Robert Greene: A Process for Finding & Achieving Your Unique Purpose

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford Medical School. My guest today is Robert Green. Robert Green is an author who has written more than five best-selling books, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Laws of Human Nature, and Mastery. He completed his undergraduate training at the University of California Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Robert Green's books are

unique

and important to many. One of the most important reasons is that they explore the interaction between the psychology of self-exploration and the psychology of human interaction, all rooted in history and modern culture and at the same time a way that belongs to everyone who first learned about Robert's story.

I work by reading the book Mastery, which I think is a brilliant exploration and practical tool on how to think about and pursue one's

purpose

. Whenever I'm asked for book suggestions, I always include Mastery in my top three recommendations during today's discussion we covered. a wide range of topics including how to find, pursue and achieve one's

purpose

. We talked about selecting a life partner, as well as romantic and other relationships. We also discussed the themes of motivation and urgency and the concept of death ground that emerged. During our discussion of Robert's recent stroke, Robert's stroke posed certain limitations for him, but it also allowed him to explore how to write, how to practice, in fact, how to interact with life in general in new ways that allow him to continue to expand his sense of purpose.

I am sure that by the end of today's episode you will have gained enormous amounts of new knowledge that will allow you to move forward on the path to

your

purpose, perhaps find

your

purpose if you feel like you haven't already and, to a large extent, Improve your relationship. with yourself, with others, and indeed with the world around you before you begin. I would like to emphasize at EMP iiz that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research duties at Stanford; However, it is part of my desire and effort to achieve zero. cost for Consumer information about science and science-related tools for the general public in accordance with that topic.

I would like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Roka Roa. He makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the highest quality I have ever encountered. I spent my entire life working on the biology of the visual system. I can tell you that your visual system has to face a tremendous amount of challenges in order to see clearly. Roa understands those challenges and has designed his eyeglasses and sunglasses accordingly. that you always see with Crystal Clarity Roa ey glasses and sunglasses are designed with a new technology called floating fit that allows them to fit perfectly and not move even when you are active, in fact, every time I wear my Roa glasses or sunglasses .

I usually forget I'm wearing them. I wear Roa sunglasses at night when I'm driving or reading at night and I wear Roa sunglasses during the day if it's bright, especially if I'm driving into sunlight. If you would like to try Roa glasses or sunglasses, you can go to roka.com, that's r.com, and enter the code huberman to get 20% off your first order again, that's r.com, and enter the huberman code at checkout. Today's episode also comes to us. by Helix Sleep Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows to fit your

unique

sleep needs. Now sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance when we sleep well and enough.

Mental health, physical health and performance are up to you. One of the key things to getting a good night's sleep is making sure your mattress meets your unique sleep needs. Helix Sleep has a short 2 minute questionnaire that if you visit their website you can take it and answer questions like: do you tend to sleep on your back, side or stomach, do you tend to get hot or cold in the middle of the night, maybe you don't know the answers to those questions and that's okay at the end of that two-minute quiz. We will match you with a mattress that is ideal for your sleep needs.

I sleep on the DUS us mattress in the evening and when I started sleeping on a mattress in the evening about two years ago my sleep improved immediately so if you are interested in upgrading your mattress check out helixsleep. .com huberman take their 2-minute sleep quiz and they'll match you with a mattress custom-made for you and you'll get up to $350 off any mattress order and two free pillows again. If you are interested, visit Helix sleep.com huberman to get up to up to $350 off and two free pillows today's episode also comes to us at awakening awakening is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs mindfulness training sessions yoga nra and nsdr sleepless deep sinus protocols I started using the awakening app a few years ago because although I have been doing meditation regularly since my teens and started doing Yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my father mentioned to me that he had found a app that turned out to be the awakening app that could teach you meditations. of different durations and that had many different types of meditations to put the brain and body in different states and that he liked it a lot, so I tried the awakening app and I also found it extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have more time to meditate and I actually love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to achieve different levels of understanding about Consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into many different types. of states depending on what meditation I do.

I also love that the awakening app has many different types of Yoga Nidra sessions for those of you who don't know that Yoga Nidra is a

process

of being very still but keeping an active mind it is very different than most meditations and there are excellent scientific data showing that yoganidra and something similar called sleepless deep rest or nstr can greatly restore cognitive and physical energy levels even with just a short 10 minute session if you choose. Try the waking up app, you can go to waking up.com huberman and access a 30 day free trial again. That's wakeup.com huberman to access a 30-day free trial and now for my conversation with Robert Green Robert, I'm so happy you're here I'm so happy to be here Andrew, thank you so much for inviting me to write a short story in 2015.

I was teaching a course for college students. This was a great course. 450 students. Where was this? This was when I was a student. Professor at the University of California, San Diego. I was about to return to Stanford, but the course was called Neural Circuits in Health and Disease, but there was a final lecture where I did a lot of questions and answers with the students about science, races, races. paths and what I found was that many of the students had questions not only about science but also about how to learn and search for information, yes, and I recommended three books at the end of the course every year that I taught it.

I taught it for four years. and one of the books was the book Longitude, which is a wonderful story about the discovery of timekeeping devices in a book that I will leave as a mystery, not so as not to be mysterious, but because it is not, it is a science book. I'll just tell you what they are, um uh, principles of neuroscience, so I thought I don't know, yeah, it's great, it's better as a doorstop for most than a book, but it's a wonderful resource. If you want to learn about neuroscience and your book Mastery, go, and the reason I recommended Mastery is because these students would soon be going into the great jungle of college education, you know, and for me I found Mastery to be absolutely transformative. book because it taught me a lot about how to learn from others, how to expect certain types of interactions when assigned to a mentor and vice versa, and talked about some things that we will delve into further.

Today, but no less important, it is about identifying that unique seed that exists within all of us that can guide our best decisions in terms of

finding

our purpose and for that I will usually end up with a great debt of gratitude and I will probably do that again at final, but I want to start with a huge debt of gratitude because Mastery transformed my entire life and in many ways this podcast probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for Mastery because it really embedded this idea in me. that we all have a deeper purpose and it explains how to find that purpose, so I'm telling you and I'm also going to use it as a way for me to ask you now as I'm sure people's ears are listening to this.

Do you know how you find your purpose? Could you share with us what it means to find one's purpose and how early life events can perhaps tell us what that purpose is for each of us? Well, thank you for that wonderful introduction. almost blushing, it's a fantastic story, well, you know that being a human being is not easy unlike an animal because we are born and no one gives us direction, our parents can be a little our university professors, etc., mentors, but in general us. We are alone and it is a very, very difficult

process

, you wake up in the morning and you don't really know what you are, what you can do, you can choose 12 different paths, it can be very confusing and very overwhelming when you discover that. sense of purpose when you find what I call your life's task everything has a direction everything has a purpose your energy is focused it's not like you're going down a narrow, single path it's not like life gets boring and it's all about Just about discipline and problem solving, it's actually the most exciting thing that can happen to you because you never have that feeling of loss, you wake up in the morning and say, yes, this is what I need to achieve.

People come at you with all kinds of distractions, boring and irritating. things that you can eliminate, it's just the most wonderful piece of internal radar you can have, so I really wish that everyone could find that kind of internal radar, so it's not easy and I understand that there is no instant formula like that. Because it's all about instant formulas, it's difficult and I want you to know that, so it's not like Robert can give me the answer in three minutes. No, I can't, but there is a process involved. It's not that you don't know a mystery.

You can do it. It follows a very unique process and the idea is that you are talking about childhood, the way I like to frame it is when you were born, you are a phenomenon, you are unique, your DNA has never occurred in the history of the universe which goes back thousands of years. millions of years ago. years, it will never happen in the future your experience of life with your parents and everything that you experience in your early years is unique, it is yours, you are one of a kind, so that is your source of power to waste, that's just it. worst thing you can do in your life and what the power is is

finding

that uniqueness that makes you you and how you can extract that and how you can go deeper into it and use it to create the right career path, and so I tell you. people when you are a child when you are four or five years old or even younger you have what the great psychologist maslo called impulsive voices they little voices in your head that say I love this I hate that I like this food I don't like it when mom moves this way way I like it when dad comes from here you are very CED about who you are and what you like and what you don't like and these voices direct you in certain right ways and when you are very young, they also direct you towards intellectual mental activities and There is a book that I recommend to everyone.

They are Howard Gardner's five mental states. He has helped me enormously. The idea is that he talks about five forms of intelligence. Our problem is that we think of intelligence as something more intellectual. but there are many forms of intelligence, there is intelligence that has to do with words, there is abstract intelligence that has to do with patterns and mathematics, there is kinetic intelligence that has to do with the body, there is social intelligence, it has five and the idea It's your brain naturally veers towards one of them, it can veer towards two of them, that happens, but usually one of them dominates correctly and it's like a pimple in your brain that goes in a certain direction.

Fiction, you want to go with that grain and because that's where your power will be, so when you're young, if you go back and think about when you were four or five, maybe you can get a sense of some kind of direction or voice within you who drove you towards this. To me, they were words from I can remember when he was six years old. He was just obsessed with words, just the letters in Words, almost like in a slightly schizophrenic way. He spelled the words backwards. He disarmed them. He made anagrams. I love paland drums.

True, he had something with words andlanguage, it is very primitive, some people know Albert Einstein when he was four years old, his father gave him a compass for his birthday and he was fascinated with this compass, the idea that there are invisible forces. out there in the cosmos moving this needle and is obsessed with the idea of ​​invisible forces Steve Jobs when he was seven or eight years old or maybe younger at a game in Berlin, California, his father passed by a store with technological devices in the showcase and he was just mesmerized by the design of those devices and the glass tubes and everything, so he wanted to go in that direction.

You know, Tiger Woods saw his dad hitting golf balls in the garage and he was like screaming. With joy he had to do it right, you know, I can give you a million different examples of this, of course, these are people who are famous, obviously. , we can go back and find out it's easier, but what's wrong with you? Please cut me off. off yes I'm going to continue for a long time no please continue please what's happening to you is that you're seven now you're getting older and you're starting to not hear that voice anymore you're hearing the voice of your teachers telling you you're not good in this field you need to improve in math you know that you shouldn't be interested in these sports or anything you should be so bad your parents are starting to tell you that this is the career they want for management They want you to do well, you start to hear that more than your own voice and as you As you get older it gets worse and worse and worse, when you're a teenager it's all about what other people do, your peers, what's right and what's not right. you know, and that's more, all that noise enters your brain and you can't hear it anymore, you don't know who you are, so you go to college, maybe you choose a major that seems practical to you and that your parents want you to get into, maybe you wander around, you're not sure and then you enter the work world without that internal radar that I'm talking about and your brother, you're lost, where should I go?

Well, I need. to make good money and then you make a decision based on the need to make a lot of money. Some not all, but some people do that and I understand that need, we all need to make a living, but that can get you into a very bad situation. path because you are not emotionally connected, the thing is that when you discover that Primordial inclination, that grain that is within you, then you have the energy to be disciplined, perform boring tasks to learn, you learn at a faster pace because you are emotionally involved when you are emotionally involved in a topic, the brain learns twice three times four times faster than when you are not.

I always lead by example at university, I studied foreign languages, which was a kind of passion for me. three or four years I studied French and then I went to Paris and I couldn't speak a word, it was useless because it didn't teach me anything practical, right, I was totally confused and then, but I was in Paris and I and I loved it and I wanted to live there and I had a girlfriend and I needed to speak French to her and I can tell you that in one month I learned more than those four years of university because I wanted to because I was committed to my emotions.

When I was there, it was like I had to survive to learn French, while most of us don't have the need to learn this subject. We are half, we pay half as much attention, but when you find that thing that really connects you, you are paying deep attention, your emotions are engaged, you are learning at a much faster pace, okay, and the question is how do you discover that when you are older? , when you are 21 years old. I give people a lot of help and usually it's not that hard, we can go through that process, it gets harder when you're 30 and you've been wandering around, but it's not impossible, I didn't really start to find my exact path until I was 38 39 , to be honest, so there is hope when you get 40 and you get 50 it gets harder and harder and it's very sad if you waste that seed of uniqueness that I'm talking about and I tell people there are ways to come back and we go through a process like that of archaeology. dig and dig and dig and find those bones from your childhood that indicated what you should do, but when you find your life's task, everything opens up, it doesn't mean you've discovered it, well, I have to point to this in particular.

I work when I'm 28 that's not how it works it gives you a sense of direction you can try different things you can experiment you can have fun when you're 20 you're going to learn you're going to learn skills but it gives you a general framework instead of all this confusion, this chaos , social media, the Internet, I could go here, here, here, you're lost in C, it gives you a very important sense of direction. Compass, as you described. I have this image of um, you know you mentioned animals that presumably don't have a lot of flexibility in terms of the niches they can exist in, but the way I imagine this process is that as humans, we're immersed in an environment and here I am. using an analogy where, um, we don't really know if we're an aquatic animal, or a land animal, or an Aven, or an amphibian, or an amphibian, for that matter, um, and making the wrong decision it's right to be an amphibian that's trying to fly. .

Although I'm sure they are out there in the animal kingdom, it's not just a waste of time, it's probably deadly, and I don't want to overdramatize the failure to find one's purpose, but I see it that way, while such Perhaps we could simply say that the process of finding one's purpose is realizing that, you know, I'm an amphibian, I can go in and out of the water, while a group of other creatures around me stop at the edge of the water. water, and this is really cool and a bunch of other things like these flying things that actually can't even get into the water, some of them maybe on the surface or dive into it, but they can't do what I can do.

It seems like the process of self-discovery is about restricting one's choices to a sort of wedge within the full landscape of options and, you know, I can certainly remember that after reading Mastery, it helped me remember some of the first seed emotions I felt. . experienced as a very different sensation in my body, can you describe that? Yeah, um, without making it too specific to my unique taste. You know, when I was a child, I loved flora and fauna. I loved learning about biology, sure, yeah, no surprise, um, but animals. and how they move in particular and fish and going to a proper aquarium store for the first time for me and snorkeling for the first time was like Wow and even as I describe it it's almost like my body is floating, I feel it in my left arm. of all things and I feel that there is something to do about it, it is not just that I am observing things that delight me, it is as if there is something, there is a state of activation created within me, as if I have to do something with this and , usually it's tell everyone until they don't listen anymore, um, but a lot of times it's also to draw those things to think about them and I just delight in them, it's a constant source of delight, so seeds like those and there are some other things that in that landscape of Flora and Fauna and learning about animals and biology, including the human animal and then organizing the information, I find it so satisfying that it's like a drug that, um, and that's how it feels, It feels like that, you know.

Eternal spring of life, right? So for me that's what it was and in 2015 when I was teaching that course I loved it but I was feeling a little lost in my scientific career and then I read Mastery and realized that yes, I love running the lab. I love teaching. but there is something else for me and it has nothing to do with a podcast. I didn't even know what podcast. You probably knew what a podcast was. I was listening to podcasts at the time, but um, but I wasn't on social media. I wasn't planning on having a podcast, but what I wanted was that feeling in its full number of forms, that's the goal, to get that feeling in as many ways as possible, it's absolutely perfect because the connection to what I'm talking about It's not something intellectual, it's visceral, it's emotional, it's physical and you feel it in your body and when you do it it's like it's at your level, it's like you're swimming with the current, you feel it.

They are easy, everything fits together, there is a delight, not everything is going to be delicious, there will be tedium involved, there will be moments of boredom, but you are able to endure the moments of boredom because you feel that deep overall connection, so yes, that is precisely De what I'm talking about, I mean, it's for me, it's something similar. I said about words, but the other thing I was obsessed with as a child was the first human ancestors don't ask me why I was just I'm so obsessed with our ancestors millions of years ago and how it's possible to live here in the '60s or '70s with cars and everything but getting to where we are now and I wrote a short story when I was 8 about a vulture.

It was written from the point of view of a vulture watching the first humans emerge on the planet. I'm sure it was absolutely horrible. Terrible, but the strange thing is that I'm writing a new book and everything I'm doing in that book. It is reaching the ears of the first humans and I feel like a child again. I'm so excited, I'm so happy, so I can relate a lot to your story. You mentioned these five different forms of intelligence or mental frameworks as you mentioned. them, um, and I'm certainly aware that you know I lean towards more intellectual interests, although, as you pointed out, the emotion, the Delight is visceral, yes, and actions are actions, they are of the body, ultimately, right, one has to draw, talk. writing books Etc. to transmute that emotion into something real for people who are not as intellectually attuned but perhaps kinesthetically attuned, for example.

I can only wonder what that's like. I'm not completely uncoordinated, but I don't think I am. a kinesthetic attunement or a state of mind, but, for example, a podcast listener mentioned that he thinks about feelings that he literally experiences thought as a Being as a kind of mosaic of correct bodily sensations and that thought for them is not entirely correct. things from the neck up, but only from the neck down, which to me was really intriguing, so I only mention this because, as you point out, there have to be an infinite number of different types of orientations based on our unique DNA and experience But what do you think explains why these seeds in particular or, as you point out, like the direction in which the grain runs in the brain?

I mean, part of it will be nature, it will be DNA, sure, but we are. To talk about this as if there is something exciting, inspiring or charming that captures us, can it be the other way around too? m I'm going on the D the things of the body feel good if the things of the mind of the intellect feel bad and does it matter whether or not we are attracted to our Purpose By recognizing what we love or what we hate or both are useful? oh, they are both very, very useful, you know, a lot of intelligence is not non-verbal, we think in terms of images, we are very infected by other people's emotions, so I know, for example, uh my My mother is very, very interested in history, she is obsessed with history and I probably absorbed her interest in history.

I don't think there's a genetic gene for that interest, you know, so you're going to absorb things from your parents too. So it's not all just genetic, but yes, what you hate will pay a lot, but the problem with doing that is that if you go in one direction and you're in elementary school, etc., and they force you to learn. math and you hate it what it tends to do is it stops you from learning in general you think I don't want to I don't want to I don't want to be disciplined I don't want to go through anything because it's painful it doesn't lead anywhere it's not my frustration stops you from learning in general so it's very important for a child to have the experience of love as soon as possible so that they can know what they hate and why they hate doing it well and then they can rebel and they can enter that field instead of I hate learning I hate discipline I hate studying I hate trying things over and over. again if you are kinesthetically oriented and you know a part of me I understand because I love sports you have to practice it will take a lot no you are not going to instantly be good at the right thing and that will require you to like it but if your experience in mathematics CU I You hate learning, you won't, it will transfer to sports, you will hate discipline in general, so it is very important for parents to let that child have at least glimpses of that moment of love that I know for myself when I finished university and I entered the working world I had to get a job I got to work in journalism I hated it I hated working for other people I hated office politics I hated all the egos I hated the flattery I hated the lack of quality it was just about you know making money and get things out there and then I worked in Hollywood I hated Hollywood I hated working in Hollywood that shaped me a lot and made me go in the direction that I went, but only from the basis that I knew I wanted to be a writer, so you know that It is very important that not only do you form hatred, but there also has to be that love.deep and positive emotional about something that is also ingrained in you in some way.

What you just said really highlights the fact that energy and motivation can come from any pressure, you know, desire for something or desire to get away from something and um earlier when you were talking about how we're much more committed and driven toward things that move us emotionally and, in fact, we know it based on neuroscience, you know them too. I'm sure that just by releasing certain neurochemicals in the brain and body, our brain would have some reason to change. True, if you don't feel agitated and can do everything you are trying to do, of course your brain wouldn't change. , why would it be right for agitation to be a signature of neurochemicals saying, hey, something's different now? true, you may need to do something different, including reconnecting, true, and that can come from positive or negative experiences.

I'm obsessed with this idea of ​​energy. I mean, we all want to have more energy and focus, and we usually hear about the concept. of energy in the context of caloric energy, like what we should eat, when and how much, and we need to sleep, but what you're really referring to is neural energy, like engaging ourselves, that's, you know, sitting there, ready to commit. but it requires the right experiential macronutrients, the right experiential micronutrients, as opposed to, of course, we need good nutrition, but that's not enough, it's NE necessary but not sufficient, so would you say that when we're, let's say a good number of our listeners?

We're adults, you know, in our 20s and beyond, the things that excite us as adults and that really generate some sense of readiness or grab our attention, are still informative to guide our decisions about the best life and the purpose of life, OK what are you doing? What exactly do you mean by that? I mean there are things that turn you on quickly, like knowing where you need to relieve some tension and there is entertainment and there are things that give you fairly immediate gratification and there is a bigger picture of something that will give you satisfaction in the future. years to come, so you will be able to feel that when you are older and can pay attention to it, but many times we are paying too much attention to immediate pleasures in life to what gives us Instant Gratification and that is what we are looking for, so this is a type of a much deeper process that involves that digging that I was saying, it's deeper than just like this, no It's not like that, you know, it's more of a macro thing than just that, that's why, when you're 20, 30, 40 years old , you want to pay attention to yourself and the problem with people. in today's world is that you are not paying attention to yourself you are not inside your own head you are not listening to those voices you are no longer listening to what you love what you like because like I said, there are a lot of these others There are distractions and so So you're always in tune with what other people like because you're on social media.

This is what people follow. This is what they're interested in instead of tuning out, standing back and watching. yourself and going through the process of that's not me, I don't really like you to know, so what you're talking about is I think very deep levels of frustration or anxiety are definite signs that you should pay attention to. I'm telling you that this is not a good direction for you, this is a waste of your time, and in general, I tell people to be self-aware and to be able to listen to those voices to understand that your frustration is leading you. saying something and sometimes you just act.

Doing it without understanding it, but understanding why you're frustrated, why you don't like your career, why you're not happy with where you're going, is the key to everything that will open up, and you'll actually be able to do it even when you're 30. years. bring you back to that childhood inclination, but if you can't hear where those emotions come from, then they are useless, they are not teaching you anything, as we all know, quality nutrition influences, of course, our physical health, but also our our mental health and in our health. cognitive functioning our memory our ability to learn new things and concentrate and we know that one of the most important characteristics of high-quality nutrition is making sure we get enough vitamins and minerals from high-quality raw or minimally processed sources, as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics. and fiber to support basically all cellular functions in our body, including the gut microbiome.

Now I like that most people try to get optimal nutrition from Whole Foods, ideally primarily from minimally processed or unprocessed foods, however, one of the challenges that I and many other people face. is consuming enough servings of high-quality fruits and vegetables per day, as well as the fiber and probiotics that often accompany those fruits and vegetables, so back in 2012, long before I had a podcast, I started drinking ag1 and I am delighted to that ag1 is sponsoring the Hubman Lab podcast. The reason I started taking ag1 and the reason I continue to drink ag1 once or twice a day is that it covers all my fundamental nutritional needs, that is, it provides me with insurance that I'm getting adequate amounts of those vitamins and minerals. biotics and fiber to ensure optimal mental health, physical health and performance if you want to try ag1 you can go drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer: they are giving away five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2 again, drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer, so it seems like one of the goals is to engage in what I'll call for the moment unadulterated self-reference, you know, unadulterated, uh, in every sense of the word because um when I was a child, as you pointed out, um, in the stages of life that are before puberty, they are literally prex um, which I think is important, because, um, puberty, for me, as a neurobiologist who started as a neurobiologist Developmentally, I can tell you that puberty is the most profound transformation the brain undergoes in a lifetime, there is absolutely no doubt about it, everything is different after puberty because of all the new relational dynamics that become evident and our potential participation in them, yeah, it's just that you know.

Not enough has been said about how dramatically puberty changes the brain. Sure, I mean, we're different people before and after puberty. Hormones that are suddenly raging. Hormones are there and they are not just changes in how we see the world, but changes in how the world sees us. and not only through the lens of sexuality, but also the expectation of what we are capable of doing, what we are responsible for or not responsible for in our ability to learn. I mean, puberty is like that. You know, it is also the fastest aging stage in our entire life. life expectancy of those kids who go home for the summer and then come back shaving, you know, I was a little late, I wasn't a late bloomer, but I had a long, drawn out puberty, but I remember those kids, I'm sure they all we remember them.

Children, everything changes and that is why I think that before puberty, these seeds, as you described them, of delight or resistance to things, think that they are unadulterated, they are not contaminated by the voices and expectations of others, so which I can see the challenge of reaching Coming back to it as an adult, I wonder if this relates to something I've heard you talk about before, although maybe not as much as some of the other topics you've discussed publicly, which is the real thing versus the false Sublime, oh. um, could you maybe just define for us what Sublime really is, what a sublime experience is, and the distinction between real and fake?

Sublime experiences because I feel like this is about finding that right seed, it's about finding authentic seeds within us rather than opposite ones. to when emotions can distract and deceive. I never thought I'd ever made that connection and it's the book I'm writing right now, so thank you for that. I have to think about that. In fact, I'm writing a book about the sublime and um, I have several ways to illustrate it. I generally like to use a metaphor and the metaphor is that being a human being, a social human being, living in a particular culture means that you live within a circle and that Circle of that time is the conventions of thinking of ideas that are acceptable of behavior that is acceptable here is where you can go mentally where you can go physically you know all the codes and conventions so that the Circle for ancient Egypt and for the 21st century United States Obviously they are very different but it is the same Circle it is the same limiting factor you're not supposed to leave it these are thoughts experiences Behavior you're not supposed to do the sublime is what lies just outside that Circle um, the word sublime comes from the threshold, it's like there's a door and it sublime is literally at the doorstep, you're looking towards something else, and the quintessential Sublime experience is a near-death experience where you're standing at the doorstep of death itself, which is why in my book I'm illustrating the different types of sublime experiences you can have in relation to the cosmos in relation to thinking about being alive, simply being alive is the strangest feeling you can ever have.

I know that person personally after my stroke. I enter the chapter about childhood and how sublime your own childhood was. I enter into the relationship of animals with animals. I'm going to have a chapter on the brain, a chapter on love that I'm working on right now. a chapter on history, okay, but what I'm trying to say is that the human brain is designed for these experiences, it's designed for transcendental experiences that take us out of the small, narrow realm that we live in because we are aware of our death like the only animal truly aware of its own mortality and it scares us to death and the idea that we can see something bigger than just the banal parts of our lives is a door that allows us to transcend the moment to feel connected to something bigger, feel connected to some power in the cosmos, with Evolution itself, and so we are wired for that and I am writing a chapter now about 40,000 years ago at the moment when I believe the sublime was born.

The story I'm trying to illustrate right now with our Upper Paleolithic ancestors, so it's deep within us, we need it, we have to have it in the 21st century, we have very few avenues for it, some real religion used to be the major. There are various ways to access this and because it is so profound we look for false forms of the sublime that give us the feeling that we are transcending, but it is not at all because the sublime has to come from within, it is an experience that have. that you are generating in your own mind and in your own experience the false Sublime comes from outside comes from drugs comes from alcohol comes from shopping comes from online anger comes from joining a cause and just taking out all your aggression and violence right , it comes from causes, it comes from addictions, okay, it gives you the feeling that it calms you down and makes you feel like there's something else going on in life besides your job that you're sick of, but it's not real, I don't. is. lasting is false it is an illusion it is not based on anything real it does not connect with that deep part of human nature that is connected to these experiences so what happens is that you have to have more and more and more you have to have, you know more from this rush you need more drugs you need more alcohol you need more sex you need more horn it will never satisfy you but the true Sublime you do not have that feeling it is as if it were transformative once you feel it it lasts for the rest of your life it is what maslo again called a peak experience so that's the difference between failures and the real Sublime I haven't completely connected it with what you were saying but if I think about it I think you're onto something very interesting.

I mean, maybe the connection I was trying to make doesn't hold up, but yeah, for me, those first experiences of seeing things that delighted me in a way that felt like they weren't just Well, the thought process was a long time ago. time when something like oh my god I can't believe this exists, this is so cool, it's the coolest thing and it clearly created a state of activation inside of me, but then there was also a thought and a feeling of again a lot this is o pre preverbal is not really preverbal I could talk at that age but it was um that's me and I'm on it right there's a connection there and then it was there's something to do about it The arousal state created in the body was, you know?

I need to learn more about this. I need to tell people about this. I need to think about this. I need more examples of this and see if they're all like this or not, you know, etc. um it definitely meets some of the criteria of a sublime experience and I knew again when I was in graduate school and again when I was this young professor about to transition to tenure.I knew I was going to do something different, that's how it was. like I was on the threshold of something but I didn't know what was next, but I could trust it because of that early experience of knowing that was the threat, like I'm an amphibian, this is my environment and you're an amphibian too, true, and we are different amphibians, but you know that we are going to be amphibians together in that very moment and there is a permanence to it that seems to transcend time.

I'm obsessed with time perception, so I have to be. Be careful not to go off on a tangent with that, but the human brain's ability to split or macro-split time is incredible and it has been said, not only of addictions, but also of interactions with toxic people, that they kill time, that humans have an I. I think I was young. I'll look it up, but one of the great psychologists said something to the extent that addictive behaviors, thought patterns, substances are human attempts to kill time so that they don't have to address their mortality, yes, and that has always had a lot to do with it. meaning to me, yes, we say killing time is our expression killing time through passive engagement, but also killing time by trying to be overwhelmed or overcome by an experience or a substance, as opposed to when you are truly connected, you have that feeling of flow and 3 hours can pass and you are not even aware of it, so time is a totally subjective experience, it can be extremely slow and tedious and you feel very depressed or it can happen but it happens without you realizing it and It's a wonderful experience you know when I'm immersed in my writing I'm not aware of the passage of time I'm so involved so immersed that it's a deeply pleasurable experience of time, it's sublime and yeah, so I agree with you.

I think your distinction is very interesting. You know, I'm eagerly awaiting your next book, but we won't rush you. I'm so immersed in this that I could talk for hours because I also have a chapter in there about what I call the dayon, which is like that voice inside you that speaks to you and I'm writing a whole chapter on How sublime that is when you connect with that voice so that you are right. There is something very connected to Mastery in this book, but it is the next chapter that I am writing. Fantastic. I can not wait.

I can not wait. I would like to. Switch slightly to a topic that you've written about extensively and that's power, um, and not just power, but seduction, which you've written about extensively and, of course, you've written about finding one's purpose. , so tell me if the framework I have written. I just gave myself the freedom to create and if it's not, I hope it's not maybe in some way interesting, so to me you talk and we will talk about power as a resource, it's something that, um. it's there as a device that can be used or not used um and I think of seduction as a form of exchange between an individual so there is a verb associated with the power of seduction that I'm thinking of more as a noun in this context you you're the word guy, um and then you know the purpose is, uh, it's actually about finding to what end or ends one is going to devote power, seduction and the other forces that allow human beings to interact with each other in the world, um, but power as a resource. that can be expressed in different ways and accessed in different ways maybe we could explore that a little bit because you know, when we hear the word power, I think a lot of people prepare like here we go, someone is going to try to have power over me this is what it's about. of manipulation and so on, etc., but I learned early enough that in every career, endeavor, there are power dynamics, there is a Mentor, apprentice, they, the teachers and their students, and they both have power, um, in romantic relationships, there are a power. exchange there is yes and its NOS there is maybe there is um uh covert and overt contracts yes I will do this because I want to correct you will do this because you want great sounds great open contract they are also covert contracts well I don't feel safe doing that so what I will do is take something from the interaction that you are not aware of in order to alleviate my sense of danger and give me the opportunity. illusion of feeling safe and all kinds of complicated human dynamics that have to do with us having this forebrain that can do all this gymnastics, so maybe we could start very simply by saying: do you know how you would define power in terms of it's a definition functional as in interpersonal relationships and then why do you think power is so essential to all relationships?

That's really what I'd like to get at. Why is it so essential? Why couldn't I be something else like me? Defining po is that I try to take it out of that kind of negative context that most people have and that you raised and bring it to something very primitive and very Primordial, the way in which the human being is connected, the feeling that there is no we have control over our environment and in the earliest period it was literally over our environment and wild animals and nature and climate etc., but now the feeling that you have no control over your career, over your children, over your parents, is deeply unhappy and forces us to act in certain ways, whether it's trying to find positive ways of power or doing what you call covert ways of gaining power, you know, passive aggressive, traditionally passive aggressive means, so you're deeply ingrained in the US wanting a degree of control over the immediate environment and In immediate events we can never have complete control and the idea of ​​having complete control is silly and would actually be very ugly because you want a degree of Letting Go and let the circumstances come to you, etc., so that the feeling of you that you want to feel. like with other people and relationships that you can influence them, that you can move them in a certain direction, either so that you love and treat yourself better or so that you stop engaging in annoying and irritating behaviors or so that you know to wake up and find and and and do productive activities if they are your children, etc., you want to have the ability to influence people to move them in a certain direction, whether it is in your interest or theirs, and once you have that need, all human beings who have ever lived have it. that need and many times we do not recognize it because we are ashamed of our desire for power because of our need to control every human being is right and it is not easy because human beings are complicated, they don't.

If you say do this and you are talking to your child he will do the opposite or do something else, you can't just force people in the right direction by being open and telling them this is what you should do. do you create resentment? you create an enemy. They may say yes, yes, dad, yes, husband, I will do what you say, but they are you, they are going to resist you deep down, so people are deceitful, they dress. masks pretend to say one thing and do another they have their egos and you inadvertently hurt their egos or trip them up in some way and they react in a way you don't expect and that's why power is this kind of invisible realm that envelops a society in which people continually fight each other and fight, but no one talks about it, no one talks openly about it, no one says this is exactly what I'm trying to do, so when you enter the social world in the race. world you don't expect these battles you don't know no one has taught you no one has trained you your parents don't train you no one trains you and you make mistakes and you realize how political people are if you are a Sharky character and there is a certain percentage of them, You realize wow, I can trick people, I can manipulate them, I can get what I want, I can pretend to love them and they will fall in love with me and I can do all these other things, but for most of us, 95% of We who are not sharks and I include myself in that category, it is very, very disturbing to suddenly enter that world and see all those invisible power games that no one has given you. any advice helped you and then take it out of the realm that it's just about trying to take over the world and manipulating and exploiting and abusing that, it's something within you, you have this need and your suppression of it will only bring it out. passive ways and you won't be able to control certain things if you want to move people if you want them to follow your ideas if you want them to be more aligned with your politics or your ideas you have to be subtle you have to learn In psychology, you have to learn certain aspects of how almost moving people without them realizing it in certain directions, which is like The Art of Seduction and, if you're not interested in that, you're just going to tell people what you think and what you're going to do.

It means that you are not interested in practical action, you are not interested in results, you are only interested in inventing your own frustrations or your own anger, so learning the small and subtle dynamics of power is extremely essential because you are a social animal, It doesn't mean that you're going to get dirty, that you're going to suddenly go out and manipulate people. Most of the 48 Laws of Power are not about defense, but about how to defend yourself. the Sharks on how to defend yourself from making classic mistakes like upstaging the teacher, like talking too much, like arguing with people instead of proving your ideas over and over again, it's not something ugly, it actually makes you a better social individual, so It's how I like to frame it, it's very interesting.

I think when I was young it was really important for me to know where I fit in in my friend group and I didn't see it as much or when as a hierarchy. I was in my academic studies. I thought of it as a hierarchy, although it was clearly correct. The goal was to discover my unique place where I could do the most good for myself and others. of finding my place um, I don't want to say on a CU shelf that gives an image of something vertical, but you know, let's make it lateral, a lateral arrangement of different people with different strengths, different life purposes trying to discover them.

I know where I should be to express that and also feel connected to others, and in order to do that, I had to do it. Now I realize, based on your answer, that I had to find out, you know who is trying to have power. about who pretends not to want power but actually exercises it. You know this kind of stuff and there's an incredible part that comes with knowing that you're in the right place, both in the profession interpersonally in relation to yourself and in context. from one's peer group just yeah, this is where I belong because trying to gain power when one is trying to move into a position that isn't right for them or in a way that isn't right for them seems so forcefully expensive, yeah, It seems like a waste of life, frankly, right, you know, trying to gather resources just to have them to give the illusion of power, but then being afraid of losing them sounds like a recipe for misery, as you pointed out, you know? while discovering where I am most powerful in the benevolent sense of the word, that seems like a good quest, well, it is connecting with Mastery again and finding your life's purpose.

You know, I knew when I was young that I could. I didn't wield physical power because I was a skinny runt and I didn't get bullied, but people picked on me, etc., so I drifted into intellectual pursuits where I could have power, and in the end, you know you could have been. You're an athlete and you may have done well in high school, but haha ​​Look at me now, I'm not saying it's a beautiful thing, but that's part of human nature, the desire to prove yourself and find that niche that suits you. interested. you belong, so you don't have that kind of buzz, that feeling of inferiority that psychologist Alfred Adler describes very eloquently, so a lot of that is like compensating when you're a kid for things that are your weaknesses and finding what you want.

You're so good at it, you have that power and people can't bully you, right? And now you're like a famous neuroscientist, while they say who knows what they're doing, so power definitely. It's connected somehow to that inner sense of what you're meant to do and you feel it with the ease and connection that comes from it, so I can honestly say that my distaste for working for other people and office politics and egos Now I have an existence where I don't have to deal with any of that and I'm so blessed and I wake up every morning and I pray to God, thank God I found this because it's the perfect lifestyle for me.

Yes, you can accurately describe him as an Intellectual Beast, so that's kind of a compliment. We hear the word beast and think you know a ferocious Beast that tries to harm others, but I'm happy to be one. beast, yeah, you know, so I think finding where we can be a beast, you know, and for some people, that's painting or gardening or whatever, um, I think again it relates to these issues or this quest. of Master's seduction. It's also a very loaded word, right, it's even uglier than power because seduction, right, seduction, in a way, drips with the idea that someone is tricking another person into doing something they wouldn't otherwise want to do, but seduction is our propensity to do. doing it and having it done to us is integrated into our systemnervous and has a lot to do with the hypothalamus and a lot of other areas that I won't bore us with the nomenclature, but for me um sedu implies some kind of exchange.

Suppose we could seduce ourselves by denying or convincing ourselves of something, but most of the time when we talk about seduction, we are talking about an interaction between two or more people, so what are some of the basic principles of seduction and Yeah? You are interested in playing a little bit of an anthropologist and a neuroscientist. I would invite you to that, why do you think we have neural circuits in our brain that allow us to seduce and be seduced? Well, I don't know how. I'm being kind of an armchair intellectual, but my theory is that part of this has to go back to social events in our prehistory that have to do with taboos and society was initially organized by a series of taboos. most notably the taboo on the incest and what happened is just not my theory, it's Malanowski Malanowski's theory.

I pronounce it um, that the moment a taboo enters the human brain like you are not supposed to sleep with this woman, desire arises inside you. of you sleeping with that woman the feeling of not the feeling that this is forbidden awakens desire awakens contrary impulses in humans and we can be very um what is the word perverse creatures, so if you have ever tried to repress a thought you realize it keeps coming up it keeps coming up you can't suppress it don't think about an elephant Andrews whatever you do don't think about an elephant you're thinking about him because you can't help it well the idea that you're not supposed to desire this person awake that real desire, so I think that the feeling that something is taboo and transgressive is the ultimate type of origin of our desire for seduction, but seduction implies vulnerability, it implies that someone gets inside, someone gets inside. under our skin and to do that we have to let them in so that the person who is being seduced is somehow complicit, because if you just put up a wall and say no, I'm not going to be seduced, nothing will.

This happens but you have a vulnerability and you are allowing that person into your psyche. In your inner space, the paradigm for that is early childhood, so Freud talks a lot about this, so I don't know if people still believe in Freud. I certainly do well. absolutely a genius of both Psychology and Physiology he was wrong about many things he did many things he should not have done Let's admit that I think everyone would agree that sleeping with your patients and being a cocaine addict are bad ideas, but At the same time he had absolutely supernatural levels of knowledge and brilliance of human nature.

He slept with his patience. I think he did, but if I just threw that at him without him doing it, then you know, forgive me, I certainly had emotions. attachments to his patients that he should not have had. I don't know if he slept with them, it's very possible that he had them, but his idea was that the child is seduced by the father. You are in an extremely vulnerable position. Your life depends on it. them and they are seducing you with their energy, you are letting them in correctly and that creates a pattern for the rest of your life and so, for example, the feeling of being carried by your father and just being physically carried is a form of Seduction because You don't know what he's going to do to you, you're very excited, you want that surprise, right, and for me it has to do with the seduction of a story.

Stories seduce us a lot. We don't know where they are, they're taking us. We don't know what the next chapter is. What will happen to them? this character or not the surprise lowers our resistance and opens our mind to what will happen next is a form of fairy tales of seduction the stories you were reading as a child, your interactions with your parents are deeply ingrained in you. You can't be seduced unless you're vulnerable, right? That's why I like to change it and get away from the negative connotations. Being vulnerable is actually a positive trait, I think.

Many people in the world today because things are so hard and invasive that people have become too invulnerable, they don't want to let anything in and this now infects their relationships with other people, they don't want to be influenced. They want to be strong within themselves. They are afraid of giving in to the other person or surrendering to their influence, but it is actually a delicious feeling to surrender to the power of another person and then reverse that burden and have them surrender to his power. So when I'm reading a writer, sometimes I'm completely seduced by them, as if Friederick Nich were one of my favorite writers.

I let everything go, I let it into my brain and I am completely seduced. I let it guide me, but then I meet writers I don't like at all. I'll mention one, you know, it's probably not a good thing, but I'll pass Pinker. I don't like St St Pinker. I find it really annoying, okay, but I force myself to try to find it. a way of being seduced by him, letting him into my brain to see where he's coming from, opening myself up to the possibility that he might be right, so vulnerability, letting people into your mental space is a form of intelligence, It's a kind of emotion. and an intellectual intelligence and forgive me for interrupting but I think it also implies a level of trust because empathy or allowing yourself to be vulnerable to the point of being seduced by something um by definition if you choose to do it uh implies that you also have the confidence that you can return to to be yourself afterwards, that you will not be lost in circumstances, that you will not be kidnapped to the point of not returning, or in some way that is detrimental to you. so it's um, I sound very nerdy here, it's confident filming in a lot of ways, right, like take my mind and take it wherever you want because I know I can come back at any time and the same thing in a Physics in a romantic sense, right, you are opening yourself up to the charm of the other person's energy, but if they start showing dark energy and you see that they are abusive or that something is wrong, you have the ability to withdraw, well. there it becomes complicated because it is very complicated, well, because the attachment systems that are also rooted in childhood, can often overwhelm one's ability to recover, I mean, I mean, how many if I had a dollar for every time? that I met someone? my life says like you know, I know they're bad for me, but I just don't like it, we just can't seem to disconnect that way, you hear about it all the time, I mean, you see court cases about this that are public and you know, you just say, why didn't they stay away from each other?

Well, because once those attachment systems are locked in, it almost becomes a relationship, and here metaphorically speaking, like a parent-child relationship, like suddenly you couldn't decide who your parents were. Your parents simply because you know better now, you will always be affected by the reality that they were and had an influence and I think that attachment system is a force that pulls quite strongly, yes, and many women. They have written to me from The Art of Seduction telling me that their boyfriend or husband was using some of these tactics on them and that it was very painful and they were a little angry with me for it, but then they realized it. that they didn't really learn it from my book, it was already sort of programmed into them, but that reading about these tactics and strategies actually helped them recognize what their husband or boyfriend was doing to them: the manipulation and games that were played. were playing, do men write to you and talk to you about the seductive trappings that women have used to bring them into a relationship too?

Or do you usually listen to women? I mainly hear women complaining about men and how I abused them and how they used some of these strategies. I don't deny it, I have a slightly disastrous advantage because I didn't want to write a book about seduction. That doesn't have that taboo element because I say. seduction implies a taboo and I didn't want to, I didn't want to censor myself, but the seduction of a woman on a man clearly also exists less, I admit, it is less frequent that it is physically abusive, but of course, I mean from an early age, both.

Boys and girls, men and women, are trained by society in the kind of seductive tactics and adornments, right, I mean everything from makeup, perfumes, hairstyles, cars, watches, jewelry, expressions, displays of power of any kind. Dude, I mean those things, the world is full of those things, yeah. but men are generally somewhat happy when a woman seduces them, unless they are after her money or something, but in general, in the sense that I talk about this in the first chapter, I could say that it is the archetype par excellence of the seductive woman, the kind of half-human, half-bird creature on a rock that sings so beautifully that you have to jump into the water and then they kill you, so the idea is that men want to let themselves go because men have to. to have so much control so powerful they have to project this image they have a secret desire to let themselves go and be almost dominated by a very powerful woman many men have that and I'm talking about some of the most powerful men in history Julius Caesar Mark Anthony, um Joe dagio , all these men, very masculine men who have fallen in love with very feminine mermaid-like women and been completely dominated by them and actually enjoy the process because it's like a feeling that I can let go, I can go into this.

It's a totally sensual physical world and it's extremely pleasurable, it's like another realm outside of my kind of cold male world, you know, so I don't make men complain too much about women who have honestly seduced them, it's usually the other way around. . I would like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you achieve your health goals. I have been a believer in getting regular blood tests for the simple reason that many of the factors that affect your immediate and long-term health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test.

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I've heard it before and I promise this is not an original idea that I claim to have heard somewhere else and my friend asked me to ask. Kind of a question that in all sexual exchanges there is definitely a power exchange, um, maybe you could elaborate on that, um, because while you were describing some of the seductive power dynamics that exist, IT IS a phrase I've heard before, It came to mind, um, that at first it made me laugh but then it made me think quite deeply about this issue of the relationship between sexual and power dynamics, which is this notion of overcoming from below, you know, if one you're giving another person the impression that they're more powerful by virtue of the word they give, they actually have some power, the right power can be given or taken, but um, a lot of times, seductive exchanges and sexual exchanges and romantic exchanges in particular are about both people, uh, buying into a temporary illusion, let's pretend you're in charge when I'm actually in charge, okay, but I know you think you're in charge, okay, let's pretend none of that exists and let's just do important to explore in the context of this.

Well, I wrote The Art of Seduction with the idea that it was an art invented by women. It was invented by women who had essentially no social, political power, in any sense of the word, in domestic law, but the only power they could exercise over a man was through sex, some physical attraction, so they developed this art. somehow attract a man into his world through various theatrical effects. Cleopatra is kind of the archetype of this and then she draws the powerful man into this world. She has the illusion that he is the one chasing her, but in reality she is the one controlling the It is dynamic, many times the person who seems to be the weakest in the relationship, who is not chasing, is actually inviting the chase, it's actually leading the other person, so there are a lot of kinds of appearance games going on and you can never understand it.

Figure out who exactly is in control of the dynamic because one person is like allowing the other to guide you, but the fact that you allow it isa degree of power, it's a degree of control, so it's very difficult to understand and Sex, power and romantic relationships are very intertwined in America, physically, emotionally, neurologically, it can't be helped, so I think It's a bit dishonest to say that none of that exists, that it's like there's an egalitarian Paradise out there when it's not really programmed in us for that kind of relationship. There is a recent scientific publication on SL that I want to share with you in this context because I would like to know your opinion on it.

David Anderson, who is a phenomenal neurobiologist that he has been a guest on. this podcast before he was a professor at Caltech he basically studies the functions of the hypothalamus, so okay things like aggression, mating and things like that, and he does it in great detail, he's a virtuoso of the hypothalamus and he published a paper. two years ago showing that there are indeed neural circuits in the brains of animals and presumably also humans that control sexual mounting behavior, but that in reality there is a separate circuit for purely non-sexual mounting and the physical power over which it is expressed in animals.and anyone who has ever had a dog and gone to the dog park will see same sex dog montages or dog montages that seemingly have no sexual endpoint, yes, and as you explore this and talk about With David about it, it is very clear that there are neural circuits that essentially have everything to do with an animal of one species climbing on top of another animal, usually from behind, often biting the back of the neck and saying "I'll control you." .

It is often done in a playful way. The context, especially between animals, is not always aggressive, but there is a certain element of aggressiveness, but it essentially says that I decide whether you are mobile or not at this moment and that is very important. I want to emphasize that this is a circuit that is completely separate from all reflexes associated with sexual behavior in men and women. I find this fascinating, um, and because we hear about power over right and we hear about power and we think about physical power over the idea that something so primitive.

Since mounting something as primitive as biting or hitting has its own unique set of circuits in the brain, I think it corroborates everything you put in your books about power and maybe even seduction, so I just throw that out there for consideration. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that, if not, feel free to say no, but of course, but for me this was a really important discovery because I think everyone looks at the increasing behavior and goes oh. that has to be sexual and sometimes it's oh, I see what you mean, but it's not like there are a lot of neural circuits in the brain that actually try to define who's on top, literally, that has nothing to do with sex.

Yes, I'm sure it's true. I have never, ever, ever read anything about it, but I can say that I wrote a chapter in my new book about love and that is something different than seduction and I was trying to come up with an idea of ​​love that has an element of equality that doesn't have this power dynamic. I love that and, you know, it's like the antithesis of my Art of Seduction, where I'm almost contradicting myself and I was getting into his biology and even his physics, so there's a famous French biologist whose name escapes me.

Sorry, I can't remember it from the '20s and '30s um and he was studying parium and he found out that he was studying them, you know, they're in these ponds, etc., and he said there were times when these single-celled organisms would suddenly mate, everyone was joining just one by one and absorbing. the membrane of one inside the other and then they would like to leave and then once a couple did that, all the parium started to join together, then they would sink to the bottom of the pond and the parium don't reproduce through sex, they reproduce dividing. correct self-reproduction and that's why I was saying that the desire to attach to connect with someone so deeply that you absorb one is absorbed by the other is biologically connected to us goes back millions and millions and millions of years and is a desire essentially a biological desire to love, right, and it's an energy that permeates everything, it's not just about power and hierarchy and that I was showing other creatures that had something similar happening and you know, in physics we talk about entanglement and we also talk about um you know, the matter, if matter is not absorbed, is not opposed by a large amount of kinetic energy, comes together, I mean, particles come together to form matter, etc., etc., then there is something in the universe that is trying to connect things to each other, so there is this. this type of energy that exists in the world where we have a deep need to connect with someone outside of those power dynamics, right where there is a degree of equality where we feel attracted to each other and let go of the ego games that we leave.

As we move forward, we overcome our own physiology, our own hypothalamus, and we get involved in this. I call it sublime love and it involves the physical part, the sexual part is the trigger because when you have sexual relations with someone your body suddenly becomes permeable. to its energy in a way that you cannot control, it releases all kinds of chemicals in the brain that are very powerful and many times that sense is too powerful and you react and you are afraid and you back away, but if you don't If you don't react and you go further there, then the mind also becomes permeable to the other person, their energy and their desire, and then a kind of spiral effect is created where the physical and mental connection reaches this state that I call Sublime love, now it is an Ideal, There really isn't much of it in the world today, but there are stories in history that illustrate it and I think it's a biological need for us to feel a deep sense of connection that we normally attribute to religion and God.

Etc but I maintain the essence of love the model for love is between two heterosexual or homosexual human beings it does not matter and that feeling of overcoming our own neurology our own system and entering this zone is deeply satisfying we all want it and it has to involve stopping Power dynamics aside, letting go and everything being the same, it's not that the other person is exactly like you, you recognize their difference, but in terms of being worthy of attention, being worthy and respected, you leave all those other things out, so there is an area that is possible that is outside of this name of power that we are talking about.

I'm excited that you're writing about this, so this is for your next book. Yes, I'm very excited. I couldn't help but think of some of the parallels between what you describe and what we are seeing today in the landscape of politics and social dynamics where it is clearly not about putting aside egos, people feel that both sides they feel attacked, everyone in the middle feels confused, like why do I have to do it? Pick a helper um and there doesn't seem to be any hint of a future where people put down their swords, which means that if we were to stick with your previous definition, which I really like, no one feels safe enough to be vulnerable enough. like for um. allowing people to come together, which is just a way to reward, you know a lot of other things, um, and not as eloquently as you described it, but letting go of the power dynamic and making yourself vulnerable is the key. to access love in the romantic context, surely, but also in the social context.

I mean, what are the channels for that? I guess there's the argument, not mine, that everyone should take a bunch of psychedelics and see the interconnectedness of things, but that seems like a realistic route. I just don't see that being you know, um, you know, 12th grade graduation, um curriculum, um, nor do I think that would be healthy. To be clear, I think we would end up with a lot of expression. There are many problems, but there is a lack of a magical substance that can increase feelings of connection between everyone simultaneously. How are you going to save humanity?

Robert. Well, because I'm concerned about young people in particular with the culture of sexual relations with pornography. etc, etc, it is a kind of rewiring of the human brain and we are losing what I just described and I see a lot of young people in particular and I don't blame them because they have grown up in a world that is very chaotic and very hostile I could say I think it is um and I don't want to be picky here but I love what you just said I think in my mind it's hello things like that are hijacking the hard wiring of the brain okay um and I'm just Again, forgive me, the audience probably can't rewire the brain of that way.

I think we can expand and rewire our wiring, but a lot of what you talk about in your books is about finding one's Essence, but then what I love about your books, among many other things, is that it's about that dance. between the wiring and the possibility of effort, so anyway, forgive me for being very precise, so yeah, how do you get us out of there? so good, you're putting a big burden on me, I am, but I think you're up to the task, you know, um, well, I try to do that in this chapter because I wanted to seduce the reader into the idea that this is something extremely pleasurable. . and extremely healthy and the feeling of being vulnerable is a very positive attribute that will infect not only your romantic relationships but will also infect you mentally.

That's why creative people are extremely vulnerable, they are extremely vulnerable to ideas, they are extremely vulnerable to the environment and closure. go into your own ego, into yourself, so the chapter is called Escape the Ego Prison and you're kind of trapped inside yourself and your own thoughts and desires, and it's like a prison that locks you and you in. . you want to escape in some way and you escape through drugs, you escape through pornography, but that doesn't lead you to escape, you want to be able to let go and get out of this prison that you are in, so it is a desire that we all have and so I wanted to frame it as this incredibly positive dynamic that you can participate in and the ability to be vulnerable to other people to open up and say yes, they might hurt me, but I'm strong. enough to accept it and if they hurt me I will learn from it and I will recover and I know it is a little naive of me but I want you to at least have that feeling because many young people write to me and say: I can't fall in love anymore.

Can't. I don't like that feeling. It makes the loss of control too much. You know, and a big part of that is their behavioral patterns to create this sense of control. that you can have when you are locked inside yourself, hence the overindulgence in pornography, yes, and masturbation, etc., as a way to avoid the understandable fear about interrelational dynamics, yes, yes, so you know when you are young. You are idealistic, at least many young people are, and you have these dreams and these hopes, and letting go of this possibility that is deeply pleasurable and deeply therapeutic for the human animal as a social animal is like the highest form of interaction that we can have.

I can have, so my strategy in that chapter was to paint such a wonderful portrait of the pleasures that await you when you let go of your defenses, let go of all your natural resistance factors and open yourself up to other people, it is the key to not only a romantic relationship, but also professional success, mental energy, creativity, openness in general, so I don't think a relationship can have, you know, a big impact, but we'll see when the book comes out, but I'm defending that sense of openness, opening yourself to the universe, to the cosmos itself as an energy that permeates the world and so that you don't want to feel closed within your ego, within yourself, I want to make you feel the pain of that, because you don't really feel the pain, You feel like it's comfortable for you, but I want to be clear that it's not comfortable, it's deeply painful and it disconnects you from some of the things. best experiences you can have in life, so I have that strategy, the only other hope I have is in the human Spirit itself, so a lot of this is being caused by social media, I think it's true, um and uh, and the instant and the type of immediate.

We can get gratification in many ways and my hope is that young people will become fed up and disgusted with all this disconnection and alienation in their lives and that they will hunger for something more communal, more interactive, more real rather than virtual and so on. that the human Spirit cannot be completely crushed by technology etc. so I have that hope because we have gone through these Cycles before in history where people have become very invulnerable and very closed off and closed off and suddenly there is an explosion , a creative explosion as in the 1960s as in the 1920s as in 18th century Europe with the Casanovas and where seduction reached its kind of apia, etc., so it has oscillated back and forth between these moments when humans become incredibly closed-minded and bitter and partisan and the conflict of everything and everyone. divisive, etc. and suddenly it goes in the opposite direction.

I'm hopeful for that possibility and I've structured my chapter to maybe sweep that a little bit along that link and see if I can have some effect on, well,I think what you just described in conversations like this and what comes out of this is probably going to have a tremendous effect. I think that is exactly what is needed now and I will certainly be there to amplify that message. I agree with everything you said and not just because you're sitting here as a guest. this podcast, but because it is clear to me that, while power dynamics and seduction are connected to our human relationships since the beginning of time, we have reached a very challenging period in our history, it is a relief for me to know which is happened before, but in a very different context uh we hear a lot about the pendulum swinging back and forth uh someone actually uh Peter Atia online The doctor's brother actually said "Yo, so we'll give him credit," He said no, it's not a, it's not. a pendulum that swings back and forth has unfortunately now become a wrecking ball so it swings back and forth and causes damage when it reaches its um you know they are extreme and I think I also hope with You long for a moment when people recognize you. the injustices that surround them and that have been done to them and to others and um, but somehow they are able to transcend that and the word that I would like to take up the word justice.

It was pointed out to me by someone I respect a lot. You know that having a sense of justice is a wonderful and important thing and, as human beings, it is important to know how. We structure society, but I think a lot of the negative things we see today have something to do with the availability of pornography, high calorie density foods, etc., a lot of things like that, but that one about The problems with networks social because they have their positive aspects, but one of the negative problems in my opinion is that it is a constant flow of examples of injustice, so all day long you are seeing things like that that piss you off and piss off other people and for different reasons, but what they pointed out to me is that one of the key things about a feeling of injustice is being able to determine whether there is something you should do about it or not, and I think we all now feel a little kidnapped by all the injustices that we see because we feel that We're supposed to do something about it, but it may be that while we can't let every injustice go, we're being bombarded all day with things that bother us.

It's hijacking our creativity, it's distracting us from our deeper purpose, it's preventing a sense of vulnerability that would lead to a sense of deep love, and so on, so I don't think it's just The Lure, the tempting lures of sexual food and Um, and from looking at you know bodies and hearing voices on social media, I think there's some validity to that, but it's also that you know there's a lot of opportunities to lower the gravitational pole forces of Injustice like H, that It's so frustrating, why are they doing it? I mean, I find myself talking to my coworkers when I walk in about did you see this.

This is crazy. What's going on? They are crazy when you know it, instead of thinking about anything else at that moment. I'm trying to get out of it, but I think you're not going to do it alone, but I think you're going to play an important role in saving us from this because people, I think, because people just need to see themselves through a different lens and I realize I realize this is distracting me from who I'm supposed to be, well, a lot of what modern life should entail is the ability to ignore certain things, for example, since I don't know if you know that app next door, oh. true, I used to have it, but then I would see all the packages stolen from my neighbors' porches in Oakland and then I started to enjoy living in Oakland less and I love the city of Oakland, it has its problems, it definitely has its problems, but When it was a kid from the East Bay, you know, I went to school and you know I have a deep love for the East Bay and it's always had those problems, but when you see things stolen from your phone in the middle of the night when you wake up, believe the feeling that they want to get my stuff, it's terrible right, so I have it in my spam filter, but I look at it and every headline is people stealing, someone broke into someone's house, this P dog bite.

Me, this fast dog walking around, there is a homeless person who screams and attacks people over and over again. I feel like I'm living in this neighborhood, it's like Beirut or something in the 1980s. I can't even get out my door. I just don't look at the next door anymore, I just ignore it, I never open it because I know that they are algorithmically designed to put that in front of you every time so that you click on it because it's us. respond to that kind of thing naturally, we can't help it, so you have to be able to shut your mouth and look at what you can really control in your life, so I have this visceral aversion to what's happening in Ukraine because I was in Ukraine recently and I feel like I have identified very strongly with their struggle and I can't feel that indignation, every time I read an article about it it drives me crazy, so all I do is stop reading like As much as I can I read things that They're kind of rational and intelligent and I send the money and you know, I donate everything I can and I help them pretty much, but I don't allow myself to have that kind of indignant feeling. of time, so someone has to write a book, someone has to instruct us and what to ignore and what to really pay attention to, so there are things that you can control, injustices that exist, that you can control by voting for certain, building a movement, you know, deal with climate change, not by trying to recycle every little thing in your house, but by doing something much more macro in the world, you know, joining a cause, there are things you can do and that is positive and it is a way to channel . that kind of dark energy in you for a positive purpose, but it's totally disruptive and totally distracting, debilitating and energy draining to fall down those rabbit holes and let them and let yourself fall into them, so you have to learn the art . what to ignore and what not to pay attention to and understand that you are programmed to see those kinds of red alert buttons on Facebook or next door wherever they are and it's just negative, it's like a candy rush and we have to avoid it and It is taking us away from our purpose that each of us has.

I mean, I think for me that's the most nefarious aspect, unless your purpose is to organize and be an activist. People ask me. I wrote a lot about that. human nature book about the dark side of human nature true and we all have it we all have a dark side we all have hidden aggression we all have feelings of envy we all have feelings of grandiosity we all have aggressive impulses how to deal with it? And I say the way to approach it is to channel it into something positive and prosocial and that could be putting it in your artwork to vent that anger and that indignation and something that people can relate to or it could be an organization of something that could be your purpose in life and do something positive, so that's the only way you could really use that energy for some kind of real life task or purpose that you've been discussing lately on some of your channels about masculine and feminine . um let's say roles um and crisis of male female dance as well as the crisis of masculinity per se the crisis of femininity per se um would you mind expanding on that a little bit?

I think we could probably take three four hours to explore everything. this in its entirety, but some of the things you said stood out to me, because I completely agree that, just as we are not given a road map when we come into the world on how to find our purpose, I think there is also a road map of very conflicting roadmaps presented to us and in fact multiple contradictory roadmaps about what it means to be masculine or feminine or some combination of both which of course are all a combination of both just to varying degrees, well yeah , so men have a feminine side to them, which if you try to suppress it, it will come out in other ways and women have a masculine side.

I think Yung describes this very well with the anima and the Animus, which I think is extremely real, it's very, very confusing. Right now, for both men and women, we don't know the roles, everything is very fluid and it's very, very difficult, especially if you're young, so young women are getting the idea that everything should be the same and that women should have and of course it is correct, they should have received the same salary and they should have the same professional opportunities, there should be no prejudice or harassment or anything, but at the same time on social media it is about looking perfect and appearance is incredibly important. and if you are not sexy you are in terrible trouble and many young girls are extremely confused by this, they are getting mixed signals and guys find themselves in perhaps even worse circumstances where being masculine is seen as a negative thing, so we Ya we have no ideal about what constitutes a good positive form of femininity and a good positive form of masculinity.

In fact, we even think there shouldn't be anything like that. There is no such thing as being masculine or feminine. It's very, very confusing and you know, I think of masculine traits that I think are very positive and that should exist to counteract the Andrew Tate type of seduction that a lot of young men are falling for and it's kind of an inner strength. where you are in control of your emotions, you are not invulnerable, etc., but you can accept criticism, you can take physical education, you know that you can have moments of failure and you will recover, but you have a kind of internal resilience and a kind of inner strength, a kind of quiet calm that I think used to be exemplified in movie icons like a Gary Cooper type thing, and that kind of inner calm feeling where you're not hysterical.

Don't be angry about everything that happens when you have a kind of inner strength and confidence and you can endure that thing that Ryan Holiday talks about a lot with stoicism, you can endure all the difficulties in life, but you have that. Citadel within you is a very powerful form of masculinity, as opposed to sleeping with a lot of women who have very fast cars, you know, being abusive and a bully, etc., etc., these are signs of weakness or insecurity and being masculine should be. a sense of security, inner confidence and inner strength, and that's what we should revere in our culture and we should have icons like that, okay that doesn't mean there isn't a role for men who are not masculine or who have more of feminine virtues, that also definitely plays a role and you know, we see a lot of that in all kinds of walks of life and then there should be a positive role model for women, you know, instead of their appearances being judged by their appearances and having To conform to the ideals of what is fashionable or not, it is about being incredibly powerful and competent and having experience and being really successful in your career and instead of continually being judged by your appearances, which It's very damaging, so these are terrible times, I mean.

I feel lucky to have grown up in a time where there were these types of models for me and I think about my father who was a very quiet man and was just a middle class salesman, that's basically what he was that he just sold for his whole life he sold chemical supplies for a company um but he was very dignified, he treated people well, he was very calm and quiet, but he was also very empathetic, that was my role model for what I think is a good masculine energy and I think a lot of people just don't have it and are very lost, so I don't know what the answer to that is.

I can't really produce that out of thin air, but I wish I could. Certainly today there could be many more, shall we say, examples and options of masculine and feminine qualities that can be observed due to social media and the Internet, and as you pointed out before, a key characteristic to becoming a functional human being, especially today in day. It's learning what to ignore. I mean, there's an interesting idea in nutrition and health circles: never before in human history have humans been able to access such a wide variety of foods that differ from what their ancestors ate and I don't.

I'm not even talking about ancient ancestors, I mean, if you grew up in the Bay Area like I did in the '70s and '80s, there were few ethnic restaurants, but we ate the same, you know, 15 or 20 foods over and over again. again, and finally that exploded. in dozens of options and more and fusion foods and all kinds of things, so there's this idea in the nutrition communities that we're not programmed to think and discern so many different food options that you know are and try so many different flavors , whereas before people a portion of the planet or country generally ate one way in a given season if there is seasonality, etc., in a similar vein, now we are and children are also overwhelmed with a number of different options of how Express oneself. oneself both masculinity and femininity, but in general terms, then the question is then,How do you choose well?

How do you decide what is what is functional what works what is better what am I? Everyone wonders who I'm right. I think I find all teenagers fascinating. Who I am? Adults don't tend to ask that question, but who am I? I still ask myself the question. Okay, that's good, maybe I should ask myself that more often, but I think we've clearly fallen off a cliff with these things. I don't think we're at the point yet where we're headed toward the brink of confusion. I think young people are really confused because the moment you assume a clear and let's say balanced set of feminine masculine attributes or maybe you're a little more masculine or a little more feminine it's like, um, there are a million examples that you They say that's wrong, I know that and then sometimes it has a tendency to anchor to well, no, I'm right because this is who I am and Then all of a sudden you're in a bigger battle, so you know, the big one.

Gary Cooper's love for his movies, but now we have a million variations of Gary Cooper, who look nothing like Gary. Cooper, you and I are talking and a lot of people won't even know who we're talking about, but I know I'm a dinosaur, but maybe it illustrates the point, no, it's not that you're a dinosaur, but, um, there. There is no single or even set of masculine or feminine ideals, so choosing role models is something I really internalized from your book Mastery, yes, you know, there were many years of loneliness for me and I won't go into stories of just wondering, what I am going to do? 13 my house was completely broken, it had nothing to do with the reality it was before you know who the men in my life are that I'm going to mentor and luckily for me, I assigned myself mentors whether they knew it or not.

It helped me and I changed them as you recommend, there wasn't one, um, I understood that there was a process of rupture, an integration process that combined joining and uniting different things. I think I really believe that's what's required, but it's not. it has to be 100% Gary Cooper it can be 10% Robert Green 10% someone else you know 5% this and create a kind of pie chart where you know who you want to be in a given context, but that takes work, it takes a little bit of work and discernment, but God, that's powerful, um, and really the credit goes to you because you know you were a mentor of mine, you didn't even realize the way you forge and organize information and there were others, but the mastery It's where I learned how to do that and this is not a podcast, it's a sales pitch for Mastery, but God, he really taught me.

Well, I have a graduate advisor who was wonderful and brilliant, but she didn't know how to explain a lot of things to me. I would find someone else for that right and someone else for the other and someone else for the other and together I would create a mosaic of really great mentors that made a lot of sense to me, yeah, yeah, so I think there's a role for that process that you explain in Mastery in the broader context of what you might have become as a person and that includes masculine and feminine ideals, yes, and it's an ongoing process throughout your life, so who did you hold on to when you were 14 or 15 years. it changes when you're 19 I had a series of people like you, you're talking about my high school English teacher who had a huge impact on me and who basically taught me how to write.

I internalized his voice when I went to Berkeley. I had a teacher there. who became my kind of surrogate father at Berkeley, who I deeply admired because of his academic level, so he became a kind of intellectual model later in life, when I finally wrote my first book. I met a man Steers who was a book packager who understood business etc, he kind of saved me, he was kind of a mentor for the next phase of my life, so time and time again I found people, but they have positive qualities, qualities that they admire, they are not perfect, everyone has flaws and at some point maybe you see too many flaws you continue I need someone new in my life but there is nothing wrong with that it is not like you are violating any code or hurting them you pass on to someone else except the sense of finding people whose qualities you admire we don't learn from people by simply following their ideas we pick up their energy their Spirit now you didn't necessarily take my energy or my Spirit from the Reading Teacher although maybe you did I don't know , but when you interact with that Stanford professor or whatever, it's not just verbally, there's a kind of non-verbal communication, you're internalizing some of the positive qualities that you saw in them and you find this series of mentors because I call them surrogate parents, You can't choose your father and mother, but you can choose these ideals, you can choose these mentors in your life, you can rewrite your family history and find that father figure that you never had by holding on to this person. but it has to be the right person, it has to be someone you connect with emotionally and intellectually and who has the positive qualities that you want for yourself.

Well, maybe I'll embarrass you by saying that, since I was a freshman in college, which is Really, when I changed my academic life and really my life, I kept the same notebook with a list of names of people I admire. and who I am, you know, trying to emulate in some ways, not in every way, certainly and certain names have been crossed out but most of them have survived and certainly after reading Mastery your name made that list and um and I hope that don't cross me out at some point no, not at all, not at all, not at all, and through reading.

Masters, there were additional names, you know, I had the great, great misfortune of all three of my academic advisors dying from suicide, cancer, cancer, which sounds tragic, the joke in my field is that you don't want me to work for you, that is. that's what everyone says, but being essentially scientifically orphaned because there's a strong Mentor-mentee relationship in science and progression throughout your career, uh, it forced me to go out and find other people and also learn to quote my mother and my father in quotes. the context of the profession and I received a lot of help, but I can't emphasize enough how valuable that practice is, so when you look at the landscape of social media options, I want to say that these are literally just people's options, since you know, Call it following, but you know it should probably be called something else, because following, you know, falls short of emulating or trying to emulate, but I think in the context of masculine and feminine ideals this is very critical, but it's like the buffet The food is so huge now, I mean, you have all the dishes on the table, so we are not prepared for that, no, and I know that personally.

I get very agitated and upset if I go to the market and have to choose. between 30 items and I have no idea what I want, it makes me very moody and upset, whereas if I know, it's okay, I can have this food, I can't have that, I'm just looking for this, it's okay, it's easy , you don't need two. Hours and wasting time too many options is very detrimental to the human being, I think, and that's why going back to what I said originally, when you have that sense of purpose in your life, about what's important, it just infects your career, but it infects everyone. everything you do so you know that eating this food is going to take away the energy that I need to create this thing that means so much to me and energy and feeling my brain active and alive is an incredibly important value, okay, I'm not.

I'm going to eat all that sugar because it's bad for me, right? It means I'm not going to get outraged about these things on the Internet because it's a waste of time. I can not do anything about it. It's just feeding on me you know. Oh my gosh, I forget the part of the brain that's like the amydala or whatever, so no, I don't want to go there and go on and on and on with all this stuff on social media, some of it is good, some of it is interesting. , I can follow them. Andrew Huberman's podcast and I enjoy it and I learn a lot from it, but a lot of these podcasts are useless, they don't help me in any way, so it gives you this kind of filter and this radar to eliminate those hundred. different options that drive us completely crazy and I know maybe I'm partially on the spectrum or something but I can't trans.

I can't stand too many options, it drives me completely crazy, so I always have to channel my energy into something that is productive and having a sense of your purpose every time you discover it in your 20s, hopefully, it gives you the ability to say that These are the positive role models that I want in my life. These are the mentors and following people on social media is so easy, it's just a click and it doesn't mean anything. A mentor relationship takes work. It takes courage because you really have to promote someone and ask them. helps physically and a lot of people write to me saying that I'm afraid to ask this powerful and important person to be their apprentice, so it involves a sense of social courage where you have to literally engage with another human being. who you admire and who you think is powerful, so it's developing your social skills etc, but it's a skill you develop, you can't just follow someone, you can't just watch their lectures, you have to interact with them and overcome some things. of your fears and anxieties in the process, yes, and I could add something else.

I think everything you say is absolutely true and I think engaging with the various tools you recommend is immensely helpful, as I think hearing about a book. It's great to read a book It's even better to think about a book It's even better that you read it It's even better than that And then write down your own ideas and write a good book, that's the big win, right? and that's what I believe in the world. What the universe wants from us is not necessarily to write a book, but you know, translate what I just said into any number of different Endeavors, yes, you want to be able to think for yourself properly so you're not just absorbing ideas from other people and people. friendly To imitate them and just learn the outside of their ideas, you want to digest them and then slowly make them become your own ideas by interacting with them, creating them and putting them through your own lens, so one day it will be a moving book.

In me is the art of thinking and how to use that type of process and delve into it and I talked a lot about it in one of my podcasts, which could be the seed of a book, but it is the difference between dead thought and The ideas of Living thought can be alive or they can be dead and a living idea is something that enters your brain from an external source, a philosopher, an article, someone you admire, someone you hate and then you absorb it, think about it and decide . I'm going to turn it into this and I'm going to bring it to life and turn it into something that is part of me, another part of a living idea, that is, you have an idea that occurs to you about a book or a project or something about the world and you say maybe that's not really true, maybe the opposite is true and you go through a process and you go through it again and again and you reflect on it and you refine this idea and maybe it becomes its opposite. and through the process of reflecting, correcting and revising it, you turn it into something that lives, something alive within you, over and over again, and what prevents people from going through that process that would be the subject of my book is basically anxiety. because I believe that the way you handle anxiety is the most important type of quality in life.

It will determine if you will be successful, if you will find your career path or if you will not be able to. I don't know if you can follow that idea in Everything but anxiety is a sign to you that you don't understand something, that there is a problem that you can't solve and therefore what happens to most people if you are insecure is that you cling to something instantaneous. and it is easy to get rid of your feeling of anxiety. I don't understand this problem. Oh, it must be essential, it must be the answer because this person said it right and that's why you don't develop the ability to think no.

It develops the ability to go to the next level, but if you take that anxiety and everything goes well, maybe a is an answer and then you start going through a and then you say no, maybe a is not the answer, maybe B is the answer. . You are able to overcome your anxiety and overcome it more and more, and more and more, you do not rush to look for the first available answer that is there, you are able to go through a process of refining things, and so on in your career yes Yes you're anxious about success, if you're anxious about money, you're going to make bad decisions, but if you're able to deal with that anxiety and say maybe "I need to think more deeply about where I'm going." If you have to come up with other alternatives, then you will make a much better decision over and over again, so if you are a creative person, it is very, very difficult to have that blank sheet of paper in front of you. that book that you haven't written that movie or whatever fills you with a lot of anxiety and you have to deal with it and if you are able to become creative and productive then great things will happen that you will create a masterpiece, so the ability to Dealing with anxiety and not giving in to the most instant gratification you can get is to me an indicator of someone who will be creative and invent something, as opposed to people who just recycle old, dead ideas.

Amen. that they once told methat you know that anxiety turns us all into children and not in the positive sense of being children, you know, it makes us regress to a mode in which we feel a complete lack of control and I completely agree that being able to manage anxiety and work dance with it, yes, since we cannot get rid of it, perhaps nor should we, because it is a sign, as you point out, that we do not understand something, that there is something to be curious about, a process or something out there or both, I think that really resonates, yeah, and I think a lot of people will benefit from hearing that because I think we hear the word flow and we all imagine.

I even catch myself imagining that you know when Robert Green sits down. From the bottom right it's like there's a blank page and then you just meditate and then you come out with these books, um, but you know, if I get real for a second, I'm sure there's a lot of internal turmoil and anxiety, God. mine. You have no idea, so my process is 95% pain and maybe 2 and a half% ecstasy and I don't know what the other two and a half% would be, but then I write a story because it's all in my new book. and most of my books I always start with the story of the story, etc., and it's so bad I can't believe how bad it is, how flat it is, how it is. it sucks, I'm so embarrassed, I hate myself, then I go and dig deeper and start changing the words.

I'm starting to improve the second version a little. It's kind of acceptable, but it still sucks, if I let it out. world, it would be very embarrassing, work, it's anxious, you know, and my wife can tell you that I'm a miserable being, when that happens, everything looks black to me at that moment and I got over it, so if I gave in to my anxiety and This happens with many books and writers. I would just publish that second version that is not very good, it is not very strong, it is not well thought out because my ideas when I look at them the first time I go that is not real that is not what is really happening here Robert, you are wrong, You want to get to what's really real in that story, so you have to go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, so don't just give Get up and move on, here's the chapter.

I'm going, it's got to be better, it's got to be better until finally, after two months of struggling, it seems like it's gotten to the place I want it to be, but I use that anxiety to keep getting better. and improve it and then when I get to that point and the story is good enough and I can let my wife read it and then my editor, I feel great, I have that 2% moment of joy, but it came through all that anxiety, but I can tell you that the feeling of satisfaction when I finish a chapter is tremendously great when I finish a book.

It's better than any kind of drug experience anyone could have. It is such a wonderful feeling of achievement and overcoming all barriers. my process involves a lot of anxiety and dealing with it, that's why I talk about it, that's why I want to write a book about it, thanks for sharing that, I'm trying to write a book and I've been doing it for several years and now I feel a little better , but clearly I need to try harder, but in other areas of life, I'm familiar with experiencing tons of anxiety and that's okay. I'm going to reach this milestone and then I'll figure it out. the next milestone, but even that process of saying "okay, I'm going to break this down into milestones" in itself is anxiety-inducing, it's just that, but at some point it creates enough inertia that you just stumble through the process and then it continues, like this who tries not to bleed, that's too much, yes, I think a lot of people will benefit from hearing this, in fact, I'm sure they will.

So speaking of anxiety, you have a clip on the Internet that we'll link to in the subtitles of the show notes, which I think is absolutely fabulous about how to find a romantic partner or how to get more out of an existing romantic partner. I don't even remember what I said, you'll have to remind me, oh, it's so Well, one point in particular, yes, I remember that, what I think is very true is that there must be at least one and probably several points of real convergence on terms of one's interests or tastes that go beyond food.

Someone likes or you know what kind of house they want to live in, but that actually goes back to these early forms of delight and you mentioned that for you and therefore presumably for your partner, you know that there is a mutual love and respect for the animals. be one of those things within the context of your relationship, right, not that a love of animals is necessary for me, I'm sure that's right, exactly. I could never date a woman who didn't love animals, right, my sister used to. They make fun of me by saying that if a woman gave me a birthday card or a card that had a drawing of a particular animal that I am especially fond of, my sister would use it.

I have an older sister and she used to say oh no, she's done, he's gone. I know you would know um fortunately it's not that simple um but there's some truth to what she was saying um it's certainly uh necessary but not sufficient but maybe you could elaborate a little bit on this notion of um convergent interest and contrast This by far from what people tend to hear and say about what's important in the partnership because I think this is something that a lot of people struggle with both in terms of finding a partner and in terms of building a partnership, well, you have to know. .

There are different relationships you can have, I mean, do you want a week-long relationship or a month-long relationship or are you looking for something longer and more fulfilling that involves, you know, maybe years of being together and, you know, people can become very bored? very quickly, especially if you can't converse with them about topics that interest you and then you mention animals, animals are a very good example because it's not. I'm not saying they both have to be Democrats or Republicans, that's too banal. and superficial, but the love of animals reaches your character, it reaches something very deep within you or your dislike of animals, if that is the case, but it points to something about it that is so primal that it is so connected to a kid there's going to be a there's a deep connection and it's not like you both have to love cats, which is good if that's the case, but just animals in general, you love their energy, you love the fact that they are innocent in their own way.

I love the fact that they're not playing with you. You love the kind of instant love you can get from them and you connect with them on that level. It is a very positive sign because it goes beyond intellectual things. something emotional and visceral, so really the emotional connections, the values ​​that you have together are very important, money is another one that is extremely important, so if one of you is incredibly material oriented and it's all about money, it's power, success and comfort, and the other is not really interested in that, it is about spending money etc., many people have endless fights or something like money just where there is no convergence and money indicates a deeper value about the person, so I'm not saying there's anything wrong if money motivates you.

I'm not moralizing about it because that can indicate a value that maybe you grew up without it and that being comfortable and feeling like you don't have to worry about something is very, very important to you and not being interested in money reveals that. something about your character, so I tell people you want to look at the character of the person and see a kind of convergence there and something that can last and I remember I was reading this for one of my books on Franklin Delanor Roosevelt and Elanor Roosevelt and The thing was, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt was his incredibly handsome and vibrant young man before he contracted polio.

Very active. Very athletic. Very handsome. All the women were chasing him. He was like the perfect match. He was rich and Elanor Roosevelt was like the ugly duckling. She. She wasn't very pretty, she was a little socially awkward, but he saw her character, he saw that intellectually she was compatible with him, he saw that they had similar interests on that level that I'm talking about, which goes beyond what emerges and he chose Elanor. and everyone was surprised about it, you know, no one was trying to woo Elanor. WR her last name at the time, I think it might have even been Roosevelt, um, so she was very shocking, you said I looked.

Someone I could last with, who had some qualities that were much more important to me and it ended up being a very satisfying relationship, of course, she later had the Dianes of him, so it wasn't perfect, but it was very positive. relationship, so by looking at your values ​​in life you know when it comes to liking money when it comes to your career when it comes to comfort or lack of comfort some people like not to be comfortable they like to be on the edge they want challenges want to move from city to city and if you partner with someone who just wants to live in the same house you will have conflict after conflict after conflict, the sex could be great and that could be good for a month or two.

I have nothing against that, I'm not going to judge that either, but it won't lead to a long-lasting relationship. You know, sports and athletics are something else. Is it someone who likes the outdoors or is it someone you know like Zaha Gabor? being in Time Square in a penthouse in Manhattan, you know, that kind of thing, values ​​that get to the core of each character and that are so deeply ingrained that you almost can't change, you can't control and there's a convergence there on several levels, it's a sign that you can have a deep connection with that person and it is very important and if those connections are good and there is a physical attraction because if without the physical attraction it will fade, you have a recipe for incredible success for something that can really last and having a long-term relationship like I've had is a great anchor in your life, you know, for me, for someone who works as hard as I do and hopefully for her as well, it just grounds me and makes life so much simpler and easier and it's not just simple and easy, there's a lot of love and a lot of deeper emotions involved, but having a long term relationship, if you can have it, is something that pays a lot of dividends, so being able to finding that kind of convergence, you know, when I met my now wife. um, I had a cat at the time.

She had always been a dog lover, but this was a cat she had and I love that cat like hell I can. I can't believe he was such a wonderful cat. I brought her to my apartment on the first date. He wanted to see her reaction to the cat. You know, because in general, and I don't know people, I misjudge women who don't like cats. No, I can't get along because there is something feline in the feminine nature that I love and she loved my cat, that was the best sign of all and things just Bloss and she loved me for loving a cat, so there was there was a big convergence right there that we saw right away and there were other things, but that was the first one.

I love that story and everything you just said suggests that I think that in order to find the right partner and build an existing partnership that hopefully feels at least partially true, it requires at least some self-knowledge. Because unless you know your character, your own character, then it's impossible to really determine whether someone else's character is going to be a good fit for them or not. Self-awareness is actually the most important quality in life in all aspects, but yes, I mean, if we go by social pressures, a man will choose a trophy wife who looks sexy and attractive and will impress all his male friends. , etc., etc., you will be guided by the things that the culture tells you that these are the right images for you and then there will be no connection with you because you are choosing purposes that do not connect with who you are and that is why you have to know yourself yourself, you have to know what you love, you have to know what you hate.

I think most people know that they love animals or not. I think most people know that they like stability or they like things to be a little chaotic. I don't think you have to go too deep. levels of introspection, but what you have to do is when you're involved in a relationship you have to think that those things matter, that's the problem, you tend to think that those things can think that sex matters more than anything that matters. physical attraction or you think that the person who has a lot of money matters, etc., etc., you don't think this other aspect is important.

If you value what I'm talking about, then your self-awareness will be activated because you basically know these essential basic parts about your own character. I think people sometimes get distracted by admiring qualities that they might find admirable but that don't fit their own character. I've seen this many times before where, well, someone will say well, someone will start listing. outside of the positive attributes of the person they're dating, like he does this blank, blank, blank, she does this, you know, he volunteers, etc., and that's all cool, I mean to volunteer for good causes. I'm all for that, but then what?

What they often overlook seems to be whether or not that is a core value for them or whether it is simply something they admire. I hear a lot of admiration in the early days of relationships and then I hear about failure and what you're doing. Speaking is something deeper, more aligned with one's own meaning.of oneself and it almost leads me to use the word, you know, more about energetic, it's like merging people's energies, which sounds very new. Agy and that's not my intention, but. I think it relates to something that we hear a lot about and I think it's valid, which is how it feels to be around someone in a different context, like if we feel at ease, if we feel lightness, the ability to express ourselves and to say and do. we enjoy and admire them in their expression rather than simply admiring what they do.

They have achieved it. than a combination of energies, there are also a couple of other things that you need to understand as well about their character and people can be very deceptive and very slippery and they can wear masks. A telltale sign that I have noticed in my own relationships in the past is that the woman was a certain way with me that I thought was very good and I liked her and then when we were with other people, she acted in a way that He was very irritating, he's like a different character and I really fell out of love with him. with her when I saw her in social interactions she revealed it to me, she was almost wearing a mask and playing a game, but the moment she entered a different circumstance I saw another aspect of her character, so you must also be very attentive to her character , what's below, which have some of these values. that they are not just trying to win you over for whatever and they are playing with you, the other thing that is very important is a sense of mystery, so a couple can get boring very, very quickly, just after a year, you know all. about them right, they're going to say the same things the conversations go around in circles it's just that you've come to an end there are no surprises there's no mystery you want someone who has corners that you don't really see at first that they Sometimes it surprises you that suddenly there is a quality that you had not suspected before, so people who are too obvious, too familiar, who show everything instantly, are going to end up boring you, right, but people who have a little Reserve?

I know this is maybe I'm projecting my own values ​​onto the world, but people who intrigue you and who you don't quite understand make you want to know more and if they can be like this after two years or three years or five years, wow, that's great, but the feeling that I know everything about this person and they never surprise me again is what breaks the charm and leads to the end of the relationship, well, the idea of ​​learning more about someone, um, maybe. It also suggests that they continue to evolve into fodder in the landscape of life.

You know they're not fully baked, yeah right, which I think is an interesting idea during the four episode series we did on Mental Health. Paul kti a The psychiatrist said that a combination of generative impulses that he defined as the desire to create something in the world of self-expression is really fundamental in a relationship and he said that you know it matters less whether a person likes it or not. classical music and the other. Rock and roll, as long as your relationship to music is similar or something like that, is about an impulse of a certain kind to engage in the world, so that one person can love the music and the other person can't like the music, but the way it approaches.

Life is perhaps one of mutual curiosity, desire to discover, etc., and that this exists in a Continuum. I'm curious if it seems to agree with who you are, with what you say, but the only thing I would add. It's just that if you love classical music and they love heavy metal music, you're going to go crazy pretty quickly, you know it's not going to fit you and I know I'd have that problem, you're both going to be in headphones. Very true, the fact that they both did it because music is like animals in a way, so I completely agree with what you are saying, but I would say that maybe music is not the best example because music says something very deep about a person, right? there and you know I'm not saying that one is superior to the other, but it reveals something that is non-verbal and that gives you a window into who they are, so if they like punk rock like you do and I grew up with punk rock, there is something rebellious, this has an anti-authoritarian quality that is very strong, you can see that through them, if they like modart and soft string quartets, there is someone who values ​​softness, tranquility and peace, and you don't you are like that the music shows you something, a quality of their character that can be very revealing and very eloquent, so it doesn't mean that you both have to love The Clash or the Dead Kennedys or whatever my own Generation shows Um, but that They both have that rebellious streak and that rebellious streak could be that there are classical music composers who could be quite rebellious and angry, you know?

And I actually like them, so I think that convergence is a positive thing, but overall I agree with that, I'm curious about the non-verbal communication component of all types of relationships, but let's stay in the landscape of romantic relationships for the moment. Yes, maybe we also include professional relationships because what you just described is really about a resonance around the non-verbal. -verbal things, I mean, you can articulate them with words, yeah, um, I love animals, I love this music, this is the best song, did you see that otters are amazing, right, this kind of thing, but language Is it just an attempt to put, you know, words? in a feeling in those cases so it can be classified as non-verbal um with regards to non-verbal communication, you've written quite a bit about the fact that people often communicate with their body and facial expressions um uh, I'm certainly familiar with the somewhat, if not very creepy, feeling of someone smiling like a toothy smile and then when they walk away, that smile dissolves very quickly and, you know, you don't have to be a neuroscientist or a psychologist to realize that.

There was something quite false about that experience or this person experiencing emotions like step functions on, off, off, which is not how most of us EXP experience emotions, most of us experience emotions with a certain omnipresence, like they're happy walking in the door because of something. It happened before and that's why I'm going to smile as I walk out the door, if I see something shocking and discouraging, of course, I'm going to frown, I'm going to wipe that smile away, but those are rare cases, so, um, let's talk about the mouth the eyes the face the body in the context of communication what are some important things to pay attention to I want to come back to when it comes to convergence is the sense of humor is extremely important, so it's not like the two of you Like the comedians themselves, but if one person likes ranchero humor and the other doesn't, that's a problem and also the fact that the person doesn't have a sense of humor or doesn't make you laugh is a very, very bad sign.

So I wanted to add that component there. I'm very glad you did it. Someone who can make me laugh, you know, it's necessary but not enough, but boy, it's close to being enough. Yes, I would say yes. I would say yes. You know when it comes to the Art of Seduction The Art of Seduction is a non-verbal language that you must Master is a language of the gifts you give is a language of how you smell is a language that we communicate through the eyes, etc., etc., and what you have to understand about the human being is that we evolved for a much longer period of time without words than the small 40 35,000 years that we have symbolic language, during that vast period of darkness in the one we did.

We didn't have words, we didn't communicate non-verbally, we were picking up on people's signals and we were observing every little detail of their behavior because we didn't have words to decipher it, so it's wired into our brain to have an amazing sensitivity to people. that they are not. -Verbal communications we can almost be telepathic that way if we learn that language, the problem is that we have the ability but we don't develop it at all because we are so word oriented that you are only listening to people even if you are listening. For them you're just listening to the words and you're thinking that the words mean something, the words are sincere, which they often aren't, and at the same time you're hearing the words so much that people are shuffling in their chairs, they're kind of looking at someone else. side they are looking at other women or other men their voice shakes a little when they say something where it shouldn't shake their eyes are dead the smile is a little fake you are not looking at anything, so the most important thing in law number one of the nonverbal communication is paying attention to it.

Continually develop the practice of cutting out words and observing people almost as if you would pick up the television, mute it, and simply observe their behavior. It's not easy and it's not natural because what we want are the words, the words were words, we want to focus on them, but your ability to turn off the TV to mute it will suddenly reveal so many things about people that it reveals so many things Sigman. Freud said that people continually reveal all their secrets through their non-verbal behavior. You can read them like an open book if you master this language.

And I have in the laws of human nature. I describe the story of Milton Ericson. No. I know if you're familiar with Milton Ericsen, perhaps the greatest modern teacher of nonverbal communication, he was an incredible psychologist, in a way, he's the inspiration behind um, what's it called, help me here, neurolinguistic, oh, NLP. , it's kind of a bastardization of his ideas, but he created hypnotherapy, he's the person who created hypnotherapy, certainly, hypnotherapy is a valid psychiatric practice, I mean, it's excellent clinical data that supports the fact that Milton Ericson He had polio when he was 19 and was paralyzed.

His whole body was paralyzed, he couldn't even move his eyes properly and he sat up in bed and had a very active mind and he was just going to die from sheer boredom and what he did for the two years that he was paralyzed like that was just observing the communication. people's nonverbal and taking notes in his brain and learning each one, he learned the 20 different ways of yes, the 100 different ways of no, every intonation, how someone walked into the room, how they left the room, you know how They looked. with pity or empathy or something, he mastered it and then when he became a psychiatrist and treated people who thought he was psychic, he could see everything in them, it's because for two years all he could do was observe them, not could speak. he couldn't do anything, he couldn't read a book, so you have the same power, but obviously you don't have po, but you have to pay attention to it first.

It's an amazing thing once you do it, it's actually a lot of fun. and I tell people one day go to a cafe in your city wherever you live and just watch people because you can't hear them, they're a few tables away, watch their nonverbal behavior as they interact and see if they respond. signs from them and there are things that are signs of genuine emotions, so, for example, an exercise you can do is approach someone from an angle where they can't see you approaching and surprise them and say, hey, hey, Mike. Whatever they turn to in that second, their expression reveals how they really think about you.

You'll detect it if you can pick up microexpressions and you can, they only last like 150th of a second, but they're there, you can express a kind. and they smile you can see the little disdain in their eyes at that moment they put on the mask or you are talking to them they are looking at you but their feet are facing the opposite direction that means they are dying to get away from you these are signs that you don't necessarily pay attention to their posture it will tell you everything about their confidence levels over and over again the fake smile if you can master the ability to detect the fake smile smile, you will do great because you will be able to see that what you really want to do is see the person with a genuine smile, especially in romantic relationships, someone whose face lights up, a real smile lights up your entire face, is not like that. turn on your mouth that these parts of your face go up your eyes come to life there's like something neurological happening in your brain that is changing your entire facial expression and it means that someone genuinely likes you someone is genuinely interested in you I'm really laughing or connecting with you, man, if you can see that it will help you a lot in the romantic sphere and that will help you get away from those toxic people who continually feign interest in you because a narcissist is a toxic person.

It thrives on deceiving you with a charming and seductive front that makes you come into its world, then they can hurt you, then they can do something to you and then they have you in their you know, in their trap, so be able to see. that they are not genuinely interested in you that they are faking it will help you avoid very toxic relationships and like I told you I don't know if we were on the air or not, but deep narcissists are dead-eyed, they almost can. I can't help it, they can fake the smile, they can fake everything else, except the eyes.

You have to be able to read it because you're like, well, what are dead eyes? You'll know it when you see them. There is no life in them. like they're looking through you, they're not looking at you, they're looking atThrough you, what can I get from you? You are what they call a self-object, they are an object for you to use and that is how they are looking at you. like they're looking at a hammer or something, yeah, the concept of dead eyes and also living eyes is so fascinating because as an audience of this podcast, you'll know because I've said it too much, but I'll say it again, that the eyes are the only two parts of your brain that are outside the cranial vault.

I mean, they're literally two parts of your brain that line the back of your eyes and the dynamics of the pupils. Those changes, of course, reflect how bright or dark the room is. but they also reflect levels of arousal that are on the time scale of milliseconds, so when one expresses, you know, um words from Glee, right, the pupils constrict a little bit, believe it or not, or excuse me, they dilate. a bit. I've had it backwards for a while. moment um and vice versa, you know, when one feels less excited, um, kind of moments of despair, expressions of despair, that people should become a little bit smaller because the excitement is decreasing, so I think you know that we We realize these things at a time.

On an unconscious level we do, um, the death of the eyes is a kind of um, the conclusion that that appears to us if we pay attention, but the problem is that love registers unconsciously but We don't give it any value. We trust our words, we trust our rationality, as opposed to our intuitions about people, so sometimes when you meet a person for the first time, signs appear in your mind, something is wrong with them and then you forget about it because you do not trust. those initial unconscious signals that your brain is giving you, so first you must trust that these intuitions are very valuable, the other thing is to pay deep attention to the tone of voice.

The Voice as the actors will tell you is like the hardest thing to fake, right, it's very hard to fake emotion, your voice has it or you don't, it's very hard to fake confidence and you can, I mean, books have been written about it, I'm not going to go into all the details. the details about it, but the person will reveal a lot of their emotions that they're experiencing particularly confident levels, you know, like a shaky voice or something, or a confident booming voice that some people can fake, but it's often very difficult. We can still see through it and at the Seduction level women and men are very in tune with a woman's voice but we are not aware of it because our mother's voice had an incredible impact on us in early childhood, his song.

Her, the tone of her voice, was probably the first seduction we went through and a woman's voice has tremendous power over us, so hearing a voice that ties you down or irritates you is something that is a bad sign. and so. It goes deeper than all the characteristics we were talking about, but the voice of a woman that reminds you of that mother who sings a song, whatever the feeling, is someone who can seduce you very easily, yes, there is an um, There is a place to name. This is like subcortical courtship, you know, you know, below the cortex, as geeky neuroscientists like me say, you know you're reaching below the cortex with all these things that you know, the convergence of real loves and desires, I mean, we express. with words we feel the world using, of course, our cortex, but we're actually talking about entering the subcortical material which is the material of our history, the material of our um wiring and our uniqueness, our uniqueness.

I couldn't help but think about it. the fact that before we were talking about the infinitely wide number of options of things to engage with, etc., but at the same time you were now talking about these microinflections and the subtleties of voice and body communication. that whether it's emojis or people sending leaked images or the default text message communication that's so prominent now, it seems like we have more options now, so, more input, but the kind of qualitative differences between the options have been lumped together. in a pair. of simple containers like it's like we've gone back to just the primary colors, but the canvas is huge or I don't know if that analogy works, but you get the idea because ultimately to develop good choices about the profession. romantic relationships friendships you need a lot of examples and a lot of information to allow you to grasp the subtlety, um, but as long as they are emojis and filtered images taken at a particular angle that you know, usually from above ask for the front image and send below. me a picture of your worst your worst expression um all that um it seems like there are greater opportunities for deception now and I don't just mean people deceiving others, I also mean deceiving ourselves like, oh God.

My, how could I still be so disappointed? Again, about a particular landscape of life, it doesn't have to just be romantic interactions, it could be other landscapes, like how could they cheat on me? Well, you are deceived because the inputs were poor, it is not good data, as we say, well, the thing is. If things are like this, you are immersed in the virtual realm, it is very, very difficult to master the non-verbal communication aspect, which is so important, so if you are dating on an app, you are browsing and then you find the person you are looking for.

I've missed out on the biggest experience in life, which is actually having to go out to a bar or a restaurant or a social event and literally having to meet another person and deal with observing their behavior and their type of things. Evaluating who they are is a muscle that you have to pay attention to in non-verbal communication and if you only know how to use Emojis or Tinder apps, that muscle completely atrophies, you have no power, you are not capable of doing it. decrypt anything and that is what is happening with many people who use these applications.

Social skills are like any skill, you have to develop them, it is a muscle that you have to develop and you have all probably noticed it in your own life. If you've been through a period where you're withdrawing, you don't want to be around people and you spend a month like that and then you go out, you feel uncomfortable, it takes a couple of days to get used to it. Being around other people, you say stupid things, your body language is awkward, but if you're in a situation for months where you're constantly interacting with people, you're on a film set, and day after day that skill starts to develop, but you have to be out there in the world you have to interact you have to look at people's emotions you have to measure them in real time we are not made for virtual encounters we are human creatures of flesh and blood and we need to look each other in the eyes and pay attention to all of these little details, these new nuances that you can only get in person in that sense, what are your thoughts on Ai and how that's going to shape our sense of identity? others and relationships as if that were a topic that could be covered in a series of minutes, but what are your best outlines?

Maybe even deeper thoughts about AI, well, I'm going to piss off a lot of people. off, but I'm a little worried about that, um, I mentioned before about anxiety, the role that anxiety plays in thinking, you come up with an idea and you're like, yeah, everything's fine, and then you go to the next level and everything gets better. and you say, oh, maybe that's not so good, and then you go to the next level, you go to level three and it gets better and better. You have anxiety, another aspect of intelligence is self-awareness, right? Beingness is looking at yourself.

I have prejudices. I have confirmation bias I have conviction bias I have recency bias I have to counteract these things I also have a dark side I have aggression I have to be aware of how my emotions color my thinking the third quality that comes into int I'm talking about intelligence now, not artificial intelligence is the ability to deal with anxiety and move to a third level. Intelligence is the ability to look inside yourself and see your own biases and the third thing is the ability to see a holistic picture, the kind of aha moment that scientists have where you accumulate all kinds of data points and then, from nothingness, an image of yes comes to mind, there is the answer.

You see everything, you see the whole Gestalt. Simone Vile compared it to a square cube that you can only. you see a cube from one side or you will never be able to see a square cube you can only see one side if it is rotating you are still only seeing the sides only in your mind you can imagine everything so the mind has to go through a process to have holistic thinking If you can invent a machine that can deal with anxiety and have anxiety and can go to level three if you can make a machine that can be self-aware that can go the people who program me are prejudiced therefore I am prejudiced.

I also have a dark side because people have programs. You have a dark side. If this machine can also think holistically beyond all the data points and all the massive information it combines, it can have that "aha" moment. a human conscience. I can see creativity there. The other thing I would say is that when I was a student at Berkeley, a long time ago, I was 19 years old. I decided that One Summer, this is a big paradigm shift for me. I'm going to take this class. in ancient Greek in six weeks they teach you a year of ancient Greek, that means that every day you have an exam every Friday you have a final exam eight hours every day of a dead language I thought this would be the best discipline for me after someone who To be honest, I haven't been doing too many drugs, okay?

Finally, at one point, we are given this paragraph from the most difficult to read ancient Greek writer. This was near the end, thiddies or thiddies, as they say. If I had had all night to try to translate a paragraph, I wouldn't be able to understand it. You have to understand the weirdness of Ancient Creek, all the endings, the strange ways of thinking, the whole picture, that moment, aha, I was fooling myself at one point. I thought I had it, I translated it and gave it to the teacher the next day. I remember he was kind of a hippie that you would have as a Berkeley classical professor Dennis, but also a hippie, the fact that you knew his name is very revealing.

I can only remember his name Dennis he he said Robert I can see your thinking but you need to go to another level you missed you didn't have that aha moment you didn't put it all together you were close but didn't you have to try harder and that stuck in my mind forever ? Every time I have a problem I have to think more. I have to go to the next level. What if I had pulled out my translation of Through City and just? Did I copy it right or what would have happened if I put it through GPT chat and gave me the translation.

That muscle in my brain that I've developed over 40 years that allows me to write books would never have been developed and that muscle is what I don't do. I don't know the answer here. I have to go to another level. I have to try harder. I have to think. I have to think. I have to have that engine running properly, but if I just grab the GPT chat, it buffers and then we're on. There will be a whole generation of people who will stop thinking and not go through that process. You know, you've heard of Douglas Heder.

I think he said that people train to go to Mount Everest, it takes months of physical effort, it's painful, and then they climb Mt. Everest, they see the top, wow, what a great moment, said Chad GPT, it would be the equivalent of taking a helicopter to the top of Mount Everest without any of that training and having the same moment, it's not the same. You have to go through that process. I need to go through that pain and if only and the thing is Chad gbt we think we are so modern So sophisticated but in reality we are seduced by magic, you put it there and you see the writing going whoa It's like magic it's like a magician but it's empty it's like your brain doesn't work right it's paid it's the pagan part of us we like that kind of magic instead of having to go through the thought process itself so I'm not in FA against having tools I use tools.

I use the Internet. I use Google. I'm looking for some information about my book. I find it. I use it. I like it, but I have also learned to develop my brain to think and make that motor move constantly. I am deeply concerned about people who cannot learn a foreign language, who cannot master anything, who simply immediately grasp the first response it generates, etc. It worries me too and a moment ago I was thinking that you know something like that. people may listen to what you just said and say, "well, the same thing was probably said about the car," like "how many amazing experiences of walking from place to place will be lost when people start driving from place to place." ", but I think the key difference, and this certainly lines up with everything you just said, is that what you're talking about is not simply arriving at the same destination, you're saying that the destination itself is different when one does a bit of effort and you experience some anxiety to get there, so it's not the same as car versus horse versus walking versus plane yes, it's fundamentally different because the journey transforms the outcome yes yes I agree with you on many aspects of theAI.

It also excites me in the context of certain things. I agree with you if it could be a tool, but are we operating the tool or is the tool operating us? That's what I'm talking about. I'm also a little worried, especially in the context of what we've been talking about for most of today. discussion about avatars replacing our online personas too much, you know, the Avatar of ourselves is already being carried out through filters, through the reduction of emotional expression to emojis, through the reduction of language to a smaller number of words to explain feelings, you know.

The previous guest on this podcast, Lisa Feldman Barrett, an emotion expert, talked about how when a culture has a word for a particular subset of anxious feelings, for example, she taught me that in Japanese there is a word for the sadness that one experiences. when they get a bad haircut, yes, I know, you know, and that normalizes the feeling and leads to feelings of less despair compared to what many children now, especially when they grow up, learn, which worries me, saddens me, depresses me. I know in science we say there are groupers and dividers and they've been arguing for years about whether that's a brain structure, well if I name those two things next to each other, two different things, I can't just name one of them after myself. , which is what usually happens so to speak but when you have too many groupers or too many dividers, things are either too simple or too complex and of course the correct answer is that the best use for naming things comes somewhere in the middle to Right, that's how a field progresses because if you group things together too much a field can't progress, you give yourself the illusion that it's progressing but it's not progressing, but if you divide things into a million different subcategories, like just the The word adrenaline is also called epinephrine and that basically has to do with people arguing about who went crazy with credit and confused people for decades, yeah, and there's another story there, and I know too much about the scientists involved and there was a triangle loving about the name of certain parts of the nervous system, oh yeah, people.

Sleeping with other people's partners and love triangles have created more gnome class drama in science. I could spend an entire hour on this, in any case, what I hear from you is that we cannot afford to lose our sense of nuance and because that sense of nuance taps into what we are actually experiencing and AI threatens to turn us in avatars of ourselves. Look at it this way, we worship technology, it's our new religion, okay, and we worship the GPT guy like he's a God. I'm serious, there are religious elements here, what we should really worship is the human brain, which is the greatest creation in the known universe.

I'm afraid it's the most complex piece of matter in the entire universe, the number of neurons, the amount. of synapses the number of possible connections between neurons is infinite practically infinite it is a wonderful instrument it is so powerful that we have barely scratched the surface of what we can use for it let's worship that brain that is in your head only you have so many years to use it you have so many years to develop it is so wonderful and powerful it can give you so much pleasure so much power in life so the tools are fine we all need tools we all need we need hammers we need nails I need saws etc., but the real thing is the hand that uses it, the brain who connects his hand with hammers, who knows how to hit things, you know.

I think of the um, the great painter Renoir in the 19th century, he had like a stroke or something, so in the last few years he couldn't move his right arm that she painted with and it was disastrous, so what he did was put on the brush in his mouth and paint and he painted some beautiful paintings that way because his brain He had mastered the art of painting, not with his hand but with his brain, he had mastered it so well that he could paint well with the brush in his mouth because I could direct it and I could.

He had the knowledge of how to make something perfect. The brain is absolutely incredible the plasticity of the brain that I am discovering after my stroke is absolutely a miracle you know what I don't know is Professor Schwarz at UCLA who was studying OCD and how he was able to cure people with OCD to Through certain plasticity exercises he did he made them aware of their type of brain block, etc., and got them out of there. That brain plasticity is by far the greatest miracle of all and continues into our 60s and 70s and beyond. get down on our knees and worship the brain and if we did that we would create a complete shift in our values ​​and we wouldn't be so instantly seduced and in love and worshiping the technology, we would worship the brains that create the technology instead of you know, the other way around, certainly We have a fan of brains and their potential for plasticity sitting here.

I have the benefit of my scientist great-grandparents, who won the Nobel Prize for neuroplasticity during the critical period, saying that. Again, my scientific great-grandfathers are David Hubel and Toron Visel. David is dead. Ton is still alive. He's 96 years old and they won the Nobel Prize essentially for discovering the critical window in the early stages of development, where plasticity is especially robust. They also did other things. They should have won two. The Nobels, frankly, for their other work on Vision, but one thing they missed, however, was something you mentioned that is worth highlighting again, which is that the brain maintains the capacity for immense plasticity throughout life. .

That's absolutely clear, conditions change early or later in life, but your specific situation really stands out and is something I'd really like to talk about for a few minutes if you're willing, as you mentioned, you experienced a stroke, and such. Maybe some knew it. but maybe not for everyone, especially for people who are just listening to this podcast and not watching on video that shirt, although it is very well designed in its original state, it also includes some unique stitching, so maybe you can share with us , uh, what and For those listening, there is an irregular line of stitching that extends from Robert's left short sleeve to the midline to where the buttons on his shirt are and from his right short sleeve to the midline as well, separated from each other, these, this.

It's the kind of sewing that looks like maybe it had been on the sewing machine and not someone with skills, but they did a good job of basically putting it back together. Why do those stitches on your shirt tell us about the stroke and let's go? Talking about neuroplasticity might also seem like a fashion statement you know, but it's really not, well it was May 2018, it was my birthday and my wife gave me this shirt. I love paintings, it's like not. I know why I love prints and plaids. It must be like a Scottish part of me, something from an ancestor, but I love paintings.

Can I interrupt you just briefly, forgive me? Everyone is going to be angry about that interruption. Do you know that there's a fundamental circuit in your visual cortex designed to detect checkered patterns, no, I didn't know that, yeah, and we can talk about why it's closely related to your ability to perceive motion, actually, yeah, and we can go over that in another moment, but yeah, so we'll talk about just like Quee, okay, yeah, back to your birthday, okay, so she gave me a plaid shirt knowing how much I loved it and I love this shirt, I love the colors, etc. , etc. and then two months, three months later, on August 17, 2018, I was driving my car, she was with me, I was getting into traffic, I started driving and all of a sudden she says, stop, Robert, stop, whoa, Why can I drive?

I'm fine and suddenly everything started to get very strange, everything looked strange, my voice didn't. It doesn't sound the same and she was kind of scared, but she was actually pretty calm, which was amazing. She was having a stroke. She had a blood clot that was blocking blood flow from the bra to my brain. In fact, at one point I got out of the car like I was, I don't know what the hell I was thinking and then she pulled me in, then the rest goes blank and I had some weird feelings that still stay with me because I was essentially about to die. because the blood was not flowing. to your brain is basically the end of you, unless something happens very quickly and she either that or you're going to suffer severe brain damage, so she called 911 immediately and recognized something.

My whole face looked funny and they got there. unconscious and they essentially took this shirt and I just cut it in half and took it off my head and then they intubated me, I think in my hip area to get something out, the blood clot was in my neck and they were able to free it. and they rush me to the hospital and I'm unconscious and then I wake up and I'm on a stretcher in the hospital and I don't do it for a moment. I'm thinking maybe I'm dead because I'm lying. on a stretcher and I almost feel like I'm in a coffin.

I don't know what's going on and I have all these weird feelings and I tell people that we're so curious about death that we think about death a lot and you know. Is it final? What does it mean that we should really pay attention to death? Death is actually a lot more interesting in some ways than death and people who have died go through a process if it's long enough and people who have had near death experiences like I've gone through that process of dying and I've come back to life and in the process of dying strange things happen to the brain, particularly with a stroke or something like that where the blood stops flowing to the oxygen stops flowing to the brain.

I have visions and things that you might think are hallucinations but then it seems like you're actually glimpsing reality rather than the illusion that the brain creates, so I've written about this in my new book, but my idea of ​​the brain is that creates an endless series of illusions for you, creates this perfect version of reality, the feeling of a self, the feeling of a continuous self. Through time, it creates a linear sense of time progressions, it creates colors, it creates a world that visually may look familiar, etc., etc., but it's all an illusion, it's all a construction.

The right images come into your brain and they are not organized in any way and the brain is organized in a way that you can understand it well when you are dying. All that. gets up and you're actually seeing something else, so I saw, for example, that I don't really have a self, that it doesn't really exist, that I am and the image that came to mind because I was sitting on that gurnie was a sensation Strange, I can hardly explain it, but it's like you took a picture of something real in the world and you scrambled it all over and it was all wavy and you couldn't see exactly what it was.

For me, that was the image I had of myself. There are like 50 different competing selves inside you and you think there is only one and you think it's consistent, but it's not an illusion. The self is literally an illusion that your brain builds when you are dying you see these things when you are dying you see other things like this you see that time is something very strange so I had an experience of when I got out of the car and they stopped me, I thought like 10 Seconds had passed, my wife told me no, that was like 10 minutes.

He had no sense of time. Everything was mixed up and it was very, very Him. She taught me so many things that I can barely express now. I'm always thinking. of strange things that come to me because my brain was damaged it made me realize that the brain creates everything so I can't communicate with my hand my fingers I can't communicate my brain I can't communicate with my leg right so you think walking, writing and manipulating Things is just your body operating in a certain way, it's your brain telling you how to move these different things, when that brain stops working you realize how much your brain determines everything, everything starts there and when there is damage to your whole brain it alters. your way of thinking etc., not to mention how you see life itself after something like that, so it was a terrible experience, it ruined so many things I loved in life, but it also gave me a lot in return, being able to leave.

I went on for hours and talked about it because it was the most powerful experience of my life when you were going through your re-emergence into Consciousness in the hospital. Did you feel like you were observing these multiple versions of yourself? um, maybe that's a different way of putting it. Did you feel like you were behind the circuit board that is your brain watching how you normally function and being able to see multiple versions of yourself or was it something more where you were outside of your body and brain? I think I was more out of In my body and in my brain I also had another thing that happened where you know sometimes you can't REM, your memory may be playing tricks on you so I also have to realize that maybe not I am remembering exactly what happened or I have since translated it in a different way, so it is a warning and I am aware of it, but I had this Vision that atI was originally dead when I first became aware that I was in heaven and I was looking down. and my mother and my wife were talking and it's like over my grave I guess and I had this feeling ah, everything's okay, I'm gone but life goes on, they're okay, it's okay, so I don't know that sense of myself if it was like I was aware of what was happening but I have the feeling it was something external.

I don't really know the answer because it's so confusing the other feeling I had was life when I was having the stroke made the life slip away from me and my bones became softer and softer and softer and softer and I can't really explain logically. than the sensation of bones softening and dissolving, but for weeks and months afterwards I was able to access that sensation of my bones dissolving. Etc., it was a feeling like all your energy was leaking out of you and you were literally dying, so I read books about near-death experiences CU, that's a lot of what I'm a big part of my next book.

God, it's fascinating, there is so much. There are many interesting things to cover because it teaches us a lot. I'm so glad you survived your stroke B. that your mental faculties are no more grateful than I am. I'm telling you probably not, but I'm still very grateful, so that just illustrates how. grateful you should be um B for having maintained, if not grown, your mental faculties. I mean, you seem extremely intelligent. um, I promise you're not missing a beat. uh, you know, you always wonder if, actually, one of the most common fears that people have. It's that somehow they are losing their minds or their memory and people are not and they are not aware of it.

You know, you listen. I have family members who have asked me if they ever start to show signs of severe dementia, I um. Well put an end to it for them, which I won't do, um, that's not my place in this world, um, but I think it's a common fear among people, but you're still extremely astute, uh, and thank God for that, you mentioned that, um, while you lost certain. Skills in which new appreciations and new abilities have emerged. Could you share what some of them are and what they mean to you? Because I think when you hear about someone who's had a stroke, we tend to focus on what's missing, but clearly this.

It's been a transformative experience in positive ways too, well, I had to face some of my own demons. I had to face the feeling that I expected things from life and here they are taken away from me and I am, I am. I'm kind of ungrateful to be alive and here I am mad because it takes me 10 minutes to time my shoes and I can't really button my shirt I had to learn what really matters and have patience and stuff the other thing was I loved hiking. I was very physically active and I'm sitting by the window in my office.

I see people running back and forth riding their bikes walking their dogs. God, I'm so envious if I could walk a dog. Right now I would be the happiest person in the world, but then I go through a thought process that may not be completely healthy: They are not aware of how wonderful it is to simply walk a dog, but I am aware of it. When I go out to my backyard and I can't walk and I see that I know this is going to sound very Tria and sentimental, but I see that you know butterflies or things in my garden.

I think wow, that's amazing, you know? Things like that that I couldn't appreciate before because I'm sedentary and I can't move. Suddenly I have to pay attention to what's around me, not take it for granted and find and absorb all the pleasure there is in it. Now I can, when I sit at my desk writing my new book, it's 4 hours because that's all I can stand, maybe three, sometimes those four hours are bliss for me. I really appreciate it now because I know my brain is almost gone. right, it means a lot to me and just being alive, you know, is a wonderful experience.

I have a chapter in my new book called Awakening to the Strangeness of Being Alive and it's about the fact that if you think about it and how unlikely it is that humans have evolved at all, even that all the bottlenecks and evolution by chance exist. we had to go through, including the demise of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals, but there are 20 other major bottlenecks throughout the history of evolution. We had to go through all those that almost became extinct 80,000 years ago due to some virus that infected. There were only 8,000 people, humans on the planet, all these different things and here we are with Zoom meetings etc., it's like the strangest story you can imagine.

It's beyond science fiction, but no one thinks about it, no one sits down and says, God, I'm alive, if you came back, the chain of people who had to hook up and have children all the way to your parents, the unlikelihood of any once you are born it is astronomical. I mean, unless my science is completely wrong, you know, 70,000 generations of people coming together, etc., eventually end up in your DNA. I mean, unless I'm missing something, it's pretty unlikely, but no one thinks that through. I certainly think about it now because I almost died. I have nothing else to think about.

I have to entertain my brain the same way Milton Ericson had to entertain himself by watching people, so he's taken a lot away from me. I do not know how to swim. I'm riding my recumbent bike, which I love, and 80-year-old Grandmas zip by me and damn, how horrible I'm so envious, I'm so insecure, but then I realize, hey, I'm, I'm like, I'm like . a ship I'm sailing it's wonderful I'm outside you know I have to go through these processes but I think it has developed me in some way that in the end it sounds very positive like you have had to adapt to a new frame rate In life like the old movie it had a certain frame rate, this movie has a certain frame rate, but within that frame rate there are gifts that you certainly missed in your previous version of yourself, is that it, yeah. but also, as I tell people, I took my life for granted.

I was swimming all this time. I was fantastic. I rode a bicycle. I traveled, but I never sat down and thought, "This is wonderful, how grateful it is that this can be taken away from you." I tell people don't do that to yourself. I try to teach them that they can take it off tomorrow when you go out to walk the dog. Think of me. Think about me who can't walk the dog. And I appreciate the things I did. I don't appreciate it, so I try to help people that way when I can. I think the critical message is also to inspire a sense of urgency in people.

I think people hear a sense of urgency and say, "Oh God, I'm in." I'm already under so much pressure, life is so difficult, but we're not talking about a sense of urgency to take on more of what life has to offer. I think we're talking about a sense of urgency to find one's purpose, which takes work and is an ongoing process, but to really get out of the modes of apathy, laziness, um languor and start as you've described, paying more attention. . I mean, this is a concept that was very important for me to hear about and learn about how to do it. you get out of your routine, you start to pay more attention to the things around you and within you and, um, maybe it's no coincidence that you referred to that as citing death ground, yeah, so, um, it's a strategy from my book that I wrote, I wrote a book on strategy my version of The Art of War is called 33 Strategies of War but it is actually about strategy, strategic thinking is inspired by Sunu, the great Chinese strategist, but it has vast implications philosophically, the idea is that you can almost think of it as barometric pressure when necessary.

It's pressing on you like your back is against the wall like you have to do something and there's like this pressure around you, you find energy there that you never believed before William James talks about this when he talks about getting a second wind, he explains It's very eloquently, when you feel that your life is in danger, you can suddenly jump things that you have never been able to jump before, so Sunsu says: "Put an army on the ground of death and it will fight and until it wins, that is, put an army with their Return to the ocean or return to the mountain and it is win or die.

They will fight 10 times harder. You will find in you the energy that you normally lack when death confronts you in the face or in urgency or deadlines. or people pressuring you when that barometric pressure drops and there's nothing like that you think you have all the time in the world you can't get anything done wow man, I'm 23, I have all these years ahead of me I'm going to figure it out right I'm not going to die I'm 50. 70 80 years ahead No, no, that pressure is now gone and you're wasting your time, you're, you're, you're doing all kinds of things that don't lead to any kind of skills that you're not learning or anything that you need to put on in the realm of death, you need to feel that barometric pressure, which is the real reality, the real reality is that you could die tomorrow. you could have a stroke tomorrow you could be fired tomorrow everything could fall apart you need to have that sense of urgency now because that's the reality you're fooling yourself into thinking you have all this time and when you feel that pressure suddenly you can move mountains, you have energy, you life, you know, you just have focus, etc. neurologically, everything clicks, you know, and people who have had that experience have felt like the ship is sinking and they better leave.

They act together and survive, they talk about all these physical processes. I have a story in my new book. I hope I don't bore you with everything. It's not quite the opposite about a mountain climber who, um, heh, was climbing this mountain alone and was having a great time but there was a storm coming and he had to duck and all of a sudden he fell and cut his leg badly and there was like a branch stuck in it and he broke all these bones and he was going to die he was on a ledge I could see it was getting dark and the storm clouds were gathering there was going to be this he was in the Rocky Mountains he was alone and suddenly he managed to get up on his feet two feet and he can't explain how, but all this energy, all this adrenaline started flowing in him and he said he was like a mountain goat, it was like going down a ledge, he jumped, he was able to go down to another ledge, heh heh .

He managed to get out of it and for the next 20 years he was tormented by how that happened. I want that feeling again because it was actually the most static feeling I had, energy that I never suspected in myself and that's why he tries everything to get that feeling back, he tries to climb other mounts, he tries to go to Mount Everest, he tries and doesn't come back and finally discover the formula and why it happened, study a lot of Neuroscience, it's a great book. I'm using it in my new book called Bone Bone Games. It is a very interesting book with a lot of science. um, and he got the feeling back in a smaller sense, but it was the feeling that your life is in danger.

I better get my act together or it's the end and suddenly, adrenaline, dopamine, all the other things were happening in him and he got and found that energy, so, that's the last kind of deadly terrain right there, the human will to live is truly incredible and now I have to say, as I said before, that I am very grateful that your stroke did not take you away because clearly there is still a lot in there and you continue to share what is really exquisitely useful knowledge. Oh, thanks, it's just that I'm a little surprised. I began today's discussion by expressing my gratitude for what you have already done for my life and the lives of so many other people through your books.

You know, it's clear that you've been on a foraging exploration and that you're looking to organize and communicate information primarily in the form of written books but also online content. You have a fantastic YouTube channel that I subscribe to and follow and, um, and listen to with full attention, uh, and the other places you share information with, including this one. one of today are truly valuable and appreciated, so I want to say it on behalf of myself and those who have known you and your work for several years, but also for the many people who now surely know who you are. and what it's about, it's so clear that these things come from the heart and that whatever early seed was planted, you know we're all grateful and better off as a result of that seed, so, uh, I could do this very, very long list of the number of specific ways in which you have improved the journey through life and made it clearer.

I mean, you know life can certainly be difficult, but it can also be very confusing and I feel like Robert Green's road map, even though it's just one, is an extremely valuable map to have and use, I certainly do. has been for me, so a huge thank you, Robert, thank you for sharing today and thank you for everything you do and everything. which you are still doing and I'm sure you will in the future, oh thank you. I wish I could find the word to explain the kind of strange emotions I get when I hear that maybe there's no Yiddish, maybe for Clem or something I don't know, but thanks, yeah, well, we'll just have to have you here again, uh, when it comes outyour next book, I can't wait, but we'll wait, okay, yes, I hope to continue here.

I have faith. you'll be fine fine fine thank you come back again thank you very much I hope I can thank you for joining me in today's discussion with Robert Green I hope you found the conversation as stimulating as I did if you are learning and enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our channel YouTube, which is a great way to support us at no cost. Also, subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple, and on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us a review of up to five stars, see also Discover the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode, that's the best way to support this podcast.

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