtain that that's there you know and then sometimes i tell myself no i have ways of judging that they're that they're cons there's a consistency between the face and the reality but oftentimes there is not and i've become very good at that kind of [ __ ] detect detection which i've been doing my whole life how do you get good at that well you know some things are hard to put into words which is why i struggle so dif much with my books because a lot of human communication i estimated 95 it's just a number is non-verbal right so we don't pay much attention to that because we're so word oriented right we're so embedded in language that we think everything in terms of what people say but unconsciously without even realizing it we're continually judging people on their non-verbal behavior right so there's their eyes their smile are different from what they actually say but we're not really so in kind of a pre naturally intuitive way we understand that we don't trust those kind of judgments right so we we rely more on what they say than what the signals that we pick up from their body language so years and years of training and being sensitive to it it's probably something that has to go back to my child that if you put me on a couch and psychoanalyze me right here there was probably something in my childhood where i had to learn how to really read people not by what they said by but everything about them and i have kind of a feel an intuitive feel for the energy the vibrations the mood that people give off not through what they say but through their body through particularly their tone of voice and all the other signals that is a number that is the main way of judging you know what's going what's really going on the other thing you look at are people's patterns of behavior right things that have happened in the past as i said in laws of human nature nobody ever does one something just once right if somebody [ __ ] up and does something kind of hurts you in some way and they say oh i'm sorry i don't know what came over me that that's not me don't trust that it'll happen again for sure it will happen again a second or third fourth time what do you think is going on there because when you were going through the list of things being in a bad relationship was the one that really jumped out of you know you hear people ending in these just like horrendous cycles of being stuck in this abusive relationship and the person manages to reel them back in what is going on on the side of the person who convinces themselves to go back into that relationship is there the need to be loved is there a wound or something that you're that they're trying to deal with and how do you advise people that are stuck in a loop like that well it's probably from some kind of primal wound right so there's a perverse part of human nature which is oftentimes in early childhood something happened to us often something that didn't happen to us like the love we didn't get or the feel the nurturing that we didn't get there's this kind of wound this emptiness this lack right and we grow up and we're not really aware of it and kind of things grow over this wound but what also happens which is the perverse side of human nature is that early on our kind of sexual excitement is sort of kind of grows up around that wound so that is so weird and yet seems so self-evidently true yeah but why well i i'd have to be like i'd have to go into something you know hit my go inside my own psychoanalytic you know mindset here but um you know when you're when you're very young you're extremely vulnerable you're extremely open to the energies of other people in ways we don't understand right now right it's it's it's hard to imagine something what i'm writing about right now in my new book when you're two years old one years old before you even had really mastered language you're so dependent on other people you're so open to them that their energy gets infused it's completely internalized and also children at that age also have their sort of sexual nature is being created at that moment at a very very early age certain desires you know for us sex is not just a physical thing it's an emotional thing right we have it's psychological so things that we didn't get are charged with all this kind of energy that then could later on turn into sort of desires so let's say for instance you had a mother who was very narcissistic who really wasn't giving you the normal mother nurturing empathetic energy it was more about her and you had to pay attention to her right well that kind of creates the sort of desire this you're you're as the infant you really want that love from that mother you're trying to drag you're trying to attract and pull it out of her as best you can and your energy your desire is is surrounding her with this kind of emotional charge sexual energy and you're going to find throughout your life you are going to be attracted to narcissistic women it's going to be your your achilles heel throughout your life because you want to kind of re heal that wound you want to be able to play back that initial trauma and sort of rewrite the way it ended up where now you're going to find this narcissistic woman and she's going to give you finally what you never had before right it's a very very common pattern right and so you're not even aware of this and it's extremely difficult to break out of because your desire is for this type of person so you might meet a woman just doing it from a man's point of view who isn't narcissistic who's very empathetic and very caring and she would be perfect for you and you may even have a relationship with her but the excitement the energy that charge isn't going to be as strong as with that other type and you're going to fall back into the old patterns again and again and again and the only way out of it is to go back and look at your early childhood and look at these wounds and confront them face to face and understand that you're a prisoner of this kind of these kind of things that were ingrained at you at a very very early age and what does that process look like like how do you confront something like that well how do you even develop the awareness of the problem well you have to look at what's going on in the present right now you have to be first of all it depends on how old you are and how many relationships you have but you have to see your own patterns and if you have unhealthy patterns where you have debt fallen again and again and again for the wrong person you have to see a sort of a through line there what ties it all together what's going on right so um you know a common scenario that i wrote about in human nature is in this particular scenario where your mother is giving you the attention that you think you want right you have this feeling when you're a child three or four years old that that mother is abandoning you that's almost your fault in that case right because you don't want to believe that a parent could be wrong or flawed because it's too painful of thought so you want to think that you are flawed and she has abandoned you for some reason it's very painful so what you're going to do throughout your life is you're always going to be the one cutting off a relationship before it gets too intense so that you don't ever have to go through that abandonment feeling again right that's your pattern right so after six months the relationship is kind of you know growing you'll find some excuse she's not right for me she's saying the wrong thing she's you'll break off the relationship blaming her when in fact you're afraid deeply afraid that she's going to abandon you and you can't stand that so you've got to see these patterns and they're very painful and they're very difficult because they're touching upon things that go to the heart of who we are you know it's not just in your relationships you're gonna probably be doing that with your jobs as well you're gonna be quitting jobs before they you know before you get to the point where you have too much responsibility they're very very deeply ingrained in you and you have to be able to look at them so awareness is everything the ability to look at yourself realistically and understand you're saying see things as they are see the world as it is it begins with yourself seeing yourself as you are right and seeing that your adult self that's so confident and has this you know this way about the world is covering over some wounds some vulnerabilities from your deep childhood not everybody but for a lot of people that's the case you have to be willing to rip away the skin and look underneath and see that wound and touch upon it and then kind of analyze it and sort of see the patterns in your life before you can begin one thing that you do really well which i think is definitely part of your appeal is that you're able to write about these difficult things in human nature without needing to remove yourself so you're not doing it as a spectator oh oh those humans over there they've got problems um you're able to really look at it yourself so as you think about this process of ripping the skin away i think was the the phrase that you said and confronting that how do you begin to to translate what's actually happening without the need for the ego to step in and say no no you're it to not go in either direction quite frankly to either then say oh because you have this flaw you are a loser or to blind yourself to the flaw and say no no that's it's not a problem like how do people find that middle ground of acknowledging it without succumbing to negative emotion around it that's a great question um you know so sometimes you know you need help in these areas it depending on the depth of the wound so sometimes you need a third person's eyes on it you can't necessarily analyze it yourself which is why you might want to go into therapy or you might want a spouse or a significant other or someone you love and trust who can tell you these things because sometimes it's very hard for you to have any kind of distance from them you know but um the the ability to detach yourself from your own emotions is extremely important in life it doesn't mean that you become a cold rational person at all i don't believe in that at all emotions are extremely important for us it's what makes us creative at what feeds our imagination gives us drive but the ability that you can gain over your life in this instant and in every other instant to have a degree of detachment not a it's only a matter of degree where you can stand back and you feel something very powerfully you feel attracted to something or a person you feel excited or repulsed and to not react and to step back and analyze and go why am i feeling this right now is it because of what somebody is saying right now or does it go deeper to that is it related to some other issue that is a skill that is not easy but you can develop it day by day by day taking little steps and so if you're able to slowly detach yourself from your day-to-day emotional reactions it gives you a little bit of distance between you and your ego right so i meditate every morning i've been doing it now for 11 years for like 40 over 40 minutes it's a ritual that if i don't do i feel extremely depressed something's wrong okay and when i'm meditating i become deeply aware these thoughts start coming up they bubble up you can't control them you become deeply aware of your ego of certain patterns and you're thinking of certain anxieties of certain kind of neurotic thought patterns right you're seeing it before your eyes it's floating there this is your ego robert it's going here there and there you can see it and now when you're in that state you can almost see it as if it's another person and it's very powerful it's very liberating now in the case of someone who's dealing with a deep wound i don't know if you can go you can't go there like tomorrow and do this i'm a realistic person i'm very practical i don't want to advise people something that's not going to happen it's something that you're going to have to it's a life skill that you have to build the the the the power to take take a step back and look at yourself with some distance and see that ego as if it's over there it's floating in front of you it's giving you signs of who you are you know you can develop that and it's very powerful and it will give you the ability to look at your own wounds objectively but you're never going to reach a degree of 100 detachment me who's been practicing this for many years i still get caught up in those wounds i still get caught up in my ego it's just a matter of degree that that's all i'm talking about this is such an insanely complicated issue when i think about okay so if the number one problem is people aren't aware that there's a game being played basically you can't take things sort of at their surface and then understanding that as you were saying that self-awareness is also this critical part then there are the studies that have shown that your mind will give you a reason for something even when that reason is obviously not true and i don't know if you heard about that study where people that have had the ability to form uh long-term memories damaged so they can do short-term memories but you could reintroduce yourself to them every three minutes and they'd be like oh my god they'd greet you anew each time and the doctor put a pin in his hand and he walked in and he shook hands and it poked the person they jerked their hand back like you know why'd you do that they leave they come back three minutes later the person does not remember meeting them at all they stick out their hand and the person will refuse to shake it and so they don't remember ever meeting them before and so they'll say why won't you shake my hand oh well you know i've had a long-standing rule i don't shake the hand of people with white lab coats and they come up with all these different excuses because the brain can't like sit there in this ignorance and so you have something that's clearly hardwired in us to to so we i have heard humans referred to as meaning making machines which makes a lot of sense to me we make meaning out of something right so if we have this hardwired propensity to come up with some sort of meaning something somewhere and we have the psychological immune system which doesn't want me to feel badly about myself so now i have an inclination to lie to myself basically from some like deep seated part of me that survives even damage to the ability to make long-term memories and so when i think about the deck being stacked against people in terms of really figuring out what's actually going on inside themselves it gets a little scary and this is where so for me when i think about okay if all the things that i just said are true nested inside of all the stuff you've been talking about the only path i see out of that is you because everyone needs self-esteem so your psychological immune system is trying to make you feel good about yourself got it so you need to take conscious control of feeling good about yourself but you need to wrap it around something anti-fragile so that for the only answer i've come up with in my own life is to be the learner that way if i do something stupid i make a mistake whatever i can just go hey that sucks and it does make me feel badly but i only value myself for being a learner and since recognizing how i actually am would be useful then i'll face the truth of what this is and then i can learn and move on well you touch on an extremely important critical thing here the element that i'm trying to hit at which is your level of desire for change so if you're trapped in these patterns and you feel a great degree of pain and your life isn't going anywhere and you're having bad relationships bad work habits and you say i can't deal with this anymore you're extremely motivated to go through the process that you just mentioned which is after every event that occurs you go through a kind of an autopsy right and you analyze you can do this on a daily basis with a journal or you can do it on a weekly basis you know what did i do there what was the element of where i actually might have created the problem between me and another person and i have to be reasonably rational and i have to be reasonably realistic you're right if we saw it completely into ourselves we would hate ourselves so thoroughly that we wouldn't get out of bed we'd all be killing ourselves you do need a degree of illusion you do need a degree of self-esteem and confidence right and what happens is you know it's kind of like an internal thermostat and so you have like people who are what i call deep narcissists who have no kind of sense no anchor inside of them no real sense self-esteem to hold on to and when that self-esteem starts going down down down they have no way of dealing with it and their only way of dealing with it is acting out in the way that narcissists act out so we all have if we're not a deep narcissist we have that thermostat where things start hurting us a little bit and we bring ourselves back up through this self-esteem mechanism so we don't get too depressed and too down there's an element of unreality to that but it's very valuable and i would never ever ever want to burst that you need a degree of illusion in your life it's very important but if you really want change if you're really fed up if you're not kidding yourself if you're not going through this [ __ ] process yeah i kind of want to change my life but you don't really mean it then nothing you no words no no therapy will ever get you to that point you almost have to hit bottom you almost have to tell yourself i can't take this anymore and now the motivation is so deep that you're able now to go through to begin the process of going through that kind of self analysis because that's the only way you're going to get out of it it's the only way you know a lot of the of of our culture is making this worse in a way unfortunately i mean there's good things in our culture no but there are bad things give me some of the bad well i think social media for all the good that it does makes it very hard to be self-reflective interesting i i thought for sure you were going to say just leads us to compare ourselves why does it make it hard to be self-referring well it does well comparing yourself is not self-reflective when you compare yourself your standard is always what other people are doing right they're on these great vacations he's got a great job tom has this amazing house where i'm living in this hovel in los feliz right that's not looking at myself that's always having the other person as the standard it makes us so out in the world in other people but other people are saying what other people are doing it makes us continually think in the social sense and not able to turn inside and look at how who we are what makes us different we're so attuned to what's cool to what other people are doing out there what other people are saying that we lose a kind of an intuitive grasp of who we are right so the psychologist abraham maslow talked of impulse voices he said that a child of one years old has this impulse voice that says i like this fruit i don't like this fruit i'm gonna throw it away right and and then other things these voices inside that make them that individual this is what they like and what they hate right these are very very important as you develop later in life you know this is what you love these are the subjects that interest you these are subjects you're not interested these are the people you like these people you don't like it's who you are in the deepest sense of it it's your what i call your primal inclinations it's you at its core and if you're so attuned to what other people are saying and doing and telling you and thinking that voice gets drowned out by a million other voices and you're not able to hear yourself anymore and it's very hard to take a step back and actually look at yourself and analyze yourself so i think that in some ways this this dilemma that we're talking about is getting more and more difficult because to be able to do what you're talking about you have to be willing to be alone you have to be willing to close the door in your room write down and say this is what's going on this is what happened this is what i did this is what they did you can't be out there in the world and do this it's impossible to do that process because you're going to be sucked into the social dynamic and you won't be able to think about yourself so i think it's made things a little bit harder for people that's really interesting and oh man the the human condition is utterly fascinating it does not seem designed to make us enjoy it or you know it literally seems survival is like the only uh consideration and that can be obviously very difficult for people so as people navigate the modern world as they try to make their way through something like that what are the tools and approaches um that you recommend to people well it's kind of what the subject of sort of what the daily laws is about there's there's two things so um you know the the the source of your power in life is your attitude towards the world and in in human nature i kind of describe what i believe an attitude is it's your lens it's your way of looking at the world everybody's lens is different you're not seeing things exactly as they are you're seeing them filtered through how you look at them some people are so important yeah some people are optimistic and adventurous some people are anxious and closed and you could put two people in the same circumstances visiting the same place the pessimistic anxious person will find it unpleasant people are rude i don't like it the adventurous exploring type will find the circumstances very exciting but it's the same thing it's just you're judging in a different way so the lens that you want you want a lens that clarifies things you want a lens that's realistic that you're trying to see things as they are right it's good to be excited but sometimes if you're too excited and too adventurous you're going to walk right up to that tiger and they're going to eat you alive sometimes you have to be a little bit wary of things you have to see your circumstances for what for what they are in military terms they call it situational awareness you're very aware crystal clear about who you are about who other people are about what the world is like so that's the attitude that you want to craft for yourself in this world and it's very difficult as you've been saying very eloquently the cards are stacked against you a because of how we're wired you know our brains developed 200 000 years ago in circumstances that certainly aren't the way things are now so we're so there's kind of a a gap there between you know how how we're wired to think and what's going on in the 21st century and b we're dealing with technology that's making things harder so you your goal in life is to become more realistic to be able to step back and look at things as they are and how do you get there is the question so first you have to see that as your goal and it has to be important to you it has to be something that you want and it's not just something that's cold and dry and scientific really fast why is that the right goal why is that the right goal yeah to see i agree with you i just want to see how you explain it to people why it matters to see the world the way that it actually is well okay imagine it this way so there's yourself everything begins with you right you're filled with all kinds of illusions about who you are about what you're good at what you're bad at what your weaknesses are what your strengths are if you're able to see inside of yourself with a degree of realism you'll be able to understand this is what i was destined to be in life this is what i call my life's task this is the career that's that fits me that suits me so if you're able to have that realism when you're 22 years old you're not going to suddenly go off on this wrong career path that's going to make you miserable make you an alcoholic by the time you're 30 you're going to have a degree of direction in life it's incredibly liberating it's incredibly powerful to be able to see inside of yourself and know what you were destined for and what makes you you other people other people wear masks they smile but they doesn't their smile doesn't mean anything there are toxic people out there it's not everybody i don't mean to make you paranoid maybe there's like five percent of the world that's truly toxic every single human being i can guarantee you has had to deal with these talks of people in a way that's painful and you don't see them you know they're very tricky these are people who've learned to disguise themselves you're going to get sucked into all these dramas and traumas with these people can make your life miserable imagine you had a realistic attitude and you could see through these people you could catch before you get involved with them signs of that they might be one of these types another thing that's incredibly liberating the world that you live in there's a zeitgeist there's a spirit of the times there are trends there's things that are going on right now in your career in the world at large and we're fed with so much [ __ ] in the media we have no idea what's really going on the ability to see this is where the world headed is headed this is where business will be in two years this is where things are going to be these are the trends the power so the power to see inside yourself the power inside to see other people to see the world you know you're superman if you can do that if you can have a degree of that the world is at your feet basically so you know i don't think there's any counter-argument to that where you don't want that kind of realism and it's not this ugly thing it's incredibly sexy because it's incredibly powerful right so we've now come to the point you and i we agree that that's what you want the person out there is going yeah i want that as well okay robert that's fine how do i get there aha well you have to be patient you have to know it's a process you can't get ahead of yourself you can't get ahead of your skis it's going to take day by day by day by day you have to build it up you're working against your own nature you're working against the times so be patient be compassionate with yourself and learn to take these baby steps and in the book daily laws i have a lot of different ways of attacking that the main way of attacking it is learning the ability as we talked about earlier to be able to detach yourself from the immediate events going on and to be able to look at yourself with a degree of dispassion and say this is what i did really did what really happened here so just a simple example something kind of doesn't go the way you wanted to which will happen almost every day or every week you know with your children with your spouse with your boss wherever okay what is your normal reaction every single human including myself blame that person they're not caring they're not empathetic they're an [ __ ] there's they're narcissistic blah blah blah stop it stop it right now don't do that again step back and say what did i do okay if that person is toxic why am i involved with them there's something wrong about me if that person got reactive and resentful and they had a bad tone of voice something that i said maybe there was something in me that was projecting kind of negativity maybe my own mood wasn't really was kind of creating this atmosphere that made them react that way look at yourself instead of blaming other people you know these are parts of the process there are many others but yeah dude that is so huge people always so i have a saying that i like that most people [ __ ] hate which is everything is my fault i love it it's so useful so uh fault is a word that gives people i don't know emotional distress or something so they don't like when i use that phrase um but what i like to remind myself is that if i did something different i could get a different outcome right and that's so powerful to me to not by blaming somebody else by making it their fault i give away all my power and there's nothing i can do about it and now i'm sort of a victim of circumstance but man when you take 100 ownership and you look at your life and say my life is an exact reflection of choices that i've made now if i want it to be different then i just need only make different choices completely and and one of the things that's like that is if something went wrong maybe and i'm to blame just accept it just accept the fact that it happened don't try to change it but just say that this has happened and i'm not going gonna fight it and it's just my fate in life you know it's okay right so the ability to accept things is also taking ownership of them so if something bad happens and you can't really control it because let's be honest there are times that you can't control things they're just going to happen who predicted a pandemic you can't control that right so your first reaction is to get all pissy and go dammit why did heaven [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] i'm a victim blah blah okay that's just going to make you more depressed more inward more harder to act in the world whereas if you say okay i can't control the pandemic it's a terrible thing but i'm going to roll with the punches i'm going to accept the way things are i'm not going to fight it this is the way the world is what can i get out of it what kind of benefit well maybe i can reassess my career maybe before the pandemic happened i was just headed in this path and i wasn't i was kind of blind maybe i'm not really happy with what i am i'm not happy with my relationships with my career maybe i need to reassess it maybe it's time for me to be alone and read books and and study and learn new skills etc so the ability to to accept things that you can't change and to see some benefit from them is also part of that i want to go back to emotions so we've talked about how emotions are incredibly powerful you um i don't think you use this example in the book but it was certainly along these lines that if you damage the region of somebody's brain that deals with the emotional centers they can't make decisions which is absolutely just insane to me um and you also have a quote in the book though that i wrote down that i would like to share with people now and for clarity's sake i actually agree with both sides of this so you've got the side that you talked about where if you damage the emotional centers of somebody's brain they can't make a decision and then you also had um a quote and i don't know why my the app has crashed that i have the quota i can paraphrase it if i can't get this out here we go i think i can get it now um nope not opening so the paraphrase of the quote is that emotions are essentially a disease looking for a remedy and i was like yes yes you can't just believe your emotions or maybe that's not the right way to think about it but you can't just take them on board and because i have this feeling i'm going to act on it or it represents truth right help people understand first give us that like what do you mean how is it possible that my emotions aren't necessarily useful or true and then we'll balance it with the idea of how important emotions actually are well in in a japanese zen way your emotions are truth because you are feeling the way you're feeling okay so that's real right but it could stem from a very false source as well okay so let's just go back to that example that i gave earlier of the young boy who was felt abandoned by his mother right and his whole pattern in his life is to be the one that's doing the abandoning so he's not abandoning himself so in the moment that he's with this woman within this relationship that's been going on he's starting to feel something's wrong with her she's bad she's she's not right for me she's gonna you know i better leave this relationship right he's not reacting on what she's doing his emotions are not coming from which she could be perfectly fine she could be totally loving he's projecting on to her his own emotions what he feels is genuine he genuinely feels that something is wrong but it doesn't come from the truth itself it comes from some deeper much deeper pain so your emotions you feeling them but the source of them you have no idea what the source is right so you know you exploded somebody in your office tomorrow because of something and then you don't realize that in the morning you were already put in a bad mood by something that somebody else said and that kind of made you prone to like exploding later on in the day you are seeing that other person that triggered you but you're not seeing what happened earlier in the day that set the tone for it that planted the seed for your being triggered right so you don't have access to the source of what's really causing your emotions now i'll be honest you're never going to get true access to the actual source of it because there's something buried very deep inside who knows where it came from who knows how young you were who knows really the unconscious processes that were going on okay so you're never going to get at the core the real truth but you're going to get closer to it you can and you cannot react in the moment you can say if this you're this young man who's trapped in this pattern it's very difficult the thing to go but am i being is it true that she's actually being like that if i actually step back and analyze her words they're totally neutral she's not being mean or vicious she's not about to leave me right or she's not betraying me in any way it's totally neutral right and i often go through that process i've been in a relationship for a long time where i get a little bit upset and angry and i'm blaming her and blah blah blah and i have to go back like it takes a couple hours for the microwave to kind of cool down right and you go no way man she why does she feel the way she's feeling well it probably comes from me but i'm i'm totally projecting onto her right so just the idea that you are projecting your emotions onto people just the idea that you're reacting to something that's an illusion it's a mirage is liberating enough because it's going to prevent you from doing stupid things how many times i've had this problem do you get angry and you send that angry email voicing all of your upset and just pleasure and then two hours later you go [ __ ] i wish i hadn't said that i wish i hadn't revealed my vulnerability i wish i had maybe i was it was i overreacted right so the ability to to write that email and then put it in the draft folder and never send it and you know i have this thing in my own uh computer where in my email that draft folder is getting larger and larger it's got 12 it's got 20 it's got 80 things in it that shows me 80 times i have put that thing into the draft folder and i have a degree of control so yeah the idea that they're one that you don't have full access to everything that led you to react the way that you did and two that to some extent it's an illusion so you call it attitude i call it frame of reference i've given my entire professional life to the idea that frame of reference may be the single most important thing in the determining the outcome of your life so looking at right now in much of the developed world your zip code is the number one predictor of your future success so were it your iq i could understand that but the fact that it just is where you happen to grow up that's really really distressing to me and so having worked in the inner cities a lot and seeing up close what the problem is you encounter people with incredible intellect but as you watch them process the data they're processing it through a filter and that filter is what you call attitude and when it encounters an attitude that isn't helpful you get an outcome that's like a fun house mirror and you're like what the way that you're looking at this doesn't make sense in the following way you have a goal and the way you're thinking about things either your goal makes no sense it won't optimize for fulfillment or joy or you have a goal that makes sense and the way that you're parsing the data does not lead you to take actions that will actually move you towards that goal right and so it becomes this really um distressing question of okay somebody gets to adulthood they have an attitude or a frame of reference that isn't helping them accurately it isn't helping them process data in a way that will move them towards a useful goal that's the the cleanest most truthful way to say it so then the question becomes what can you do to begin reformulating that attitude that frame of reference in order to get you where you want to go do you think at all about the like what is the atomized thing that makes up the attitude for me it's beliefs your frame of reference is is a reflection of i'll call it roughly 25 beliefs that you have get those beliefs right you're a-okay get those beliefs wrong and you've got a real problem but the atomized thing for me is a belief what's the atomized version of an attitude for you well i'm not quite sure i understand the beliefs part but i'm trying to um explain it do you want me to explain it yeah all right so the most important one so i've actually written down the 25 that i think make this up but there's one that's really important it's what i call the only belief that matters which is that in fact you talk about this in your book mastery is essentially about this idea that if you put time and energy into getting good at something you will actually get good at it right and that thing has utility in the real world now if you believe that then you'll pick up the guitar and you'll start practicing you'll sit down at the typewriter and you'll start writing if you don't believe it it wouldn't make sense to pick up a guitar you're either good at it from birth or you're not and so why would you bother right that one belief will bifurcate your entire life because you're either gonna lean into just the things you think you're already naturally gifted at and your life will be limited by whatever that is or you will spend a massive amount of time and energy gaining mastery right and those two same person but those are wildly divergent outcomes yeah i i think that's that's that's very true um i don't know atomizing i think i might just basically being agree with you i would maybe say the stories that we tell ourselves which comes down to the same thing because i've discovered in my meditation that the way the brain works is continually telling us stories about the world about ourselves about the way people are and i don't mean stories in it's literally what i'm saying it's like constructed like a story it has a narrative arc to it right this is what happened to me and and the story is constructed and this is the result and what the story i'm telling myself might not be the correct story at all right so being able to understand what really happened what is the actually the story that that occurred there is extremely important and so you're hitting on the bedrock which is extremely fundamental which is do you believe that you're capable of change do you believe that good things happen when you go through a process of learning and taking steps do you believe going back to your belief that you can actually get out of your patterns because you can be fooling yourself you can be bullshitting you can be saying yeah i kind of do but deep down inside you don't really want to do it because believe it or not your bad patterns give you a degree of comfort right it's something that you know and to get out of them you're suddenly thrust into the unknown and that could be very frightening so you could be holding on to these bad patterns so the belief that i can change i can actually do something different in my life i can actually recreate myself i can actually learn things i can actually rewire my brain because the brain is incredibly plastic even at the age of 40 50 you can change your career you can learn new skills you know i've reached 60 i'm constantly learning as well the brain is insanely plastic do you believe that do you believe that you have the possibility to change yourself to alter your patterns that's probably the single most important thing right there and to get people to believe that as i said there's two levels there's the people who will shake their head yeah yeah yeah they'll read mastery but it won't mean anything to them because they're afraid of the change they're comfortable with a degree of failure i hate to say because if you don't try things you never have to deal with the responsibility the pain of failure right so you don't really want to change deep down inside you don't really believe in tom's number one belief right you're kind of fooling yourself so it's not a fairy tale it's not a bunch of a myth that we're creating it's true that you have the power the brain if you just understood this one thing that the brain is like a landscape it's like a landscape out in the world that you see where things can be lush and tropical or they can be completely arid and dead you create that landscape yourself you create the brain that you have by the degree of how you're open to experience by the degree of how much you learn by the degree of how many different sources of information you take in you can create this incredibly alive brain that's very creative imaginative and how much more fun will your life be if you're open and you let things come in and new ideas come in so it's up to you you're the one that's creating your misery it's creating your patterns it's and it comes down to that bedrock one belief that you just mentioned i think we touched on it a little bit the last time we spoke it's an incredibly interesting idea that you feel like the right person to explore partly because you do take a certainly a darker look at life than i do and for some reason i find myself completely drawn to that flame uh of the way that you look at the world maybe because it's good sort of disconfirming evidence for me it doesn't just put me in my own loop um but the guy who people say some people say that you know robert you shouldn't write these books this is like evil machiavellian content the world is better off not you know sort of turning a blind eye to this which i heartily disagree with but for that person to now be touching on the sublime what drew you to that well um it's it's i could go on forever about this i'll try and keep it reasonably short but i've been interested in this idea from 15 probably 20 years it's i don't know i read an article i read a book about it a long time ago really excited me and i meant to be my fourth book after i finished war i started researching it and then i got um disrupt distracted by the 50 cent book that i did then came mastery and then came human nature and finally i took a breath and said all right this is the time for the sublime it's going to be my next book and the 18th chapter of the law of human nature is about confronting your mortality and i talk about that the sublime in that chapter and the idea is that here's how i explain the sublime it's kind of like a circle if you can imagine human life as a circle social life to be a human means in any time period the culture that we live in creates a circle and in that circle is a limit to what you're allowed to believe in what you're allowed to think your behavior there are codes and conventions and rules that we all ascribe to they're not the same as what they were in ancient egypt 3 500 years ago but back then they had a circle it was just a different circle right okay so you're not supposed to think these thoughts you're not supposed to do this that's that this is the circle that we live in just outside that circle is the realm of the sublime it's something that we're not really ever supposed to think about or we're not really supposed to ever do it's something that's filled with a slight transgressive energy a level of excitement because deep down inside of human nature we don't like limits we rebel against them we want to be free our spirits are yearning to be free and that sense of these are codes that you have to abide by is very restricting it feels like a prison almost so we're inevitably attracted to things outside of that and that is the realm of the sublime and it's incredibly exciting it contains so much energy because in that circle all of your energy is kind of crushed and compounded inside of you it's kind of you have to feel this we have to do this when you let go and you go explore outside of it it's like suddenly you're tapping into something that's in the cosmos incredibly energizing it's what maslow called a peak experience right okay so the ultimate form of going beyond that circle is death itself death is the ultimate limit obviously to our lives and people who have peered through that door because the word sublime literally means up to the threshold that's the latin up to the threshold of a door so imagine that circle has all these little doors in it and you're peering through it this is something that i haven't thought of before right um the ultimate door is death right and people who've peered through that door have had a near-death experience a little bit to some degree it changes you it's like that is the biggest blast of the sublime that you can get that's the strongest form of the drug imaginable you no longer look at being alive anymore the same way you no longer see the trees the birds the the people that you love in the same way do you ever get universally that people see something better than they did no it's not true it's a good point there have been studies of near-death experiences i don't remember the percentage but there is a percentage the smaller percentage that has a negative experience it's very painful and ugly and demonic and hellish and no they're not having this so thank you for bringing that up that's true but most people for most people it has this effect where and the reasons why the people have the hellish view there are other things going on it's not that's just not normal um is you know you you came very close to death and you're alive so everything has a different meaning to you right things that you took for granted before no longer have that same sense and there are other things that go on well anyway the typical to my story here i wrote that chapter with those ideas in mind and then two three months later i came this close to dying myself so what had been this intellectual abstract argument about near-death sublime blah blah blah became very real right i was in a coma i was driving my car if my girlfriend hadn't stopped made me pull over if the medics hadn't come quickly i would have permanent brain damage or i would be dead i came very close i was in a coma i didn't have like visions of of you know angels etc and all the other things that people sometimes claim they have but i had some very strange things some feelings in my body that not as often anymore but i still sometimes get a feeling that my bones were kind of melting from the inside it was kind of like a sort of dissolving what was solid about me was dissolving right and then a sense of a very it's only for a brief second and sometimes i'm not even sure if it's true or not but i had an image of me up above looking down and i had i had died and people were talking about me right i'm not sure whether my brain in memory is playing a trick on me but i seem to have that recollection anyway it became very real to me this subject right and so now it wasn't just this intellectual or thing about writing a book about the sublime it was very very real the last thing i'll say is when i originally planned the book back in 2005 or so i was going to be jetting off to tierra del fuego to see you know the the south pole i was going to go swimming with dolphins in the caribbean i was going to be going on top of you know mount everest i don't know whatever that kind of stuff having sublime experiences obviously i had a stroke i can't even really walk outside my house and take a normal hike i can barely walk a few blocks i can't do any of these things right so what i've had to discover is because i can only write a book if i'm in the mood of the book right so i have to be feeling sublime to write the book i have to find it in everyday things i have to find it in the little garden in my house i have to find it in the cats in my house in my girlfriend you know and out in in her eyes looking outside my window in the books that i'm reading i have to suck the sublime out of every little trivial little affair that i goes on in my life and putting that in the book i think will so if i had written that other book people were going oh that's great but this guy this kind of rich white guy he's able to fly off here that does nothing to do with my life i'm living as a stricter life as you can imagine there are people much more restricted than me but pretty damn restricted and yet i'm able to find this in my daily life if i can find it there's no barrier for other people no matter if you're flipping burgers and mcdonald's the world is sublime and it's all around you and you don't have to go to tierra del fuego to to experience that i want to get more into what the sublime is actually so i honestly it's a word that i never really thought of okay i feel like i have an intuitive understanding that it's something sort of surprising and wonderful but with uh not sort of big um amplitude's the wrong word but there's there's something relaxed about it like uh a warm bath is sublime you know but this idea of it being a threshold something that you're seeing beyond into something new that's a new take on it for me which is far more interesting well it's it's the sublime is not a warm bath quite the opposite it's a mix of pleasure and pain it's a mix of two opposing emotions a sense of fear and a sense of awe almost consecutively or at the same time right so if you go to see a horror movie or you're on a roller coaster the excitement comes from the fact that you feel kind of at risk that there's sort of danger there but you're safe right so you're feeling two things at the same time kind of anxiety and kind of about the pleasure that you're actually not being threatened so neuroscientists have shown that the mixing of two sort of contrary emotions creates an incredible intensity of affect much more than just a single emotion so the quintessential experience of the sublime when it was first written about in the 18th century was climbing uh the alps the matterhorn or wherever it was right and you got a sense of how small you were how you know you could die very easily if there's an avalanche and how you know how fragile you were in the face of this immensity and yet the awesomeness of it the beauty of it was overwhelming and so they were fascinated with this idea of being able to feel these two contrary emotions at the same time so it's not at all a warm bath um i can only the the sublime is an experience it's hard to it's something hard to put into words so robert's trying to write a book about it i know believe me believe me i know but let me give you an idea give me one example of something that is so insanely sublime that you can't ever think the same about the world after you contemplate this okay so here you and i are sitting here talking in this incredibly high-tech amazing house with all the insane technology around us all right consider this our planet some 4 billion years old around 3.1 billion years in some little bit of pond some kind of organic life began we don't know how or why or what triggered all those scientists are getting closer some form of single-celled bacteria cro self-created itself out of chemicals that came from other planets right carbon etc okay this single-celled bacteria dominated the planet for billions of years it was the only form of life right okay and then sometime in the past i i've forgotten the exact time frame in my mind it's in my book the first multicellular creature was created maybe that was two billion years ago or so okay and it was a complete freak accident one piece bacteria swallowed another bacteria and created a multicellular organism it's only happened once in the history of our planet once contemplate that we know that because there's only one line of dna that we can trace back to the first time that it happened there's not a second line of dna only one so it happened once it's never happened again it was a freakish example if that hadn't happened forget everything else that occurred on this planet okay but it did happen okay so these are called bottlenecks certain things occurred that created um evolution go in a certain direction and they could have occurred differently i'll skip to 60 million years ago when a an asteroid the size of new york city hit earth hid in in the yucatan peninsula and it was the most insane explosion ever like the equivalent of all the nuclear bombs on our planet it destroyed the dinosaurs it destroyed 99 of the life on this planet right it was the holocaust of all holocausts if it and this meteor almost missed the earth asteroid very easily could have missed the planet because think of the emptiness of space and the smallness of earth it was a freak accident if that hadn't happened dinosaurs would still be walking around here mammals would have never emerged as the dominant creature i'll skip to 80 000 years ago humans at that point there were only like 10 000 humans left on the planet if one single virus i'm talking about homo sapiens one single virus would have wiped us out at that point we were extremely vulnerable if that number had gotten down further anything could have wiped us out right a change in climate etc okay if that had happened we wouldn't be here and neanderthals would have probably taken over the planet and who knows what that would look like right now okay then think of your own parents and how unlikely was there ever meeting and the circle the fate that happened there if they hadn't met tom wouldn't be here or you'd be somebody else right there are 70 000 generations more or less going into you going back to the or first homo sapien all right that one time encounter between you and your parents multiplied by 70 000 chance encounters so to bring us to the present that you and i are sitting here together in this office with all this stuff around us it's you and it's me the odds against it are so unbelievably astronomical that you can't even compute so what does that make you think about that what you what's happening to you right now if you really contemplate it it will alter how you think about everything everything you see around you the plants the animals they didn't have to be that way it's extremely unlikely it's a weird world that we live in right so that is an example of a sublime thought it's a little bit scary because it has to do with annihilation holocaust deaths but it's also an awesome thought about the fact that you're just alive so that's that's sort of and it's something i went into in the second chapter of my book i find this so interesting so how how do we make use of that and why is it so useful well the reason it's so useful and this is what i just did in my third chapter is it's wired into our nature so a lot of things are wired that aren't so good that we could talk about but the need for transcendent experiences the need to be taken out of ourselves which is the source of all of our religious all of our spiritual beliefs and all of our the art that we create almost everything that we humans do goes back to our earliest ancestors right and being the first conscious beings on this on this planet conscious in the way that our brains are conscious they looked at this world and they saw things that go you know i'm talking about aborigines in australia how did this world happen how did this occur how could it be that there are stars and plants and kangaroos it's insane and right and they had these kind of sublime thoughts and out of that they created gods and spirits and all sorts of forces okay but that awesome feeling that feeling of why why are things the way they are why is there something and not nothing is very much wired into our nature and to deny it is very painful and so what i talk about in the book is if you're not going after the sublime you're going to go after the false sublime and the false sublime will be drugs it'll be alcohol it'll be joining some kind of ugly political campaign in which you get all your yaya's out and you feel angry and violent blah blah blah right you know on and on and on it could be porn you know online porn etc the kind of drugs that take you outside of yourself but are kind of ugly and they're and they're addicting and they're not liberating so if you're not going after this you're going to find it in some other way and it's not going to be healthy and you want this in your life because it gives you a kind of peace and it gives you a scale of priorities you know if if the big bang occurred some 13 14 billion years ago and started this whole thing off what does my little 80 90 years of existence mean this is like a flash it's like a pop of a popcorn in in this in in the eternity of time it doesn't mean anything it's it's so small so why does it matter so it's calming actually it's calming you down it's making you think the things that are happening right now aren't as big as i think they are so you want this in your life then you ask me how do you get it is that your question yeah so as you were explaining it i thought um some people i think are [Music] gonna brush it off maybe they don't um stop to really let that hit them and so when you were talking i thought okay is this why so i've never done psychedelics but i have a feeling whether it's a zen cohen whether it's a psychedelic whether it's using your ability to shape your own attitude to suck the sublime out of these simple moments there's something to your point about we're hardwired for it there's something necessary about jarring us out of our frame of reference right that is if evolution is selected for it there's something necessary maybe to combat our ideas calcifying into dogma there's something in there that's critically important and so i'm just curious for people that don't know how to suck the sublime out of the marrow of a simple moment how they do it well the how they do it is is is is through my book i'm afraid because the book you haven't finished writing yet yeah i'm only a fourth of the way through you give us tidbits in in the daily laws so i will i will thank you for that yeah a couple chapters are in there um the reason i say that i'm not trying to hype myself is there are lots of books written about the sublime particularly in terms of art and in terms of like cultural history but they're very academic they're very kind of boring which is very paradoxical because it's the last subject in the world that should be boring so the book that i'm trying to write is obviously inspirational but it's also very practical so each chapter the last section i include exercises for you to practice in your life they're going to make what i just wrote about actionable and in the very end i give you meditations three things to meditate on every day that'll make this part of your daily life part of your daily practice right so i'm trying to make it as as practical as possible so for instance the first chapter is about the cosmic sublime which is in the daily laws about the big bang about the origin of stars about our own sun and our own planet and how insane all that is right and i talked to you about how you can have that feeling of the cosmos being created by doing certain things in your daily life you can visit certain landscapes you don't have to climb mount everest you can just go to the nearest mountain around you put your phone away right leave that behind go alone if you can or bring somebody with you and you don't talk interesting and just so you can think no just immerse yourself in this world i've given you now pages of how unlikely it is that a mountain exists i've explained to you where the mountain came from i've explained to you how unlikely the birds in the sky are and how unlikely life is and now you're in it and now you're seeing at night if you if you camp out you're seeing the night sky you don't have to have money to do that you can go out anytime to the nearest mountain or hill and to have that experience right there are other landscapes as well anything having to do with water water is the most weird thing if you ever think about it because as far as we know we're the only planet that we know of that has the form of water that we have and we're looking for other planets that have it form of water yeah well there's no more water on mars it might be buried underneath underground or they have water they have liquid on it's liquid gas on jupiter and saturn but they don't have our form of water there's certainly a planet out there that will have it but water came to us from from the sky it didn't sound something natural to earth it came from rain it came from comets and asteroids that left left it here these are molecules that aren't natural to our planet when you're swimming in water you're like inside of it it's the only element when you're in a mountain you're not inside the mountain you're not inside the dirt and the stone but you're in water you're in it it's part of your body it's incorporated in you and to imagine the vastness of water so the cosmos is this vastness this infinity water is a touch of that infinity there's no beginning or end to water there's no kind of limit to it so i'm giving you these places like deserts that you can go to where you can have a touch of that i also tell you on the internet and i give you all the links here's where you can look at things that um what's like the hubble telescope has photographed it is insane the images that we can now look at it is one of the most beautiful things about living in the 21st century they have photographed a black hole i describe in that chapter what a black hole is to black hole is something you can't even imagine and yet they have photographed it but just photographing the farthest reaches of our galaxy the thoughts that'll inspire so it is very practical but you have to read my book i'm very open all you have to do is publish it that's incredible so i find it very um i don't know the right way to frame this other than to say that while i wouldn't wish a stroke on anybody the fact that you in particular are able to bring back the lessons from that what are you doing on a daily basis to get those um joyful moments despite all the restrictions well i have to be honest it's a struggle you know some days i'm very successful and i feel very excited and happy some days it's like i've got tourette's syndrome i'm just walking around going i'm so upset i'm so frustrated and so i'm daily having to struggle with myself and so whenever i feel that level the frustration is very easy to explain imagine that you can't really button your shirt that your left hand is so weak that you it it takes you forever to put in your shirt to get dressed in the morning takes like 10 20 minutes to like get my vitamins off the shelf is this kind of ordeal i can't type so just my hands so you take for granted you out there you take for granted your use of your hands brother i can tell you the hand or sister that hand is a miracle you have no idea if you lost one of your hands what a nightmare it would be don't take it for granted the fine little things that your hands can do because i can't do them anymore you know i can't walk in a normal way i'm always kind of losing my balance i have to hold on to things etc like so the frustration is every single day there's a tenseness like am i going to fall am i going to drop this can i hold on to this can i get this done and it builds up until your your body starts getting tense before anything ever happens so i have to fight that and i have to feel it before it happens and i have to go through kind of a mantra of you are getting better you're just not aware of it robert it's something you can't see it's so gradual that it's going to take three or four more years calm down it's not like it's this is going to be you forever etcetera etcetera other times i don't believe my mantra and i get upset so it is a daily daily struggle and i can go through weeks where the struggle seems great and i'm fine and then suddenly i'll fall through this hole where i'm just like damn it you know i see people walking by on the street taking a hike just three years ago that was who i was it's not who i am now i'm like a different person i want to cry you know i can't do the things that gave me pleasure so sometimes i can't control it when i see things in the world that remind me of my past life but i had to find compensation so i can't take a hike up into the beautiful griffith park which is very beautiful with incredible woods up there something i love doing i can't ride a bicycle but i found a a recumbent bike it's basically a tricycle a souped-up tricycle right but i got the top of the line trike recumbent trike right the best you can get the fastest the lightest weight one and now i'm able to go up these incredible hills it was like obviously slower than normal people a normal bike but i can go up the biggest hill you can imagine and i do it and i go up into the hills and the woods and i'm alone and it's my therapy and i know that it's ephemeral that it only lasts for like half an hour an hour i'm suck every second of joy out of that being in the woods that i can being alone and being away from everything so i've had to find compensations you know i had to look at the little things around me and find insanely beautiful things about them also i had the kind of stroke that damages the right side of the brain which has an effect on you many ways but the main thing is it crea you can't your right side of your brain isn't communicating to the left side so your left arm your left leg isn't getting signals from the brain that's why i can't do the things i can't do but it saved my cognitive abilities so if it's hitting my left side which people have strokes that's the kind of people that lose the ability to talk they can't really think straight i wouldn't be able to write a book so every day three o'clock if i'm lucky after i've exercised i sit down i'm with my sublime book with my notebook i'm in heaven nobody bothering me please don't call me if you call me i'm gonna cuss you i'm gonna get the [ __ ] out of my hair i'm only working on my book i am the happiest little baby in the world you know because that book is saving me it's my therapy so i've found compensations but you know we talked earlier about patients i'm patient in some sense you know to write a book but i'm also impatient in another sense right i'm impatient with my body with my physical things i want to be able to do things now and so i've had to learn a different form like a meta patients and a whole other level of patients and and it's a work in progress that's all i can say talk to me about hope how is it you know as you do physical therapy and try things and you make some progress but not as much as you want how do you continue to renew your hope it's it's the most hardest thing and it's the most important thing i can tell you um because the moments that i don't feel hope i'm just kind of ready to give up you know i mean what's the point of this so i have to continually rekindle it and it's been a roller coaster ride because in the beginning people will say robert you've got to try this you've got to try hyperbaric chambers you've got to try this this accuscope that this guy has you have to try the stem cell research you have to go this and that i get my hopes up oh all right i'll spend thousands of dollars on this new form of therapy i do it a little bit of change but nothing really happens then my hope sinks it's like um i don't know what the expression is uh a god that dies every single time this happens is how i explain it like i had this belief in something and then it got burst it's very painful and so you know people are commonly suggesting new forms of therapy my hope rises and i have to be able to control that and know that there is no quick fix on this the actress sharon stone had a stroke very similar to mine at an age at a comparable age and i actually was going to try and contact her it sounded like we had very similar experiences she wrote that it took her seven years whoa to get back to a normal kind of life i've done three years so far so i have to tell myself that there are no quick fixes and she herself did every form of therapy imaginable and believe me people are well-meaning and they come they say robert you gotta try this you gotta try that i've gone to the point where like please don't tell me that anymore you know i don't believe in quick fixes i have to do this day by day by day i have to retrain my body you know so i'm trying a new form of therapy right now it didn't instantly give me results um it's something very interesting it's based on feldenkrais fascinating new way what is feldenkrais it's a whole different way of looking at your body and i find it fascinating it's just not hyper designed for a stroke victim but i think somebody will someday it's based on this idea that the body is a whole unit right so you can't isolate the parts the body works as a whole it's in a complete organic hole so if you have back pain it doesn't stem from your back it stems from your pelvis it stems from your hamstrings it stems from how you move your legs stems from your neck the whole body and we have built in tensions all over our body we use muscles that we don't need to use right so every time you're about to lift something or do something arduous or even psychologically do something arduous the chest muscles tense up as if that will help you somehow get over what you're doing but you don't need the chest muscles they're not you design for that you're using muscles that you don't need they're expending energy if only the muscles that were necessary to do the job were firing everything would work so much better so the felt in christ this is called the anat by neil method she was a student of elton christ is there's an ideal of the body that i can sense when i do the lessons where you're on a whole other level you're like only using the muscles that are necessary you're moving with this kind of grace and elegance and efficiency that wasn't existing before all the bad habits with our necks our shoulders and and the psychological stuff that they put you through it's very powerful it's just not geared specifically for a stroke victim then i'm doing another form of therapy tom you have no idea how boring this physical therapy is right so when i'm used to exercises that's kind of fun i even lifting weights can be fun because you see your muscles building right you feel your heart pounding swimming running it's all kind of fun this is like little micro movements with your knee with your leg it's so boring so i have to like put music on i have to watch the ball game i have to do something to distract myself so i mean i'm going through all the the weeds here of of my process but that's well so what i find interesting about it is just inevitably all of us are going to go through something or have gone through something and how we deal with that crisis is so telling and the fact that you've you know we were talking before we started rolling that typing is hard and so here you have an author and you've taken away one of the ways by which they get that out and as somebody who's thought so i'm a late bloomer and i have this real sense of wanting to make the most of the time that i have late blooming meaning when how how late were you blooming the the skills stack right so i feel like i'm getting better but like when i think about things that i'm i'm 45 now and i'm only just now getting confident in certain abilities thank you what's your secret diet exercise sleep meditation that really there's nothing magical i do not come from great genes i'm very sad to report um so when i think about the things that are just now beginning to click for me and i'm like oh my god like i see even people on my own team that are 10 years 15 years ahead of where i was it's very easy to be jealous that oh my god you have this insight you know so many years before i did and you know how much more time will you be able to make use of but very quickly you realize it's not a fruitful way to approach it and so i this was years ago now maybe five years ago i did this thing to celebrate i forget how many subscribers we had on facebook or youtube or something and i went live for 24 hours so i was on camera for 24 hours without all i the only breaks i took were to pee and then three days later i was in england and i gave a speech and um i didn't have a microphone and so for nine hours i was essentially yelling um to this large crowd and then i woke up and my voice was weird and it didn't go away didn't go away and i felt like i had a lump in my throat and then like when i would turn my head i could feel something click and i was like so then of course i'm like is this cancer like what is this and you start thinking what would happen if i lost my voice as a leader even just in business forget being on camera my ability to persuade to um galvanize a team to get people excited and focused i have learned to do it all with my voice and so i started thinking what would happen if i lost my voice and it's like okay like i would definitely have to mourn i would have to go through a period where it's like i'm just gonna feel badly for myself for a while but then it's like you you make use of what you have but it really made me take stock of i had taken my ability to speak for granted for at the time whatever 39 40 years and now i don't and now i'm very thoughtful and so getting the kind of insights of the struggle that you're having it's very useful yeah i mean it's all unfortunately it's inevitable for everyone you may not you may not go through a stroke but you're going to deal with some kind of adversity where the physical things that you took for granted are taken away from you that just happens as the nature of life and it can occur at any age um so these are skills that you have to develop and you but the main thing i try and tell people is i don't know how much how how powerfully i can i can implant this in your brain but do not take for granted what you have right now because i can tell you i did i thought i'd be swimming the rest of my life it was my life it meant so much to me do not take for granted what you have now when you're doing these activities feel insane amounts of gratitude that you have a body that can perform these things because it could be taken away from you tomorrow right so that's the number one thing i want to tell people it's not to get anxious and paranoid and fearful about the future that's not going to help you at all you need to have a joyful life a happy life so but look at what you have right now and look at the marvels the things you don't realize as i said what your hands and legs and brain can do it's absolutely miraculous and awesome so just look at it that way and then if these things happen we are creatures that are able to accommodate ourselves to things we can be very good at that right you know we find compensations for it i mean the other thing you know being 45 i was even late more a later bloomer than you i think i mean i didn't start writing the 48 laws until i was about 36 37 you were probably you were doing things well before that i remember from a business standpoint yeah yeah it your story of late blooming is really extraordinary like it's amazing well yeah i mean um so you know until i was 36 i was pretty lost i wasn't like starting a great business like quest and all these other things i was a struggling depressed penniless screenwriter in santa monica in a one-bedroom apartment you know in this kind of run-down apartment building right and then suddenly my life changed so i'm as late a bloomer as you can get but there's a reason why you bloom late if you bloom at all which is it comes at the moment that you're ready for it right so people who are 32 33 that you might be envious of they're not ready to create what you're able to create now with all of your experience and all the things you've learned with all the businesses you've started all your entrepreneurial skills all the people you've interviewed you have that rich landscape of a brain that we're talking about that 32 year old they may have more ex you know some more experiences than you had but they have nowhere near the ability to to exploit it like you have it now you know so yeah i like to run the brain in a vat experiment and that i find it really useful and every time i explain to this this to people i never see this sort of spark in their eye that i want to see but for me this has been really liberating which any time i find myself thinking you know woe is me or whatever i say hold on imagine for a second that all of this is just the frame of reference that you need literally you came into existence in this moment you're a brain in a vat somewhere and all the trauma sadnesses um failings all of that is the context to your point about emotions is the emotional context becomes necessary for you to make decisions and move forward so rather than lament it just like make sure that you're making decisions that propel you forward and even though i don't believe that i think my life was lived and it is exactly what i think it is and the traumas and all of that are all real and they're just a part of me but there's something about running that thought experiment that allows me to recontextualize the purpose of you know whether it's lamenting being a late bloomer or my big lament which you talk about in the book you know just not being as smart as i want to be like when i see people that can really process data quickly oh i get so jealous to this day that everybody has their thing that's my thing and uh but realizing that with if you look at it from just a slightly different angle all of a sudden it's like all right i'm good you process data very quickly you think that because you're talking to me about subjects that i've already thought about if you were talking to me about a subject that's totally new uh it it certainly startles me every time how long it takes me to really like i would never be a debater on national television i would just tell you that so that does not speak so much specialized skill that i wish i had oh really definitely yeah i mean i've been around i've been at social gatherings for the uh uh this one person i know who has these meetings with the smartest people around and these these whipper snappers who are 25 26 and they're doing what you're doing there they've got all this information all the snappy stuff all these anecdotes damn where's that coming from you know i'm just not like that animal right i'm slow i'm deliberate i need to read about i need to process things and i go slowness is a good thing right they may be a whipper snapper but they may be not being able to like go into depth about anything they're on the surfaces they're kind of regurgitating ideas and beliefs that are kind of on the surface that they're good at at fooling people but they're not going into the depths people who go into the depths are slow are deliberate take time to think who are more thoughtful you know and are more patient so i wouldn't want to be that fast you know that high speed processor that they have because i don't think that's where great things come from it's interesting that's a very good way to think about it the harder way to think about it though is to say what if they really are just better than me and now facing that so the one that i always pose to people is i want you to imagine that someone you really respect doesn't respect you that's hard now if you can deal with that like if i can stare nakedly at my own inadequacies compare myself to somebody who just objectively is better at something that i want to be good at so not not even discounting like sure there might be trade-offs but can i look nakedly at somebody who is truly better than me at something that i want to be great at and still find joy and fulfillment in my life that to me is like that's the question and so i've tried to get myself to a place you talked earlier i thought this is so brilliant that your ego gets knocked down but you have these mechanisms like a thermostat to reset your sense of self that to me is the juice you have to get good at that and so i used to really get an emotional twist over this stuff but i have learned some very useful techniques to keep my emotional equilibrium so i can say that i'm envious of people that have that without diminishing my sense of self or you know losing time and energy to worrying about it anymore i used to i don't want to paint that this was easy but that to me is is the trick okay but i still think your process of that they're so much better than me is a bit of an illusion or the reason for being envious okay so you combat your envy all right but i'm trying to tell you i don't think there is a reason for your envy in the first place so people are they're not as brilliant as you think they are right people are good at faking things generally right and then maybe they're not as happy as they seem to be maybe their life you're just seeing them on television or with their snappy answers but they're covering up everything else that's going on underneath right you're not seeing the full picture there right so there's generally your envy is always kind of exaggerated because you're beginning from a place of insecurity you're beginning from a place of inferiority where you're primed to feel envious of people like that so it's almost starting with you you're almost projecting onto them their superior qualities you know and i find myself doing that yes there are people who are better than me i certainly know that there's a writer i deeply admire who passed away recently he's much more of an academic and intellectual his name is roberto colosso he was an italian writer wrote a lot about ancient greece that guy is far more brilliant than i am he's amazing what he wrote about i'm in awe of it and i really mourned his passing but i think it's important to feel for that not envy but just disinterested in admiration for people who are superior to you and to recognize it i know there are plenty of writers and thinkers who are superior to me and if they are genuinely that way they're not bullshitting all my hats off to them we need people like that it it it reaffirms my faith in humanity when i see someone that i think is vastly superior or great at what they do i wish i could be like them okay there are other humans on this world it's not as bad as we think it is who are absolutely brilliant and you know i feel that way about great scientists as well i'm kind of a a scientist monkey in a way so um it's a monkey oh sorry no i love it you're teaching me it's a french word monkey means a failed you know i wanted to be a wannabe i'm a scientist wannabe sort of thing i missed the boat it literally means missed um so you know i deeply admire it and um and if i detect creativity and people in their work i'm in awe of it you know and there are people who can do creativity that i can't even begin to imagine that's where i feel aw and genuine admiration i never feel envy believe me i feel envy all the time but not for people who are incredibly creative yeah it's interesting that's a great frame i love that i like you when i meet somebody that blows me away i love it like i'm stoked i'd be lying if i said that i didn't want it also for myself but i'm stoked that it exists in the world um yeah that is very exciting when you see what humans are capable of and then you take us as a collective it's really interesting so i just i was interviewed by a guy named brian keating yesterday who wrote a book about um i think it's called into the impossible uh but he talks or no sorry his book is about um beyond like getting rid of the nobel prize i forget the exact title brian forgive me um but he was talking about how the nobel prize has like caused some of the greatest scientists on planet earth to commit suicide and like all this crazy [ __ ] i was like what and he was like oh yeah you you um get these guys are nominated for a nobel prize but because they never win it becomes so devastating that they can't live with it and i'm like you're nominated for a nobel prize something that like 0.000 of humanity will ever you know achieve uh but he was like yeah it's like a really a devastating thing for people and he he of course remembered all the people that had won and i get you have to sign this book when you win and so in the book you see like um albert einstein and all these other people and he said you know feinman was like well i'm never going to be an einstein einstein was like i'm never going to be a newton newton was like i'm never going to be a galileo or whatever and it was like you know that all of these people were just like we look at them like oh my god like that would be insane to hit that level and each and every one of them had someone that they were like well but i'll never be that person so fascinating well that's that's that's human nature in a nutshell because i talk about that in the laws of human nature in the chapter about envy that our brains operate by comparison that's how it operates on the most basic level two a piece of information comes through our senses and our brain immediately processes it by comparing it to previous things that we that we've experienced so the brain only operates by comparing so when you create a social animal that has a brain that operates that way and is conscious obviously they're going to be primed to continually compare themselves to other people right so albert einstein was comparing himself to niels bohr to other people who he had insecurities as well people who were into quantum mechanics and making these great discoveries he felt that kind of little wound of envy as well and it's been written about so yeah it's impossible to get over the most powerful person in the world is going to feel that envy and in fact the higher up you go the more insecure you might tend to become you know and you wonder do i still have it i'm getting older a lot of scientists reach their prime when they're 30 35 now they're 45 and they're 50 and that nobel prize slipped through their hands even though they're absolutely brilliant so they're going to be feeling envy envy is deeply deeply human and nobody wants to talk about it it's the most common human emotion and it's the least common uh topic that we ever discussed except in your books where you go into it beautifully which i love and that's part of the fun of your books is it's all the things that nobody wants to talk about and talked about well and articulately with stories and evidence i mean it's really fascinating and for anybody that wants to you know do what we were talking about earlier and develop that self-awareness just hearing about it talked about so clearly is very helpful oh well thank you very helpful dude i love your work i uh it has been a joy to have you on the show as many times as i have i cannot wait for the next one yeah this is what my fourth time you three or four yeah and hopefully there will be five six that's incredible yeah yeah i love having you on the show [Music] thank you for being here yeah where can people follow along as you write the next one well we have the the new book out daily laws which came out last week which is amazing okay i did the audio version i highly recommend it you you make multiple appearances i did yeah how do i sound fantastic okay now secretly i wish you'd read the whole book was there a reason that you didn't how's the other person great but it's wonderful but when i mean i want robert greene well um it's it's a bit stressful um i i love it i would have done the whole book but just to do the parts that i did took about three hours and it's about five percent of the book so you know you do the math it would have taken like two solid days no doubt and um i'm not a trained actor i'm gonna do this sublime book that would be i'll be narrating that because i do enjoy it it's kind of fun because i wrote it i think i kind of give it an extra flavor so yeah um so you can i have a new website it's at robertgreenofficial.com i hope i have that right i'm robert green official your socials are at robert green official yes and there you will find instagram i have tick tock believe it or not my man yeah that's good that's good this new generation needs to know okay so i've ticked if i talk instagram facebook uh twitter and then a website where you can get links to all of my books and some of my ancient blog posts and things like in interviews it's in my youtube channel incredible well as always thank you for being here it was wonderful thank you can't wait to read my inner discussions with you thank you guys trust me when i say you don't want to miss a single word that this man says so be sure to check it out and speaking of things you don't want to miss if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,329,350

Keywords: ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Robert Greene, The Daily Laws, Mastery, Power, Seduction, Conversations with Tom, interview show, mindset, meditation, self-awareness, ego, emotional wounds, changing belief, breaking bad habits, changing patterns, emotions, reflection, power, master self control, how to control your response, sublime, self analysis, blame, extreme ownership

Id: Nyj431txkN0

Length: 100min 51sec (6051 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021