Robert Greene: A Process for Finding & Achieving Your Unique Purpose
03:07:06 Share

Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. My guess today is Robert Green. Robert Green is an author who has written more than five best selling books, including the forty eight laws of power, the laws of human nature and mastery. He did his bachelor's training at the university of california, berkeley, and the university of with consequent medicine.

Robert Greens books are both unique and important for several reasons, not the least of which is that they explore the interaction between the psychology of self, self exploration and the psychology of human interaction, all rooted in history and modern culture. And at the same time, in a way that pertains to everybody, I first learned about robbert to work from reading the book mastery, which, to my mind, is a brilliant exploration and a practical tool for how to think about and pursue ones. Whenever I asked for book suggestions, I always include mastery in my top three recommendations.

During today's discussion, we cover a wide range of topics, including how to find and pursue and achieve one's purpose. We talk about the selection of a life partner as well as romantic and other types of relationships. We also discuss the topics of motivation and urgency and this concept of a death ground, which arose during our discussion of Roberts's recent stroke, Robert stroke, rendered him certain limitations, but also has allowed him to explore how to write, how to exercise, indeed, how to interface with life in general, in new ways that allow him to continue to expand his sense of purpose.

I'm certain that by the end of today's episode, you will have cleaned tremendous amounts of new knowledge that will allow you to navigate forward along the path to your purpose, perhaps find your purpose if you feel you haven't done that yet, as well as to greatly enhance your relationship with yourself, with others, and indeed to the world around you. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desire and effort bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electoral light drink with everything you need and nothing you don't.

That means plenty of salt magnesium in peason, the so called electronic and no sugar. Now, salt, magnesium and patashie are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electro lights need to be present in the proper ratios.

And we now know that even slight reductions, intellectual light concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits and cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back electronic ratio of one thousand milligrams that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of plastic um and sixty milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electro lites. And while I do any kind of physical training, and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase.

Again, that drink element L M T dot com slash. Today's episode also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga ea cessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga edra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place to bringing the body into different states, and that he liked IT very much.

So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate. Times I have a longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do.

I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga eda sessions, those you don't know. Yoga eza is a process of lying very still. But keeping an active mind is very different than most meditations.

And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda, and something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or n str, can greatly restore levels of cognitive physical energy even, which is to a short ten minute session, if you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. And now for my discussion with Robert Green. Robert, i'm so happier here.

I'm really happy to be here and you thank you so much for inviting me.

A short story in twenty fifteen now is teaching a course to undergraduate. This was a big course, four hundred and fifty students. This was when I was a professor.

University of california Sandy ago was about to move back to stanford um but the course was entitled neural circuits in health and disease. But there was a final lecture where I would do a lot of Q N A with the students about science, about careers, about career paths. And what I found was that many of the students had questions about not just science, but about how to learn and forage for information.

And I recommended three books at the end of the course every year that I taught IT. I told IT for four years. And one of the books was the book lagi ude, which is a wonderful story about discovery of time keeping devices at c yeah one book i'll leave as a mystery um not to be not to be mysterious but because it's it's a science book.

I'll just tell you what IT is, principles of neuroscience. So I thought that that one yeah big IT makes a Better door stop a for most than a book but it's is a wonderful resource um if you want to arn about neurosis and your book mastery. And the reason I recommended mastery is because these students were soon going to go to the great jungle of yeah you know post undergraduate education and and for me I found mastery to be an absolutely transformative book.

And that IT taught me so much about how to learn from others how to expect certain types of um interactions when one kind of a signs of themselves to a mentor advice for so and I talked about something that we will get into in more debt today, but not the least of which is about identifying that unique seed that exists with in all of us that can guide our best decisions in terms of finding our purpose and and so I will usually end with a great dead of gratitude, and i'll probably do that again at the end. But I want to start with a great dead of gratitude. Mastery transform my entire life in many ways this podcast probably would exist or is not for mastery because IT really embedded in me this idea that we all have uh a deeper purpose and IT explains how to go about finding that purpose. So I tell you the ad and I also will use as a segway for um asking you now, since i'm sure people's ears are pricked up to this, how do you find your purpose could you share with us what what IT is to find one's purpose and how early life events perhaps can cure us to what that purposes for each of us?

Well thank you for that. That marvel introduction is am almost blushing. That's that's fantastic story. Um well, you know being a human being is not easy as supposed to an animal because we're born and nobody gives us like a direction.

Our parents might be a little bit our college teachers, that set of a mentors, but generally were on our own. And it's a very, very difficult process. You wake up in the morning and you don't really know what what you can do.

You can choose twelve different paths that can be very confusing and very overwhelming when you find that sense of purpose, when you find what I call your life's task. Everything has a direction. Everything has a purpose.

Your energy is concentrated. It's not like you're just going down a single narrow pathway. It's not like life becomes boring, and it's just about discipline and solving problems.

It's actually the most exciting thing that can never happen to you because you never have that lost feeling. You wake up in the morning, you go, yeah, this is what I need to accomplish. People come at you with all kinds of distractions and boring and irritating things.

You are able to cut IT out. It's just the most marvel piece of internal radar that you can have. So I genuinely wish that everybody can find that kind of internal rate are.

And so it's not easy. And I understand that this not like instant formula because we're all about instant formulas. It's difficult and I want you to know that.

So it's not like Robert can give me the answer in three minutes. No, I can't. But there is a process involved.

It's not it's not you know, a mystery. You can follow a very singular process. And the idea is you're talking about childhood.

The way I like to frame IT is when you were born, you are a phenomenon and you are unique. Your D. N.

A has never occurred in the history of the universe. Going back billions of years. You will never occur in the future.

Your life experiences with your parents and everything that you experience in your early years going on up is unique, is yours. You are one of a kind, right? So that is your source of power to wait. That is just the worst thing you can do in life.

And what what the power is, is finding that uniqueness, what makes you you and how you can mind that, and how you can go deep into IT and use that to create a career path, right? And so I tell people when you're a child, when you're four or five or even Younger, you have what the great psychologist maslow called impulse voices, the little voices in your head that say, I love this. I hate that.

I like this food. I don't like when mammy moves this way. I like when daddy comes from here, you're very cute into who you are and what you like and what you don't like.

And these voices kind of direct you in certain ways, right? And when you're very Young, they direct you towards intellectual, mental pursuits as well. And there's a book I recommend for everybody.

It's Howard gardeners, five frames of mind. It's helped me immensely. The idea is he talks about five forms of intelligence.

Our problem is, we think of intelligence as mostly intellect. Al, but there are many forms of intelligence. Is the intelligence that has to do with words.

There's abstract intelligence, has to do with patterns and mathematics. There is connected intelligence as to do with the body. There is social intelligence.

He has five of them. And the idea is your brain naturally views towards one of them. You can viewer towards two of them.

That happens generally. One of them kind of dominates, right? And it's like a grain in your brain that's going in a certain direction. You want to go with that grain, and because that's where your power will lie.

So when you're Young, if you go back and think about when you were four, five, you can maybe get a picture of some kind of direction or voice inside of you that was impelling you towards this. I know for me IT was words from. I can remember when I was six years old, I was just obsessed with words, just the letters in words, almost like, almost slightly schizophrenic.

I would spill words backwards. I would take them apart. I would do anagrams.

I love palin drums, right? So I had a thing about words. And language is very primal. Some people, you know, Albert ion time, when he was four years old, his father gave him a birthday gift of a, and he was just means mazed by this compass, the idea that there are invisible forces out there in the Cosmos moving this needle. And he successes to the idea of invisible forces.

Steve jobs, when he was like, seven or eight or maybe Younger in berlin, california, his father, they passed by the store with technological devices in the window. And he was just hipperty zed by the design of those devices in the glass tubes and everything. So he wanted go in that direction.

You know, tiger woods saw his father hitting golf balls in the garage, and he was just like screaming with joy. He had, he had to do that, right? You know, I can give you a million different examples of this.

Of course, these are people who are famous. Obviously, we can go back and find that it's easier. But what happens to you, and please come me, if i'm going on too long, please continue.

What happens to you is your seven. Now you're getting older and you started not hear that voice anymore. You're hearing in the voice of your teachers telling you you're not good at this field.

You need to get Better at mouth. You know you you shouldn't interested in these sports or you should be going in this way. Your parents are starting to tell you this is the career they want.

We are the direction they want you to go in, right? You start hearing that more than your own voice, and you get older. IT gets worse and worse and worse.

Then when you're in a teenager, it's all about what other people are doing, your peers, what's cool, what's not cool, you know, and that kind of is more so all of these noise enters your brain and you can't hear that anymore. You don't know who you are. And so you go to college, you kind of maybe choose a crew, A A major that seems practical that your parents want you to go into.

Maybe you kind of wander around, you're not sure. And then you went to to the workers without that inner radar that i'm talking about. And you, brother, you're loss, right? Where should I go? Well, I need to make money, right? And so you make a choice based on the need to make a lot of money.

Some, not everyone, but some people do that. And I understand that needed. We all need to make a living. But that can set you off in a very bad path because you're not connected emotionally.

The thing is when you figure out that primary inclination, that grain that's inside of you, then you have the the energy to to do to be disciplined, to go through boring tasks to learn. You learn at a factory because you're emotionally engaged. When you're emotionally engaged in a subject, the brain learns twice, three times, four times as fast as when you're not.

I always give the example. In college, I studied foreign languages, which was kind of a passion of mine. For three or four years, I studied french, and then I went to paris, and I couldn't speak a word, was IT was useless because I didn't teach me anything practical, right? I was totally confused.

And then, but I was in paris, and I and I loved you, and I want to live there, right? And I had a girlfriend, and I needed to speak french to her. And I can tell you, in one month I learnt more than those four years of university because I wanted to, because I was engaged, my emotions were there.

I was like, I had to survive to learn french whereso. Most of us, we don't have a need really to learn this subject. We're half or paying half attention. But when you find that thing that really connects to you, your paint deep potential, your emotions are engaged, you're learning at a much faster rate. okay.

And so the thing is, how do you find that when you're older, when you're twenty one, I, I, I give people a lot of help and it's usually not so difficult you can go through that process. IT gets harder when you're thirty and you've been wandering around, but it's not impossible. I didn't really start find my exact path until I was thirty eight, thirty nine to be onest.

So there's hope when you get forty and you get fifty gets more and more difficult, right? And it's very sad if you wasted that sea of unique is that i'm talking about. And I tell you, with our ways of going back, and we go through a process like archaeology, we have to dig in and dig and dig in and find those bones from your childhood that indicated what you were meant to do.

But when you find your life's task, everything opens up. IT doesn't mean you figured out, okay, i've got to aim for this particular job, and i'm twenty eight. That's not how IT works.

You a sense of direction. You can try different things. You can experiment.

You can have fun. When you're new twins, you're gonna learn, you gonna learn skills. But IT gives you an overall frame. We're instead of, wow, all this confusion, this chaos, social media, the internet, I could go here, here, here you're lost at sea. IT gives you a very important .

sense of direction, a compass, as you describe this. I have the same image of um you know you mention the animals that presumably don't have a lot of flexibility in terms of the niches they can exist in. But the way I imagine this processes that as a human were pumped into a environment, and here i'm using analogy where we don't really know if we are an aquatic animal, a to rest and or or an avian and or in emphysema for that matter and to make the wrong choice right to be an inhibition who's trying to fly, although i'm sure they're out there um in the animal kingdom uh it's not just a waste of time, it's probably deadly.

Um and not to over dramatize the the failure of finding one's purpose, but I see IT that way whether perhaps we could just say that the process of finding once purposes to to realize like a you know i'm an iphigenie I can go in and out of water where as a bunch of other creatures around me stop at the waters edge, right right and this is really cool and a bunch of these other things, like these flying things that they can't actually even go in the water, some of them might you know be on the surface or died didn't do IT but they can do what I can do so with the process of self discovery. IT sounds like it's about um restricting one's choices to uh uh a sort of wedge within the full landscape of options and um you know for me I can certainly recall after reading mastery, IT helped to me recall some early seed emotions that I experienced as a very distinct sensation in my body describe that yeah without making IT too special to my my unique taste you know, as a kid I loved Flora and frana. I love learning about biology.

No surprise there, but animals and how they move in particular, and fish. And going to a proper aquarium store for the first time for me, and going sourcing for the first time was like, wow. And as even as I describe IT, it's almost like my body floats. I feel IT in my left ARM of all things and IT feels like there's something to do about IT.

It's not just that i'm an observation of things that delight me, like there's something there's an activation state created within me like I gotta do something with this and typically it's tell everybody about IT until they won't listen anymore um but often times it's also draw those things to think about them and I just delighted in them. It's a constant source of delighted and so seeds such as those, and there are few other things in that in that landscape of Flora and frana and learning about animals and biology, including the human animal and then organizing information, feel feel so satisfying to me. It's like a drug that and so I just fall, feels like this, you know, eternal spring of life, right? And so for me, that's what IT was in twenty fifteen when I was teaching that course, the course I loved.

But I was feeling a little bit of stray in my scientific career. And then I read mastery and I read, yes, I love running a laboratory. I love teaching, but there's something else for me and I has to do not with a podcast.

I even know what A I probably I knew what a podcast was. I was listening to podcast at that time um but I was in on social media. I had know lots of having a pocket but what I wanted was that feeling in its total number of forms.

That's the goal. Get that feeling as many forms as possible, right? Is that about .

that absolutely perfect because the connection to what i'm talking about, it's not an intellectual thing. It's it's visceral, it's emotional, it's physical, right? And you feel that in your body and when you're doing IT, it's like it's at your level.

So like you're swimming with the current, you feel that things are easy, everything clicks together, there's a delight. Not everything is gonna delighted. There's gonna be tedium involved. There is going to be moments of boredom, but you're able to withstand the moments of boring because you feel that deep overall connection. So yes, that's precisely what i'm talking about.

I mean, it's for me, it's a little bit a similar thing is I said about words, but the other thing that I was obsessed with when I was a kid was early human ancestors. Don't ask me why I just was so obsessed with our. Ancestors millions of years ago and how it's possible to be living here in the sixties or seventies with cars and everything to come to where we are now.

And I wrote A A short story when I was eight years old about a vault. Er IT was written from the point of view of a vault. Er watching the first humans kind of emerge on the planet, i'm sure was absolutely awful, dreadful.

But the weed thing is i'm running a new book and all i'm doing in that book is going into her into early humans. And if feel like a kid again, i'm so excited, i'm so happy. So I can very much relate to your story.

You mention these five different formers of intelligence. So frame, frames of mind, if you refer to them. And i'm certainly aware that the ede lean towards a more intellectual interest, although as you pointed out, the excitement, the delights is visceral yeah and the actions are actions there of the body. Ultimately one has to draw, speak, write books. It's at a um to transmute bad excitement into something real .

for people that are not as .

intellectually tune but maybe our kinna esthetically tune, for instance. I can only wonder what that's like not completely n ordinated but I don't think i'd have a kinney's tune uh or frame of mind but I for instinct had a podcast listener mention that they think in fields that they literally experience fought as a server as of a patchwork of a bodily sensations, right? And that thought for them is not of the stuff from the neck up, but only from the down, which to me is really intriguing.

And so I only raised this because there have to be, as you point, how there's an infinite number of different sort of orientations based on our unique D N A. And experience, what do you think explains why these particular seeds, or as you point out, like the the the direction that the grain runs in the brain. I mean, it's it's partially gona be nature, it's going to be DNA.

But we we're talking about this as if they're some exciting or all inspiring or delightful thing that captures us. Can not be the other way too. Can I be um you know one has a bad experience as a child in an intellectual environment and then decides, you know i'm going in the things of the body feel good things of the mind of intellect feels bad and does IT matter whether not we are drawn to our purpose by recognizing what we love or what we hate .

um or are both useful oh they're both very very useful um you know a lot of intelligence is is not is non verbal. We think concerns of images were were very much infected by the emotions of other people. So I know for instance, my mother is very, very interested in history.

He is obsessed with history, and I probably absorbed her interest in history. I don't think there's a genetic gene for that interest, you know. So you're going to absorb things from your parents is worse. It's not all just genetic. But yeah, what you hate will pay a big, have a big thing.

But the problem with doing that is if you go into the direction in your in an elementary school seta, and they forced you to learn math and you hate IT, what IT tends to do is IT turns you off from learning in general. You think I don't want to, I don't want, I don't want to be discipline. I don't want to go through anything because it's painful, doesn't delete anywhere, not mean that frustration IT turns you off from learning in general.

So it's really, really important for a child to have the love experience as early as possible, so that they can know what they hate and why they hate IT, right? And then then they can rebel, and they can go into that field as supposed to. I hate learning.

I hate this one. I hate studying. I hate trying things over over again. If you're kaetheli oriented and you know a part of me, I understand that because I love sports, is you have you have to practice. It's gna take a lot.

It's you're not going to instantly be cooled at something right, and that's gonna require a love of IT, right? But if your math experience, because I hate learning shit, you're not you, it's going to transfer to support you're gonna hate discipline in general. So is very important for parents to let that child have at least climbers of that love moment.

I know for me, when I finished college and I entered the workroom, I had to get a job. I got worked in journalism. I hated IT.

I hate IT working for other people. I hated office politics. I hated all the egos. I hated the smartest us.

I hate that the lack of quality was all just about, you know, making money and getting things out there. And then I worked in hollywood. I hate in hollywood, hate IT working in hollywood. That formed me very much. Maybe go in the direction that I went IT, but only from the basis of I knew that I want to be a writer so you know, that's very important that it's not just hate I can form you, but there also has to be that positive, deep emotional love of something that also is grounded in you in some way.

What you just said really highlights the fact that energy and motivation can come from others either pressure, desire for something or desire to get away from something. And um earlier when you were talking about how we are so much more engaged and driven toward things that stir us emotionally and and actually we know based on the neurosciences, as you know, to ensure that um only by the release of certain other chemicals in the brain and body with our brain have any reason to change, right? If you don't feel agitation and you can do everything that you're trying to do, of course your brain will changed.

Like, why would IT right that agitation is a is the signature of the newer chemicals that are saying, hey, is different now, right? You might need to do something different, including reward yourself, right? And that can come from positive or negative experiences.

I'm obsessed with this idea of energy. I mean, we all want to have more energy and focus. And Normally we hear about the concept of energy in the context of color ic energy, like what should we eat and when and how much and we need to get sleep.

But what you're really referring to is neural energy like that, the engagement of ourselves that, you know, sitting, they're ready to be engaged. But IT requires the right experiential micro o nutrient, right? The experiential micro nutrient ens, as opposed to, of course, we need good nutrition. That's not sufficient. It's necessary but not sufficient. So would you say that when um we are like that, since a good number of our listeners are in adult um you from our twins on that the things that excite us as adults that really generate some feeling of readers or or grab our attention um are still informative toward guiding our decisions about best life and life purpose .

well um what what exactly do you mean by that? I mean like because there are things that excite you in in a kind of a quick way, like you know where you have to relieve some tension and you there's entertainment and there's things that kind of give you pretty immediate gratification. And there is a larger picture of something that will give you fulfilment over years to come.

So you can feel that when you're older and you can pay attention to IT. But a lot of the time is where we're paying too much attention to the immediate pleasure of life, to what gives this instant gratification, and that's what we're grabble for. So this is a much more kind of deeper process that involves that digging that I was saying it's deeper than just kind of I like this, I don't like that you know kind of thing.

It's more it's more something mac than than just just that. And so when you're in your twenties or in your thirties or in your forties, you want to be paying attention to yourself. And the problem with people in the world today is you're not paying attention to yourself.

You're not inside your own head. You don't hear those voices. You don't hear what you love, what you like anymore.

Because, as I said, there are so many of these other distractions going on. And so you're always like attuned what other people like, right? Because you're in social media.

This is what people are following, is what they're interested in as opposed to disengage, backing off from that and looking at yourself and going through the process itself. That's not me, actually. I don't really like that, you know.

And so what you're talking about is I think very profound is levels of frustration or anxiety are definite signals that you must pay attention to that they're telling you this isn't a good direction for you. This is a waste of time for you. And in general, I tell people self awareness, being able to hear those voices to understand that your frustration is telling you something.

And sometimes you you just act on IT without understanding IT understanding why you're frustrated, why you don't like your career, why you're not happy about where you're going, is the key to everything IT will open up. IT will actually be able, even in your thirties, to return you to that childhood linate. But if you can't listen to where those emotions come from, then their useless. They're not teaching you anything.

I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

The reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once are usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for god. Health, our god is very important, is populated by got microbiome that communicate with the brain, the immunity stem and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiology alth.

In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations, vitamin minerals, that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met, and IT tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman and theyll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea, and they will give you a year supply of vitamin d three k two. Again, that's athletic Greenstock comes slash huberman en to get the five free travel packs in the year supply of vitamin d three k two.

So sounds like one of the goals is to engage in what i'll just call for the moment and adult self referencing you an adult terrain, the the all senses of the word, because. As a child, as you point out, um at stages of life that are before puberty, they're literally presets ual which I think is important right because um puberty to me, as a nearby elders who started off as a developmental neurobiologists, I can tell you that poverty is the most profound transformation that the brain undergoes in the entire life span. There's just absolutely no question about that. Everything is different after puberty because of all of the new relational dynamics that become apparent in our potential involvement in them. Yeah it's just it's you know it's not talk about enough how dramatically puberty changes the I mean, we are different people before and .

after pubs in the hormones are there .

and it's not just changes in how we ve you the world but changes in how the world views us yeah and not just through the lens of sexuality, but also um expectation of what we are capable of, what we are responsible for or not responsible for our learning capacity of the pity is like this. It's also the most rapid stage of aging in our entire life span. Those kids that go home for summer and then come back like shaving and I was over late.

I wasn't a late bloom right along protractor you pretty but I remember those kids. I'm sure we all remember those kids. Um everything changes. And so I think prior to puberty, these seeds says you've describe them of delight or of resistance to things, think they are unadulterated. They're not contaminated by the voices and expectations of others and so I can see the chAllenge of reaching back to those as an adult.

Um I wonder if this relates to um something that i've heard you talk about before, although perhaps not as much as some of the other topics you've discuss publicly, which is um the real versus the false sublime um could you perhaps just define for us what sublime really is? What a sublime experiences and the distinction between real and false sub me experiences because I I feel like this relates to finding that seed right? It's it's about finding authentic seeds within us as a post when emotions can be distracting and misleading.

Wow, I never thought I never made that connection is the book that i'm writing right now. So thank you for that. Have to think about that. I'm actually i'm writing a book on the sublime and um I have several ways of kind of illustrating.

I generally like to use a metaphor and the metaphor is that being a human being, being a social human being, living in a particular culture means that you live inside of a circle. And that circle of that time are the conventions of thinking, of ideas that are acceptable, of behavior that is acceptable. This is where you, where you can go mentally, where you can go physically.

You know all the codes and conventions. So that circle for ancient egypt and for twenty first century america, they're obviously very different. But it's the same circle.

It's the same limiting factor. You're not supposed to go outside of IT. These are thoughts, experiences, behavior. You're not supposed to do the sublime is what lies just outside that circle. The word sublime comes from on the threshold of it's like here's the door and the sublime is literally at the threshold of the door you're looking out into something else, right? And the quint decentish sublime experience is a near death experience.

You're standing on the on the door with the threshold of death itself, right? And so in my book I am illustrating the different kinds of sublime experiences that you can have in relation to the Cosmos, in the relation to thinking about being alive. Just being alive is the strangest sensation you can possibly have.

I have, I know that very personally. After my stroke, I go into child charter on child and how to blame your own childhood was. I go into animals relation to animals. I go have a chapter about the brain, chapter about love and working right now on a chapter about history. Okay, but what i'm trying to say is the human brain is wired for these experiences, is wired for transcendental experiences that take us out of the no little room that we live in, because we're aware of our death, is the only animal truly conscious of its own mortality. And IT finds the hell out of us.

And the idea that we can see something larger than than just the the bin al parts of our life is a door way that open allows us to kind of trans, send the moment to feel connected to something larger, to feel connected to some power in the Cosmos, evolution itself, right? And so we're wired for that. And i'm writing a chapter now, about forty thousand years ago at the moment where I think the supply me was born is a story that i'm trying to illustrate right now.

And with our upper payer ethic ancestors. So it's deep inside of us. We need IT.

We have to have IT. And the twenty first century, we have very few avenues for IT. Any real avenues.

Religion used to be the main kind of wave of access in this. And so because it's so deep, we reach for false forms of the sublime. They give us the sense that were we're trace ending.

But it's not at all because sublime has to come from within. It's an experience that you have that you're generating in your own mind and your own experience. False sublime comes from outside.

IT comes from drugs. IT comes from alcohol. IT comes from shopping. IT comes from online rage. IT comes from joining a cause and just getting at all your aggression and violence, right? IT comes from causes.

IT comes from addictions OK IT gives you a sense IT comes you down and makes you feel like there's something else going on in life besides your job that you're sick of. But it's not real. It's not lasting.

It's false. It's an illusion. It's not based anything real. It's not connecting to the deep part of human nature is wired for these experiences.

So what happens is you have to have more and more and more and more of IT. You have to have, you know, more of this rush. You need more of the drug, you need more of the, you need more of the section and more of the porn.

It's never gone to satisfy you. But the real supply me, you don't have that feeling. It's like it's transformative. Once you feel IT IT last three for the rest of your life is what as low again called the peak experience so that the difference between the faults and the real subline I haven't quite connected what you're saying, but if I think about I think you're on something very interesting.

I mean, maybe the connection I was trying to draw was a doesn't hold but yeah for me um those early experiences of seeing things that just delighted me in a way that felt like that not only is the the the thought process as long time ago went something like, oh my godness I can't believe this exist.

This is so cool, this is the coolest thing and so clearly created activation state within me but then there was also a thought in a feeling of gandalf is or prepreparation not truly prevert. I can speak at that age but IT was um that of me and i'm of IT, right? There's a connection there and then IT was there's something to do about this.

The activation state created in the body was know, I need to learn more about this. I need to tell people about this. I need to think about this. I need more examples of this and see whether or not they're all like this. You know it's said a um so certainly IT meets some of the criteria of a sublime experience.

And I knew again when I was in grade gate school and again when I was a Young professor about a transition a ten year that I knew was going going to do something different was as if I was on the threshold of something. But I didn't know what that next thing was. But I could trust IT because of that early experience of knowing that the thread I like, like, i'm an inhibition.

This is my environment and you're an inhibition to and we're different inhibitions, but you know, we're gonna inhibitions together, right? And then and there's a permanent to IT that does seem to transform you. I'm obsess with time perception. So you have to be careful not to go off on attention about that, but at the human brains ability to find slice or macro slice time, incredible and and it's been set of um not a addictions but also interactions with toxic people that they murder time that that humans have A I think he was Young look at up but um one of the great psychologist said something to the extent that addictive behavior s thought pattern substances are humans attempts to murder time so that they don't have to address their mortality yeah and that's always made a lot of sense to .

me say killed time is for expression.

kill time through passive engagement, but also kill time through i'm trying to get overwhelmed or overtaken by an experience or a .

substance as supposed to. When you're truly connected, you have that sense of flow and three hours can pass by you not even aware of IT. So time is a totally subjective experience.

You can be extremely slow and tedious, and you feel very depressed or compassed by, but that passes by without you even noticing IT. And it's a wonderful experience. You know, when i'm deep in my riding, i'm not aware of the time passing.

I'm so involved. I'm so immersed. It's a deeply, deeply pleasant experience of time.

IT is the blind. And yes, so I agree with you. I think your distinctions very interesting.

I'm usually awaiting your your next book, but we won't rush you.

Well, i'm so immersed. I could talk for hours because I also have a chat in there about what I call the day on, which is like that voice inside of you that speaks to and i'm winning a whole chapter about how supply me, that is, when you connect to that voice. So you are spot on. There is something very much connected to mastery in this book but it's the next chapter that .

i'm writing testing can't wait. I get wait. I'd like to shift slightly to a topic that you've written extensively about which is power um and not just power but also seduction. Would you written extensively about and of course you've written about finding one's purpose.

So tell me if the framework that i've just given myself liberty to create is an accurate one and if it's not i'm hoping that um it's not in perhaps some interesting ways. So to me you talk about and we will talk about power as as a resource. It's something that um it's there is a resource IT could be used or not used.

And I think of seduction is one form of exchange between the individual. So there's a verb association with seduction power i'm thinking of more is are now in this context you're the word guy and then purposes is really about finding like to what end or ends when it's going to devote power seduction and the other forces that allow human beings interact with each other in the world. um.

But power as a resource that can be expressed in different ways and access in different ways, maybe we could just explore that little bit because, you know, when we hear the word power, I think a lot of people kind of brace themselves, like, here we go. So what is going to trying to have power over me? This is about manipulation and so on and so forth.

But I learned pretty early on that every every career endeavor, their their power dynamics, there's mentor and tea, they're teachers and their students and both have power um in in romantic relationships there's a power exchange there yes is and their nose there are babies. There are um uh covert and overt contracts. Yeah i'll do this because I want to you'll do this because you want to great sounds great overt contracts.

They're also covert contracts. Well, I don't feel safe doing that. So what i'll do is i'll take something on through the interaction that you're not aware of so that I can sort of um ease my sense of danger and make give myself the illusion of feeling safe and all sorts of kind of complicated human dynamics that have to do with us having this for brain thing that can do all of the gym NASA CS.

So maybe we can start very simply by just saying you, how would you define power in terms of its a functional definition like in in interpersonal relations? And then why do you think power is so essential to all relationships? That's really what i'd like to get to. Why is this so essential? Why could IT be something else?

Well, the way I defined powers, I try and take that away from that kind of negative context that most people have, that you, that you brought up. And I bring IT to something very primitive and very primal, the way the human being is wired, the feeling that we have no control of our environment.

And in the early est period, IT was literally of our environment and wild animals and nature, and in the climate is set a but now the sense that you have no control over your career, over your children, over your parents is deeply, deeply immiseration. And IT compels us to act in certain ways, either attempts to find positive ways of power, or doing what you call culvert ways of getting power, you know, pass of aggressive, traditionally passive aggressive means. So is deeply widen us to want a degree of control over the immediate environment and immediate events.

We can never have complete control. And the idea, if you have a complete control, this nonsense, and they would actually be very ugly because you wanted degree of letting go and letting circumstances come to you, would set at set up. So the sense of you, you, you want to feel like with other people and relationships that you can influence them, that you can move them in a certain direction, either to get you to love you and treat you Better, or either to stop annoying, irritating behaviors, or either to, you know, wake up and and fine and and do productive activity with your children.

It's set a you wants to have the ability to influence people to move them in a certain direction, either in your interest or in their interest, right? And once you have that need and every single human being ever whose ever lived has that need, and we often don't recognized that, because we're embarrassed by, we're embarrass by our desire for power, for our need to control. Every human being has IT, right? And it's not easy because human beings are complicated.

They don't. If you say, do this and you talk in to your son, he'll do the opposite or do something else. You can just force people in a direction, right, by being overt and telling them, this is what you need to do.

You create resentment. You create an enemy. They may, they may say, yes, yes daddy, yes husband, what you say.

But there you, they're, they're na resist you deep down inside, right? So people are tRicky. They were masks. They pretend to say one thing and they do another.

They have their egos, and you inadvertently won their egos or trip them some way, and they react in a way that you don't expect. And so power is this kind of invisible rum that envelops society where people are continually battling each other and struggling in IT. But no one is like talking about that.

No one's being over to about. No one's saying this is exactly what i'm trying to do. And so when you entered the social world, in the career world, you not expecting these battles.

You do not know one to taught, you know, one's to change. Your parents don't train you. Nobody trains you, and you make mistakes. And you realize how political people are. If you are a sharky character, there is a certain percentage of them realize, wow, I can deceive people, I can manipulate them, I can get what I want, I can pretend to love them, and then the fall for me, and I can do all this other stuff.

But for most of us, the ninety five percent of us who aren't sharks, and i'm including myself in that category, it's very, very disturbing to suddenly enter that world and see all that visible power games on this. No one's giving you any advice for help you. And so take IT out of the realm of it's just about trying to dominate the world and manipulate and exploited and and abuse is something inside of you.

You have this need, and your suppression of IT will only make you come out in passive ways, and you won't be able to control certain things if you want to move people, if you want them to follow your ideas, if you want them to be more line with your politics or your ideas, you have to be settled. You have to learn psychology. You have to learn certain aspects of how to almost move people without them, realized against in certain directions with which is like the art of seduction.

And if you're not interested in that, you're just gone to tell people what you think and what you're going to do. That means you're not interested in practical action. You not just the results, you're just interested in inventing your own frustrations or your own anger. So learning the subtle little dynamics of power is extremely essential because we're social.

Animal IT doesn't mean that you're going to get dirty, that you're going to suddenly go out there and manipulate the hell out of people, most of the forty eight laws of powers about defense, but how to defend yourself from the sharks about there, how to defend yourself from making classic mistakes, like out shining the master, like talking too much, like arguing with people instead of demonstrating your ideas on and on and on. It's not an ugly thing. IT actually makes you a Better social individual. So that's how I like to frame IT.

It's very interesting. I I think as a Young guy growing up, I was so important to me to know where I fit in with my friend group and I didn't think of that so much as a hierarchy um nor when I was in my academic excise did I think of IT as a higher or key even though I was clearly was right so much as the goal was to figure out where was my unique slot that I could um do the most good for myself and others right? You know, kind of finding my spot, I don't want say on a shelf because that IT gives an image of something vertical.

But you know in the let's make IT lateral a lateral arrangement of different people with different strength, different life purposes, trying to figure them out where where should I be in order to express that and also feel connected to others and um and in order to do that, I did have do I realize now based on your answer, I did have to figure out um who's trying to have power over who's pretending that they don't want power but actually exerting power um you know these sorts of things and there's an incredible piece that comes from knowing that one is in the correct place both profession interpersonally in relation to oneself, but also in the context of war, peer group kind. Yeah, this is where I belong. Because trying to gain power when one is trying to move to a position that isn't right for them, or in a way that isn't right for them, just seems so energetically costly and seems like a waste of a life.

Frankly, not trying to gather resources simply to have them to give the illusion of power. But then being afraid of losing them just sounds like a recipe for misery, as you point IT out. Yeah, yeah. Where figuring out where are my most powerful, in the beneficent sense of the word that that seems like a good, a good pursuit.

What's connecting up to the mastery and in finding your life's purpose. You know, I, I, I knew when I was Young that I couldn't exert physical power because I was a skinny little run, and I was, I wasn't bullied, but people would kind of pick on me and said, I said a, so I veer towards intellectual pursuits where I could have power.

And in the end, you know, you might have been a job and you might have done well in high school, but ha ha, look at me now. I'm not saying that is a beautiful thing that but that's part of human nature, the desire to actually prove yourself and find that niche that you that you belong to. So you don't have that kind of humid, that sense of inferiority what you offered adeler, the psychologist describes very eloquently.

So a lot of IT is kind of compensating when you're a child for things that are your weaknesses and finding what you're so good at that you do have that power and people can't bully you, right? And you you're you're like now a famous neuroscientist was there like, who knows what they're doing, can think so. Power, definitely, that is connected in some way to that inner sense of what you are meant to do.

And you feel IT with with the ease and the connection that comes from IT, right? So I can honestly say that might dislike of working for other people in office, politics and egos. I now have of an existence why I don't have to deal with any of that. And i'm so blessed. I wake up every morning and I pray to god, thank god like I found this because it's it's the perfect lifestyle for me.

Here you can be accurate described as an intellectual beast. So it's um which is like a compliment, right? We hear the word beast and we think you know a ferocious beast trying to harm others but have .

been being .

a beast yeah you know it's so I think finding where we can be a beast you know and and for some people that or or yeah gardening or whatever IT might be um I think is again ties back to the these issues of or this quest for mastery. Seduction is is also a very loaded word.

right, even more ugly .

than power, because seduction, right reduction kind of grips with the idea that somebody is tricking someone else into doing something that they otherwise would not want to do. But selection is both our propensity to do IT and to have you done to us is hardwired into our nervous system and has allowed to do with the hypotheses and a bunch other areas that I won't born us with the nomenclature. But um seduction to me implies some sort of exchange as as we could seduce ourselves through the IO or convincing ourselves that of something but more often than not, when we talk about seduction we're talking about an interaction between two or more people um what are some of the core principles of seduction in and you care to play um anthropologist a bit um in a neuroscientist I I would invite that why do you think we have neural circuits in our brain that allow us to produced and be seduced?

Well um I don't know how if if if i'm being kind of an armchair intellectual here, but my theory is some of IT has to go back to social um events long in our pre history, which I have to do with taboos. And society was initially kind of organized by a series of taboo s right most notably the tab, who are incest and what happened? This isn't just not my theory, is the theory of the melanocytes.

Milan also said, the moment a taboo enters the human brain, like you're not supposed to sleep with this woman, the desire arises inside of you to actually sleep with that woman. The sense of no, the sense of this is prohibited, stir the desire, stiers the contrary impulses in humans, and we can be very, um what's the word perverse creatures, right? So if you've ever tried to suppress a thought, you you realized that IT keeps coming up, keeps coming up.

You can't suppress IT. Don't think of an elephant, Andrews, but every do. Don't think of an elephant. You're thinking of you because you can help IT right? The idea that you're not supposed to desire this person stiers that actual desire.

So I believe the sense of something being taboo and progressive is the ultimate kind of origin of our desire for seduction. But seduction involves vulnerability. IT involves somebody gets inside, somebody gets under our skin, right? And to do that, we have to let them in.

So the person being seduced is, in some ways, to do degree complicit. Because if you just put up a wall and you said, no, i'm not going to be reduce, nothing will happen. But you have a vulnerability.

You're letting that person into your psyche, into your inner space. The paratime for that is early childhood. So if before he talks a lot about this, one of people still believe in for anymore.

certainly solute genus, both psychology ology wrong about a lot of things did, a lot of things he shouldn't have done. I let's acknowledge that, think everyone would agree that sleeping with your patients and being a coconut bad ideas but at the same time he had an absolute near supernatural levels of inside and brilliance .

into human nature.

I believe he did. Um I just throw that on him without him doing IT.

Then he certainly had emotional attachments to his patients that he shouldn't have had. I don't know if he sleep with him, him very well might have. But his idea was that the child is seduced by the parent.

You're an extremely vulgar position, right? Your life depends on them and they're seducing you with their energy. You're letting them in, right? And that kind of creates a pattern for the rest of your life.

And so for incidence, the feeling of being Carried by your father and just being taken around physically is a form of seduction because you don't know what he's going to do to you. You're very did you want that surprise, right? And to me, it's related to the seduction of a story.

Stories are very seducing to us. We don't know where they're taking us. We don't know what the next chapter is. What's going to happen to this character or not? Surprise lowers our resistance and opens our mind up to what's going to happen next as a form of seduction, fry tales, the stories you are reading as a child, your interactions with your parents deeply, deeply ingrained in you.

You cannot be seduced unless you are vulnerable, right? And so I like to switched IT around and get IT out of the negative connotations. Being vulnerable is actually a positive trade.

I think a lot of people now in the world today, because things are so harsh and invasive that people have become too invulnerable. They don't want to let anything in, right? And this now infects the relationships with other people.

They don't want to be influence. They, they want to be strong inside of themselves. They are afraid of giving into the other person, of surrendering to their influence.

But it's actually a delightful feeling to surrender to the power of another person and then reverse that charge and have them surrendered to your power. So when i'm reading a writer and sometimes um they completely seduced me like fried rick natures, one of my favorite writers, I let go of everything. I let him enter my brain and i'm completely seduced.

I let him lead me along, but then I encounter writers that I don't like at all. I mentioned one know probably not a good thing but Stephen picker, I don't like Stephen packer. I find him really annoying. Okay um but I forced myself to try and find a way to be seduced by him, to let him into my brain, to see where he's coming from, to open myself to the possibility that he could be correct. So vulnerability, letting people into your mental space is a form of intelligence, is kind of an emotional and an intellectual intelligence and forgive .

me for interrupting but I think IT also implies a level of confidence because empathy or allowing oneself to be vulnerable to the point where you're seduced by something um by definition, if you're choosing to do IT implies that you also have the confidence that you can get back to yourself afterwards.

They you're not going to get lost of given the circumstances they are not going to be hyg to of no return, right? Or in some way that's detrimental to you. So so it's only really nerdy here.

It's IT. It's Colinette with confidence in many ways, sure. Like take my mind and take IT where you will because I know I can come .

back at any time, right? And the same thing in a physical selection in a romantic sense, right? You're opening yourself up to the charm, to the energy of the other person. But if they start displaying dark energy and you see that they're abusive or something is wrong, you have the ability to retreat.

Well there IT gets tRicky well because the attachment systems, which are also rooted in childhood um often times can overwhelm one's ability to recover oneself. Like, I mean, to start, I mean, how many fight a dollar for every time someone that I knew my life saying, like, you know, I know they're bad for me, but I just can't like just can't seem to disengage like that. You hear about that all the time.

I mean, you see court cases about this that are public, and you go, why didn't they just walk away from one another world? Because once those attachment systems are locked in, yeah, IT almost becomes in in here, metaphorically speaking, like a parent child relationship, like you can't suddenly decide your parents weren't your parents right, simply because you know Better. Now you are forever stricken with the reality that they were and they had an influence. And I think that that attachment system is, is, is a force that tugs pretty hard.

yeah. And a lot of women have written to me since the art of seduction, saying that their boyfriend or husband was applying some of these tactics on them. And I was very painful, and they were kind of a little bit angry at me for ford. Then they kind of realized that they IT was, they didn't learn really from my book. I was already kind of wired in them, but that reading about these tactics and these strategies actually help them to recognize what their husband or boyfriend was doing to them, the manipulation and the games that were being played.

Do men write to you and talk about the seductive advancements that women have used to to um bring them into relationship as well? Hers are you typically hearing from women?

I mostly hear from women complaining about men and and and how they abuse them and how they use some of these, some of these tragedies. I I don't deny have a slightly deferral edge to them because I didn't want to write a book about seduction that doesn't have that taboo element, because I say seduction involves the taboo. And I didn't want to I didn't want a sensor myself.

But female to male seduction, clearly also exists, is less off. I acknowledge that is less often is IT physically abusive. But I mean, from an early age, both boys and girls, men and women, are coached by society on the sorts of a seductive tactics and an endorsement of in everything from makeup, perfume, hair sells, cars, watches, jewelry, expression, power displays of any kind um I mean that stuff the world's filled with that stuff.

you man, or generally kind of happy when a woman is them, right? Unless they were after their money or something like that, which happens. But generally the sense, you know, I talk about this in in the first chapter about sirens, which I says the quint essential archetype of the female seductor ous the the kind of half human, half bird creature on the rock singing so beautifully that you have to jump in the water and they kill you.

And so the idea is that men want to let go. Because men have to be so in control, so powerful, they have to protect this image. They have a secret desire to let go and be almost dominated by a very powerful woman.

A lot of men have that. And I talk about some of the most powerful meaning in history, Julia season, mark Anthony, um jode majo, who all these men, very masculine, and men who fAllen for very feminine sian, like women, and been completely dominated by them. And they actually kind of enjoy the process because it's still like a sense of I can let go, I can enter this totally session, sensual, physical world and is is extremely pleasing.

It's like another rome outside of my kind of cold, masculine world, do you know? So I don't really get men complaining too much about women have to do them honestly. It's usually the other way around.

I've heard before and I promise is not original idea that i'm pretending to have heard elsewhere that my friend asked me to ask sort of question that in all sexual exchanges there is a power exchanges um maybe could elaborate on that um because as you were describing some of the seductive power dynamics that exist a phrase that i've heard before came to mind um that at first made me chuckle but then made me think um quite deeply about this issue of the relationship between sexual and power dynamics which is this notion of topping from the bottom you if one is giving someone else the impression.

That they are more powerful by virtue of the word giving, they actually hold some power, right power is can be given or taken but um often times a seductive exchanges and sexual exchanges and romantic exchanges in particular or about both people uh buying into A A temporary illusion. Let's pretend that you're in charge when actually i'm in charge, okay, but I know that you think that you're in charge, okay. Let's just pretend none of that exists and just do x right. And I think this is another example of covert contracts and it's one that actually can potentially create a lot of problems post talk right um but I think the relationship between sex, romance and power is an important to explore in the context of this.

Well, I wrote the art of seduction with the idea that he was an art invented by women. IT was invented by women who had no power, essentially socially, politically, in any sense of the word in, in, domestically, right. And but the one power that they could, that they could wield over a man, was through sex to some physical attraction.

And so they developed this art of kind of Loring a man into their world through various theatrical effects, clear a patch being kind of the archetype of this, and then lowering the the powerful man into this world. He has the illusion that he's the one pursuing her, but in fact, he is the one controlling the dynamic. So often times, the person who appears to be the weaker one in the relationship, who is not doing the pursuing, is actually inviting the pursuing, is actually leading the other person on.

So there is a lot of kind of appearance games going on, and you can never really figure out who exactly is in control of the dynamic cause one person is like allowing the other person to lead them on. But the fact that you're allowing them is the degree of powers, the degree of control, right? So it's very hard to figure out.

And sex in power and romantic relationships are very much entertained in us physically, emotionally neurologically. You can avoid IT, right? And so I think it's kind of dishonest to say that, that none of that exists, that it's like that there's some egalitarian paradise out of their when it's really not wired in us for that kind of relationship.

There's a recent scientific publication slash fact toy that I want to share with you in this context. I de like your thoughts on IT David Anderson, who is a phenomenal new biog. He has been a guests on this podcast before. He is professor at cal tech, studies basically the functions of hypothermia, so OK things like a aggression meeting and things that sort, and does IT so IT with great detail. He's a virtuoso of hypothermia.

And he polished a paper two years ago showing that indeed, there are neural circuits in the brain of animals, and presumably in humans as well, that control sexual mounting behavior, but that there is actually a separate circuit for purely non sexual mounting and physical power over that's expressed in animals and anyone that's ever owned a dog and onto the dog park see same sex mounting between dogs or mounting between dogs that has apparently um no sexual and point and in expLoring this literature and some talking to David about IT, it's very clear that there are neural circuits um that have everything to do with essentially one animal of a species getting on top of the other animal, usually from behind, often times scarfing or biting the back of the neck and saying I control you it's it's often done in a playful context, especially between animals not always aggressive but there's a certain element of aggressive to IT but is that he says I decide whether not you are mobile or not for this moment and that and this is very important and one emphasize. This is a circuit that is entirely separate from all of the reflexes associated with sexual behavior in males and females. I find this to be fascinating um and because we hear about power over, right and we hear about power and we think about physical power over, but the idea that something as primitive as mounting, just like something as primitive of as biting or a striking, has its own unique set of circuits in the brain. I think substantiates every everything that you put in in your books about power and maybe in seduction as well. So as I just can't toss that out there for consideration, I I I wonder um if you have any reflections on IT if not um feel free to just say I don't but of course but to me this was a really important discovery because I think everyone looks at mounting behavior and says, oh, that has to be sexual and sometimes is IT.

And but but .

it's not that there is a there seem to be a host of neural circuits in the brain that are are really about defining who's on top, literally that has nothing to do a sex .

yeah i'm sure that's sure. I never i've never i've never read anything about that, but I can say that um I wrote a chapter in in my new book about love and that's a different thing than seduction and I was trying to come up with an idea of love that does have an element of equality that doesn't have this power dynamic going on in IT and kind of like the antithesis of my art of seduction, where i'm almost contradicting myself.

And I was going into the into the biology of that, even into the physics of IT. So there is a famous french biologist to his name escapes me. Sorry, I can't remember from the twenties and thirties um and he was studying paramecium and he was found he was study them there then these pounds said and he said that there was these moments where these single cell organisms were suddenly coupling.

They were all joining together, just one to one, and they were absorbed in the membrane e of one inside the other. And then they would like, go. And then once one couple of that, all the parameter m started joining up together, and they would sink to the bottom of the pond.

And paramecium don't reproduce through sex. They reproduce through dividing themselves, right, self reproduction. And so he was saying that the desire to couple to to connect to someone so deeply, where you absorb one is absorb the other, is biologically wired into us, goes back millions and millions and millions of years.

And it's a desire, essentially a biological desire for love, right? And it's to an energy that permeates all, although it's it's not just about power and hierarchies. And that he was showing other creatures that had something similar going on.

And you know, in physics we talk about entanglement, and we also talk about no mattered. If mattered isn't isn't opposed by a lot of connection. Err, IT joins together. I mean, particles joined form. Matter is said that a, so there's something in the universe is trying to connect things to each other.

So there is this kind of energy that exists in the world where we have a deep need to connect to somebody with outside of those power dynamics, right, where there's a degree of equality, where were drawn to each other. And we let go of the ego games, we let go the playing. We kind of, sir, mount our own physiology, our own hypothalamus, and we engage in this I call IT love subway.

And IT involves the physical part. The sexual part is the trigger for IT. Because when you have sex with someone, your body is suddenly premium to their energy in a way that you cannot control.

IT releases all kinds of of chemicals in the brain that are very powerful, and often times that sense is too powerful. And you react and and you're afraid of IT and you pull back. But if you don't react and you go further, than the mind also becomes premiere to the other person and their energy and their desire.

And so then the kind of create inspiring effect with the physical and the mental connection reaches the state that I called love supply. Now it's an ideal IT doesn't really exist that much out there in the world today, but there are stories in history that illustrate, and I believe that is a biological necessity for us to feel a deep, deep sense of connection. We Normally describe that to religion, to god, that, but I maintained the essence of love.

The model for love is between two human beings, straight or homosexual doesn't matter. And that feeling of mounting our own neurology, our own system and an entering this zone is deeply, deeply satisfying. We all wanted and IT has to involve letting go of the power dynamics, letting and everything being equal.

It's not that the other person is exactly like you. You recognize their difference. But but as far as being worthy of attention, as being worthy and respected, you leave all that other stuff outside. So there is a zone that's possible that's outside this power day night. What that we're talking about.

i'm excited that you're writing about this. So this is for your next book yeah i'm very excited. I couldn't help but think of some of the parallels between what you describe and what we're observing nowaday in the landscape of politics and social dynamics were clearly um there is no setting aside of egos.

People feel both sides feel attacked, everyone in between feels confused, like why do I have to pick aside um and there seems to be no hint of a future where people are setting down their stores at which means if we were to go with your earlier definition, which I like a lot, nobody feels safe enough to be vulnerable enough to to allow the union of people to occur in. Which is just a way, way of rewarding you know, a bunch of other things and not nearly as appliques tly as as you described IT. But if setting aside of power dynamics, are making oneself vulnerable is the key to accessing love in the romantic context, surely, but also in the societal context, I mean, what are the channels for that?

I mean, I suppose there is the argument, not mind that everyone should just take a about load of psychodeviant s and see the interconnecting veness of things, but that seems like unrealistic route. I just don't see that being um twelve grade graduation curriculum. Nor or do I think that would be healthy. I to be clear, I think that we end up with a lot of expression of of problems there um but short of a magic substance that could increase feelings of a connect veness among everyone simultaneously um how are you going to save .

humanity robot? Well, because i'm concerned about Young people in particular with hookup culture, with pornography at a it's kind of rewiring the human brain and we're losing what I was just describing. And I see a lot particular a lot of Young people, and I don't blame them because we've grown up in the world is very chaotic and very hostile. Le.

I say I think it's and not be nick picky here, but I I love what you just said in my mind. It's things like that are hijacking the hardwiring of the brain, okay?

Really required rain. Well.

I think we can expand and rewire upon our hardwiring. But so much of what you talk about in your books is about finding one's essence. But then also, what I love about your book so much, among many other things, is that it's about that dance between the hard wiring and and the possible of through effort so anyway, forgive me for for being that's .

very accurate.

So yeah how do you get us out of this? Well.

you putting a big burden on me.

I am but I think you're up to IT.

Um well, I try to do IT in this chapter because I wanted to reduce the reader into the idea that this is something extremely pleasurable and extremely healthy and the feeling of being vulnerable is a very positive attribute that will in fact, not just your romantic relationships, but that will infect you mentally. So creative people are extremely vulnerable. They are extremely vulnerable to ideas.

They're extremely vulnerable to the environment. And closing yourself off into your own ego, into yourself, to the chapters called escape the prison of the ego. And you you're kind of trapped inside of yourself and your own thoughts and your own desire.

It's like a prison dent enclosing you. And you wanted escape somehow. And you escape through drugs. You escape through born. But IT doesn't need to actually escaping. You want to be able to let go of the self and get out of this this prison that you're in, right? And so is a desire that that we all have.

And so I wanted to frame IT as this incredibly positive dynamic that you can engage in and the ability to be vulnerable to other people to open yourself up and to say that, yeah, they might hurt me, but i'm strong enough to take IT. And if they hurt me, i'll learn from IT and i'll rebound. And I know that a bit naive on my part, but I want you at least have that feeling, because a lot of Young people write to mean, they say, I, I can't fall in love anymore.

I can't. I don't like that feeling. I IT mixed the loss of controls too much, you know, and and a lot of that, what their behavior patterns are in creating the sense of control which you can have when you're locked inside of yourself.

hence over indulgence in pornography. yeah. And masterful tion sea as a way to avoid, you know, the understandable fear about interrelation dynamics.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, when you're Young, your your idealistic, at least a lot of Young people are, and you have these dreams and these hopes, and to let go of this possibility, which is deeply pleasurable and deeply therapeutic. C, to the human animal. As a social animal, it's like the highest form of interaction that we can have.

So my strategy, that chapter was to paint such a wonderful portrait of the pleasures that are awaiting you by letting go of your defenses of, letting go of all of your natural resistance factors, and opening yourself up to other people, is is a key to not just a romantic relationship, but to career success, to mental energy, to creativity, to being open in general, right? And so I don't think I could have A, A, A, why, you know, a huge impact, but we will see when when the book comes out. But i'm advocating that sense of opening yourself up to the universe, to the cosme itself, as an energy that permeates the world.

And so that you don't want to the feeling of being closed inside of your eagle, inside of yourself. I want to make IT so you feel the pain of that because you don't really feel the pain of IT. You feel like it's comfortable for you.

But I want to make a clearly that it's not comfortable. It's deeply, deeply painful and it's disconnecting you from some of the best experiences you can have in life. So I have that strategy.

The only other hope I have is in the human spirit itself. So a lot of this is being caused by social media, I believe, right? And and the incident and the the kind of immediate gratification we can get in so many ways.

And my hope is that Young people get fed up and get disgusted with all this disconnection and alienation in their life, and that they hunger from actually something more communal, more interactive, more real, as supposed to virtual, and so that the human spirit can be completely squashed by technology. Is said that. So I have that hope because we've gone through these cycles before in history where people have become very invulnerable and very locked and closed.

And suddenly there's an explosion, a creative explosion, like in the one thousand nine hundred and sixty, like in the one thousand nine twenties, like in nineteen century europe, with a cascine ova, where seduction reached this kind of appoggiatura. So IT has kind of swung back and forth between these moments where humans get incredibly closed and bitter and partisan, and everything's conflict and everyone's device and suddenly goes in the opposite direction. I I have hoped that possibility, and I structured my chapter to perhaps sweep that a little bit along that time and see if I can have any effect.

Well, I think what you just described in conversations like IT and that stem from IT or likely to have a tremendous effect, I think it's exactly what's needed now. And um certainly i'll be to to amplify that message. I I agree with everything you said and not just because you're sitting here on this podcast, but because it's clear to me that while power dynamics and seduction are wired into our human relation since the beginning of time, that we have reached a very chAllenging period in our history, it's somewhat of a relief to me to know that it's happened before.

But in a very different context, we hear a lot about the swinging back and forth of the pendulum, a someone, in fact, a Peter attia online physicians brother actually said, um so what credit him he said, no it's not a it's not a pencil in the swinging back and forth. Unfortunate now it's to become a recking ball so it's swinging back and forth in doing damage as IT as IT reaches its um you know it's extremes and I think that um I also look forward to a time where people acknowledge that the injustices around them and and that have been under them and others and but somehow are able to trance end that and the word that i'd like to pick up on there is the word justice. They was pointed out to me by someone I respect very much that you know, having a sense of justice is is a wonderful and important thing and as humans is important to how we structure society.

But I do think that a lot of the negative things that we see out there nowadays have something to do with the availability of ready, availability of pornography, high and city calorie food, that said, are a bunch of things like that. But that one of the issues with social media, because he does have its positive aspects, but one of the negative issues in my mind is that it's a steady flow of examples of injustice. So all day long, you're just seeing things like that, that pissed you off and that pissed other people off and for different reasons.

But but what was pointed out to me is that one of the key things about a sense of injustice is to be able to determine whether not there's anything that you should do about IT. And I think that everyone now feels a bit hydrant by all the injustice we see because we feel like what we're supposed to do something about IT. But IT may be that, well, we can't let everyone justice pass that bin.

Bombarded all day long with things that upset us is hydra king. Our creativity is distracting us from. Our deeper purpose is preventing a sense of vne ability that would lead to a sense of deep love and on and on.

So I don't think it's just about the the lure, the ttl zing lers of of sex food and um and looking at you know bodies and hearing voices on social media. I think there is validity that, but that it's also that you know, there's just ample opportunity to go down the gravitational pull. Forces of injustice like that so frustrated.

Why are they doing that? I I catch myself doing that, talking to coworkers when I walk in about, did you see this thing? This is crazy.

What's going on with? They are crazy when, you know, I supposed to think about anything else in that moment. And I try and yg myself out of that. But I I think that um you're not can do IT alone, but I think you will play a major role and saving us from this because people I do I think because people just need to see themselves through a different lens yeah and realize this is distracting me from who i'm supposed to be.

Well, a lot of what modern life should involve is the ability to ignore certain things. So for instance, I don't know, you know, that APP next door?

Oh, right. I used to have IT, but then i'd see all the the package is being stolen off my nights or porches in oakland. And then I started enjoying living in oakland less.

And I love the city of klin. It's got its problems, problems, but as an estate, you know, and went to school out there. And you know, like, I have deep love for the ebay, and I always have those problems. But when you see stuff being stolen on your phone in the middle night, when you wake up, IT creates a sense that, like, they're out to get .

my stuff terrible, right? And so I have IT in my spam filter, but I look at IT, and every headline is people stealing. Somebody broke into somebody's house.

This first dog bit me. This is rabid dog around there is this homeless person that's yelling and attacking people on on on. I feel like i'm living in this neighbor.

Od, it's like beyroot or something in the one thousand nine eighties. I can't even walk out my door. I just got I don't look at next door anymore. I just ignore IT. I don't open ever, because I know that, that they're designed algorithmically to put that in front of you every single time that you click on IT because that we responded that kind of stuff, naturally, we can help IT. So you have to be able to shut that stuff up and look at what you can actually control in your life.

So i've have this visual dislike of what's going on in ukraine because I was in ukraine recently, and I feel i've identified very strongly with their struggle, right? And IT just, I can't that outrage feeling IT just every time I read article about IT IT just drives me crazy. So the only thing is, I stopped reading as much as I can.

I read things that are kind of rational and intelligent, and I send the money, and I know I don't know as much as I can, and I help them practically, but I don't allow myself to get that kind of outraged feeling all of the time. So somebody has to write a book. Somebody has to instruct us.

And what to ignore and what to actually pay attention to. So there are things that you can control, injustices that are out there that you could control by voting, by certain, by a massing, a movement. But you know, dealing with climate change, not by trying to we cycle every little thing in your house, but actually doing really much more macro in the world.

You know, joining a cause, there are things you can do and that's positive, and that's a way of channeling that kind of dark energy in you for a positive purpose. But it's totally disruptive and a totally distract you and weakens you and drains you of energy to fall into those rabid holes and let them and let yourself fall into them. So you have to learn the art of what to ignore and what not to pay attention to and understand that you're required to see those kind of red alert buttons on facebook or on next door wherever they are.

And it's just it's negative. It's like a Candy rush. You have to avoid IT and .

it's taking us away from our purpose, which we eat, chap, I think to me that the the most delicious ous aspect.

unless your purpose is to organize and be an activist. People asked me, I vote a lot about, in my human nature book, about the shadow side of human nature, right? And we all have that.

We all have a dark side. We all have hid aggression. We all the feelings of envy. We all have feelings of grandier city. We all have aggressive impulses.

How do you deal with IT? And I say the way to deals, to channel IT into something positive and prosocial. And that could be putting IT in your art work, venting that anger, that outrage and something that people kind of can identify with. Or I can be an organizing something that could be your purpose in life and actually doing something positive, so that the only way that you could actually use that energy for some kind of actual lives, task or purpose.

You're discussing lately a bit on some of your channels about masculine and feminine with a roles and crises of the masculine, feminine dance, as well as the crisis of masculine ity purse, crisis of femininity purse. You care to expand on that a bit. I think we could probably take three, four hours to explore all this in full. But IT was struck by some of the things that you said because I agree completely that just says we are not given a road map when we arrive in the world as to how to find our purpose. I think there is also a very conflicted road map that's thrown in front of us, and indeed conflicting multiple road maps about what that means to be masculine or feminine, or some combination of both, which, of course, everybody is some combination of both, just a varying degrees.

Well, um yeah, so men have a feminine insight to them, which if you try to repress IT, will come out in other ways. And women have a mastic inside of them. I think Young described as very well with the animal and the animals, which I think is is extremely real.

It's very, very confusing times for both men and for women right now. We don't know the rules that there everything is just so fluid and it's very, very difficult, particularly if you're Young. So Young women are getting this idea that everything should be equal and that women should have.

And of course it's right. Should I be paid the same, which at the same career opportunities, there should be no prejudice or or harassment or anything, but at the same time on social media is all about looking perfect. And looks are are incredibly important.

If you're not hot, you're terrible trouble. And a lot of Young girls are extremely confused by this after getting mix signals right. And boys are even in perhaps even worse circumstances, were being maskin and the seen as something negative.

So we don't have any ideas out there any more of what what constitutes a good positive form of femininity and a good positive form of vascularity. In fact, we even think there ouldn't be anything like that. There is no such thing as being mass and feminine, whatever.

It's very, very confusing. And so you know, I I think of of of masculine traits that I think are very positive and that should be out there to kind of counteract the sort of Andrew tate seduction that a lot of Young men are falling for. And it's a kind of an inner strength where you're sort of in control of your emotions. You're not invulnerable, it's IT. But you can take criticism, you can take people.

You know you can have moments of failure and your bounce bag, but you have a kind of inner resilience and a kind of inner strain, a kind of a quiet calm that I think used to be exemplified in movie eye, like a gary Cooper type thing, right? And that kind of sense of inner comes where you're not hysterically, you're not getting upset about everything that happens where you have a kind of inner strength and the confidence and you can withstand kind of what ryan holiday talks about lot about what stowers m you can understand all of the hardships and life, but you have that citizen within you is a very, very powerful form of masculinity as opposed to its all about sleeping with a lot of women having really fast cars, you know, being abusive and being a bully and said, IT said, these are signs of weakness, of insecurity and to be mass killing should be a sense of security and inner confidence and inner strength, right? And that's what we should generate in our culture.

We should have icons like that. okay. IT doesn't mean that, that there's no role for men who are not masculine and all who have more of the feminine virtuosity. That's also this definitely a role for that. And you know we see a lot of that in all sorts of that arenas of life.

And then there should be a positive model for women, you know, where instead of their appearances being judged by their appearances and having to confirm these ideals of what's hard or not, it's about being a incredibly powerful and competent and and have expertise and being really successful in your career and and as opposed to being continually judged by your appearances, which is very damaging. So these are terrible times. I mean, I I feel fortunate that I grew up in a time where there were these kind of models for me to go by.

And I think of my father, who who was a very quiet man, and he was he was just a middle class salesman, is basically what he was. He just sold for all his whole life. He sold chemical supplies for one company, but he was very dignified.

He treated people well. He was very common, very quiet, but he also was very empathetic. That that was my role model for what I think is a good masculine energy. And I think a lot of people just don't have they're very lost. And so I don't know what the answer is that I can't really produce that out of thin air, but I wish I could .

well certainly nowadays there many more um but the examples in options of masculine and feminine qualities out there for observation because of social media and because of the internet. And as you point out before, a key feature to becoming a functional human being, especially now that is, is learning what to ignore. I mean, there is an interesting idea in the circles around a nutrition and health that you know never before in human history have human beings been able to access such a wide variety of foods that are differ from what the ancestors ate. And I don't even mean ancient ancestors.

I mean, if you grew up in the bay area, as I did in the one thousand nine hundred and seventies and eighties, there were a few ethnic restaurants, but we ate the same, you know, fifteen or twenty foods over and over again, right? And then eventually that exploded into dozens of options and more, and fusion foods and all sorts of things. And so there is this idea, nutrition communities that we are not hardwired to um think about and design so many different food options that you know and to take so many distinct flavors where as before, people in one portion in the planet or country is generally one way the given season, the seasonality is set set in a similar vein.

Um we are now and children two are now overwhelmed with the number of different options of how to express oneself, both masculinity, femininity, but generally speaking. And so the question is then how does one choose right? How does one decide what? What's functional? What works? What's best? What's me? right? Everyone asking themselves, who am I right?

I think all teenagers, I find this faster. Ask themselves who I am. I adults don't tend to asked themselves to that question.

Who I am? I, I still ask yourself, kay, that's good. Just asked myself that more. But I think that we clearly .

have gone .

over a Cliff with the stuff. I don't think we are still at the point where we're kind of veering towards the edge of confusion. I think Young people are really confused because the moment one assumes uh one clear and let's say baLanced mask set of masculine feminine attributes or maybe there's a bit more masculine, a bit more feminine, it's like, um there are million examples telling you that that's wrong. I know and then sometimes has the tensity to anchor to well no no i'm right because this so I M and then always in a larger battle so you know gary Cooper, great, love his movies. But we're like we now have a million variations on gary Cooper um that don't look anything like the gary Cooper you and I are talking about and a lot of people won't even know who we're talking about.

But but that's perhaps dinosaurs perhaps that illustrates .

the point no I do not that you're dinosaur but that there is no single or even um set of masculine or feminine ideals so picking role models is something that I really truly internalized from your book mastery yeah you know there were a lot lonely years for me and I won't get into the stories. I ve just wondering like my what I anna do you know on thirteen my home was completely broken.

No sembLance of the reality was before who that the males in my life i'm going to origin to. Unfortunately for me, I signed mentors to me, whether nothing new IT or not, that really helped me along. And I changed them up as you recommend.

There wasn't one. I understood. There was a breaking up process and integration process, combining and threatened together a different things.

I think I truly believe that that's what's required. Um IT doesn't have to be one hundred percent. Gary Cooper IT can be ten percent robbert Green ten percent.

Someone else know five percent this and creating a pie chart of sorts of you know who one wishes to be in a given context but that takes work IT takes a bit of work in the nation but gosh that's powerful um and really credit goes to you because I you know europe entr of my you didn't even realize. In the way that you've forged in organized information. And there were others.

And but mastery is where I learned to do that. And this is not podcasts, a sales pitch for mastery, but got really taught me, okay, have a graduate advisor. SHE was wonderful and brilliant, but he didn't know how to explain a lot of things to me. So i'd find someone else for that, right, and someone else for the other thing, and someone else for the other thing, and together create a patchwork of of really excEllent mentors that made a lot of sense to me. Yeah yeah so I I think there's A A role for that process that you spell out in mastery in the larger context that could have become as a person and that includes masculine and feminine ideals yeah .

and and is an ongoing process threat your life. So who you gm down to when you were fourteen or fifteen will change when you're nineteen. I had a series of people like you're talking about.

My high school english teacher had an enormous impact on me, who taught me basically how to write. I internalized his voice. When I went to berkeley, I had a professor there who became my kind of surrogate father, berkely, who I deeply admired for his level of scholarship.

So he became kind of an intellectual role model. Later in life, when I finally wrote my first book, I met a man, you dolphs, who was a book, packager, who understood the business at sea. He kind of saved me.

He was sort of my mentor for the next phase in my life. So on and on and on. I found people, but they have positive qualities, qualities they admire.

They're not perfect. Everyone is flawed. And so at some point, maybe you see too many of the flaws you go on. I need somebody knew in my life, but there's nothing wrong with that. It's not like your, your, your video dating any codes or hurting them.

You move on to somebody else, but the sense of finding people whose qualities you admire, we don't learn from people just by following their ideas. We pick up their energy, their spirit. You didn't necessary pick up my energy or spirit from reading master.

Rather, maybe you did. I don't know. But when you're interacting with that professor at stanford or whatever is not just verbally, there's kind of a non verb communication going on.

You're internalizing some of the positive qualities that you saw on them and finding these series of mentors because I call IT surgit parents, you can choose your fathers and mother, but you can choose these ideals for, you can choose these mentors in your life. You can kind, real, write your family history and find that father figure you never had by glowing onto this person. But IT has to be the right fit, has to be someone that you connect to emotionally and intellectually, and that has the positive qualities you wish for yourself.

Ali embarrass, perhaps by saying that since I was a freshman in college, which is really when I turned my academic life around, and really my life around, i've maintained the same notebook with a list of names of people that admire and who I um you know trying to emulate in some way, not in every way. Certainly certain names have been crossed off, but um most of them have survived and certainly after reading master your name made that list and and been crossed off at some .

no not at .

all not not at all in through reading mastery there were were additional names. I had the the great misfortune of having all three of my academic advisors die suicide, cancer, cancer, which sounds tragic. The joke in my field is you don't want me to work for you.

That's that's what everyone says. But by being essentially scientifically orphant because there's a strong mentor mentor relationship in science and progression through the career track, IT forced me to go out and find other people and also to learn how to quote, quote, mother and father myself in the context of profession. And I got a lot of help, but I can't emphasize enough how valuable that practices.

And so when one looks out on the landscape of social media options, I mean, these are are literally just options of people to we call IT following. But um you know you should probably should be called something else uh because following you know IT fall short of emulating or attempting to emulate. But I think that in the context of masculinity mining ideals, this is so critical. But like the buffet of food is so enormous now, right? I think you ve got every cuisine on the table and were .

not wired for that. no. And I know personally I get very edged upset if I go to the market and I have to choose between thirty items and I have no idea what I want IT makes me really cranking upset, whether if I know OK, I cannot have this food, I can have that I we only looking for this, okay, it's easy.

Doesn't take two hours, waste my time too much choice is very detriment to the human being, I think. And that's why we're going back to what originally said, when you have that sense of purpose about your life, about what's important is that, just as in facts, your career, but infects everything you do. So, you know, eating this food is going to drain me of my energy that I need to create this thing that means so much to me and energy and feeling my my brain active and alive is an incredible important value.

All right? I'm not going to eat off that sugar because it's bad for me, right? IT means i'm not going to get outraged by these things on the earth because it's a waste of time. I can do anything about IT.

It's just feeding on my, you know, on my I forget the part of the brain that that slight the middle, whatever, right? So no, I don't want to go there right and on and on and on all these things in social media. Some of its good, some of its interesting.

I can follow Andrew huberman s podcast, and I enjoy them. I learned a lot from, but a lot of these podcasts are useless, did not helping me in any way. So that gives you this kind of filter.

And this RAID are to cut out those hundred different choices that drive us absolutely crazy. And I know maybe i'm partially I maybe i'm a little bit I don't know, I said maybe partially on the spectrum something, but I can can't stand too many choices that completely drives me nuts. So I always have to kind of fun on my energy into something, the things that are productive.

And having a sense of your purpose, whenever you discovered in your twenty years, hopefully gives you that ability to say, these are the positive role models I want in my life. These are the men doors. And the thing about following people and societies is so easy.

Just a click IT doesn't mean anything. A mental relationship takes work. IT takes courage, because you have to actually go up to somebody and physically ask for their help.

And a lot of people, right to me, say, i'm afraid of asking this important, powerful person to be their man. Tea, right? So IT involves a sense of social current where you have to literally engage with another human being who you admire, who you think is powerful.

So it's building your social skills that a, but it's a skill you develop. You can just follow someone, you can just watch their lectures. You have to engage with them and you have to get over some of your fears in your anxieties in the process.

I might die to IT. I think everything he says absolutely true. And I think i'm engaging in the the various um tools that they recommend is immensely helpful.

Like I think here, hearing about a book is great. Reading a book is even Better. Thinking about a book is even that you read is even Better than that.

And then writing down your own ideas and writing a book. Well, that's that's the big win, right? And that's what the world, I believe that's what the universe wants from us. Not sorry to write a book, but you know, translate what I just said. Any number of different .

endeavors you want to be able to think for yourself, right? So you're not just absorbing ideas from other people and kind of mimmo king them and kind of just learning the exteriors of their ideas. You wanna kind of die gest them and then have them slowly become your own ideas by interacting with them, by created and I putting them through your own lens.

So someday it's it's a bookstore in me is the art of thinking and how to use that kind of process and go deeper into IT. And I talked a lot about IT in one of my podcast, which might be the seed of a book, but it's the the difference between dead thinking and a live thinking. Ideas can be either alive, they can be dead. And an alive idea is something that enters your brain from an external source of philosophers, an article, somebody you admire, somebody you hate.

And then you absorb IT, and you think about IT, and you decide, i'm going to turn around into this and i'm going to make IT alive and going to make IT something that part of me another part of in the live idea is um you have an idea that comes to you about a book or a project or something about the world and you go maybe that's not actually true. Maybe the opposite is true. And you go through a process, and you cycle through IT on on, and you reflect on, and you refine this idea, and maybe IT turns into its opposite.

And through the process of reflecting and correcting and revising IT, you turn IT into something living, something alive within you, right on, on, on. And what prevents people from going through that process, which would be the subject of my book, is basically anxiety. Because I think how you handle anxiety is the most important kind of quality in level.

Determine whether you be successful, whether you will find your career path where the you won't be able to. I don't know know if you can follow that idea at all, but um anxiety is a signal you that you don't understand something, that there's a problem out there that, that you can't resolve. And so what happens to most people if you're insecure is you glam on to something instant, easy to get rid of your feeling of anxiety.

I don't understand this problem. Oh, IT must be a must. A must be the answer, because this person said that, right? So you don't develop the the ability to think, you don't fill the ability to go the next level.

But if you take that anxiety and you go, alright, maybe eight is an answer and then you start going through and then you go, no, maybe a isn't the answer, maybe b is the answer. You're able to surround your anxious and go passed, come further and further and further. You don't rush for the first available answer that's out there, right? You're able to go through a process of refining things.

And so in your career. If you're anxious for success, if you're anxious for money, you're gonna the wrong choices. But if you're able to deal with that anxiety, say, maybe I, I, I have to think more deeply about where i'm going, have to come up with other alternatives, then you can make a much Better choice on, on, on.

So how if you deal, if you're creative person, it's very, very chAllenging to have that blank piece of paper before you. That books, if you haven't written that film or whatever, you filled with a lot of anxiety and you have to deal with IT. And if you're able to turn into something creative and productive and great things will happen, you're create a masterpiece. So the ability to deal with anxiety and do not give into the most instant gratification that you can get is to me, a marker of somebody will be creative and will invent something I supposed to, people who just resty cle old and dead ideas.

Amen to that was once told that no anxiety makes children of us all, and not in the positive sense of being child like, you know, IT IT regresses us to a motor where we feel a completely lack of control. And I completely agree that being able to manage xiety and work dance with IT, yes, we can't rid ourselves of IT.

No, no, perhaps nor should we, right? Because it's a signal, as you point out, that we don't understand something, that there there's something to get curious about, right, a process or something out there or both. I think that really resonates. yeah. And I think a lot of people benefit from, from hearing that because I think we hear the word flow, and we just all imagine even catch myself imagining that you know, when robber Greens sits down the right, it's like there's a blank SHE and then he just kind of meditate and then boom, outcome these books. But I you know, if I get realistic for a second, i'm sure that there's a lot of inner .

turn oil in and I god you have no idea so um my process is is ninety five percent pain and maybe two and a half percent x to c and I don't know what the other two and a half percent would be but um so I write a story because all in my new book, and most my books always begin with the story from history. He sa and IT is so bad. I just I can't believe how bad, how flat IT is, how IT sucks.

I'm so embarrassed. I hate myself, and I go when I go digging and I start changing the words and IT, I start making a little bit Better. The second version is kind of palatable, but it's still sucks.

It's if I let you down to the world would be very embarrassing. I work, it's anxious, you know, and my wife can tell you i'm a miserable being. When that happens, everything looks black to me at that point, and I pushed through IT.

So if I gave in to my anxiety, and this happens with a lot of books and writers, I would just put out that second version, which isn't very good. IT isn't very strong. IT isn't thought through because my ideas, when I look at them the first time ago, that's not real.

That's not the actual thing that's going on here. But but you've missed the mark. You wanna hit what's actually real in that story. So you have to go deeper and deeper and harder and harder and harder. So I don't just give up A O, here's the chapter and it's gotto be Better.

It's gotto be Better until finally after two months of struggling IT seems like it's it's gone to the place that I wanted to be in, right? But I I use that anxious, keep improving and making Better. And then when I reach that point in, the story is good enough.

And I can let my wife read IT and then my editor. I feel great. I have that two percent moment of joy, but IT came through all of that anxiety.

But I can tell you, the feeling of fulfilment when I finish a chapter is pretty damn great. When I finish a book, it's Better than any kind of drug experience anyone could ever have. It's such a wonderful feeling of accomplishment and pushing past off the barriers, you know. So my process involves a lot of things. So I dealing that's why i'm talking about I A book about IT.

Thank you for sharing that. I'm attempting to write a book and have been for several years, and now I feel a little bit Better. But clearly, I need to ratchet down harder.

But another domains of life. I familiar with the experience of tons of anxiety, and I just get to this one milestone, and then i'll figure out the next milestone. But even that process of saying, okay, when to break this down in the milestones itself as anxiety provoking.

sure. It's just that at some point you generates enough energy that you just you just sort of stumble forward into the process and then keep going to try to bloody oneself too much. I think a lot people benefit from hearing about that. In fact, i'm certainly will. So speaking of anxiety, you have a clip on the internet that we will provide a link to in the shown at captions, which I think is absolutely fabulous, about how to find a romantic partner and or get more out of an existing romantic partnership.

I don't even remember what I said.

You have to remind. No, it's so good. One point in particular yeah that I remember that I think is also true, is that there needs to be at least one in probably several points of like real convergence in terms of one's interests or likes that go beyond like what food somebody likes, or you know what type of house they want to live in.

But that actually traces back to these early forms of delight. And you mention a that for you and therefore personally your partner, that you know a mutual love and respect for animals happens to be one of those things within the context of your relationship, right? But not that our love for animals is required for me is, how is exactly never .

go out with the woman who didn't love animal.

right? My sister used to teese me that if a woman gave me a birthday card or a card that had a drawing of a particular animal, which I am particularly fond of, my sisters, i've an older sister, and you to say, oh no, it's over. He's gone. Know that fortunately, it's it's not that simple, but there's some truth to what you are saying. It's certainly it's necessary but not sufficient. But maybe you could elaborate a little bit on this notion of conversion, interest and contrast IT with a lot of what people tend to here and say about what's important in partnership because I think this is something with a lot of people grapple with, both in terms of finding a partner and in terms of building partnership.

Well, um you have to you know there's you there's different relationships you can have. I mean, do you want like a one week, a one month relationship? Are you looking for something longer, more satisfying that volente tail? You know, maybe years is of being together. And you know, people can get very boring very quickly, right, particularly if you can have a conversation with them about subjects that interest you. And so imagine animals.

Animals is a very good example because it's not i'm not saying that you both have to be democrats or republicans that's too bin on superficial but the love of animals reaches into your character, which is something deep inside of you or you're dislike of animals that happens to be the case but it's signals something about IT that's so primal, al, that's so connected to a child that there's going to be a deep connection there and sound like you have to both love cats, which is good if that happens to be the case. But just animals in general, you love their energy. You love the fact that their that they are innocent in their own way.

You love the first, they're not playing games with you. You love the kind of instant love you can get from them kind of thing. And you connect to them on that level is a very, very positive sign because IT goes beyond just intellectual things into something emotional and visceral.

So really, the emotional connections, the values that you have together are very important. Money is another one that's extremely important. So if one of you is incredibly material oriented and it's all about money, is, is, is power and success and comfort.

And the other is IT really into IT into spending money. A lot of people have endless fights or something like money, right, where there is no convergence there. And money signals a deeper value about the person.

So i'm not saying, is anything wrong if money motivates you are not moralizing about IT because I can signal a value that maybe you grow up without IT and that feeling comfortable and feels like you don't have to worry about something is very, very important to you. And then not being interested in money revealed something about your character. So i'm telling people you, anna, look at the person's character and see a kind of convergence there and something that can last.

And I remember I was reading from one of my books about Franklin, Eleanor rosel and elena rose vell. And the thing of IT was, Frankly, delor rose event was his incredibly hands, some viBrant Young men before he got polio, very act of very athletic, very hands, some, all of the women were after. He was like the perfect match.

I was wealthy, and ela rosebed t was like the ugly duckling. SHE wasn't very pretty. SHE was kind of socially awkward, but he signed to her character.

He saw that intellectual SHE was a match for him. He saw that they had kind of similar interest on that level that i'm talking about, the gobin eath just the surfaces. And he chose elinor and everyone was shocked about IT.

You know, nobody was was trying to court elenor. I've heard her last name at the time SHE. I think SHE might have been been rosevean.

IT was very shocked and he said, I looked at somebody who I could last with who had some qualities that were much more important to me and ended up being a very satisfying relationship course later on. I had his dalian ces. So IT wasn't perfect, but IT was a very IT was a very positive relationship.

So seeing your values in life, you know what IT comes to? Like money, when IT comes to, like career, when IT comes to comfort or lack of comfort. Some people like not being comfortable.

They like being on the edge. They want chAllenges. They want to move from city to city kind of thing.

And if you partner with somebody who just wants to live in the same house, you're going to have conflict after conflict after conflict. The sex might be great, and that might be good for a month or two months. I've been nothing against.

I'm not going to judge that either, but IT won't lead to a long lasting relationship. You know, sports athletics are another thing is, is someone that likes the outdoors, or is this someone whose you know like josh, a born has to be in in a time square in a pens in manhattan, you know, kind of thing. So values the reach inside of a character that are deeply and grain that you can almost not change, you can control.

And there's a convergence there on several levels is a sign that you can have a deep connection with that person is very important. And if those connections are good and there's a physical attraction, because if with all the physical attraction, IT will kind of this allowed, you've got a recipe for for incredible success, for something that can really last. And having a lasting relationship, as i've had, is is such an anchor in your life.

You know me for someone who works as hard as I do and hopefully for her as well, IT is grounds me. And that makes life so much simpler and easier. And and it's not just simple and easy.

This a lot of love and A A great deal of of of deeper emotions involved. But having a long term relationship, if you can have IT, is something that pays off in so many dividends. So being able to find that kind of convergence, you know, when I first met my now my wife, I had a cat at the time.

I'd always been a dog person, but this is a cat I had. And I love that cat. Like, I can't believe you have such a wonderful cat. I brought over to my apartment on the first date.

I wanted to see her reaction to the cat, you know, because I generally, and uh, a lot of people was churched that women who don't like cats, I I don't, I can't get along with, right? Because there's something feeling in the feminine nature that I love and SHE loved my cat. And boy, that was the best sign of all.

And things just block. And he loved me for loving a cat. So there was a great convergence right there that we saw her right away. Then there were other things, but that was the first one.

I love that story. And everything you just said suggest, I believe, that in order to find the right partner and to build an existing partnership that hopeful ly feels at least partially right to people that IT requires at least some knowing of self. Because unless you know your character, one's own character, then it's impossible to really determine if somebody else's character is going to mesh well with IT or not.

Self awareness is is actually the most important quality in life for all aspects. But yeah, I mean, if we go by social pressures, a man will choose a trophy wife who look sexy and hot and IT will impress all of his male friends. At, at, at.

You go by the things that culture tells you that these are the write images for you, right? And then there will not be any connection to you because you're choosing for purposes that don't connect to who you are. And so you have to know yourself.

You have to know what you love. You have to know what you hate. I think most people know that they love animals or don't love animals.

I think most people know that they like stability or they like things to be kind of a slightly chaotic. I think you have to go through deep levels of introspection. But what you have to do is when you're involved in a relationship, you have to think that those things matter.

That's the problem. You tend to think that those things, many things, that sex matters more than anything, physical attraction matters. Or you think that the person having a lot of money matters and said that you don't think that this other aspect is important. If you value what i'm talking about, then yourself awareness will kicking because you really basically know is essential basic parts about your own character.

I think people sometimes get um distracted by admiration of qualities that they might find admirable but that don't mess with their own character. I've seen this many times .

before .

well where someone will say that someone will start listing off the positive attributes of the person that they happen to be dating, like he does this blank, blank and blank SHE does this. He volunteers at that. And that's all great.

I mean, volunteering for good causes are only supported that. But then what they're overlooking often, IT seems, is whether not that's a core value for them or whether not just something that they admire. I hear a lot of admiration in the early days of relationships that later I hear about fAiling.

And what you're talking about is something deeper, more aligned with one's own sense of self. And IT almost a leads me to use the word you sort of out more about energetics. It's like merging of people's energies, which sounds very new age.

That's not my intention, but but I think IT relates to something that we do hear a lot about and I think is valid, which is how IT feels to be around somebody in different context. Like do we feel at ease? Do we feel lightness and ability to express ourselves and to, and do we enjoy and admire them in their expression?

I supposed to just admiring what they do. They've accomplished black, black and black. They manifest these qualities that I wish I had right to hear that and and aspire to have, which is very different than a meshing of of energies.

Also are a couple of things. You have to understand their character as well. And people can be very deceptive and very slippery. And can wear masks.

One telling sign that i've noticed my own relationships in the past is that a woman would be a certain way with me that I thought was very good and I liked. And then the moment we were with other people SHE, actually a way that was very irritating, is like a different character. And I really kind of fell out of love with her when I saw in social interactions SHE revealed.

So with me, he was almost wearing a mask and laying a game. But the moment he entered a different circumstances saw another aspect to her character. So you also have to be very attentive to their character, what lies underneath that they have some of these values that they're not just trying to win you over for whatever you're playing along with you.

The other thing that's very important is a sense of mystery. So a party can become boring very, very quickly right after a year. You know every single thing about them, right? They're going to say the same thing.

Those conversations go around in circles is just you reached an end. There's no surprises. There's no mystery. You want somebody where they have corner that you don't really not see at first that they surprise you sometimes silly. There's a quality that you had suspected before. So people who are too obvious, who are too familiar, who show everything instantly, they're going to end up boring you, right? But people who have a bit of reserve, and I know this, maybe i'm projecting my own values on the world, but people who who kind of intrigued that you don't fully understand that make you want to know more. And if they can be like that after two years and three years or five years, while that's fantastic, but the sense of I know every single thing about this person they never surprise me anymore, is what kind of breaks the the enchantment and leads to the end of the relationship with .

the idea of more to learn about somebody, perhaps also suggest that they are continuing to evolve into foregone in the landscape of life. Yeah, they're not fully baked. Yeah, right. Which I think is an interesting idea. In during the four episode series that we did on mental health, paul county psychiatry said that a matching of general drives, which he defined as the desire to create something in the world of one's own expression, is really critical in relationship. And he said, you know, IT matters less whether not one person likes classical music in the other person, rock and roll provided that their relationship to music is similar, or something of that sort like that is about a drive to of a certain sort to engage in the world. So one person could love music, the other person's not into music, but the way that the approach life is one of grabs, mutual curiosity, desire to find out that said, a and that that exist on a continuum of curve IT seems to drive with what?

But the only thing I would add is if you like classical music and they love like heavy metal music, you're going to be driven crazy pretty quickly. It's, you know, it's not gonna mess with you. And I know I would have that problem.

You'll both be in headphones .

a so the fact that you both have, because music is like animals in a way. So I agree completely with what you're same, but I wouldn't say maybe music is the best example because music is something very deep about a person, right? And you know, i'm not say one is superior to the other, but IT revealed something that's nonverbal that that can give you a window into who they are.

So if they like punk rock, like you do when I grew up on punk rock, there's a rebellious st thing. This took this, an anti authoritarian, an quality is very strong. You you get to see that through them. If they like mode start and soft stream cortez, there's somebody that kind of value, softness and equity in peace and you're not like that. So the music kind of shows you something equality about their character that can be very telling and be very eloquent.

And so IT doesn't mean you both have to love the clash or the dead Kennedy or whatever showing my own generation um but that you both have that rebellious streak and that rebellion street could be you like this classical music composers who could be pretty dead rebellious and angry no, I actually have kind of like them. So that convergence, I think is a positive one, I think. But in general, I agree with that.

I'm curious about the nonverbal communication component of all types of relationships, but let's stay in the landscape of romantic relationships for the moment now, maybe include professional relationships too, because what you just described is really about a resonance around the non verbal stuff. I mean, I can be articulated with words. Yeah, I love animals.

I love this music. This is the best song. Like, did you see that? Like, authors are amazing, right? This kind of thing.

But language is just an attempt to place, you know, words on a feeling in those instances. So IT can be classified as non verb with respect, non real communication. You written purely extensively about the fact that people often communicate with their body and facial expressions.

I'm certainly familiar with the somewhat, if not very curious, sensation of somebody smiling like a toothy smile. And then as they pp IT away, that smile just dissolving very quickly. And you know, you don't have to be a neuroscientist or psychologist to realized that, like, there were something quite false about that experience, or that this person experiences emotions like step functions on off, on off, which is not how most of us experience oceans.

Most of us experience motions with some pervasiveness. Like, I was happy walking in the door because of something happened before and someone to smile while i'm walking in the door. I see something shocking in dismain.

Of course i'm going to frown. I'm in a White boy that smile, but those are rare instances. So let's talk about the mouth, the eyes, the face, the body in the context of communication. What are what are some important?

And I want to go back on its far as convergence is sensitive, humor is extremely important, right? So it's not like you both like the same comedians, but if one person likes rushe humor and the other person does IT, that's a problem. And also the fact that the person doesn't have a sense of humor or doesn't make you laugh is a very, very bad science. So I wanted to add that one component in there.

I'm so glad you did. Someone who can make me laugh has uh you know necessary but not sufficient but boy it's approaching .

sufficient um you know when he comes to the art of seduction, the art of seduction is a non verbal language that you must master. It's a language of the gifts that you give. It's a it's a language of how you smell.

It's a language you try that you communicate through the eyes and the thing you have to understand about the human being is that we evolved for much longer period of time with outward than the small forty, thirty five thousand years, that we have symbolic language. So during that vast period of darkness, for we do not have words, we were not communicating nonverbally. We were picking up signals from people.

We were watching every little detail of their behavior because we didn't have words to desire IT. So it's wired into our brains to have an mazing sensitivity to people's non verb communications. We can almost be telepathic that way if we learn that language.

The problem is we have the capacity, but we don't develop IT at all because we are so word oriented. You're just listening to people. If you're even listening to them at all, you're just hearing the words.

And you're so thinking that the words means that the words are sincere, which they're often not at the same time that you're listings so much towards. People are shuffling in their chair. They're kind of looking away.

They're looking at other women or other men. Their voice is kind of trembling when they say something that were shouldn't tremble, their eyes are dead. The smile is kind of fig. You're not watching any of IT, so the most important thing, innovation communication law, number one is pay attention to IT continually develop the practice of shutting off the words and watching people almost as if you took the television and muted IT, right? And just watch their behavior.

It's not easy and it's not natural because it's the words, the words, words we want, we want to focus on them, right? But your ability to turn the television off to mute IT will suddenly open up so many things about people. They reveal so much things for signal, for its, that people are continually using out all of their secrets through their nonviable behavior.

You can read them like an open book if you master this language. And I have in the laws of human nature, I described the story of milton erick, and I don't know you from me, with milton nicks, and perhaps the greatest modern master of number of communication. He was at an amazing psychologist. He sort of is the inspiration behind, and what's called, and help me out here, linguistic.

I mean.

because kind of a best ization of his ideas, he he created hyo therapy. He's the person who create .

hypothermia therapy. Is is a valid psychiatric practice minutes. ExcEllent clinical data is support.

Well, milton, eric and head polio when he was nineteen and he was paralyzed, his entire body was paralyzed. He couldn't even move his eye e balls, right? And he SAT in bed, and he had a very active mind, and he was going to die from share board him.

And what he did during the two years of being paralyzed like that was just watching people's nonviable communication and making notes in his brain, and learning every single he learned, the twenty different forms of yes, the hundred different forms of no right, every intention, how simply entered the room, how they left the room, you know, how they looked at him with the pity or empathize, he mastered. And then when he became a psychiatrist and he treated people, they thought he was psychic. He could see everything into them, because for two years that all he could do was observed that he couldn't speak, he couldn't do anything, he couldn't read a book.

So you have that same power, but you don't have polio, obviously, but you have to first pay attention to IT, right? It's an amazing thing what you do. It's a lot of fun actually. And I tell people go to a cafe one day in your city where if you live and just watch people because you can't hear them, their refuse tables way, watch their numerable behavior as they interact, and see if if you pick up cues from them and there things, there are signs of you wind emotions.

So for instance, an exercise you can do is you go up to somebody from an angle where they can see you coming up to them and you surprise, and you go, hey, hey, mike, whatever they turn. For that second, their expression reveals how they really think about you. You will detect if you can pick up micro expressions and and you can they're only like one, one fifty of a second.

But they're there. You express the kind of and they smile, you can see the little to staying in their eyes, right? Then the mass comes on, right? Or you're talking to them, they're looking at you, but their feet are facing an opposite direction.

That means that they're dying to get away from you kind of thing. These are signals that you don't necessarily pay attention to. Their posture will tell you everything about their levels of confidence, right on and on and on.

The fake smile, if you can just master the ability detect the fake smile, you will go wonders for you, because you able to see what you really want to do is to see the person with the january smile, particularly in romantic relationships, someone whose face lights up. A real smile likes your whole face up. IT doe doesn't like your mouth.

These parts of your face go up. Your eyes get alive. There's like a, there's like A A neural thing going on in your brain that's changing your whole facial expression and IT means that someone genuinely likes, they're genuinely interesting, they're genuinely laughing or connecting to you. Man, if you can see that, it'll help you so much in the romantic room, and then it'll help you get away from those toxic people that are continuous ly faking interest in you, because a narcissa toxic person thrives by deceiving you with a charming, a lowering front that makes you come into their world.

Then they can hurt you, then they can do something to you, but then they have you in in in their in their you know, in their trap, right? So being able to see that they're not genuinely interested in you, that they're faking IT will help you avoid very toxic relationships. And as I said due, I don't know we were on there or not, but deep arsy sis have dead eyes.

They they almost can't help IT. They can fake the smile. They can fake everything else but the eyes.

You have failed to wait because you say, what are dead eyes? You'll know that when you see IT, there's no life in them. They're like looking through you. They're not looking at they're looking through you. What can I get of you do what they call a self object there, an object for you to use and that's how they're looking at you like they would look at a hammer or something.

You have the concept .

of dead .

eyes and also alive eyes. So fascinating because, as audience of this podcast will know, because I said that too much, but i'll say again that the eyes are the only two pieces of your brain that outside the cranny of volt, I mean, there are literally two pieces of brain lining the back, your eyes and the dynamics of the pupils.

Those changes, of course, reflect our bright or dim ges in the room, but they also reflect levels of arousal that are on the millisecond time scale. So as one expresses words of of glee, right, that pupils constrict a little bit, believe or excuse me, dialed a little bit, I got a backwards there for a moment, and vice versa. You know, as one feels a less, less excited sort of moments of despair, expressions of despair, the people should get a little bit smaller because arousal is going down. And so I think we pick up on these things at the unconscious level we do the deadness of the ice is kind of the the um the conclusion that the pops out of us if we're paying attention.

But the problem is in love we registered unconsciously, but we don't give IT any value to IT. We trust our words. We trust our rationality is supposed to our intuition about people. Sometimes when you meet a person for the first time, signals go up and you might bring something wrong about them.

And then you forget IT, because you don't trust those initial unconscious signals that your brain is giving you, right? So you have to, you have to verse kind of trust that these intuitions are very valuable. The other thing is pay deep attention of the tone of voice.

The voice, as actors will tell you, is like the hardest thing to fake, right? It's very hard to fake excitement. Your voice, either hazard or a dozen.

It's very hard to fake confidence. And you can. I mean, books have been written about that. I'm not onna go into all the the details about IT, but the person will reveal so much of their emotional, of the emotions of their experiencing, particularly levels of confidence, you know, like a trembling voice or something, or a booming, confident voice, which some people can fake, but often is very difficult. You can still see through IT.

And on the level of seduction, women, men are very, very attuned to the voice of them. But we're not aware of IT because the voice of our mother had an incredible impact on us in early, early, early childhood, her singing, her the tones of her voice. That was the probably the first reduction that we ever went through. And a woman's voice has tremendous power over us, right? And so hearing a voice that kind of grades are irritate you is is something that that's a bad like deeper than all the Carriers that we were talking about but a woman's voice that kind of reminds you of that mother that sing song you whatever feeling was that's somebody that can very easily seduce you.

Yeah there's a there's a place for naming this. It's like sub cortical court ship know below the cortex is yeah like the geeky neuroscientists like myself say, you know getting downbeat the cortex with all of this stuff, you know convergence of of real loves and desires I mean that we express with words we sense the world using the course our cortex, but really tell you about getting into the the subcritical stuff that is the stuff of our history, the stuff of our hardwiring and our e our unique ness.

I couldn't help but think about the fact that earlier we were talking about the now you infinitely vast number of choices of things to engage in people, to engage with eeta but at the same time as you are now talking about um these mico inflections and the subtle ty is a voice and bodily communication that whether or not its a oj es or people sending filter images or the default to text message communication that is so prominent now IT seems like we now have more choices so more input but the sort of quality ative differences between the inputs have been banned into a couple of simple beans as if we've regret to primary colors only um but the canvas is huge or may I don't know that analogy works but you get the idea because ultimately in order to develop good choices about profession, romantic relationships, friendships, you need a lot of examples and a lot of information that allows you to clean the subtle ty um but as long as its eo gies and filter pictures taken in a particular angle usually from above. Ask for the picture head on and below send me a picture of your worst your worst expression um all of that um IT seems that there is now increased opportunity for deception. And I don't just mean people misleading others.

I also mean us misleading ourselves. Like, oh my goodness, how could I be so disappointed yet again about particularly landscape of life and doesn't just have to be romantic interactions that could be other landscapes like, how could I be fooled? Well, you're fooled because the are the inputs were deficient, not good data as we say.

Well, the thing is, if things are you're immersed in the virtual realm, it's very, very hard to master the nonverbal communication aspect, which is so important. So if you're dating from an APP and you're flipping through and then you find that person, you've missed out on the greatest experience of life, which is actually having to go out to a bar or go to A A restaurant or go to a social event and have to literally encounter another person and deal with looking at their their behavior and kind of assessing who they are. It's a muscle that you have to pay attention and on verb communication.

And if you're just, you know, going through the mog s are going through the tinder apps, that muscle completely atta fes, you have no power, you able to deliver anything. And that's what's happening with a lot of people who are using these apps. A social skills are like any skill at all that you have to develop them.

It's a muscle you have to develop. And you've all noticed this problem in your own life. If you've gone through a period where you're kind of retaining, you don't undergo around people and you spend a months like that, then you go out, you feel awkward IT takes you like a couple days to get used to being around other people.

You say stupid things, your body language awkward. But if you're in a situation for a months where you're constant interacting people, you're on the film set certain day and day out, day out, that skill starts developing. But you have to be out there in the world.

You have to be interact and you have to be looking at people's emotions. You have to be aging them in real time. We're not built for virtual encounters were creatures of human of flesh and blood. And we need to be looking at each other in the eye and paying attention to all these little details, these new answers that you can only get in person along those lines.

What are your thoughts about A I and how that's going to shape our sense of cell, sense of others and relationships as if that's a topic that could be covered in a series of minutes, but your what your top count or maybe even deeper thoughts about A I?

Well, i'm going i'm going to piece a lot of people off, but I am kind of very concerned about IT. I mentioned before about anxiety, the role that anxiety plays in thinking, you come upon an idea and you go, you have that's so good, and you go to the next level and IT becomes Better. And you go, and maybe that's not so good, then you go to the next level, you go to level three and IT gets Better and Better.

You have anxiety. Another aspect of intelligence is self awareness, right? The believe will look at yourself, go, I have biases.

I have confirmation bias. I have conviction bias. I have recency biases.

I have to counteract these things. I also have a dark side. I have aggression. I have to be aware of how they color my thinking, my emotions.

The third quality that goes into IT, i'm going about now intelligence, not artificial intelligence. The bill to deal anxiety go to the third level. Intelligence is the ability to look at side of yourself and see your own biases.

And the third thing is the ability to see a holistic picture, the kind of aha moment that scientists have, where you accumulate all kind of data points, and then out of nowhere, and image comes to your mind. Of yet there is the answer. You see the whole thing.

You see the whole castle, right? Simon vile, compared to AAAA square cube, you can only see a cube from one sider. You can never see A A square cube.

You can only see a side of IT if it's rotating. You still only seeing sides of IT. Only in your mind can you picture the whole thing.

So the mind has to go through the process to have hold this thing if they can invent a machine that can deal with anxiety and has anxiety and can go to level three. If they can make a machine that can be so of aware, they can go. The people who program me have biases.

Therefore, I have biases. I also have a dark side, because people have programing who have a dark side. If this machine can also think holistically, ly, beyond all of the data points in all the massive information is combining, can have that a heart moment.

All right? I can see a human consciousness. I can see creativity there.

The other thing I would say is, when I was a student at berkely going way back, I was one thousand years old. I decided one summer is a big paradigm for me. I'm going to take this class in ancient greek in six weeks.

They teach you a year of ancient greek. That means every day you have an exam, every friday you have a final exam, eight hours every day of a dead language. I thought this would be the best discipline for me after someone who been doing too many drugs to be house with you.

okay. And so finally, at one point, they give us this paragraph of the hardest st. Ancient greek writer of all to read.

This was near the end facilities, or through kids, as they say, I stare. So I had, I had, like the whole night, try to translate one paragraph. I couldn't figure IT out.

He had to understand that the weirdness of ancient greek, of the endings, the weird ways of thinking, the whole picture, that a harm moment was eluding me. At one point I thought I got IT, and I translated IT, and I gave you to the teacher. Next day I remember he was this kind of hippy that you'd have a broadly Dennis classic professor, but also happy.

I think you knew his first name is very.

I can only remember his first name, denis. He said, Robert, I can see you're thinking, but you need to go to another level. You missed, didn't have that A H moment.

You didn't put the whole thing together. You were close, but you didn't. You have to try harder. And that stuck in my mind forever, like whenever I have a problem, I have to think harder, have to go to that next level.

Now, what would happen if I had pulled out my translation of two cities and just copy that out, right? Or what have happened if I put IT through ChatGPT and I gave me the translation? That muscle in my brain that I have developed for forty years that allows me to write books would never have developed.

And that muscle is, I don't know the answer here. I have to go to another level. I have to try harder.

I have to think, I have to think. I have to have that engine worrying around, right? But if I just graph for ChatGPT, it's dead.

And they were going to have a whole generation of people who stop thinking, who don't go through that process. You've heard dogless hush deader. I think he said, people trained to go amount ever IT takes months.

Physical exercise, painful than they climb ever. They see the top. Wow, what a great moment.

He said, ChatGPT be equivalent of taking a helicopter to the top of mount ever without any of that training and having the same moment. It's not the same, right? You need to go through that process.

You need to go through that pain. And if you just and the think of this tragedy, B. T.

We think we're so modern, so sophisticated, but really we're just seduced by magic. You put IT in there and you see this group ow. It's like magic. It's like a magician, but it's empty.

It's like not your brain functioning, right? It's pay is the pay and part of us we like that kind of magic I supposed to actually having to go through the thought process itself. So i'm man, fit against having tools.

I use tools. I use the internet. I use google. I'm searching for like some fact toy for my book. I find that I use IT. I I like IT, but i've also learned to develop my brain, to think, to get that engine constantly moving. And i'm deeply concerned about jm, people who can't learn a foreign language, who can't master anything, who just immediately grab the first answer that is generated. I have concerned I am too.

when I was thinking a moment ago that, you know, like some people might hear what you just said and say, oh, well, the same thing was probably said about the automobile, like how many amazing experiences of walking from one place to another are going to be lost when people start driving from one place to another.

But I think the key difference in the certainly lies with everything you just said, is that what you're talking about is not just arriving at the same destination. You're saying the destination itself is different when one exert some effort and experiences some xiety to get there. So it's not the same as automobile al versus horse, versus walking, versus airplane.

Yes, it's fundamentally different because the the journey transforms the outcome. Yeah yeah. I have been agreement with you about many aspects of A. I am also excited about IT in the context of certain things.

I, I, I, I agree with you. I could be a tool, but are we Operating the tool or the tool Operating us is what i'm talking about.

I am concerned a bit to specially the context of what we've been talking about for most of today's discussion about um avatars replacing our online personas too much. Um you know the avatara ization of ourselves is already taking place through through filters, through a reduction of emotional expression to emerging, through reduction of of language to a diminish number of words to explain one's feelings.

You know, a prior guest on this podcast, this a feldman bert, who's an expert in emotions, talk about how the moment that a culture has a word for a particular subset of anxious feeling. So sufferance SHE taught me that in japanese, there's a word for the sadness. One experiences when they get a bad haircut. Ah, yes. And so that Normalizes the feeling.

And it's two feelings of less despair as opposed to what? Now, many kids especially grow up learning what i'm anxious, i'm sad, i'm depressed that you in signs we say there are lumbers and there are splatters and they've been arguing for years about, like, is that one brain structure when I name those two things next to each other, two different things, not only can I name one after myself, which is what tends to happen, sort of speak. But when you have too many lumpers or too many splitters, things are either overly simpler, overly complex, that, of course, the right answer, the best use of naming things arrive some place in the middle, right, that our field progresses.

Because if you make, if you love things together too much, if you can't progress, if you give them yourself, the illusion that it's progressive but it's not progressive, but if you split things up into a million different subcategories, like just even the word a drena is also called epa n and that has to do with basically people arguing over who got credit crazy. It's confused people for for decades yeah and there's there's another story there that and I know far too much about the scientists involved and there was a love triangle about naming of certain parts of the nervous system that oh yeah, people sleep ing with other people's partners. And love triangles have created more drama of naming creature in science.

I could do a whole hour on this. In any case, I what i'm hearing from you is that we cannot afford to lose our sense of newts. And also because that sense of new arts taps into what we're really experiencing. And A, I threaten that that we can become avatars .

of ourselves. Well, look at IT this way. We we worship technology is our new religion, okay? And we worship ChatGPT as if it's a god.

And seriously, there's a religious elements going on here. Well, we really should worship is the human brain, which is the greatest creation in the known universe. I'm afraid IT is the most complex piece of matter in the entire universe.

The number of neurons, the number of sync, the number of possible connections between neurons is infinite, practically infinite. IT is a wonders ous instrument. IT is so powerful, we've really, really scratch the surface of what we can use for let us worship.

That brain is in your head. You only have so many years to use that. You have so many years to develop IT.

IT is so wonderful and powerful that can bring you such pleasure, so much power in life. So tools are fine. We all need tools. We all need new hammers. We need nails, we need sauce a but the real thing is the hand that uses that, the brain that connects the hand to the hammer, that knows how to hit things. You know I think of the of the um the great painter rent war in the one thousand nine century he had like A A stroke or something than the last years he couldn't move his right arms with he painted with. He was disastrous.

So what he did is he put the brush in his mouth and he painted and he paid some beautiful paintings that way because his brain had master the art of painting, not his hand, but his brain, and mastered IT so well that he could actually paint well with the brush in his mouth, because he could directed, and he had the knowledge of how to make something perfect. The brain is absolutely incredible. The plasticity of the brain, which I am discovering after my stroke is absolutely a miracle.

Know what I don't know is professor shorts U C L A was studying O C D and how he abled this kind of cure. People of O C D through certain plasti C2City exe rcises, city had making them aware of their kind of brain lock is Better and getting them out of IT. The that plasticity of the brain is very far the greatest miracle of all.

And IT goes on to your sixties and seventies. And on onward, let's all get down on our hands and knees and worship the brain. And if we did, IT would create a complete shift in our values, and we wouldn't be so instantly seduced and enamoured and worship the technology. We will worship the brains that create the technology instead of, you know, the other way around.

Certainly got a fan of brains and their potential for plasticity. Sitting over here, I have the best for my group, scientific great grandparents. Are you visit who won the noble prize for neural plans to see during the critical period.

So my scientific great grandparents are David hubble and turns in reseal. David is dead, torn and still alive. He's ninety six.

And they won the nobel prize for essentially discovering the critical window early and development where plasticity is especially robust. They did other things, too. They should have won two nobels, Frankly, for their other work on vision.

But one thing that they missed, however, was something that you mentioned and is worth highlighting again, which is that the brain maintains the capacity for immense plasticity throughout the entire lifespan. That's absolutely clear. The conditions change from early to later in life, but your specific situation really highlights that.

And it's something I really like to talk about for a few minutes if you're willing, as you mention your experience, to stroke and perhaps IT was aware to some, but perhaps not all, especially the people just listening to this podcast and who are not watching on video that on your shirt. Well very nicely designed um in in its original state, also includes some unique stitching. So maybe you could share with us and what.

And for those listening, there's there's a jg, a line of stitching that extends from Roberts left shorts leave to his midline to where the button on his shirt are, and from the, from his right shorts leave also to the midline offset from one another. This, this is the source stitching that looks like perhaps I had been at the soil machine um and not somebody was a skill but they did a good job basically of putting IT back together. Why are those stitches in your shirt? Tell us about the stroke and let's talk about .

a neural plastic IT could also seem like a fashion no but I really IT isn't um well, IT was made of twenty eighteen. IT was my birthday and my wife gave me the shirt. I have a love of place. It's like, I don't know why, I just love patterns and plans that must be like some scotch part of me, some ancestor thing.

but i've love plans. Can I interview you just briefly? Forgive me, everyone gonna get upset that you would know.

That is a fundamental circuit in your visual cortex designed to detect pad of patterns. No, I not. yes.

And when you talk about what that is, is tight, tightly linked to your ability to perceive motion, really? Yeah, we can go over at some other time. But yeah, so, well, time, just as A Q, so, okay, yes, back to your birthday.

okay. So he gave me a pleasure knowing how much I love you and I love this. sure.

I love the colors. And that is. And then two months or three months of August seventeen, twenty eighteen, I was driving my car.

SHE was with me. I was pulling out into traffic. I started driving.

And suddenly you say, pull over over, pull over. What I, why I can drive, i'm fine. And then suddenly everything started getting really strange.

Everything looks strange. My voice didn't sound the same. And he was like, freaking out. SHE was actually fairly come, which was amazing. I was undergoing a stroke.

I had a blood clock that was block in the brain, blood float of my brain. I actually one point got out of the car like I was. I don't know what the hell I was thinking. And then he pulled me back. And then the rest goes black.

And I had some weird sensations that still remain with me, because, essentially I was on the verge of dying, because blood not flowing to your brain is basically the end of you, right? Unless something happens very quickly and SHE other Better, you can get severe brain damage. So SHE called nine one one right away.

SHE recognize something. My whole face was looking funny, and they got there. I was unconscious, and essentially they took this shirt, and I just sized the thing and half and took IT off my head. And then they intubated me, I believe in my hip area to get something.

The black club was in my neck and they were able to free IT up and they rushed me the hospital and i'm unconscious and then um I wake up and i'm in a journey in the hospital and I don't for a moment of thinking maybe i'm dead because i'm lying in a burney now feel like i'm in a coffin. I don't know what's going on and I have all of these weird sensations and I I tell people we're so curious about death. We think about death the log and you know, is IT final.

What does that mean? We really should pay attention to dying. Dying is actually much more interesting in some ways than death. And people who have died go through a process if if it's long enough. And people who have had near death experiences, like I do, have gone through that process of dying and have come back to life.

And in the process of dying, strange things happened to the brain, right? So, particularly with a stroke or something like that, where blood stops flowing to your auction, stops flowing to your brain, you have kind of visions and things that you might think our hu cino. But that later seem like actually you are actually glimpsing the reality as opposed to the illusion of the brain creates.

So i've written about this in my new book, but um my idea of the brain that IT creates enlist ies of illusion for you. IT creates the seamless version of reality, the sense of a self, the sense of a continue itself through time, right? IT creates a linear sense of time progressions IT creates colors that creates a world that visually you can seem familiar in the sea, but it's all illusion. It's all a construction.

right? Images come into your brain, and they're not organized in any way. And the brain organizes in the way that you can understand IT. Or when you dying, all of that scrambles up, and you actually are seeing something else.

So I saw, for instance, that I really don't have a self that IT doesn't really actually exist, that I and the image that came to my mind because I was in sitting in that gurney was a weird feeling of like I can almost not explain IT, but it's as if you took an image of something real in the world, and you completely scrambled that up and was all wave, and you couldn't see what exactly IT was to me. That was the image ahead of the self. There are like fifty different cells inside of you.

They are all competing. And you think there's just one and you think it's consistent, but there's not. It's an illusion.

The self is literally illusions that your brain constructs. When you're dying, you see these things. When you're dying, you see other things like that.

You see that time something very weird. So I had experience when I got out of the car and I got pulled in, I thought, like, ten seconds have passed. My wife told me out those.

That was like ten minutes. I had no sense of time. Everything was scrambled. And so IT was very, very eloquent, taught me so much. Seems that I can, I can barely even express now.

I'm always now thinking of strange things that come to me because my brain was damaged. IT made me realize that the brain creates everything so I can communicate with my hand, my fingers, I can communicate. My brain can communicate with my leg, right?

So you think that walking and writing and handling things is your your body Operating a certain way. It's your brain telling you how to move these different things. When that brain stops functioning, you realize how much your brain determines everything IT all starts there.

And when there's damage to your brain, your whole thinking alters. Is that not to mention how you look at life itself after something like that? So IT was a terrible experience is ruined so many things that I loved in life. But it's giving me an awful a lot as well in return that I could go on for hours and talk about because IT was the most powerful experience of my life.

When you were going through your reemergence to consciousness in the hospital, did you feel as if you were observing these multiple versions of yourself? Maybe a different way to phrase IT is, did you feel you were or behind the circuit board? That is, your brain observing how you Normally function and you can see multiple versions of self? Or was IT something else for you outside of your body and brain?

I think IT was more outside of my body and brain. I also had this other thing that happened were, and you know, sometimes you can't remember your memory might be playing tricks on you. So i've also have to realize that maybe i've not remembering exactly what happened or that I ve since translated in a different way.

So that's a cavy out here. And i'm aware of IT. But I had this vision that I was dead at first when I first became conscious, and that I was up in the sky and I was looking down, and my mother and my wife were talking, and like, over my grave, I suppose, and I had this feeling, uh, everything's okay, i'm gone.

But life goes on there, there. They're doing fine. It's okay, right? So I don't know about that sense of self whether I was like i'm aware of that happening, but have a feeling IT was something from the outside.

I don't really know the answer to that because it's very confused. The other feeling I had was life when I was having the stroke was life training out of me and my bones getting softer and softer and softer. And I can't really logically explain that the feeling of bones softening up and dissolving.

But for weeks and months afterwards, I could access that feeling of my bones dissolve in IT. IT was a feeling of all your energy draining out of you. You're dying literally. So um reading books about near death experiences because that's a lot of them big part of my next book because is fast there's so many interesting things to go in because he teaches .

us so much so glad that a you survived your stroke b that your mental faculties is not more .

grateful than I have.

I probably not, but still very grateful. So there are just illustrates how grateful you must be be that you've maintained, if not grown, your mental faculties. So I mean, you see him extremely sharp.

I promise you you're not missing a beat. You know, one always wonder, right? Actually, one of the most common fear of people have is that somehow they're losing their mind, their memory, and people aren't and they aren't aware of IT.

You know, here I have family members who have asked that if they ever start to exhibit signs of severe dementia that I um well put in end to them which I won't um that's not my place in this world um but I think it's a common fear among among people but you're still extremely sharp uh and thank goodness forward and and you mention that um well you've lost certain abilities that new appreciation and new abilities have surfaced. Could you perhaps share what some of those are in in what they mean to you? Because I think that when one hears about somebody having a stroke, we tend to focus on what's what's lacking. But clearly, this has been a transformative experience, also in positive ways.

Well, I had to confront some of my own demons. I had to confront the sense that I expected things out of life and here I they're taken away and i'm, i'm, i'm kind of ungrateful for being alive. And here i'm pissed off that IT takes me ten minutes to time my shoes and I can't really button my shirt.

I had to learn what really matters and to have patients and stuff. The other thing was, I used to love hiking. I was very physically active.

And i'm sitting at my window, in my office and see people running up, down, bicycling, walk in their dogs. God, i'm so envious. If I had if I could walk a dog right now, i'd be the happiest person alive. But then I go through a thought process, which maybe isn't completely healthy, which is they're not aware of how wonderful IT is just to walk a dog, but i'm aware of IT.

So when I go out in my backyard and I can't walk and i'm seeing like, I know it's gona sound really reacting and set to mental, but I see you butterflies or things in my garden, i'm like, wow, that's incredible. You know, things like that that I couldn't appreciate before, because I am scary and I can't move. I have to suddenly pay attention to what's around me, not take IT regretted and find and suck all the pleasure out of IT that I can.

So now, when I sit my desk to write my new book is four hours, because that's all I can stand, maybe three. Sometimes those four hours are like such bliss for me. I truly appreciate IT IT now, because I know that my brain was almost gone, right? That means so much for me.

And to just be alive, you know, is this a wonderful experience? I have a chapter in my newborn LED awake into the strangest of being alive. And it's about the fact that if you think about IT and how unlikely IT is, that we humans evolved at all, even that we even exist all the bottle next in evolution that we had to pass through, including the disapearance of the dinosaurs and the emergency maneuvers.

But there are twenty other huge bottles next about the history of evolution. We had to pass through all of those. We nearly went extinct eighty thousand years ago from some virus.

That fact, the only eight thousand people, humans on the planet, all these different things. And here we are with zoom meetings and set IT. It's like the strange story you can average its beyond science fiction but nobody thinks about.

Nobody sits down and goes, god, i'm alive if you went back to the chain of people that had to connect and have children leading up to your parents, the unlighted ness of you ever being born is astronomical. Mean, unless my science is all wrong. You know, seventy thousand generations of people meeting and finally ending your DNA.

I mean, unless i'm missing something, it's it's pretty unlikely, but nobody thinks about IT. Well, I certainly think about IT now because I almost died, I had nothing else to think about that I have to entertain my brain the way milton erick and had to entertain himself by observing people. So it's taken a lot away from the I can swim.

I'm writing my my recommend bike, which i'd love. And eight year old grammar are zipping by me and got tant, how often? So envious.

And so my insecurity all well up. But then I was, hey, i'm like my kind of boat i'm sAiling. It's wonderful. I'm outside, you know, I have to go through these processes, but I think it's developed me in some way that that in the end, very positive.

Tell if you've had to adjust to a new frame rate on life like the the, the old movie had a certain frame rate, this movie has a certain frame rate, but that within that frame rate there are gifts to be had that you will certainly missed in your prior version of self.

Yeah but also, like I told people this, I totally took my life for granted. I I was swimming all this time was fantastic of his bicycle. I was traveling, but I never set back and thought, well, this is wonderful.

How grateful is could be taken away from you. I tell you, don't do that to yourself. I try and teach them you can be taken away from tomorrow when you're out, walk in the dog.

Think of me, think me, I can't walk a dog and appreciate those things which I didn't appreciate. So I try to help people in that way when I can. You know.

I I think critical message is also to inspire a sense of urgency in people. No, I think people here a sense of urgency and they already under so much pressure, life so hard. But we're not talking about a sense of emergency to take on more what life asked to offer.

I think we're talking about a sense of urgency to find ones purpose, which takes work and is an ongoing process. But to really get out of modes of apathy, laziness, um language ing. And to start, as you've described, IT paying deeper attention.

I mean, this is a concept that was super important for me to hear about, and I learned about IT from you was how do you get yourself out of a right? You start paying deeper attention to the things around you and inside you. And perhaps not coincidently, you referred to that as caught death ground.

yeah. So it's what is a strategy from my book, what a book on strategy. My version of the art of war called three three strategies award is really about strategy. The strategic thinking is inspired from sun sues a great chinese strategist, but IT has vast physical hc implications.

The idea is you can almost think of IT like biometric pressure when necessity is pressing in our you like you're back is against the wall, like you have to get something done and there's like this pressure around you. You find energy in that that you never believed before with him. James talks about this and talks about getting a second wind.

Explains that very eloquently. When you feel like your lives in danger, suddenly you can, you can leave over things that you never could leave over before. So san suu says, put an army on death ground and IT will fight until IT wins, meaning put an army with its back to the ocean or back to the mountain and it's either win or die.

They're going to fight ten times harder. You're onna find the energy in you that you Normally lack when death is facing you in the face, or urgency or deadlines or people pressing in on you when that very metric pressure loosens up and there's none of IT you think you have all the time in the world, you get nothing done. Wow, man, i'm twenty three.

I got all these years ahead of me. I'm gonna figure that out, right? I'm not gonna die.

I got fifty, seventy, eighty years ahead. My no, you don't. That pressure now is gone and you're wasting time. Your, your, you're doing out what the things that aren't leading to any skill you not learn you or anything, you need to put yourself on death grounding to feel that Better metric pressure, which is the actual reality.

The actual reality is you could die tomorrow, you could have a stroke tomorrow, you you could be fired tomorrow. Everything could fall apart. You need to have that sense of urgency now because that's the reality you're fooling yourself by thinking you have all this time.

And so when you feel that pressure suddenly you can move mount you you have energy, your life know you just have focused at set at neurologically. Everything clicks in, you know, and people, they've had that experience where they've where they felt like that the ship was going under and they Better get their act together and survive. They talk about all these physical processes. I have a story in my new book. I have not boring you about the quite the .

opposite about .

a mountain climate who um he he he was climbing this mountain by himself and he was having a great time but was the storm coming and he head to get down and he suddenly fell and he cut his leg open massively and he was like a branch sticking in IT and he he broke all these bones and he was he was gonna die, was on a ledge he could see that he was getting dark and and storm clouds were were massing that was he was in the rocky month he was alone and suddenly he managed to get up on his two feet and he can explain how but all of this energy, all of us adjudant started flowing in them and he said he was like a mountain goat.

He was like going down the logic, he jumped. He was able to kind of get down to another ledge. He is, he got, he got out of IT.

And for the, for the next twenty years, he was haunted by, how did that happen? I want that feeling again, because IT was actually the most like static feeling. I had energy that I never suspected in myself.

So he tries everything to get that feeling back. He tries climbing other amount. He tries going to to mount her to try.

IT doesn't come back. And finally, he thought kind of figures out the formula afford why IT happened. He studies a lot of neuroses.

Des, it's a great book and music in the mind. New book is called bone, bone games. Very interesting book.

A lot of science in IT. And he got the feeling back in a smaller sense. But IT was, the feeling of your life is in danger.

I Better get my act together at the end. And suddenly, a general dopamine, all the other things occurring in him, and he got any, he found that energy. So that's, that's the ultimate kind of death ground right there.

The human will to live is truly incredible. And so I had to say, as I said before, i'm so grateful that your stroke didn't take you out because clearly, they're still so much in there and you are continuing to share what is really exquisitely useful knowledge is is just kind of astonishing to me.

I started off today's discussion expressing my gratitude for what you've already done for my life and for the lives of so many other people with for your books. You it's clear you've been on A A ford ging exploration and that forging for organizing and communicating information mainly in the form of written books but also online content. You have a terrific youtube chain on which i've subscribed to and follow um and listen to um with rapped attention and the other venues with which you share information, including this one today, are really truly valuable and appreciated. So I I want to to say on behalf of myself and.

Um for those of no new in your work for a number of years, but also for the many people that are now sure to um know who you are and what you're about, that is just so clear that like this stuff comes from the heart and that IT whatever early seed planted this you know that we're all grateful foreign Better off as a consequence of that see so um I could make this list very, very long with the the number of specific ways in which you've um improved the journey through life and made IT clear. I mean your life is certainly can be hard but he also can be really confusing and I feel that the the Robert Green road map, even though it's but one road map, is an extremely available map to have and to use, certainly husband for me so um just an enormous thank you, Robert. Thanks for sharing today and thanks for all you do and all that your still doing and sure to do in the future of thank you.

I wish I could find the word for explaining the kind of word emotions that i'm feeling when I hear that there isn't maybe you tish, maybe for cm, there's something I don't know, but thank you. Yeah.

no, we'll have to have you back here again when your next book comes out. Can't wait, but we will wait.

okay? Yeah, all of them still around OK.

I am confident you will be okay. O, K, thank you. Come back.

angry. Thanks very much. Hope I will thank you .

for joining me for today's discussion with Robert Green. I hope you found the conversation to be as stimulating as I did. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please describe to our youtube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both spotify and apple. And on both spotify and apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode.

That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me, your comments about the podcast or guess or topics that you like me to consider for the huberman lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on youtube. I do read all the comments not on today's episode, but are many previous episode of the hubble.

In our podcast, we discuss supplements. While supplements aren't necessary for everybody, many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like improving sleep, for hormone and support, and for focus. To see the supplements discussed on the huberman lab podcast, you can go to live momentous spell.

O U S. So that's a live momentous dcom slash huberman. If you're not always following me on social media, I am huberman lab on all social media platforms. So that instrument x thread, linton and facebook and on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlapped with the content of the huberman lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman lab podcast. Again, it's huberman lab on all social media platforms.

If you haven't all race prescribed to our monthly neural network news letter, the news network news letter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as tool kits. The tool kits are brief PDF that you can download that give you tools for things like neuroplasticity and learning, for managing doping, for enhancing sleep, for physical performance flexibility, deliberate called exposure, and on and on. To join the neural network news letter, you simply go to huberman lab dot com, go to the menu tab, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email.

We do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Robert Green. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.