Full Transcript for Access the Sublime & Live Your Best Life | Robert Greene

People would come to me and they would say, Robert, I don't know what my life's task is. I'm in my 20s. You write about it. You write about Da Vinci. You write about all these other people. I have no idea. So I had to go like, why wouldn't they know it? Because if you think about your early childhood, you had those moments. You knew that you would love this.

You love kicking a ball. I love sports. But thinking deeply about their experience, I came to realize that, first of all, they've lost a deep connection to those childhood experience, to those moments. They've forgotten about them. Why have they forgotten about them? All these other voices intervened. Their parents told them what they should love, what they shouldn't love.

They had to learn math and they didn't want to learn math. The teachers told them what they were good at, which kind of constrains your brain into a certain career path. We have to cut out all of those voices. We literally had to go back into their childhood to uncover those moments where something sparked and they were excited. not because their parents told them, but because it was them.

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 School of Medicine. My guest today is Robert Greene. Robert Greene is a renowned author of books such as The Laws of Human Nature, The 48 Laws of Power, and The Art of Seduction. Another one of his books, entitled Mastery, remains one of my all-time favorite books and is one that I have recommended to the students I've taught in classes, in my laboratory, and to my friends and family and acquaintances for years.

But with all of that said, I do believe that the topics Robert discusses today are the most important of all. And I don't say that lightly. Today, we talk about the sublime and how to access the sublime. For many of us, we hear the sublime and it sounds abstract. But today, Robert explains that accessing the sublime in your daily life is not only possible, but is truly the key to a great life.

one full of rich experiences in your work, your relationships, your relationship to yourself, to animals, and even to the galaxies. And importantly, today Robert provides tools and examples for how to access the sublime in daily life. So it's probably obvious by now that I'm a huge fan of Robert Greene as the person and his books and his teaching, including his teachings in today's conversation.

You're in for a real gift with this one, so enjoy. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Robert Greene. The Robert Greene. Welcome back. The Andrew Huberman. Well, thank you. I'm not shy about my adoration of your book, Mastery. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Long before I had a podcast, I recommended it to students in my courses related to biology and neuroscience when they would ask for book recommendations.

I have a signed copy, thanks to you, on my shelf. I return to it often. And I'm thrilled you've written this new book, The Law of the Sublime. I'm so excited. I haven't read it yet because I just got it from you today. But my question is pretty straightforward. So if 48 Laws of Power was about how the world is constructed and how to navigate it.

And mastery was about mentorship and how to realize our unique gifts and potential. And laws of human nature, you've written a lot of books, my friend, is how we understand ourselves and others in the context of general principles.

The Law of the Sublime is about... It's about experience. It's about how you experience your day-to-day life, not in terms of success or power or dealing with other people, but just your sense of how you experience being alive and how you kind of open yourself up to the strangeness of this world that we inhabit. So I think a lot of our experience now, how we process our thoughts and emotions, is being kind of programmed and controlled in ways we're not aware of.

So I like to think of consciousness as this kind of mental space that we inhabit. I envision it in this book as a kind of a circle, right? Although there's really no limits to our consciousness, but this is a circle in which our thoughts kind of move around within sort of certain limits, our behavior, our emotions, what we think of the world, what we think of as reality, right? And within that circle, our experience of life can be kind of constricted.

It can be kind of the sameness. Everything seems sort of familiar. Yes, you'll have kind of experiences that might stand out, but they're all still sort of similar. And then you go on a vacation, you climb a mountain, you come back to your daily routines. It doesn't really stick in you. like when Maslow describes like peak experiences that kind of change you.

And so I'm interested in that level of experience that shakes you up, that gets you out of that circle, that makes you aware that there is another reality out there. So I have a chapter in the book about how the brain constructs what we consider as reality. It constructs how we perceive the world. It constructs an ego, a self, and all these other things.

But there's something else out there. There's another way of experiencing the world. And so the sublime is something that lies outside that circle, right? There are these points. I compare them to doorways. So the word sublime in Latin means up to the threshold of a door, sublumen, lumen meaning a threshold, right? And so... In these doorways to something outside the circle, you're moving closer to it and you're peering through it and you're realizing there's something else.

There's something else out there that's not part of your daily experience and it shakes you up. It gives you a kind of shock. The sublime is a mix of pain and pleasure. The pain is... It's outside my comfort zone. It's not what I'm familiar with, but the pleasure is the newness of it, the novelty, the excitement that it generates. And so each of those doorways that I mentioned are chapters in this book, but I'm trying to get you outside of this.

So The circle could be rather small. When you were a child, when you were born, that circle was rather large because the world was so new and fresh and unfamiliar, and you were excited about everything, and your imagination was animating everything around you. And then as you get older, it kind of gets smaller and smaller and gets constricted and flat.

And you're not using your imagination. Everything gets kind of dead to you. And so I'm trying to enliven, alter your experience of life itself at its roots, at the very roots of your consciousness. And unlike any of my other books, Each chapter ends with exercises that you can use to kind of bring these ideas that I've introduced to you in this specific chapter into your daily experience.

Because I don't want this to be an academic book about the sublime and the brain and all these other things. I want it to be something that you incorporate into your daily life. do you march through these sorts of, I want to say doors to perception, but that was Huxley, right? And he championed the use of LSD to get access to and go through some of those doors.

Yeah, and mescaline. He was heavily into mescaline. People will talk a little bit about psychedelics and altering perceptual windows, but I think most people are very familiar with the fact that their daily life and their perceptions are very heavily constrained. Yeah. is certainly once we reach adulthood, our experiences might not be mundane, but they're certainly repetitive.

Yes. In the book and just in general, are you a fan of accessing what you refer to as the sublime on a regular basis? Is this something that we can do like daily through micro practices? Or is there real value also in things that really take that sphere of everyday experiences and really turn it into a completely different shaped object? I think both.

So what happened to me, I did a lot of drugs when I was in my early 20s, in my late teens, and they had a lasting effect on me. I can remember taking one particular trip on peyote in the town of Mendocino up on the coast in Northern California. And I'll never forget the experience and how it altered how I look at just life itself, right? The simplest things.

And so when I had the original concept for this book 20 years ago, I was going to have things like that. I was going to take drugs like that. I was going to do ayahuasca. I was going to go to the Amazon. I was going to do all these adventures, swimming with dolphins, seeing chimpanzees in Gobi National Forest. Then I had my stroke. Right? And so my stroke made it so that my near-death experience kind of brought the sublime back to me in a very real sense.

I want to write this book, but I can't travel. I can't do any of these things that I thought I could do. I could take the drugs, but it would be a little bit dangerous considering I can't walk very well and my balance is bad. So sitting there in my office, how do I write this book without those kinds of experiences?

And I recalled when I, just after my stroke, I'm sitting in the hospital bed the first day after, kind of trying to process what had happened to me. And I'm looking out the window and everything looks so different to me. It's as if I had just been born. Everything looks strange, doesn't it? The sky is blue. It's weird. The clouds are passing.

I'm seeing birds in there. I'm seeing trees swaying in the wind. God damn, this world is insane. It is so beautiful. It is so marvelous. I've never noticed it before. It has this incandescence to it, right? And then it faded. That feeling faded because it was the shadow of death that had come over me and it kind of Death can create that kind of effect on you.

Then I'm home, and it's kind of missing, and I'm wondering, how am I going to be able to get the sublime, experience it in order to write about it? I start looking out my window again, and sort of the feelings start coming back. And then I sit out in my backyard, which is not very large. And I'm seeing like there's this whole world in the backyard.

It's not the Amazon. It's not Africa. But it's filled with all these insects, all this life, their flowers, their trees. So my point is the feeling starts coming over me. that the sublime is part of our everyday life. It's everywhere around us, right? You could look at this cup here that's in front of us. Normally, we just see a cup that we use to drink out of.

But in the sublime, and sometimes on drugs, and sometimes after death, you look at it, it's this weird shape. It's this funny color, this handle. It maybe even seems to be alive in some ways. It's got this material aspect to it, nothing to do with its use value. When you take drugs, even on cannabis, something goes off in your brain where you're looking at things as they are and not as their uses and their functions.

And the colors and the shapes and the materials strike you just for what they are. And they did when you were a child. So my point is, it's all around you. Your body is the product of 800 million years of evolution. Your nervous system was like the first eyes in the Cambrian explosion, when they first evolved eyes and optic nerves and a nervous system, right? It's inside of your body.

You are a product of all these, of evolution. Your body is utterly weird and sublime that it operates automatically. You know, I just had surgery on my eye because I had a little sort of cancerous melanoma there.

The surgeon cut into it, he cut in, you know, it was pretty violent. He had to take skin from my ear and replace it there. It's only 10 days later and the skin is growing back. It's insane. It's miraculous what the body can do. So the sublime doesn't have to be these extraordinary things. Just your day-to-day life is filled with these quasi-miracles.

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Two weekends ago, I was up at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. I love it up there. Amazingly beautiful place. I hope everyone gets the opportunity to visit at least once. It's a spectacular place. One of the founders, Michael Murphy, is now 96. Yeah. And he was describing what, we don't know if it was a stroke or it was some other event, but he had sort of a blackout and fall recently.

He's very clear-headed and fortunately still mobile, but he was talking about the aftermath of that experience and how his sort of pixelation of the world was altered in some way that has now allowed him to appreciate all these different colors and shapes in the same environment that he's spent so much time. So it matches very well what you described.

And artists like Chuck Close who had, you know, visual quote unquote deficits that allowed them to do incredible art at a different, kind of spatial scale. The famous example is the painter El Greco with, you know, his odd shapes and how he figures the human body is so weird. It's like looking through a concave mirror or something. He had some kind of eye problem, right? There's lots of examples of artists like that.

Yeah. So it raises this question for me, which is, To access the sublime, is it sufficient for us to just think about our current perceptions differently? So taking away drugs, taking away strokes, and the level of perception that I have now, my perceptual abilities to hear music a certain way and see the world a certain way, feel touch a certain way, they're constrained, but they're pretty vast.

This is true for everybody. But I do have the option to think about them differently. Is that one portal into the sublime or do we actually need to change our perception, our default perception? Because what you described for you or what Michael Murphy described for him was forced upon them. Right. On you. And you turned it into gifts, not the least of which is components of the book.

But- for most people, and drugs will do this too, right? But is there a portal to the sublime through just thinking about our current perception, sans drugs, sans brain events, just differently, just to decide I'm going to look at this mug differently and it will have some meaningful output? Yes. So I talk in the book, there's a chapter where I call the neuro sublime, where I'm talking about how the brain constructs the world around us.

And I discuss, I don't know if you've ever had Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor on your show. I have not. But I discuss her stroke and what it did for her. But then there's this Armenian mystic named Gurjev. Right? Amazing man. It was the turn of the 20th century and he visited all of the most esoteric cults in the Middle East and the Far East because he had this idea that they were about to disappear and he wanted to glean all of their secrets and create this new kind of philosophy that would alter human consciousness.

And he had this experiment that he said, what makes a human being human is our attention. So an animal, and God bless, I love animals, but their attention is generally somewhat limited to what's in front of them, to their needs to survive. They're not looking up at the sky and wondering about what's going on, right? They're not thinking about what's on the other side of that mountain and what's happening.

So we have the ability of this incredible attention. And when we pay attention to something and we focus on it, we kind of alter our brain chemistry and something magical can happen. And he had this notion that people are just sleepwalking through life, that they're not awake. He said if a human being were truly awake, there would not be wars.

We would not be killing each other. There would not be all this misery that we inflict on fellow humans, right? We're asleep. We're not aware of what we're doing. He had this exercise. He calls it self-remembering. I talk about it in the book. And he says, you have an experience or a moment in life, and you focus on it deeply, and you tell yourself you're remembering it.

You're going to remember it. Because what happens is... What happened three years ago on a day in July, you'll never remember what happened there because you were asleep. You weren't paying attention. There are moments in life where you're paying attention, where you get some kind of shock and you remember it. He wants you to have that kind of focus every day.

So he has this exercise where you look at things deeply and just focus on them. I'm remembering, I'm remembering, I'm experiencing it in the moment.

And he had this pupil named Uspensky, a very famous Russian mystic, who was deeply depressed. He was suicidal, and he became a pupil, a disciple of Gurdjieff. He starts practicing this. He looks at a vase of flowers in his room, focusing and attending it. I'm remembering it. I'm seeing it. I'm here today. I'm looking at it.

After 30 seconds, your mind wanders. He can't do it. But then after a minute, he notices that that flower starts looking different. And the degree of his focus and attention on it, just as it is, as he's telling himself, I'm going to remember it. In three years, it'll be stamped in my memory. He gets better at it, and then he walks outside after months of practicing this, just looking at things, simple objects.

And suddenly, the houses look different to him. They look almost like alive. Everything is intense. He's walking outside, and he's got this attention, this focus. The world is altering. And then... Suddenly, he finds himself in a tobacconist completely on the other side of Moscow or St. Petersburg. I don't remember which city. He goes, what happened? He realized that at the moment he fell asleep.

And he wasn't remembering things. And three hours later, he's on the other side of town in a tobacconist buying cigarettes. And what he realized is... He had this intense focus remembering where he's awake. And now it made him realize that normally in life, you are asleep. We don't realize how asleep we are because we don't have that contrast to what it's like to be fully awake.

So my point is, it's an exercise that can literally alter your neurology in some way. It can alter how you perceive things. It doesn't require drugs. It requires this kind of intense focus. And meditation can have the same effect. I do meditation every morning. They've proven that meditation literally alters your brain. There's literally something your thoughts can alter the matter of the wiring of your brain.

So you don't need drugs. Drugs are a wonderful gateway and Huxley describes it beautifully. But there are practices among Tibetan Buddhists, Zen Buddhists, where they get similar kind of effects through meditation, right? Or through some of these practices that I mentioned. there's this wild finding in neuroscience, visual neuroscience that comes to mind that I'll just briefly share with you if you want to reflect on.

Great, and if not, then certainly just tell us. So we assume that when we look at something that our perception of it is pretty stable, but there's this really cool set of experiments where they paralyze the eyes of people yeah in a reversible way and and you quickly find that if you look at something they can perceive it and then it disappears because our nervous system has our eyes move these saccades as you know but it's all about change in the same way that you walk in a room it smells really good and then the smell disappears but it didn't disappear you've got this habituation This happens everywhere in the nervous system.

Then there's this wild finding that if you continue to have people look at the same location, the percept of what was there changes in a significant way. And of course, the physical attributes of the thing didn't change, but the perception, the conversion of those photons into what we perceive, the abstraction of what's out there changes.

I think it matches precisely with what you're describing. What's so incredible in the example you gave is that the person was able to sort of maintain that shifted perception for long periods of time. It's almost like it enters the memory system. We can get back to the perception, but also the state that we were in. of being quote unquote awake.

I find that remarkable because the mug, the vase, the flower, they're beautiful, certainly flowers, but in some sense they're trivial too, right? Like there's nothing inherently interesting about a mug until I start creating a story about it. Like people design this, it's gotten all these wonderful, but you really have to go down that rabbit hole.

So the question I have is given how malleable our perceptions are, what quality of meaning is actually

meaningful because like on drugs, and this is one of the problems with psychedelics or MDMA, for instance, one has to be very careful, certainly on MDMA, which this is a pathogenic drug, right? Because you can hear a song and you can fall in love with your love for that song on repeat for four full hours, which is perhaps interesting. There might be an insight or few there, but in some sense, it's not like...

one could say, well, that's trivial. You assigned a meaning to something that's trivial. And I think that's where people get scared that if they start to go through these portals to the sublime, that they're going to end up kind of weird. that they're going to be the person that's like, did you see how many ants are crawling up that curb? And you're like, yeah, it's cool.

But you know, like if you go down there, I'm sure it's pretty cool, right? But no one, most people don't want to be that guy or that lady all the time because we have a name for that and it's not kind. None of us want to be the crazy person who's creating meaning out of the trivial. So how do we cope with that? Because the way I'm looking at it is you're actually seeing things as they are because your brain is filtering down things for you and creating this familiarity and this sameness so that your mind isn't overwhelmed with chaos.

So that you can get through the, you know... Aldous Huxley in Doors of Perception was calling the mind at large, that if you didn't have this filtering, you would be seeing all of these incredible things. But the mind is like this little funnel that just kind of filters and prunes everything that you see. So I'm talking the sublime, not as something crazy, not as like, oh, this could be a bunch of ants.

This is how the world actually is. You're awakening to how things actually are outside of the pruning of your brain.

I talk in the book about the artist Cezanne, who was obsessed with vision and the visual arena and how he could alter his vision by focusing on things, right? And so his expression was, We humans are given consciousness so that we can spread consciousness everywhere. So his saying was, I am the consciousness of the landscape. I am making the landscape come to life and think and be alive, right? So he had this idea that mountains are actually living, breathing things and that his mind is giving it life.

And he looked at trees like that and he would... He would stare at one tree outside of his house. It was like an apricot tree. And he would just, he was trying to focus on what it was, what it actually is. We don't look at things like that anymore. We just see the word tree. We see the category tree. He was seeing the apricots on it and he was seeing the apricots getting larger as the sun was hitting them, right? Getting sweeter and sweeter and kind of to him it was like a neurotic relationship between the apricot and the sun.

Now you might say that's insane. I don't think so. I think it's actually beautiful. I think our minds are allowed. We're not just rational creatures. We are creating emotions through everything we see. And so I get a little bit frustrated with how rational our culture has become. So for example, AI, which is the talk everyone's talking about now, people are continually anthropomorphizing AI.

It is a machine. It's not conscious. It is a machine that we have programmed. And yet even these very rational scientists are talking about it as if it's conscious. They're anthropomorphizing it. We are creatures that are constantly putting emotions into things. I don't think it's irrational because I think science has that basis in it as well.

I'm just saying that our thoughts have become so limited and constricted that the ability to see a vase of flowers and see it as this intense feeling strange, miraculous thing to actually focus on its colors and the life that it has and how in cutting it and putting it in this water, you're keeping it alive, but it's actually cut. So it's not really living.

It's just strange. So it's not your imagination putting, it's actually seeing things as they are, which we don't do.

Am I crazy? You're definitely not crazy. And by the way, I'm totally on board. This notion and the practice of looking at things differently in order to experience life differently, to extract more real meaning from life. Many times growing up in California, I've been here 51 years, I can remember driving along Highway 101. Sure. And I would stop and I'd like, Pee on the side of the road.

And I would see some like beautiful fence lines. I love fence lines. And I would think, oh, this fence line looks so old with barbed wire. What is your interest in fence lines? I'm curious about that. I don't know. I don't know. I just think they're beautiful. And there are a lot of old fence lines along 280 and along 101 when you drive from Southern to Northern California.

And just big fields, you know, it's still undeveloped to this day. And occasionally you'll see like an old, what looks like a cabin that's like no one's bothered to take away. It's like falling over. And I would need to get someplace. So I would get back in my car and drive away. But inevitably, when I would get out and pee. And then I'd look at the fence line and I think there's so much interesting detail just in this little interface between the barbed wire and the wood on the fence line.

And I still have this thought. I'm like, I could spend all day there, but I have to go someplace else. And then I realized there are an infinite number of spatial scales that we can look at things. I think we can agree that's true. And then there are an infinite number of temporal scales that we can look at things and experience things. And this is the thing I'd like to get your thoughts on.

So the spatial scale is pretty straightforward for most people to digest. So you say, okay, well, I can... look at something very small in my environment, the texture of something, or I can look at the whole environment. And we had Dacher Keltner on the podcast. He's a Berkeley scientist who studies awe. And he said that the experience of awe comes about when we transition quickly from focusing on small spatial scales to big spatial scales, like walking through a forest and suddenly there's a huge vista.

Oh, wow. You know, you're in Yosemite and you're like, all of a sudden you reach a peak and it's like, you know, and vice versa, big spatial scales to small spatial scales. But most people experience going from small spatial scale to big. Okay. So that makes sense. But the time domain is one that is... Very intriguing to me because on a daily basis, like we're constrained by the circadian rhythm when we're awake, when we're asleep, no escaping that.

But we tend to move through life, I realized a couple of years ago with the same kind of snapshot the same frame rate. You make your coffee, you do your thing, you know, but you can slow this down by taking a higher frame. You can stop and watch your espresso pour with immense amounts of temporal details. You're collecting more information.

You can't do that all day. You won't do anything else. But we can also slow things down, like lie in the yard and look at the clouds pass and start taking bigger snapshots. And this to me feels like a critical piece of this perception you know accessing the sublime because what your story about this gentleman who realized he was in a dream tells us is that the space-time filter we're talking about physics but not the cosmos but the the space-time filter like how we move through life the speed of our camera yeah and the pixel density of our camera the resolution of our camera is everything so if you're And forgive me for going long here.

My audience is probably already saying, like, let your guest speak. But the best example I have is my graduate advisor who died at 50. A remarkable woman was dying of cancer. And it was two girls and married to a scientist. I was very, very close with her family. And I will never forget our final conversation. And she was telling me about some of the goodness she had experienced recently.

And she did share with me that... she had started in the realization that she was going to be dead soon, to think about the tiniest things in the space and time domain, like they're all redheads in that family, bright red hair, like the curls of her daughter's hair moving when she walked into the room to see her. Her frame rate was changing.

Right. And I find this to be moving and also in some way that I don't yet understand informative for those of us that hopefully, fortunately are not close to the end or who are. So what is your thought about the time domain, this temporal parsing of experience? Okay. I had this thought a while ago that what made childhood so interesting and weird and why we remember it the way it was and why it was so intense was that there was this space between thoughts.

And that had a big... play on our conception of time, right? So now our stream of consciousness is like broken up into a million different fragments. I'm thinking of you right now in two seconds, I'll be thinking of my cat, you know, it'll bounce back and forth between the thoughts are just continual. But when you were a child, there was like this space.

You would think something, then there would be this kind of emptiness. There'd be like a minute would go by, there wouldn't be another thought, then there would be another one. And that space in between thoughts, create a different rhythm of life. So when you're living particularly nowadays with the Instagram model where your attention is broken up into millions of little splinters, time has this rhythm that's just not life.

That's just not how life should be. It's just way too fast. It's way too broken up. But that sense of there's a space between my two thoughts, there's like this emptiness creates this kind of flow of time that's much different. So I talk in the book about the childhood experience of time, which kind of fascinates me. And so I have the example in there of this writer Nabokov, the famous novelist, who is obsessed with his childhood.

And the reason he was obsessed with it was... He had this kind of magical childhood growing up in Russia. His father was wealthy. They had this amazing villa out in the country. His life was just full of all these adventures, and he studied butterflies intensely. And then the Russian Revolution breaks out. His father is murdered as someone who's wealthy.

They have to leave Russia. His mother dies in an apartment in Berlin. He has to flee with his Jewish wife to New York because the Nazis are there. His brother dies in a concentration camp. His whole family is gone. He can never return to Russia because Stalin is now in power, right? He has no photographs, no memorabilia, no family left, but he has this memory of this magical childhood.

And so his experiment, he wrote a book called Speak Memory, in which he tries to recreate the experience of his childhood in the adult mind, remembering it, not remembering facts, but remembering the experience. And so he talks a lot about time. And so the image is that when you're a child, time is something that's inside of you. Our concept of time is something outside.

It's abstract, right? The minutes are passing. So the image I use, time is like a river. It's a flow. And when you're a child, you're in the river and you're feeling the flow and moments are passing by. It's living inside of you. When you're an adult, you're on the shoreline and you're looking at time passing by. And you have this, you can look at the past, the future, wherever your mind takes you.

And time has this different rhythm. But when you're a child, it's inside of you. You're part of that flow. And he remembers that he was thinking at times like, my God, we're all alive at the same time. We're all these humans bathing in this river at the same time. We're alive. We feel it. I don't know if this concept is too abstract for you to understand.

But in my meditations, as I'm thinking about the passage of time, because what will happen when you meditate I meditate for 40 minutes and sometimes it like passes by and you're not even aware. Your concept of time is altered by the slowness of this process, right? And I will feel that time is inside of me, that I have this flow. It's a physical sensation of time passing.

I'm alive moment to moment. I'm inside the present moment. Time has this different rhythm, and that is a sublime experience of time. And I take readers through that exercise of the actual river and actually feeling yourself inside the river and feeling the flow of time. It has a much different consciousness, effect on our consciousness when you go through this process.

I have an absolute obsession about this time perception thing in no small part because if as a younger person I realize I could look at the fence line in great detail or keep moving on, this conversation with Barbara is our last conversation before she passed. I went on to realize it's not uncommon that as people get closer and closer to the end, provided they are lucid, and she was, it's as if there was an avalanche of new and beautiful information pouring in.

And I should point out, this was not the report of somebody who was like kind of drifting away. I mean, that was part of the sadness of it all. She was very present. But in that presence, she was able to extract what seemed like many, many years of of experience and in a non, she was a very calm person always, and in a very non-anxious or urgent way.

It's as if the end was coming and instead of freaking out, Her perception, the camera onto the world just became super high resolution and at near infinity frame rate. And she was just reporting these things. This is as she's dying? Well, she was about a week out at that point. Yeah. So close, yeah. I have a whole chapter on death and the death sublime and near-death experiences.

And what often happens in the death process is the brain is dying as well, right? And as the brain dies, some of the things, the constructions of the brain, such as time, right, and such as vision, and such as the self, start breaking down, start dissolving. Near-death experiencers have this sense sometimes of ecstasy as they're dying. Now, not all of them.

In the studies of near-death experiences, about 85%, I'm just throwing out that number, are positive. But that is the hellish near-death experience. So they're not all angels and beauty and stuff. But a lot of people are dying. And they feel the ego dissolving, and they feel the sense of abstract time dissolving, and they feel all the social pressures of life dissolving.

And they're ecstatic. They're elated. It's like a liberation, right? It's the sense that time is actually much more plastic than we think it is. The first person to study near-death experiences is in the 19th century. It was this man named Albert Heim. He was a Swiss man. He was an alpine climber when he was very young. And when he was like 21, he fell as he was climbing.

He was going to die. It was like a 100-foot fall. And as he's falling, suddenly he remembers his whole life, right? All these things, he starts revisiting it. And then later, he wants to analyze it. And he goes,

in 15 seconds of a fall, I had experienced like years of things happening, right? The condensation was insane. He wrote an article about it. And suddenly, hundreds of other articles start coming to him of people who fell in climbing accidents and had the same experience. And people who like jump off Golden Gate Bridge, the few who survive, and there are some people who survive, speak of the same thing.

Their experience of time as they're falling and as they're about to die is completely altered. And in just those 10 seconds, it's as if they lived like five years or something. So our sense of time is not so logical and rational as we think it is. And we can alter our perception of time literally by how we think and how we experience life.

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Again, go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. One of the reasons I love Aquaria and I have so many fish tanks is that whether there's one fish or octopus or many, when you look at a fish tank or an ocean scene of any kind, the mind enters this weird state because you can't control nor can you predict what's going to happen next.

If a fish is swimming leftward, you sort of predict it will continue to swim leftward. But then as soon as you predict that, it moves. And so there's this, you sort of have to let go of your anticipation of what's going to happen next. There's some constraints, but it puts my mind into this like it's almost like it releases something. It's the expectation component is just has to unlatch.

And in that, I think you get additional perception. That's interesting. It just unlatches. I mean, there's nothing you can do. I think looking at the shore, at the ocean is the same. The waves roll in generally, you know, objects fall down as opposed to up. We know this, but I think it's the presence of unpredictable things. We just accept it.

And then the brain just goes someplace new and I think useful. This is slightly off, a little bit off what you're saying, but there's a story in there about a man who had a relationship with an octopus. So I think you can relate to that. He wrote, he did that famous movie, My Friend the Octopus. Right, right. But he actually has a story about, he wrote a book about it.

And He essentially decides that he's going to cold dive off the coasts of South Africa where he grew up. Incredibly cold temperatures. There's a kelp forest, which is kind of a strange concept, right? It's a forest underwater of all this magnificent kelp. And the weirdest creatures live in there, including octopus. And he's not going in there looking for octopus.

He's free diving in this very cold water, exploring this insane landscape. and he comes upon an octopus and they slowly become friends and they have a slightly erotic relationship. It's clear from the way he describes it that there was like this love interest and this sort of eroticism because at one point, the octopus, you know, grabs his arm and he can feel it.

And it's like, it's pretty intense. And then at one moment, the octopus has grabbed him and they float together to the top. And it was like this love thing going on between them, right? And then of course, as you know, the octopus dies, right? And he's heartbroken about it. And that's when he decides he's going to do this. Well, he's been filming the whole thing.

He's going to create this film. But my point is, In the six or eight months that he had this relationship, quote unquote, with this octopus, his whole concept of time was altered because he was living in her time. It was a female, obviously laid eggs and died.

Imagine an octopus lives for three years at most. He saw all these intense experiences. It got attacked by a shark. It lost some of its limbs. The limbs grew back. Those three years, what is its sense of time? Compressed in those three years is just all of these incredible experiences. And he felt in being close to this octopus, he was like living in her time period.

Time was passing at a much different rhythm as he was living in her world. And so the idea is that they're insects that live for like a month, right? And so our experience of time is relative to our time span as well. And in these kind of encounters with other species, we can kind of some ways alter our concept of time. If you try to experiment that with your dog, you might find something similar.

How does your dog experience time? I feel like this conversation was like designed to enchant me. So I'm just, thank you. Yeah, you know, having had dogs and now another puppy, I'm familiar with the rhythm. You entrain to their rhythm and they to you. This is a big part of the relationship. Like the daily walk becomes a prerequisite. It's not a...

It's not an option. The dog needs it. And you learn to love everything about it. And that word feels really relevant here, entrainment. You know, we're bound to this circadian rhythm, this 24-hour rhythm, as I mentioned earlier. Nobody escapes it. Some people need more sleep than others, but nobody escapes it. But everything else, we're sort of entrained to a particular schedule.

And our body learns to anticipate things and adjust our perception, our energy levels to when we exercise, when we work, when we see our significant other or dog or both. The idea that we can access different time perception references, time domains through interactions with other species is like absolutely thrilling to me. Absolutely thrilling.

And I will say, having had several octopuses now and cuttlefish prior to that, that I had, oh yeah, I had many cuttlefish in my lab in San Diego. I think we had 40 cuttlefish at one point. And they're like little underwater hovel pod monkeys. They're also incredibly intelligent and do all sorts of wild stuff. And they can't change in colors.

Beautiful camouflage ability and they can camouflage half their body. The males will sometimes in the wild will... camouflage as females and then enter a clutch of females and then mate with them. A separate podcast could discuss the ethics or lack thereof of that. But in any case, I think that they're referred to in the scientific literature as sneaky fuckers.

Doesn't sound very scientific to me. Well, evolutionary biologists is sort of like two rules, is the joke. They tend to hyphenate their names, even if they aren't married. It's just sort of a weird quirk of evolutionary biologists, some. And the other is that they love to insert cursing into their scientific papers. It's like a thing. I had no idea.

In any case, my mom's an avid gardener, and she spends time with her tomato plants and her plants. I think that we can access these different time portals through interactions with plants, too. Sure, of course. What you're describing, and the reason I'm enchanted, is that it's really like the richness of life is available to us when we let go of our kind of mostly human-made things.

And I don't want to focus on the negative, but... because there are certainly positive attributes of technology, but I'm concerned that something about excessive use of social media is, you said earlier that we're programmed, but that we're like,

with each passing year, we're becoming more and more locked to one space-time relationship. And expectation of dopamine updating and novelty, et cetera. And going away for a weekend without the phone or getting a total night's sleep without the phone in the room. Yeah, yeah. Not looking at it for the first 30 minutes of the day. I think anyone who's done those things will say that it significantly alters and improves one's experience of the rest of the day.

Right, right. So maybe we are being programmed, not to sound paranoid. Well, we are, and it's whose interest are we being programmed for? I mean... Is it just to make money? Because if people's attention spans are constantly being splintered this way, it's harder to focus. You're much more vulnerable to influence, right? to advertisements, to all kinds of gimmicks and things that are being implanted in your brain because you're not able to focus deeply enough and think independently.

So there's that danger. And then on the level of mastery in which I'm talking about how the human brain functions and what it wants and what it needs as nourishment is it needs slowness. It needs the slow pace of learning. bit by bit by bit by bit progressing, and then the brain alters as new pathways are created. And so you are literally in charge of your brain and the landscape of your brain.

And when it's like this other rhythm that people are programming for you, it's a landscape that's like a desert. There's no life coming up in it. There's no connections that are happening. And you're so much more vulnerable to people's influence, right? And that's, to me, the scary part. Yeah, one of the most impressive things I saw in the last year or so is this gold medalist at the Olympics, a freestyle skier from this woman who's at Stanford.

I think her name is Aileen Gu. There's a press conference where somebody asks her, what do you do to train your mind? You seem so articulate and so sharp. And in my mind, I'm thinking, you know,

Lean is clearly far to the right of average on many, many things, right? But at Stanford and elsewhere, but I will say often at Stanford, you encounter this phenotype. Like people are extremely articulate and very fast and very present. It's like a thing. And again, not just at Stanford, but there are a lot of them among the undergraduates especially.

Her answer is incredible. Her answer was about slowness, not about speed. Her answer was that she spends a lot of time in her head thinking about her thinking, pressure testing her beliefs and understanding. And from that, she realized she can shape her thoughts through neuroplasticity and become the person she wants to be. Wow. And then in a very delightful way, she throws in that she's young and therefore she also still has plasticity.

So she's not done, she's still going. But the interesting part about it, there are many interesting things about her, but the interesting part of that was that The speed that she can access is the reflection of the slowness, the slowing down rather of her process to get there. And I think it's a wonderful example because we only see the end product.

We think she skis and she's brilliant and she's articulate and everything for her must just go, you know, fire off at, you know, 12 cylinders all the time. Well, I know I read a quote a long time ago from the quarterback John Elway, the great Denver Bronco quarterback. And he said the secret to his incredible success was that everything slowed down on the football field.

Because normally things are happening in hyper speeds, right? You wonder how can anybody function on this? I got to a level where everything was just slowing down and I could see exactly where things were moving. So... his brain through mastering a process, which is what I describe in that book, is able to literally slow things down and see things that other people couldn't see.

I'd love your thoughts on experience versus report of experience and different ways to report experience. Here's my motivation for this question.

I think people are experiencing things, but a lot of times they're recording it now as they do it in order to share it with other people. And the motivation for that is entirely understandable. But you look at a concert, everyone's filming the concert and they're sharing it with the people who can't be there. So there's a really nice component to it.

But if somebody, let's say, goes on a big adventure, a long backpacking trip in Yosemite or down to the Amazon, some people are doing that and not reporting it to anyone. But I think now because of camera phones and social media, most people are thinking about if and how they will report the experience they're having, if not in real time, later.

And you on the other hand, although there are clips of you on podcasts and so forth on social media, and we're all grateful for that, you've chosen to do the long time scale reporting of your adventures and experiences. And movies are like that too. Couple hours, but still long form compared to social media. And you beautifully describe this thing about entering the time scale of the octopus's life or the dog's daily experience.

And I was thinking to myself, well, kind of like movies I've fallen in love with, concerts that transformed me. They required that I actually just be there and not think about the export of that experience at all. So once again, I'm wondering, are we limiting ourselves? Are we getting locked into the technology that is really limiting our experience? And what was the value for you in doing a long-term writing of this book? well it was more than long-term writing because i couldn't type so my left hand is still kind of frozen and so i had to hand write the entire book you were talking about slowness i had a system of two book stands one next to each other a notebook i

would write a story in the notebook by hand

I would then edit it by hand, recopying what I had written and occasionally changing a word and then going back and doing the same thing there and then going back and doing it again. So I had to like, it altered my thought processes because I was used to typing very fast, right? This was a whole different layer of thinking that I had to go through because when you're handwriting, your thinking really has to slow down.

You have to focus very deeply because you're You can't like quickly change things, right? So it created for me a different kind of book, I think, that slowness factor. But part of the sublime is getting outside the human, the human realm, right? Okay. So we live in this period. where we never interact with anything that's not human, right? So even if you're in the wilds, you're in Yosemite or something, you're still with your phone, you're still navigating with your phone, you're still recording it so people can see you, you're immersed in the social human world, right? And it's this little bubble that you live in, but life is much greater than the human.

there's a universe, there's a cosmos, there's animals, there's landscapes, there's the weirdness of being alive, there's time, all these things that you can explore and you can alter. But if you're so locked into the human social world, you cannot access the sublime, right? And in ancient cultures, there's a lot of things in there about our indigenous and our ancient ancestors, because I'm obsessed with that as I am with childhood.

And for them, They look at the world and they see like plants coming up out of the ground. They see enormous mastodons and bears that are twice the size of what bears are now. And they're going, they are obsessed with what is inhuman. And that's where religions start from. That's where spirituality starts from. is all these things that transcend the human and how insane it is that life dies and then reemerges out of the ground that these large animals are created.

So part of being human is this obsession with what isn't human. what transcends us as a species, fascinations with just the elements, with the clouds, with the sky, with everything around us that isn't just the social world. And so when you're so locked in and you have to climb a mountain, I have a lot of things in there about climbing mountains, which can be an incredibly sublime experience.

Because if you think about it, you're literally climbing up the side of something that's millions of years old, that predates humans, right? That emerged out of the ground out of this incredible process. You're climbing into the sky. You're almost like a bird, right? You're leaving the oxygen levels are changing. Your brain is changing. Climbing a mountain can be an incredibly sublime experience.

And mountain climbers have reported some of the most sublime experiences because at every moment, particularly rock climbing, They could die, right? And the intensity of life and death, it just makes it an addiction, okay? But if you're climbing the mountain and you're like filming it and looking at it and navigating through it, you're not experiencing the mountain itself.

So... The technology is actually a major roadblock to experiencing the sublime. It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be. You could use it as a tool and an instrument. So I looked online for like things that are going on with space and the new telescopes that they have launched and the images from NASA. about our universe, that is utterly sublime.

And I can't access that directly. I can't climb into the sky and see these things. So I'm not totally against technology. You can use it to sort of mine these incredible things that science is uncovering. But it's not about my reporting it back to other people. It's not about the social aspect of the Hubble, of the Vera Rubin telescope and what it means to me and my ego and how my people who are my followers can follow that.

It's just about the experience itself, right? So technology can be used for the sublime if it's not about your influencing and about the social element. Is it fair to say that... when we try to experience

life at the same speed that we're going to report those experiences, something crucial is lost. Yeah. Because one of the great joys for me in doing laboratory science, which I haven't done in a few years, we shut my lab basically in 2023, 24, because my postdocs moved on and I was doing this other podcast thing, was I would spend years looking at things down the microscope, collecting data, observing things.

And of course, the job of a scientist is to then take those observations and then put them into... photomicrograph form and put them out into the world for evaluation and sharing. But the process of writing a paper is a whole different biz. I'll go into seminars and talking about the work. It's at a completely different speed or a completely different spatial scale, but the adventure was down the microscope.

The report of the adventure was in papers and at meetings. Yeah, yeah. I never thought about the meetings or the paper as I was doing the work. It's a totally different set of brain circuits. And that's sort of a bit of what you're describing here. And I wonder, you know, our mutual friend Rick Rubenhill, he talks a lot about how he encourages artists to forget about how they're going to be perceived in order to do their best work, which then, of course, is perceived in the best way.

Yeah. But you have to get out of the... the delivery mode. And so going to a concert and filming yourself for the rest of the world there, it's like a collision of brain circuits. And it's almost like it detracts from the experience. Yesterday, I was driving back from Topanga. I was being in a limo chauffeured back to my house. And I'm listening to music.

And I'm listening to this recording of Scarlatti, this composer by Horowitz, the famous pianist. And I'm trying to get inside of each note and follow the music as it flows. And it's very difficult. My mind was continually wandering. But as I'm going inside the flow of the music, which alters your experience of time, by the way, I'm starting to see things in the music itself.

And I'm thinking the rhythms and the patterns and certain falling of notes has this emotional effect that's very interesting. And so I'm thinking along with the music. And I'm inside the notes. And I'm inside the progression. And I'm inside the composer's mind who composed it. I'm reliving his experience as he composed the music. And so the music has this level of experience, this level of being inside of it that can be very powerful because music is utterly sublime.

I have a lot of things in there about music because music takes us back to our pre-verbal roots. Birds sing. Language probably evolved from music itself, right? And music itself... Instrumental music doesn't have words, but it feels like the essence of our emotions, of our consciousness, right? So when you're able to enter into music and I have an exercise where you think musically and you follow the notes and you follow the logic and the progression, it's a very sublime experience.

But if you're at a concert, first of all, it's a little harder at a concert because the music is of a different order, but you can still do that. I remember... I'm going to date myself, and people are going to be laughing at me. But I would go to Grateful Dead concerts in the 70s when I was in college. And you could still have that. What I'm doing with Scarlatti, I would do with some of their long instrumental pieces, which were quite sublime.

So when you're doing that, you're not inside the music. You're like recording it. It's just like entertainment or something to stimulate you on this base level. There's a way of experiencing things where you're inside them and not outside. And movies are the same way. I like when I watch a movie, particularly of a different period of time or from the past, I like to feel like I'm inside the actual movie itself, that I actually can experience it as if I am there.

So when you're so immersed in how other people are looking at you, And that your only way of thinking about it is in terms of how other people are seeing it. You're not experiencing the actual cultural moment. And culture can and should be sublime if you experience it differently. And it seems that our best experiences will always come about from being really present to that work and experiences.

I mean, in a perhaps overly simplistic way, going to a concert and choosing to not merge with the performers, but rather merge with people who aren't there, means that you are in many ways not there. Yeah. Again, I get the motivation of people wanting to share, but it's a bit of a gimmick and a heck of a trap because ultimately like the sum total of your life is these like experiences that are mundane, but you can, as you've pointed out, you can convert those into sublime experiences and the big stuff, the peak experiences.

I mean, those are awesome too. And there's no reason to not report things, but I do think that the speed of the reporting is, And the fact that it happened separate from the experience seems very, very important. I think about like a news anchor. I'm here at the storm and the storm... So they're experiencing the storm, but they're also just trying to get the message out, right? And so you can convey something about the storm, but they're not really in the experience.

They're in the experience of reporting it, right? But if they were to film themselves walking through it and getting blown around, right? And then... Later, you would think about how that would be transmitted. There's this way in which we fractionate ourselves through technology, which raises a question. I was thinking this before. You opted to write the book by hand as opposed to using audio recordings.

Why was that? Because you could have easily just sat with hands still and done that. So in the end, I filled... over 100 notebooks with my handwritten things. Literally, I can show you in my garage. But at the very end, when I thought things were good enough, I would use Whisper transcription, okay? And then I would print it out and edit with hand again.

And then finally... Dictate it again one final time and edit it with one hand. Okay, so the slowness was intense. But

you know this as a neuroscientist. The relationship between the brain and the hand is a very, very powerful one. It has very ancient roots. So many of the neural pathways involve the hand and the brain. because that's where our intelligence evolved, picking up things and manipulating them and creating tools. The relationship between the brain and the hand is very, very powerful.

So when you handwrite, you're using the brain differently than when you type and look at a screen. It's a different flow of time, okay? And then if you just dictate into the computer information, it's even kind of even more alienating in a way because your hands aren't involved at all, at least in typing you are. And so to me, I tried to immediately dictate it.

Something was lost. I didn't feel like I was expressing something deep because my hand literally has to be involved in the creation of it. And I would find, first of all, the transcription things, you know, AI is so sophisticated, but the transcription things are actually quite primitive. They don't do punctuation. They don't exactly hear what you're saying, so you'll have to go back over a lot of it.

It can be very frustrating. It's not like I'm creating oral literature. I'm not Homer. I'm not remembering, not singing about a ballad of people that I've memorized. And so it's like this immediate thing is coming out of you, whereas writing by hand, you have to think. You have to sit there and ponder each movement of your hand and the ink.

I also got heavily into ink, I have to say. So I'm a fetishist because handwriting is a very sensual experience where this isn't. And so I got all these fountain pens and I buy all these different colored inks from this company in Italy and the different, the inks had this beautiful kind of flow to it and a feel to it to actually see ink on a page.

So handwriting is a kind of a sensual experience if you go through it, right? Like calligraphy can be a very sensual experience. So people will say, why don't you just dictate your book, Robert? It's so easy, but I couldn't find, I couldn't, it wasn't me. It wasn't like natural to me. And so I had to go recourse to the handwriting aspect of I have a question and a perhaps interesting tidbit to share about the hands and handwriting.

What color ink are you, a black, a blue-black, or a blue? I had different colors. So there's this company called Visconti, Italian company. They make wonderful fountain pens. And they have this one fountain pen called Homo Sapiens, which is my favorite. And they have these beautiful bottles of ink. And I have sepia, which I love. It's a beautiful color, sepia.

It's this weird brown, yellow brown. For an ink, it's magnificent. I have black. I have turquoise. And I have red. And then I also have green, but I don't use the green very much. So I would mix up the colors because that would, each day it said, look, what color do I feel like today? Oh, I feel like writing in red, but But then I'd always end up kind of going back to sepia because I love that sepia color.

This is clearly being communicated through the universe to us. You know, the origins of sepia is from the ink of the cuttlefish. So we worked on or had, as I prefer to say it, sepia bendensis, which is the dwarf cuttlefish. So the Latin name of the cuttlefish is actually sepia. And their ink was the original source. Is the ink that color that comes out of them? It is? I mean, depending on the...

the water environment they're in and the lighting they're under. But yeah, that's the origin. The hand, you may or may not know, I learned this from my good friend Eddie Chang that we were discussing earlier, the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, one of the leading expert neuroscientists on speech and language and epilepsy and a true savant of all things, neuro and more.

he told me that the hand representation in the brain isn't just close to, but is nested inside the language areas. The Italians, tell us this right away. They move their hands as they speak. And then recently when recording my audio book, it's the first book I've ever written. And then recording the audio book, I found that if I didn't allow myself to move my hands and gesticulate with my hands, it was harder to enunciate properly.

So he said, oh, of course, because there's all these feedback loops. And

you start to look at this across cultures and you start to see that when, or even individuals, and you see that when people are trying to formulate their sentences very carefully and punctuate them in their mind as they speak them, their hands tend to go still. And then when they hit a sort of verbal flow, their hands spontaneously start to move.

So there's a direct linkage there. There's no question. Also, our language reflects that. I grasp an idea. People have analyzed the number of words for thinking and knowledge that have to do with the actual grasping and the use of the hand. Amazing. So I often think about this. Our particular consciousness... has a pattern to it that is very much constricted by language and grammar, right? So we have a subject and an object, right? And most languages have that, although some don't.

The subject and the object, which makes us think of cause and effect, right? We think of past, present, and future. We have those tenses, so we always are thinking in terms of sequences. So I have the thought experiment in my head of an alien form of life and an alien form of intelligence and consciousness that had a different structure of grammar that wasn't based so much on the hand and these kind of abstract concepts, what would their language be like? It would be very different from our own, but it makes you realize that our language kind of sometimes can restrict what we think and we're always within those parameters.

But the relationship of thinking and the hand and also vision, because so many of our thoughts about knowledge have to do with seeing, oh, I see what you mean kind of thing. You don't literally see, but we use visual metaphors all the time and hand metaphors. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't.

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Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack. to talk a little bit more about childhood. And I know I've asked you this in a previous meeting, but long ago when I read mastery, I was just, you know, like clubbed over the head in the best possible sense of the phrase with

the statement that you made that some event early in life for each of us kind of portends what we should or ought to explore later in life. Like there's some unique event that places some unique capacity, curiosity, hunger in us to go do something that is uniquely us. No other person had that experience and the experiences that follow that would allow them to do that thing.

What is your suggestion for people who want to think about what that seed event might have been if they don't know? Like how do we know what that thing was for us if we're like 12 years or older? I was always clear for myself about what that was because I was obsessed from a very early age with words. I just thought words themselves are very strange and very weird that we have these words that mean things.

And I remember, I think it was in the third grade, my teacher put up the word carpenter and she said, now try and see how many words you can form out of those letters. And for some reason, that just excited me so much that with these little individual letters, you could create all these different words, right? I don't know why, I can't explain it.

There's no logic behind it. But it seemed like letters and words were magical and that always attracted me. So I always felt a connection to, knew I had to be a writer because I had that weird connection to words themselves, not just what they meant, but the sounds of them, right? Obsessed me. But after writing Mastery, a lot of people would come to me because I talk about your life's task.

And I also have a chapter in the new book about this concept. And they would say, well, Robert, I don't know what my life's task is. I'm in my 20s. You write about it. You write about Da Vinci. You write about all these other people and stuff. I have no idea. And I had to go across this barrier because I never had that experience. I always knew that it had to be writing.

So I had to try and understand their perspective, which is in teaching, good teachers know that they know more than their students, but they have to put their minds in the minds of the students who don't know enough. So you have to kind of lower yourself into their way of, not lower, but inside their less knowledgeable experience. So I had to go like, why wouldn't they know it? Why would they? Because if you think about your early childhood, you had those moments, right? You knew that you would love this.

You love kicking a ball. I love sports, right? You knew that I love music and sounds. I talk a lot about Howard Gardner and his five frames of intelligence. You had one of them. But thinking deeply about their experience, I came to realize that, first of all, they've lost a deep connection to those childhood experience, to those moments. They've forgotten about them.

Why have they forgotten about them? Maybe they weren't as intense as mine was. But also what happened was... All these other voices intervened, right? Their parents told them what they should love, what they shouldn't love. They had to learn math and they didn't want to learn math. The teachers told them what they were good at. They get funneled through this system, which kind of constrains your brain into a certain career path.

This is what you have to learn, right? And they hear a thousand different voices in their head, and they have no connection to what they really love, to what Abraham Maslow calls your impulse voices, voices inside of you that are natural, that are physiological inside of you. They don't hear it anymore. And so I had to kind of realize that we have to cut out all of those voices.

And I would go through this process. And I compared it to like archeology. We were digging and digging and digging into their childhood for little fossils of information. I would kind of go through a process of, can you remember certain moments in your early, what are your earliest childhood memories? What are memories of things that were very exciting to you? We literally had to go back into their childhood to uncover those moments where something sparked and they were excited.

not because their parents told them, but because it was them. And for me, it's a hard concept to understand because I always had that, but people lose touch with what their own bodies want, with their own impulses, their own desires are telling them. And so we would cut through all of the other noise. I would also go through this process of you're in your twenties.

What is it that you hate? What repels you? What repulses you? For me,

I hated working for other people. I'll just lay it out straight. I hated the egos. I hated the political games. I hated people. It wasn't about results. It was about currying up to the boss and how good you were with the charming stuff. I hated it. I never lasted more than 11 months at any single job in my entire life.

Knowing that I could not work for other people, the only thing I could do was write books. It's the only profession for me where I didn't have a boss, essentially. I mean, you kind of have a boss. But anyway, what is it that you hate? What are the things that you can't do that when you do, they just feel wrong? And a lot of it is when you were frustrated...

That's a key moment in your life. What is frustrating to you? Listen to that voice because it's part of that life's task, that inner voice that's talking to you saying, this isn't you, this doesn't fit you. Listen to it and don't just see frustration, see something positive. It's telling you something about how you've taken the wrong path in life.

it's not easy and i sometimes spend days with these people and weeks trying to help them but i've had had some success but it takes time you know you have to be willing to commit to the time and you have to journal and you have to write about yourself and you have to go deep into your memories do you have to think about your childhood and you have to go back into those moments that had nothing to do with what other people were telling you I think I've heard two different notions about how great ideas and insights come to us.

One is in the doing, you know, we're drilling, drilling, lathing, lathing away at ideas or a physical thing. And, and the other is that they come to us spontaneously away from the attempt to like get to an answer. You like, in the shower or while running or doing something. And I wonder for you, has that process of insight and epiphany changed as when comparing before as to after your stroke? I mean, you're still fairly mobile.

You're clearly very articulate. But I wonder, are your ideas coming in at a different rate or in different places because of the changes in your physical life? I'll tell you what happened. And it's very interesting. I noticed after my stroke that I was more emotional. I had less control over my emotions. I would suddenly start crying and I don't really know why I was crying.

I would suddenly feel kind of a wave of ecstasy. Why is it happening to me? And then I did a little bit of research and you would know more about this, but Stroke, the right side of the brain affecting the right side of the brain often has that effect on stroke victims. The left side is language and logic and reasoning powers. The right side, and there's a lot of cliches involved in the left-right things, and I understand that.

But the right is a more kind of holistic and more kind of emotional part of the brain. And so I was feeling on a deeper level I was also feeling like so much more empathy for people, right? Like I would see other people who were handicapped, who were still in a wheelchair, and I was like, almost want to cry. And I'd almost like, damn it, I understand your weakness.

I understand the feeling of helplessness. So my brain shifted into something more emotional. I saw a quote from the poet John Keats, one of my favorite poets, and it said, oh, to have a life of sensations instead of thoughts. And so you can think emotionally. You can think through sensations. You can empathize. You can feel your way into things.

And it's a different form of thinking. And it made me realize how much your brain and the structure of it alters how you think and how you relate to the world. So something I had no control over, a stroke, altered me in this weird way. It made me more emotional. So it makes you realize how the brain so much controls who you are and how you experience life.

And so I had this much more kind of intuitive feel for the subject. The sublime was no longer an intellectual thing like it would have been 20 years ago. It was a feeling inside of me. And when I wrote a story, it would resonate inside of me, and I knew that it was right. And if it felt too intellectual, I said, this isn't working for me.

So would you say your stroke sort of freed you up to some extent to allow certain things to come out that maybe before you would have self-edited? I think so. And I think,

I don't know, it's going to sound woo-woo. It's going to sound like I've gone off the deep edge. But it felt like the stroke happened for a purpose, right? And to me, the way I look at it is, if I see it as a curse, I become a bitter person and I just shrivel up. But if I see it as a blessing, it's a much different experience. And the blessing was that I had to find the sublime in the smallest details.

Readers aren't going to be able to trek through the Gobi Desert. They're not going to be able, a lot of them, swim with dolphins. They can't have these adventures. But everyone lives in a house, in a room. We all feel kind of constricted. I can now bring the sublime to the level of your daily experience. Because... I compared myself, the image that came to me when I sat in my little office trying to write the book was that I was a bird in a cage, right? I used to be flying around and having all this fun, and now I was in a cage.

And I had to accommodate myself to a cage, and I had to kind of find a way to sing inside my cage. And so a lot of people are like that. They don't have access. They don't live in mansions. They don't have magnificent gardens. They live in small apartments. And I don't want to give this feeling like the sublime is some elite experience that only rich people can have.

The point of the book is that the need for a transcendent experience, which is what the sublime is about in many ways, is as important a need to humans as clothing, as shelter, as companionship, as anything else. It's deeply, deeply embedded in our nature, right? So I wanted to feel like everybody can have access to it. So if a stroke victim whose life is so limited can find their way to the sublime, then that means that anybody can find their way.

And that's how I wanted to write the book. What I'm about to ask is somewhat of a merge between some of your prior books about power, about personalities, about performers, and the newest book coming out soon about the sublime. And

In order to try and make this succinct, I'll just do this in bullet points. We've had a lot of discussions on this podcast about mitochondria, which are the powerhouse of the cell and energy and so forth. And one guest in particular, Martin Picard, who's an expert in mitochondria, talked about directing mitochondrial energy toward particular endeavors.

Focus is what creates our lives and us, people's experience of us and our experiences.

There are these people throughout history who seem to have so much energy and to focus that energy so intensely and do incredible things in art and, you know, oration, you know, like we might call this like charisma. Yeah. And they often died early. And I've been really intrigued by this. Like maybe their energy was packed in space and time and focus into such a, like a dense beam that they couldn't go on a long time.

And I don't, this is really woo what I'm about to ask. But in researching this and writing The Law of the Sublime, did you ever think about like, what was the experience of some of the people that you had written about earlier? Like the intense life of somebody like 50 Cent, the intense life of some of the people you wrote about in The Laws of Seduction, who are these extreme examples of life energy funneled through a particular personality and style.

And many of whom, I mean 50 is still around, but many of whom are

They die early. Does that ever come to you as an idea? Like this isn't the slow paced life. These are people that burn hot, make huge contributions and flame goes out. The sublime is often like an experience of intensity, right? So concentrated in a particular moment is a very intense experience, like a candle that's kind of burning. 50 himself, he had a near-death experience.

And in the last chapter of the book, I did him with him. I call it the sublime. And I feel like his near-death experience has completely altered him. And although we see this figure of this entrepreneur and this kind of thug and this guy with beefs and he's always putting people down, that'd be the last thing you'd think of as sublime. But I know 50.

I was with him. I spent six months by his side. I studied him deeply. And his closeness to death altered him. And he actually has great access to that kind of energy that came from his near-death experience. Now, other people whose sense of power is only about the social, I don't feel like a sense of the sublime. But if you're like a great writer or you're a scientist like Albert Einstein, he didn't die young, I don't think.

No, no. And biologists, on average, tend to have good long careers. Mathematicians have briefer careers. Well, the mathematicians are interesting because it's a known fact that the greatest math discoveries are in your 20s and early 30s, and then it just kind of dries up. Yeah, I think the Fields Medal can only be given to people, I think it's 40 years and younger.

Yeah. Biology is a more cumulative... type career yeah you have long careers that that are successful along the way and and accumulate a rich amount of knowledge yeah math is is uh it's a quick burn i wonder why it's very weird like that i don't know i mean i'm intrigued by the fact that um child prodigies yeah their peers eventually catch up to them uh-huh people catch up like with mastery people who go deep deep into a field and then burn themselves out the sublimity is in the sense of flow that they have So the sublime, as I say, is kind of a transcendent experience.

You're getting outside of your ego. You're getting outside the narrowness of your own little limited world and you're experiencing something wider, right? When you study chess deeply or Einstein with the theory of relativity or whatever the field is, painting or whatever, you have these moments of intense flow, right? where you and the thing that you're creating are one.

You're outside of yourself. It's almost like an outer body experience, right? And I talk in the book about the feeling of inspiration, which is something that goes back thousands of years, and people report it, and I've experienced it myself, where ideas seem to be coming to you from the outside. You can't explain why this epiphany happened.

There's no logic, there's no order to it. It's almost as if somebody is breathing inside of you, which is the origin of the word inspired to breathe into something. Okay, so

when you're so deeply immersed in a subject, you're kind of having this kind of moment of flow and this kind of transcendent experience and ideas are coming to you from the outside and you don't even know why or how, and it is utterly sublime. So that is... a connection between some of my earlier work and the later work. But a lot of these kind of master manipulators, like an Otto Bismarck or like some of the Cesare Borgia, I can't really find anything sublime in their experience.

I try to write about the dark side of human nature in the sublime book and how we can see something sublime in it, but kind of the dark side of the sublime. There's something sublimely evil in the world, right? But that's really kind of another story. But the feeling... When you're playing the piano and you feel like you and the keyboard are one or you're playing chess and you and the chessboard are one is a totally sublime moment, totally sublime experience.

So mastery of all my books is the one that's closest to the sublime. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Function. Function provides over 160 advanced lab tests to give you a clear snapshot of your bodily health. This snapshot gives you insights into your heart health, your hormone health, autoimmune function, nutrient levels, and much more.

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To learn more, visit functionhealth.com slash Huberman and use the code Huberman for a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman. Several times you've said that accessing the sublime is about relating as a human to things that are not human. Is there any way to access the sublime through human-human interaction? Yes, most definitely.

So I have a chapter called The Love Sublime. And it's not the art of seduction and people are going, Robert, have you changed? And I go, well, no. Seduction is a book in itself, but love is something different. And so I talk about the sense of falling so deeply in love with another human being. that you lose a sense of your own ego. And the chapter is called, Escape the Prison of the Ego, the Love Sublime.

And the idea is the human being is two sides to us. We're physical, we have an animal side, but we have something else. And I would hate to use the word, but I would say it's spiritual, right? And so if the only interest in the other person is about sex, There's some level of satisfaction to it, but there's also an emptiness that goes with it, right? But if it's just about religion and about, you know, going to church or whatever, there's nothing physical in it.

And it doesn't feel so deeply human. It's just the spiritual. But I'm a human being. I have a body. I have sexual desires. I have all these other things going on inside of me that religion has nothing to do with. Love is an area where you can combine the physical and the spiritual into something very, very, very profound. And I say it's kind of the ultimate human experience that we can have because your physical attraction to someone is, turns into something spiritual.

People are objects that we cannot see inside of them. But in love, that object becomes a subject. They become something that's inside of them. You can feel their experience. They become a part of you. Now, people are wondering, well, how often does that ever happen? You know, that doesn't sound like my experience. What I try to explain is the metaphor we use is falling in love, and it's very eloquent.

So it's literally a sense of falling. And falling has an element of fear, right? That's what you have to understand. Love isn't about comfort and security and Russell Stover chocolates and handing out red roses and valentines. There's something dark and terrifying about it because you're falling. You're letting go of your defenses and you're being vulnerable like an animal that's exposing its belly.

And that's a frightening experience. And what happens to people is as you start falling, you stop and you go, i don't completely trust this person i'm becoming vulnerable and if i become vulnerable this isn't conscious it's unconsciously they can hurt me they could abandon me and the feeling of abandonment is like perhaps the most primal horrible emotion for a human to have it goes back to our early early childhood experiences right and so we stop falling and we start going I'm not so sure about that.

Maybe they don't love me as much, or maybe I can't trust them. And as you go through that process, the other person senses it in a very primal way as well. And they stop falling because they can feel that you're not falling along with them. If you fell completely and you lost your defenses, the other person would be invited to fall along with you.

And so the reason you've never experienced in your life is you don't want to be vulnerable. And that's very natural in the modern world because our life is harsh and there's so many intrusive things going on. You want to defend yourself. I'm trying to tell young people in particular that you live in a culture that does not want you to be in love with someone.

They demean love. They demean the aspect of it. They think of it as sentimental and old fashioned, the concept of love that I'm bringing out right now. And I want to tell you, that the act of loving a person and letting go of all your defenses is a form of rebellion against the ugliness in this world. You're doing something different. You're rebelling against all the narcissism and all the defensiveness and all the closed off elements in our culture.

And you're saying, fuck you to that culture. I'm going to fall in love with a single individual and it's going to be an incredible transcendent sublime experience. I want to bring that back into the culture because

In the 13th century, we had this new thing called courtly love, right? And it's where our whole notions of Western love came from, right? Troubadours writing about it. And the sense of love was a physical and a spiritual experience. And it was kind of sacrilegious because only Christ should be a spiritual experience. So there was something very kind of rebellious about this idea that loving a man or a woman could actually be a spiritual experience.

I'm hoping in that chapter to bring back that value, particularly among young people, because they're so afraid of being vulnerable. They're so afraid of being hurt. And being hurt is okay. It's a very important human emotion to go through. Rejection and feeling hurt is actually an experience that will grow you in a way. And never allowing that falling process to occur is, I don't know, you're going to miss something very deep in life.

It does seem that people are in a very self-protective mode these days. Part of me wants to say it's because of the need for every experience, including love, to be reported on. You go back to that, but I think it's true. Yeah, you know, like that people are going to have to post it and it's going to have to be shared. Actually, I found recently a friend got married.

We're not real close, but... in a really stealth way, just like, you know, and I wasn't close enough to them to be invited. And I was like, that's pretty awesome. They just like went and got married with their closest people. Completely stealth. This is a public facing person. Nobody knows it. And the reason I think it's awesome is because it means it was just for them.

And, you know, and they're early in the relationship, but that's pretty darn cool. As opposed to the need to project it out to the world and tell everybody. I have this, I call it this demon that's inside of you. It's a voice that's constantly telling you to mistrust the other person and to feel like something is wrong in the relationship.

It's a demon inside of you that's speaking to you. And a lot of it is social. Your friends will tell you, will fill you with doubts about the other person. It's not cool to be so involved with another person. You're being egotistical. You're cutting yourself off. You're going to hear these voices. And that's what I meant about the culture is kind of against this whole thing.

And so the social element is actually playing a very large part in the fact that you don't want to make a fool of yourself, for instance. You want people to think that you're cool. That you can sleep with many different women, that you're not such a sop, you're not gullible kind of thing. And so it's a kind of a cynicism and a hardness that I find very dangerous because...

the sublime is kind of letting go of things and it's almost like softening yourself to the world and letting the world enter into you and kind of transport you. And that's what this kind of love sublime is inviting you into. Well, and the incel movement is the ultimate extreme of this. Although now, in large part because of recent events, we're also seeing something kind of analogous to the incel movement on the Female side.

For sure. A lot of... They have a name for it. I can't remember what it is, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to go down the sociopolitical rabbit hole, but there's a big divide right now that is really about lack of trust. Yeah. Love has been kind of relegated to the idiot's path. Yeah, yeah. I don't believe that, but that's certainly what it seems like out there.

just addressing the Andrew Tate kind of experience of the world and sort of the alienation from the opposite sex and seeing them as kind of the enemy is a very troubling thing. And what it is is it's like a fear of your own self because every man has a feminine side to him unavoidably. And why? because our closest relationship as a baby was with our mother, a female, right? And we internalize her voice.

We internalize her energy very deeply in a way you can't even remember. And our attractions to women are very much impressed upon us by our relationship to our mother. We were helpless for God's sake. And a woman was dominating our lives. We were dependent on her, right? So imprinted in you, besides the fact that you as a man have a fair amount of estrogen in you as well, there is a female component to your psyche and women have the same thing.

There's a masculine side to their psyche. And when you split it off and women are the enemy, men are the enemy, you're actually, you are the enemy of yourself. You are actually denying something deep about your own nature. I'm not trying to say anything against homosexual relationships. Please don't get me wrong. But the idea of a man and a woman, you're bringing together your feminine side and their masculine side and you're merging it.

And there's something kind of complete and and and wondrous about it it is this kind of you're opening yourself to your own nature and when you're angry at the other sex you're actually angry at yourself in a deep way you're afraid of the feminine that is deeply embedded inside of you you've sort of touched on um spirituality and religion and notions of god i think any conversation about the sublime at least this conversation, I feel like would be incomplete if we didn't sort of address that, that for many people, not all, but for many people, a literal love relationship where they love God and they feel that God loves them, is a profoundly important part of their life

experience. It's not just consoling, but it really gives them access to levels of perception and experience that are irreplaceable by humans. So I'll just say it directly. I don't get the sense that you're a religious person. You can correct me if that's wrong. But everything you said, you know, accessing the sublime is about the relationship to the non-human.

Even the pain and pleasure piece, like the you know, the depictions of Christ on the cross is a painful image, but then there are these loving images of that's Christianity, but you get the idea. So where does the concept and for you, the experience of spirituality, religion, and God match up with the sublime? Where does it not square with your own experience? I don't know.

It's a very complex issue. So there are different forms of religion. In Buddhism, there really isn't a concept of a higher being. It's that you yourself are Buddha. Buddha's mind and mind is Buddhist, so it's inside of you kind of thing. And there's some elements of Christianity that way. But when I look at the earliest religions, indigenous religions and spirituality in the pagan world, because I have a chapter on pagan religion in the book, I say that this need to feel transcendent, to feel connected to something higher than the individual life, is deeply, deeply sublime.

It's a deep human need, okay? And so why do we have this need for belief in something higher than ourselves? It's because we're aware of our death. We're aware of our mortality, unlike any other animal that we know of. Animals intuit the moment that they're going to die, but they don't think about it. We have the ability to think about our death, and it cripples us.

If I'm going to die, why write a book? Why spend all these years doing things? It's going to cancel everything out. There's no meaning or purpose to my life.

So our awareness of death makes us go search of something higher, of something, a deeper and deeper need inside of us. And religion for centuries played a huge, huge role in satisfying that need. And it was a very important need and it kept to some degree, a level of sanity among humans. And then in the 18th century,

we can pretty much pinpoint is when religion really started to fade in Western experience at least, right? With the enlightenment and certain philosophers and the birth of science and then the industrial revolution. And the sense of God faded from our experience. People are still religious today, but this sense of it being a living presence that was with you.

If you study Western civilization in the 14th century, God was a part of everything that you thought and did. Everything you saw, every food that you ate, every element of life was embedded in the sacred, right? We humans lost that. And then in the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution happens, science, the world is changing. And people started to rebel against that.

They were frightened of it. And there was like the romantic movement. And that is when the word sublime came into our language and became very popular. The romantic poets and philosophers popularized the word sublime. So my point is, is that we've reached this point where, where I believe, although there are a lot of religious people, the really deep sense of spirituality, the really deep sense of something larger than you, that lives inside of you, that you are a part of, and that is guiding your life, is lost.

And with it, a very, very important part of our life is lost. Religion was an anchor in our lives, and now it's gone. Now, I'm not saying that I'm a believer. I'm just saying, I'm just noting this phenomenon. And I feel like the loss of religion, the loss of the sense of something transcended, is what is partially making us insane right now.

I look at the world and I feel like it's a madhouse. People are just going berserk. They're so disconnected from their bodies, from their lives, from everything, from their environment. And so the loss of God, the death of God, the death of religion was a very, very painful moment in our history and in our psyche. And in some ways, getting back to a kind of a transcendent experience in some ways can solve this, can help us, can get us back to something, a very elemental need in us.

And in an odd way, I find that discoveries of science have a very deep kind of spiritual component. That we're learning about the human brain is insane. I'm not saying it was a creator about it, but there's something absolutely transcendent about studying the human brain, learning about the cosmos, learning about the Big Bang. is to me, it's like a spiritual experience.

And so we can recover some of that in the modern world. We don't necessarily have to go back to organized religion, but a sense of feeling that we are part of something much larger than our individual lives is an actual critical component to our experience. I really appreciate those thoughts and insights. I was thinking about your book, The Law of the Sublime, as a portal into richer experience.

I wasn't thinking about the macro there. Were you thinking about the sort of macro offering and hope for the book to have that impact as you wrote it? Because you wrote it across many years, seven years, you said, and so it sort of happened in parallel with the... with the maddening of madness taking over the world. It was always in the back of my mind, but it's a grandiose ambition, so I don't want to be grandiose.

But I tell you, recently I saw a film that I love by this director Pasolini, Italian director, and it was called The Gospel According to St. Matthew. And literally Pasolini, who was a homosexual Marxist and was pretty much an atheist, he grew up in Italian Catholic culture, He kind of fell in love with the idea of Christ. And he did a film

literally recreating the gospel according to Matthew, the book of Matthew in the New Testament. He uses all of the words from that chapter, and he chronologically goes through all of the experiences of Christ. And he uses non-professional actors. The guy who plays Christ is like a 19-year-old Spanish student of mathematics. He just plucked him out, right? And the movie is actually a very spiritual experience because it literally feels like you're there and you can literally understand where it comes from.

I was raised Jewish, but when you read the New Testament, it's beautiful. And the ideas in it are beautiful. So I went back and I reread the book of Matthew. And I'm going, how can... a philosophy that is so much about love. And there's expressions in there where somebody asks, well, should I love my neighbor? And Christ says, anybody can love your neighbor.

What you need to love is the person who's not your neighbor. You need to love the person furthest away from your experience, the marginalized, the people that normally are hated. How can a religion that expresses that end up now Being this kind of philosophy of division and hatred and marginalizing and polarization and victimization. How is it that we take something and turn it into its opposite? It's something maybe I'll write about in another book because it's a phenomenon that fascinates me.

I don't claim to know the answer deeply, but my reflexive response is by taking something that's not of humans and humans contorting it, perverting it into something that's of them, right? And I think perverted is the operative word there, right? I think stolen spirituality, it's manipulated. And is it fair to say that one of the major barriers to the sublime is focusing on things that are of humans too much.

Yeah. I mean, humans do incredible things, but and is it then fair to say that maybe the world's losing its mind because we have too much awareness of what other humans are doing all the time? Yeah. And it's blocking our awareness of all the other stuff around us. I was reading the newspaper this morning, which I do every morning, and there was two articles in there.

One was they're beginning to alter their idea of where alien life could evolve. There are these planets out there that are, I think they call it K7 or something, I don't know. They're around a star that is much larger than our sun. and that therefore burns rather more slowly. And they're perfectly round. They're not marked by all these meteors that would have hit planet Earth.

And because they're a perfect distance from the sun, they probably have water and probably life forms could evolve on these planets. And they were calling it, it would be like a paradise of evolution. I can't remember the specifics of why they say that, but it would be an environment much more conducive to life than planet Earth. And it was speculating.

It took us almost 4 billion years to evolve intelligent life on planet Earth. And that's probably why we haven't encountered other alien intelligent life forms, because it takes so long to develop, right? But these planets... Their star won't burn out. They've probably been around much longer. They probably could be intelligent life, right? I'm thinking, that's one article in the paper.

People should be like exploding over that thought. Because what it does is it makes you realize our own planet and how weird it is that life evolved on it. And it was a very precarious experiment. It almost never happened. So it makes you realize how precarious life is on planet Earth. The article I read was about dinosaurs and this fossil that was discovered in China of an early bird.

It's the most preserved fossil of a bird in the dinosaur era. Because birds are evolved from dinosaurs. We know that. But there were also flying pterosaurs. There were flying reptiles that weren't. that didn't evolve, that weren't dinosaurs, right? And I'm thinking, they were explaining how beautiful the fly, how they took to flight and the different forms of flight that occurred.

Thinking, my God, our planet, just imagine what that life was like back then, how insane it was that there were dinosaurs, how insane it was. My point is, We could be immersing ourselves in all of these insane things that science is revealing to us. It could literally alter our minds and our relationship to people, to life. When you realize that life was this thin experiment that almost never happened, it alters how you look at things, right? So, yeah, we have to get outside the human, but scientists are the ones who are uncovering it.

Humans are this insane... creature that is able to uncover the secrets of the universe, right? So in essence, I try and say in the book, we are sublime that we can do that, that we can undercover what is not human and the laws of the universe and things going on. So it's not like the human is this ugly thing. If you think of science, it's built up of That hundreds of thousands of individual work, research papers, people immersing themselves in details and then uncovering these fantastic things, right? So to me, science is a sublime phenomenon and it's humans uncovering these insane stories.

It's not like I'm saying I hate humans and you guys have to immerse yourself. It's actually the opposite. We have uncovered these phenomenal stories. We are the creators of what is sublime. And so that to me is, I can remember the early days of the internet back in the early 2000s, where it wasn't what the internet is now. It was actually a realm of kind of freedom.

I could connect to somebody in Thailand who was interested in Nietzsche, who I am, and was interested in John Coltrane, who I am. And we could talk and we could connect and we could see, yes, you come from a very different culture. Why are you interested in these things? And it would be very fascinating. It was this realm of freedom. It was like a giant human brain.

So technology could be sublime. It could lead to a paradise. Humans have a sublime quality, but we also have the capacity for something much different. And look at what the internet has become. It's become something that is not like it was in the early 2000s. It's turned into something very ugly and very dark.

I have thought for a while now that the real problem with humans is our propensity to get absorbed by drama and by numbing out. Oh, God. In fact, my mental practice in the morning... do a short meditation, very brief. I can do the sunlight thing and the rest, but I have this imagery that I implant in my head of like a thin, almost like a tightrope that I have to walk.

And on either side is like a slide down to the, not to the death, but in one side is drama and the other side is numbing out. And I do realize that you have to get a certain distance and then that tightrope turns into more of a of a flat surface that you can rest on and stay. But those early hours, like, you know, I need to do that because otherwise there are too many things, algorithms and so forth that can just yank me down the either side of that tightrope and it's not good.

I realize that you put actionable tools in the book, but I'm pulling from what we've discussed so far. I'm hearing that an important component to accessing the best of what is human, but also the non-human in order to enrich one's life and access to the sublime is a slowing down. So that means intentionally not leaping onto the the time scale, the rhythm of just anyone,

to be very deliberate about that or just anything. And I do hear you loud and clear saying that, you know, humans have a tremendous amount of value to offer our lives and not just in love, although certainly there, as you described, but it does seem that it's getting harder and harder to have a great life.

even with resources, the challenge becomes not getting yanked down the sides of this imagery. So I think we can easily see the barriers to a good life, to the sublime. If you want to just toss out a couple other tools or ways to access the better version of ourselves so that we can get to the sublime, you mentioned meditation, writing by hand.

These might seem, you know, simple but they're very profound ways to get there do you keep your phone out of the room when you work when you relate uh to other people i do but of course i'm human and it tempts me and i understand the addiction so i've uh i don't want to there's a slight hypocritical side to me because i can feel it and i do have to take the phone and put it in the drawer and i'm getting better and better at it But you talked about numbness.

I think a lot of the sublime is a function of your sensitivity to the world. So you were born with these senses like any creature. that are open, that are constantly giving you feedback from the environment, right? That's what senses are for. That's what they're designed for. So you don't die. So you see there's a tiger over there and it doesn't kill you.

Your senses are there to connect you to your environment, to connect you to the outside world. I have a story in the book about this Russian scientist at the turn of the 20th century who's a geographer who's sent to Siberia. to kind of discover, to map, give a map of Siberia, the forest there called the Taiga. And he encounters in the middle of this an indigenous hunter named Dersu Usula, famous book, and a movie was made of it.

He's part of this indigenous culture called the gold, which is on the brink of extinction. And he's a lone hunter and trapper. And the Russian scientist invites him to join their expedition as a scout because he's intrigued by this man. He slowly realizes that this man has an intelligence and a sensitivity to the environment that is far superior to anything that he possesses.

He can read the sky and the climate, and he knows the weather that's coming. He can see the birds and know what it indicates. At one point, they encounter a tiger. They hear a tiger growling through some bushes. And a Siberian tiger is not something you want to mess with, right? And so the Russian guy gets frightened. He's frightened. He's got a frightened reaction.

He picks up his rifle. And Dersu says, put that rifle down. He like screams at him. He goes, walks up to the tiger, which he calls Amba. And he goes, Amba, calm down. We're not here to hurt you. We understand this is your forest. We respect you. We will not harm you. And the Russian guy's freaking out. And the tiger walks away. And at the end of the story, Dersu ends up getting murdered by some people who were stealing his, whatever, his trappings.

He goes, we humans have lost something. If only we could keep our scientific culture, which he is a scientist, but also have these powers of our senses, we would be another animal. We would be insane. We'd be insanely powerful and we wouldn't be so destructive. We have powers that come through the senses. It's a form of intelligence, right? And when our sensory experience is so limited as it is as we live in towns and cities, it's so same.

We're not really listening to sounds. We're not really smelling things. We're not really looking. Our thoughts become constricted. We think we're just intelligent animals, but we're physical creatures. Our intelligence is modeled after our senses. And if we only see the same things, our minds kind of atrophy. And our creativity and our inventiveness came from being in these environments that were dangerous and we had to see and think and feel our way into things, into the world, right? So a lot of the sublime is a function of your sensitivity.

You can recover that. It's not like your atrophied senses are forever like that. You can put yourself in these environments. You can go to the desert and you can walk through the desert and you can feel the emptiness and the silence and the lack of vegetation and let the environment inhabit you and your senses will awaken. You can go to a mountain.

You can swim in the ocean. You can sit in your goddamn backyard and encounter it like I did with my sublime book. Your senses are waiting to be awakened. If we took somebody who was like a stockbroker on Wall Street with the most atrophied senses you can imagine, and we gave him a shot of LSD or peyote, suddenly it would all open up. He would have these experiences as well.

So the point is, it's not dead. It's there. It's wanting to be awakened. Like that guy who I said... had his self remembering experiences, it awakened him. It can happen at any moment, but it's a function of your sensitivity to the world and how you use your senses to let the world inside of you and enclose yourself in this little kind of citadel.

What I'm gathering is that our ability to be sensitive to feel things with a lot of intensity and to really be explorers, like curious explorers are key portals to this thing that you're calling the sublime. And we could spend all day thinking about the barriers to the sublime. But one thing that I do appreciate about the way human brains are wired, it's one of the great gifts of the human brain is that whatever we focus on, tends to exclude other options.

So if we go toward drama and numbing out, it excludes other options for some period of time. If we move toward what we're curious about and heightening our sensitivity, those exclude the bad options. And one thing that I love about you so much, man, is that you talk about power, sensitivity, but in particular power, through this like really benevolent lens.

Like it's like a really, you know, these days that word is so loaded and there's clearly awful forms of power, but even the, and the way you described the sensual and the erotic, right? These are also loaded terms now, unfortunately, because of the way the world is and where we currently are. But I have great hope for this book to not just educate people, but to transform them and to transform the way they interact with the world and each other.

I haven't read it yet, so that's quite a statement. But based on everything you've told us, If you would, I'd like to ask you one final question. And it's the meanest question I could possibly ask. Oh, good. I look forward to it. Yeah, I had a feeling you would. Okay. You know, as somebody who just finished a book by hand after seven years and really grinding it out, and God bless you for doing it, and have written all these other amazing books that I have read and that I do love, what's the next book? Oh, shite.

Or is there a seed of something in your mind that you're willing to share? And no is a perfectly good answer, obviously. Well, I have two strains. I know I can't do another book like that, like this, because I'm heading into my late 60s and I don't have the energy. I had a stroke. And I just can't put myself through it. I can't wait seven years because I don't know how much life I have left.

You're going to be around a while, man. All right, I hope. You're doing all the right things. Okay, I'm trying. But you never know because people who are survivors of strokes often don't have a long life expectancy. It happens particularly when the age that happened to me. because you're prone to other things happening unless you're very careful.

So I can't do another big project. But I'm kind of obsessed with something that's very hard for me to describe verbally, but it has to do with the invisible. How many things affect our lives that you cannot actually see and that are very powerful, but that if you could see... It would alter your experience. So to give you an example, we can't see the future.

We have no knowledge of the future. But things are happening right now in our present moment, little trends that are going to create the future. And if we could somehow see them, if we could kind of crystallize them into some form, we would have this kind of knowledge of where we're headed, and it would be very powerful. And there are people in history...

who demonstrated a high ability to predict what was coming. And they fascinate me. They like to live outside of their time. But we live in these abstract spaces where everything is symbolic to us. We just live in these abstract worlds, and they're invisible. And we're not aware of their influence on them. And I want to kind of make visible all of these things that you don't think about are affecting your life.

It's a weird concept in my head, and I've kind of detailed on pen and paper some examples and things, but it's going to be a shorter book, and it's going to be about negative space, about seeing what's not there as opposed to what's there, what's missing in the picture, okay? The other thing is I'm toying with the idea of writing fiction because it would be an insane challenge for me.

I'd be using a different part of my brain. But I'm kind of fascinated with the tech world and how it's so misguided. And where did it come from? And what is it about humans that have created this kind of slightly monstrous future that we're headed towards? And I've known some of these tech overlords. I've met them. and i'm kind of interested in their psychology and where it came from and what is the origin of this form of thinking that is i find very very dangerous right and so it's very inchoate it's very much nebulous but i'm toying with these characters and i'm researching about it i'm going deep into the origins of this deep levels of alienation that are being birthed

in this present moment through our technology. And fiction will give me the ability to kind of go inside their minds in a way that I can't really do with nonfiction, right? So I find what I want to express about this dangerous world we're headed to is more suited for fiction than nonfiction. So I'll see. Those are two ideas I'm toying with, and hopefully my life goes on long enough to try and create them.

I really appreciate you sharing where your deliberation is around that. I have great confidence you'll be around a while. Come on now, you're doing all the right things. You're exceedingly sharp and exceedingly kind in taking the time to come talk about the book and share these ideas with us. Again, I'm super excited to read it. You're a real role model to me and have been for a long time.

Oh, thank you so much. You really are. I mean, ever since I read Mastery, I was like, oh, shit, man, this book, this guy. And you're a few years older than me, not terribly much older. And so that's always been a goal of mine is to identify people for whom I could really model some components of my life. my life and career after, even if the specifics are different.

And it's been great thus far. So I appreciate you've been a- I'm very humbled by those words. Yeah, well, you didn't know it, but I apprenticed myself to you without asking your permission. You're like a giant in this world. And I feel very humbled by that. They were truly in your light. Thank you so much, Robert, for coming here. Thank you, Andrew.

Let's get together soon. Yeah, yeah. Maybe we do that psychedelic journey together. Oh, God, I'd love that. I'd love it. We won't live stream it. We're just going to have the experience. No one's going to be here about it. Right. Just thank you. Thanks for being you. Thanks for being such an incredibly powerful and thoughtful writer. Keep going.

Thank you so much, Andrew. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really appreciate it. We'll do it again. Okay. I look forward to it. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Robert Green. To learn more about his work and to find links to his various books, including his new book, The Art of the Sublime, please see the links in the show note caption.

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