Robert Greene
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Huberman Lab · Access the Sublime & Live Your Best Life | Robert Greene
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Why Does Robert Greene Call Humans Sublime?
Robert Greene says humans are sublime because they can uncover what is not human. Reading the paper, he hit a claim that intelligent life on Earth took almost 4 billion years, which is why other intelligent life would be so hard to meet, and that some longer-lived planets might have it. He could not recall the details. A second piece, on a bird fossil from the dinosaur era found in China and on flying reptiles that were not dinosaurs, hit him the same way. Science, he says, can change how a person looks at life by showing how close the experiment came to never happening.
He does not treat humans as something to escape. Science, as he describes it, is hundreds of thousands of papers by peopl
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Why Does a Short Attention Span Make People Easier to Influence?
Robert Greene says a splintered attention span makes people easier to influence. He asks whose interest the programming serves. If the aim is money, constant novelty makes deep focus harder, and advertisements and gimmicks land more easily because independent thought gets weaker. The brain, he says, needs slowness as nourishment: learning bit by bit until new pathways form, so a person is in charge of that landscape. The rhythm other people program is a desert with no connections, and that is the part he finds scary.
Andrew Huberman brings up an Olympic freestyle skier at Stanford, Eileen Gu, whose answer about training her mind was slowness rather than speed. She spends time thinking about
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How Did a Stroke Change the Way Robert Greene Sees the World?
Robert Greene says his stroke made him more emotional and less able to control the feeling. He would start crying without knowing why, then feel a wave of ecstasy and wonder why it was happening. He looked into it and says a stroke affecting the right side of the brain often does that. He treats the left side as language, logic, and reasoning, and the right as more holistic and emotional. He calls the left-right split full of cliches and says Andrew Huberman would know more of the science. The account is his experience of his own stroke.
Other people still in wheelchairs made him feel their helplessness, and he almost cried. He quotes the poet John Keats on a life of sensations instead of t
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How Do You Find Your Life's Task?
Robert Greene says a life's task shows up as a childhood moment that sparked excitement on its own, not because a parent assigned it. He was obsessed with words from early on. In third grade a teacher put up the word carpenter and asked how many other words the letters could make. The letters felt magical, including their sounds, and he knew he had to be a writer. He never had to go looking.
After Mastery, people in their 20s told him they had no idea what a life's task was. He writes about Leonardo da Vinci and others, and he had always known his own answer was writing, so he had to imagine not knowing. Parents said what to love. Teachers said what a child was good at. He describes a syste
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What Is Robert Greene's Law of the Sublime?
Robert Greene says the Law of the Sublime is about how a day feels, not about success, power, or dealing with other people. He pictures consciousness as a circle. Thoughts, emotions, and a sense of reality move inside it, and ordinary life can shrink into sameness. A vacation or a climb fades, and the routine returns. He wants the shock Abraham Maslow called a peak experience, the kind that pushes a person out of that circle.
Outside the circle is what he calls the sublime. He compares the openings to doorways. He says the Latin word means up to the threshold of a door, sublumen, with lumen as the threshold. Looking through is a mix of pain and pleasure. The pain is leaving what is familiar
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Why Does Robert Greene Want to Write Fiction?
Robert Greene is toying with writing fiction because what he wants to express about a dangerous world is more suited to fiction than nonfiction. Fiction would let him go inside minds in a way nonfiction cannot, and the work would use a different part of his brain.
He calls fiction an insane challenge. He is fascinated with the tech world and how misguided it is, with where it came from, and with what about humans created a slightly monstrous future. He has known some tech overlords and has met them. He is interested in their psychology, in where it came from, and in the origin of a form of thinking he finds very dangerous. The idea is still very inchoate and very nebulous. He is toying with
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Can Robert Greene Write Another Long Book?
Robert Greene cannot write another long book. He is heading into his late 60s and does not have the energy. He had a stroke, and he will not put himself through seven years of work, because he does not know how much life he has left.
Stroke survivors often do not have a long life expectancy, particularly at the age the stroke happened to him. They are prone to other things happening unless they are very careful. He is trying to be careful, and he still cannot do another big project.
The subject that has his attention now is the invisible: powerful forces that affect life but cannot be seen. The future cannot be seen, yet little trends in the present moment are already creating it. Crystall
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Why Does Losing Religion Make People Feel Insane?
Robert Greene says a deep sense of spirituality, of something larger than you that lives inside you, that you are part of, and that guides your life, is lost, and that loss is part of what is making people insane right now.
Plenty of people are still religious, yet the deeper feeling of something beyond a single life has dropped away, and with it a very important part of life. Religion was an anchor, and now the anchor is gone. He is not claiming to be a believer. He is noting the phenomenon. The world looks like a madhouse. People are going berserk, disconnected from their bodies, their lives, and their environment. The loss of God, the death of God, and the death of religion was a very pa
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Why Does Hating the Opposite Sex Mean Hating Yourself?
Robert Greene holds that seeing the opposite sex as the enemy is fear of your own self. Every man has a feminine side he cannot avoid, and women have a masculine side. Call women the enemy or men the enemy, and you are the enemy of yourself.
The closest relationship as a baby was with a mother. Her voice and her energy sink in so deeply that memory of it disappears, and attractions to women are impressed by the relationship with the mother. The child was helpless and dependent, and a woman dominated his life. A man also carries a fair amount of estrogen, and a female component sits in his psyche, just as a masculine side sits in a woman's psyche. Denying the other sex denies something deep
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Why Is Falling in Love an Act of Rebellion?
Robert Greene says loving a person and letting go of all defenses is a form of rebellion against the ugliness in the world. The act pushes back on narcissism, defensiveness, and the closed-off parts of culture. It refuses the culture and chooses one individual for a transcendent sublime experience.
He wants the stance back in the culture because courtly love appeared in the 13th century and became the source of Western notions of love. Troubadours wrote about love as both a physical and a spiritual experience. Loving a man or a woman as a spiritual experience was rebellious, even sacrilegious, because only Christ was supposed to be a spiritual experience.
He hopes to restore the value for
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Why Is Love the Ultimate Human Experience?
Robert Greene calls love the ultimate human experience because physical attraction to someone turns into something spiritual. You fall so deeply that you lose a sense of your own ego, and a person who was an object you cannot see inside becomes a subject whose experience you can feel and who becomes part of you.
The chapter is called Escape the Prison of the Ego, the Love Sublime. A human being has two sides, a physical animal side and a spiritual side. Interest that is only about sex brings some satisfaction and also an emptiness. Interest that is only about religion, such as going to church, has nothing physical in it and does not feel deeply human. Love is where the physical and the spir
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Is a Transcendent Experience Only for Rich People?
Robert Greene says a transcendent experience is not reserved for rich people, and he can bring it down to daily life, including for people who live in small apartments. The need for a transcendent experience, which is what the sublime is about in many ways, is as important a human need as clothing, shelter, or companionship, and it is deeply embedded in human nature.
The image that came to him in a little office while trying to write the book was a bird in a cage. He used to fly around and have fun, then had to accommodate himself to a cage and find a way to sing inside it. A lot of people are like that bird. They do not live in mansions or have magnificent gardens. The sublime is not an el
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Why Did Robert Greene Never Last at a Job?
Robert Greene never lasted more than 11 months at any single job, because he hated working for other people, and writing books was the only profession where he did not have a boss. He hated the egos, the political games, and the way success meant currying up to the boss with charm instead of caring about results.
He uses the same test with people who have lost touch with what their own bodies, impulses, and desires want. The search goes back to childhood for moments that sparked excitement because the feeling came from them, not because their parents told them. In the twenties he asks what they hate, what repels them, and what feels wrong the moment they do it. Frustration is the key moment
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How Do You Get Inside a Piece of Music?
Robert Greene says following the notes, the logic, and the progression is how he enters music, and the result is a sublime experience. A concert makes the exercise a little harder because the music is of a different order, but the same entry is still possible.
In the 70s, while he was in college, he went to Grateful Dead concerts and followed some of their long instrumental pieces the way he follows Scarlatti. The pieces were quite sublime. Recording the music leaves a listener outside it, at the level of entertainment and base stimulation. The sublime route is to be inside the work. With a movie from another period, he wants to feel inside the movie, as if he is there. Attention fixed on h
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Why Does Filming a Mountain Climb Block the Experience?
Robert Greene says filming a mountain climb blocks the experience, because looking through a camera and navigating the route means the climber never experiences the mountain itself.
Ancient ancestors looked at plants coming up out of the ground and at enormous mastodons and bears twice the size of what bears are now. They were obsessed with what is inhuman, and religions and spirituality started from life that dies and then reemerges and from large animals being created beyond people. A mountain can open that same feeling. The climber is on rock millions of years old that predates humans and emerged out of the ground, moving into the sky almost like a bird. Oxygen levels change and the brai
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Why Did Robert Greene Handwrite His Book?
Robert Greene handwrote the entire book because he could not type. His left hand was still kind of frozen, so every page had to be written by hand.
He kept two book stands, one next to the other, and a notebook. He wrote a story in the notebook by hand, then edited it by hand, recopying what he had written and occasionally changing a word, then went back and did the same thing there and then did it again. He had been used to typing very fast. Handwriting forced a different layer of thinking and altered his thought processes. Thinking had to slow down, and he had to focus very deeply because he could not quickly change things. He thinks the slowness factor created a different kind of book.
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What Animals Did Andrew Huberman Keep in San Diego?
Andrew Huberman kept several octopuses and, before them, many cuttlefish in his lab in San Diego. He thinks the lab had 40 cuttlefish at one point. The animals are incredibly intelligent and do all sorts of wild stuff.
They have a beautiful camouflage ability and can camouflage half the body. Males in the wild sometimes camouflage as females, enter a clutch of females, and then mate with them. He thinks the scientific literature refers to the males as sneaky fuckers. The phrase does not sound very scientific. A separate podcast could discuss the ethics, or the lack of ethics, of the disguise.
The crude name fits a joke about two habits of evolutionary biologists. Some hyphenate their names
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How Did an Octopus Change a Diver's Sense of Time?
Robert Greene says six or eight months with a female octopus altered a free diver's whole concept of time, because the diver was living in her time and time passed at a much different rhythm, and that trying the experiment with a dog might show something similar.
The diver grew up on the coasts of South Africa and cold-dived in incredibly cold water through a kelp forest, a forest underwater of magnificent kelp where the weirdest creatures live, including octopus. He was free diving and exploring an insane landscape, not looking for an octopus, when they slowly became friends and had a slightly erotic relationship. A love interest comes through in the description: the octopus grabbed his ar
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What Happens to Time in a Near-death Experience?
Robert Greene says that in the death process the brain is dying too, and constructions such as time, vision, and the self start to dissolve, so time is much more plastic than people think. Near-death experiencers sometimes feel ecstasy as they die. About 85 percent of studied near-death experiences are positive, a number he is just throwing out, and some experiences are hellish. Many people who are dying feel the ego dissolve, feel abstract time dissolve, and feel the social pressures of life dissolve. They are ecstatic and elated, like a liberation.
Albert Heim, a Swiss alpine climber, was the first person to study near-death experiences, back in the 19th century. When Heim was about 21 he
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Why Does Time Feel Different Near Death?
Andrew Huberman says dying changes how time feels: the frame rate of attention shifts, and the tiniest details in space and time come forward. His graduate advisor died at 50. She was a remarkable woman dying of cancer, married to a scientist, with two girls, and he was very close with her family.
In their final conversation she told him about goodness she had experienced recently. Once she realized she was going to be dead soon, she started thinking about the tiniest things in the space and time domain. The family are all redheads with bright red hair, and she noticed the curls of her daughter's hair moving when the girl walked into the room to see her. Her frame rate was changing.
He fin