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

Andrew Huberman:
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Robert Greene. Robert Greene is an author who has written more than five best-selling books, including "The 48 Laws of Power," "The Laws of Human Nature," and "Mastery." He did his bachelor's training at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Robert Greene's 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 Robert's 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 one's purpose. Whenever I'm 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 death ground, which arose during our discussion of Robert's recent stroke. Robert's 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 gleaned 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 research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. And now for my discussion with Robert Greene. Robert, I'm so happy you're here.

Robert Greene:
I'm really happy to be here, Andrew. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Andrew Huberman:
A short story. In 2015, I was teaching a course to undergraduates. This was a big course, 450 students.

Robert Greene:
Where was this?

Andrew Huberman:
This was when I was a professor at University of California, San Diego.

Robert Greene:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
I was about to move back to Stanford. 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&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.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I recommended three books at the end of the course, every year that I taught it. I taught it for four years. And one of the books was the book, "Longitude," which is a wonderful story about the discovery of timekeeping devices at sea.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
One book I'll leave as a mystery, not to be mysterious, but because it's a science book. I'll just tell you what it is. It's "Principles of Neuroscience." So I thought that they should-

Robert Greene:
I don't know that one.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's a big... It makes a better doorstop-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... for most than a book, but it's a wonderful resource if you want to learn about neuroscience. And your book, "Mastery."

Robert Greene:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
And the reason I recommended "Mastery" is because these students were soon going to go into the great jungle of-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... post-undergraduate education. And for me, I found "Mastery" to be an absolutely transformative book.

Robert Greene:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
In that it taught me so much about how to learn from others, how to expect certain types of interactions when one kind of assigns themselves to a mentor

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and vice versa. And it talked about some things that we'll get into in more depth today, but not the least of which is about identifying that unique seed that exists within all of us that-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... can guide our best decisions-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in terms of finding our purpose. And so I usually end with a great debt of gratitude, and I'll probably do that again- ... at the end. But I want to start with a great debt of gratitude.

Robert Greene:
Oh, thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
"Mastery" transformed my entire life.

Robert Greene:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
And in many ways, this podcast probably wouldn't exist-

Robert Greene:
Oh

Andrew Huberman:
... were it not for "Mastery," because it really embedded in me this idea that we all have a deeper purpose, and it explains how to go about finding that purpose.

Robert Greene:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
So I tell you that, and I also will use that as a segue for 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 it is to find one's purpose, and how early life events perhaps can cue us-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to what that purpose is for each of us?

Robert Greene:
Well, thank you for that marvelous introduction. I'm almost blushing. That's a fantastic story. Well, being a human being is not easy as opposed to an animal because we're born and nobody gives us a direction. Our parents might be a little bit, our college teachers, et cetera, mentors, but generally we're on our own. And it's a very, very difficult process. You wake up in the morning and you don't really know what you can do. You could choose 12 different paths. It 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 ever happen to you because you never have that lost feeling. You wake up in the morning and 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're able to cut it out. It's just the most marvelous piece of internal radar that you can have. So I genuinely wish that everybody can find that kind of internal radar. And so it's not easy, and I understand that. There's no 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's a process involved. It's not a mystery. You can follow a very singular process. And the idea is, you were talking about childhood. The way I like to frame it is when you were born, you are a phenomenon. You are unique. Your DNA has never occurred in the history of the universe, going back billions of years. It 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. It's yours. You're one of a kind, right? So that is your source of power. To waste that is just the worst thing you can do in your life. And what the power is, is finding that uniqueness. What makes you, you, and how you can mine 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. They're little voices in your head that say, "I love this, I hate that. I like this food. I don't like when Mommy moves this way. I like when Daddy comes from here." You're very cued 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 Gardner's "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 intellectual, but there are many forms of intelligence. There's the intelligence that has to do with words. There's abstract intelligence that has to do with patterns and mathematics. There's kinetic intelligence that has to do with the body. There's social intelligence. He has five of them. And the idea is your brain naturally veers towards one of them. It can veer towards two of them. That happens, but 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 because that's where your power will lie. So when you're young, if you go back and think about when you were four or 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. I can remember when I was six years old, I was just obsessed with words, just the letters in words, almost in a slightly schizophrenic way. I would spell words backwards. I would take them apart. I would do anagrams. I love palindromes. Right? So I had a thing about words and language. It's very primal. Some people, Albert Einstein, when he was four years old, his father gave him a birthday gift of a compass, and he was just mesmerized by this compass. The idea that there are invisible forces out there in the cosmos moving this needle, and he's obsessed with the idea of invisible forces. Steve Jobs, when he was seven or eight, or maybe younger, in Burlingame, California, his father, they passed by a store with technological devices in the window, and he was just hypnotized by the design of those devices and the glass tubes and everything. So he wanted to go in that direction. Tiger Woods saw his father hitting golf balls in the garage, and he was just screaming with joy. He had to do that, right? I could 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 cut me off if I'm going on too long here.

Andrew Huberman:
No, please continue.

Robert Greene:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Please.

Robert Greene:
What happens to you is you're seven, now you're getting older, and you're starting to not hear that voice anymore. You're hearing the voice of your teachers telling you, "You're not good at this field. You need to get better at math. You shouldn't be interested in these sports or anything. You should be going this way." Your parents are starting to tell you this is the career they want for you or the direction they want you to go in, right? You start hearing that more than your own voice, and as you get older, it gets worse and worse. Then when you're a teenager, it's all about what other people are doing, your peers, what's cool, what's not cool. So all of this 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 maybe choose a major that seems practical that your parents want you to go into. Maybe you wander around. You're not sure. And then you enter the work world without that inner radar that I'm talking about, and brother, you're lost, 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. Not everyone, but some people do that. And I understand that need. We all need to make a living, but that can set you off on a very bad path because you're not connected emotionally. The thing is, when you figure out that primal inclination, that grain that's inside of you, then you have the energy to be disciplined, to go through boring tasks, to learn. You learn at a faster rate 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. It was useless because it didn't teach me anything practical. I was totally confused. But I was in Paris, and I loved it, and I wanted to live there. And I had a girlfriend, and I needed to speak French to her. And I can tell you, in one month, I learned more than those four years of university because I wanted to, because I was engaged. My emotions were there. It was like I had to survive to learn French. So most of us, we don't have a need really to learn this subject. We're paying half attention. But when you find the thing that really connects to you, you're paying deep attention. 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 21, I give people a lot of help, and it's usually not so difficult. We can go through that process. It gets harder when you're 30, and you've been wandering around, but it's not impossible. I didn't really find my exact path until I was 38, 39, to be honest. So there's hope. When you get 40, and you get 50, it gets more and more difficult. And it's very sad if you wasted that seed of uniqueness that I'm talking about. And I tell people there are ways of going back, and we go through a process like archaeology. We have to dig and dig and dig 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 when I'm 28." That's not how it works. It gives you a sense of direction. You can try different things. You can experiment. You can have fun when you're in your 20s. You're going to learn. You're going to learn skills. But it gives you an overall framework instead of, "Whoa, all of 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.

Andrew Huberman:
As you describe this, I have this image of, you mentioned animals, that presumably don't have a lot of flexibility in terms of the niches they can exist in. But the way I imagine this process is that as a human, we're plopped into an environment, and here I'm using analogy, where we don't really know if we are an aquatic animal, a terrestrial animal, or an avian. Right?

Robert Greene:
Or an amphibian.

Andrew Huberman:
Or an amphibian, for that matter. And to make the wrong choice, to be an amphibian who's trying to fly, although I'm sure they're out there in the animal kingdom, it's not just a waste of time, it's probably deadly.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And not to over-dramatize the failure of finding one's purpose, but I see it that way. Whereas, perhaps we could just say that the process of finding one's purpose is to realize like, "Ah, I'm an amphibian. I can go in and out of water, whereas a bunch of other creatures around me stop at the water's edge."

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? And this is really cool. And a bunch of these other things, like these flying things, they can't actually even go in the water.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Some of them might be on the surface or dive into it, but they can't do what I can do. So the process of self-discovery, it sounds like it's about restricting one's choices to a sort of wedge within the full landscape of-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... options. And for me, I can certainly recall, after reading "Mastery," it helped me recall some early seed emotions that I experienced as a very distinct sensation in my body.

Robert Greene:
Can you describe that?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Well, without making it too specific to my unique tastes, as a kid, I loved flora and fauna. I loved learning about biology.

Robert Greene:
Sure.

Andrew Huberman:
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 snorkeling for the first time was like, wow.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And 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 in observation of things that delight me.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
It's like there's an activation state created within me like, I got to do something with this. And typically, it's tell everybody about it until they won't listen anymore. But oftentimes, it's to also draw those things, to think about them, and I just delight in them. It's a constant source of delight. And so seeds such as those, and there are a few other things in that landscape of flora and fauna, and learning about animals and biology, including the human animal, and then organizing information feels so satisfying to me. It's like a drug. And so it just feels like this eternal spring of life. And so for me, that's what it was. And in 2015, when I was teaching that course, the course I loved, but I was feeling a little bit astray in my scientific career, and then I read "Mastery," and I realized, yes, I love running a laboratory, I love teaching, but there's something else for me.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And it has to do not with a podcast. I knew what a podcast was. I was listening to podcasts at that time. But I wasn't on social media. I had no thoughts of having a podcast. But what I wanted was that feeling in its total number of forms.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
That's the goal. Get that feeling in as many forms as possible.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Is that about right?

Robert Greene:
That's absolutely perfect because the connection to what I'm talking about, it's not an intellectual thing, it's visceral, it's emotional, it's physical. And you feel it in your body. And when you're doing it, it's like it's at your level. It's like you're swimming with the current. You feel it. Things are easy. Everything clicks together. There's a delight. Not everything is going to be delightful. There's going to be tedium involved. There's going to be moments of boredom. But you're able to withstand the moments of boredom because you feel the deep overall connection. So yes, that's precisely what I'm talking about. For me, it's a little bit 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 '60s or '70s with cars and everything, but to come to where we are now. And I wrote a short story when I was eight years old about a vulture. It was written from the point of view of a vulture watching the first humans kind of emerge on the planet. I'm sure it was absolutely awful, dreadful. But the weird thing is, I'm writing a new book, and all I'm doing in that book is going into early humans, and I feel like a kid again. I'm so excited. I'm so happy. So I can very much relate to your story.

Andrew Huberman:
You mentioned these five different forms of intelligence-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... or frames of mind-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... as you refer to them. And I'm certainly aware that I lean towards a more intellectual interest, although, as you pointed out, the excitement, the delight is visceral.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And the actions are actions. They're of the body, ultimately.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
One has to draw, speak, write books, et cetera, to transmute that excitement into something real. For people that are not as intellectually tuned, but maybe are kinesthetically tuned, for instance. I can only wonder what that's like. I'm not completely uncoordinated, but I don't think I have a kinesthetic attunement or frame of mind. But I've, for instance, had a podcast listener mention that they think in feels, that they literally experience thought as sort of a patchwork of bodily sensations.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And that thought for them is not of the stuff from the neck up, but only from the neck down, which to me was really intriguing. And so I only raise this because there have to be, as you pointed out, there's an infinite number of different sort of orientations based on our unique DNA and experience, but what do you think explains why these particular seeds or, as you point out, the direction that the grain runs in the brain? It's partially going to be nature. It's going to be DNA.

Robert Greene:
For sure.

Andrew Huberman:
But we're talking about this as if there's some exciting or awe-inspiring or delightful thing that captures us. Can it be the other way, too? Can it be one has a bad experience as a child in an intellectual environment, and then decides, "Things of the body feel good. Things of the mind, of intellect feels bad"? And does it matter whether or not we are drawn to our purpose by recognizing what we love or what we hate, or are both useful?

Robert Greene:
Oh, they're both very, very useful. A lot of intelligence is non-verbal. We think in terms of images. We're very much infected by the emotions of other people. So I know, for instance, my mother is very, very interested in history. She's obsessed with history. And I probably absorbed her interest in history. I don't think there's a gene for that interest. So you're going to absorb things from your parents as well, so it's not all just genetic. But yeah, what you hate will have a big thing. But the problem with doing that is if you go into a direction and you're in elementary school, et cetera, and they force 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 be disciplined. I don't want to go through anything because it's painful. It doesn't lead anywhere. It's not me. It's 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 they can rebel and they can go into that field as opposed to, "I hate learning. I hate discipline. I hate studying. I hate trying things over and over again." If you're kinesthetically oriented, and a part of me, I understand that because I love sports, is you have to practice. You're not going to instantly be good at something, right? And that's going to require a love of it, right? But if your math experience is, "I hate learning, shit," it's going to transfer to sports. You're going to hate discipline in general. So it's very important for parents to let that child have at least glimmers of that love moment. I know for me, when I finished college and I entered the work world, I had to get a job. I worked in journalism. I hated it. I hated working for other people. I hated office politics. I hated all the egos. I hated the smarminess. I hated the lack of quality. It was all just about making money and getting things out there. And then I worked in Hollywood. I hated Hollywood. I hated working in Hollywood. That formed me very much, made me go in the direction that I went in, but only from the basis of I knew that I wanted to be a writer. So that's very important that it's not just hate. It 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.

Andrew Huberman:
What you just said really highlights the fact that energy and motivation can come from either pressure, desire for something, or desire to get away from something.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And earlier when you were talking about how we are so much more engaged and driven towards things that stir us emotionally, and actually we know based on the neuroscience, as you know too, I'm sure, that only by the release of certain neurochemicals in the brain and body would our brain ... have any reason to change, right?

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
If you don't feel agitation and you can do everything that you're trying to do, of course your brain wouldn't change. Why would it, right?

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
That agitation is a signature of the neurochemicals that are saying, "Hey, something's different now."

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
You might need to do something different, including rewire yourself.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And that can come from positive or negative experiences.

Robert Greene:
Definitely. Of course.

Andrew Huberman:
Now, I'm obsessed with this idea of energy. We all want to have more energy and focus, and normally we hear about the concept of energy in the context of caloric 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, the engagement of ourselves that's sitting there ready to be engaged, but it requires the right experiential macronutrients, right? The experiential micronutrients as opposed to, of course we need good nutrition, but that's not sufficient. It's necessary, but not sufficient. So would you say that when we are, let's say since a good number of our listeners are in adulthood, from our 20s on, that the things that excite us as adults, that really generate some feeling of readiness or grab our attention, are still informative toward guiding our decisions about best life and life purpose?

Robert Greene:
Well, what exactly do you mean by that? Because there are things that excite you in a kind of a quick way, where you have to relieve some tension, and there's entertainment and there's things that kind of give you pretty immediate gratification. Then there's the larger picture of something that will give you fulfillment 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 we're paying too much attention to the immediate pleasures of life, to what gives us instant gratification, and that's what we're grabbing 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," kind of thing. It's more something macro than just that. And so when you're in your 20s or in your 30s or your 40s, 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's so many of these other distractions going on. And so you're always attuned to what other people like, right? Because you're in social media. This is what people are following, this is what they're interested in. As opposed to disengaging, backing off from that, and looking at yourself and going through the process of, "That's not me. Actually, I don't really like that." 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 just act on it without understanding it. But 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 actually be able, even in your 30s, to return you to that childhood inclination. But if you can't listen to where those emotions come from, then they're useless. They're not teaching you anything.

Andrew Huberman:
So it sounds like one of the goals is to engage in what I'll just call for the moment unadulterated self-referencing. Unadulterated in the all senses of the word because, as a child, as you pointed out, at stages of life that are before puberty, they're literally presexual, which I think is important, right? Because puberty, to me as a neurobiologist who started off as a developmental neurobiologist, I can tell you that puberty is the most profound transformation that the brain undergoes-

Robert Greene:
Oh, for sure

Andrew Huberman:
... in the entire lifespan. There's just absolutely no question about it. Everything is different after puberty because of all of the new relational dynamics that become apparent and our potential involvement in them.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's not talked about enough how dramatically puberty changes the brain.

Robert Greene:
Sure.

Andrew Huberman:
We are different people before and after puberty.

Robert Greene:
Hormones that are suddenly raging.

Andrew Huberman:
The hormones are there, and it's not just changes in how we view the world, but changes in how the world views us.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And not just through the lens of sexuality, but also expectation of what we are capable of, what we are responsible for or not responsible for, our learning capacity. Puberty is like this, it's also the most rapid stage of aging in our entire lifespan.

Robert Greene:
Wow. I never knew that.

Andrew Huberman:
Those kids that go home for summer and then come back, like shaving.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I wasn't a late bloomer, but I had a long, protracted puberty, but I remember those kids. I'm sure we all remember those kids. Everything changes, and so I think prior to puberty, these seeds, as you've described them, of delight or of resistance to things, I think they are unadulterated. They're not contaminated-

Robert Greene:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... by the voices and expectations of others. And so I can see the challenge of reaching back to those as an adult. I wonder if this relates to something that I've heard you talk about before, although perhaps not as much as some of the other topics you've discussed publicly, which is the real versus the false sublime.

Robert Greene:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
Could you perhaps just define for us what sublime really is, what a sublime experience is, and the distinction between real and false-

Robert Greene:
Wow

Andrew Huberman:
... sublime experiences, because I feel like this relates-

Robert Greene:
Oh, really?

Andrew Huberman:
... to finding that seed. Right. It's about finding authentic seeds within us As opposed to when emotions can be distracting and misleading.

Robert Greene:
Wow. I never thought, I never made that connection, and it's the book that I'm writing right now, so thank you for that. I'll have to think about that. I'm writing a book on the sublime, and 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 can go mentally, where you can go physically, all the codes and conventions. So that circle for ancient Egypt and for 21st 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 a door, and the sublime is literally at the threshold of the door. You're looking out into something else, right? And the quintessential sublime experience is a near-death experience. You're standing on the doorway, the threshold of death itself, right? And so in my book, I'm 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 could possibly have. I know that very personally after my stroke. I go into a chapter on childhood and how sublime your own childhood was. I go into animals, the relation to animals. I have a chapter about the brain, a chapter about love. I'm 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. It's wired for transcendental experiences that take us out of the narrow little realm that we live in. Because we're aware of our death as the only animal truly conscious of its own mortality, and it frightens the hell out of us, and the idea that we can see something larger than just the banal parts of our life is a doorway that allows us to kind of transcend the moment, to feel connected to something larger, to feel connected to some power in the cosmos, to evolution itself, right? And so we're wired for that, and I'm writing a chapter now about 40,000 years ago at the moment where I think the sublime was born. It's a story that I'm trying to illustrate right now with our upper Paleolithic ancestors. So it's deep inside of us. We need it. We have to have it. In the 21st century, we have very few avenues for it, any real avenues. Religion used to be the main kind of way of accessing this. And so because it's so deep, we reach for false forms of the sublime that give us the sense that we're transcending, 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, in your own experience. The 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 out all your aggression and violence, right? It comes from causes. It comes from addictions. Okay? It gives you a sense, it calms you down. It 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 on anything real. It's not connecting to that deep part of human nature that's 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 more of this rush. You need more of the drug. You need more of the alcohol. You need more of the sex. You need more of the porn. It's never going to satisfy you. But the real sublime, you don't have that feeling. It's transformative. Once you feel it, it lasts for you for the rest of your life. It's what Maslow, again, called a peak experience. So that's the difference between the false and the real sublime. I haven't quite connected it to what you were saying, but if I think about it, I think you're on something very interesting.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe the connection I was trying to draw doesn't hold. But yeah, for me, those early experiences of seeing things that just delighted me in a way that felt like, the thought process, it was a long time ago, went something like, "Oh my goodness, I can't believe this exists. This is so cool. This is the coolest thing." And so clearly created an activation state within me. But then there was also a thought and a feeling of, again, a lot of this is sort of pre-verbal. It's not truly pre-verbal. I could speak at that age, but it was, that's 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, 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, et cetera, et cetera. So certainly it meets some of the criteria of a sublime experience.

Robert Greene:
Definitely.

Andrew Huberman:
And I knew, again, when I was in graduate school and again when I was this young professor about to transition to tenure, that I knew it was going to do something different. It 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's the thread. Like Like I'm an amphibian, this is my environment.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And you're an amphibian too, right?

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And we're different amphibians, but we're going to be amphibians together.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And there's a permanence to it that it does seem to transcend time. I'm obsessed with time perception, so I have to be careful not to go off on a tangent about that.

Robert Greene:
I am too.

Andrew Huberman:
But at the human brain's ability to fine slice or macro slice time is incredible. And it's been said of not just addictions, but also interactions with toxic people that they murder time.

Robert Greene:
Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
That humans have a, I think it was Jung, I'll look it up, but one of the great psychologists said something to the extent that addictive behaviors, thought patterns, substances are humans' attempts to murder time so that they don't have to address their mortality.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And that's always made a lot of sense to me.

Robert Greene:
Yeah. We say kill time as our expression.

Andrew Huberman:
Kill time-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... through passive engagement, but also kill time through trying to get overwhelmed or overtaken by an experience or a substance.

Robert Greene:
As opposed to when you're truly connected, you have that sense of flow, and three hours can pass by and you're not even aware of it. So time is a totally subjective experience. It can be extremely slow and tedious and you feel very depressed, or it can pass by, but it passes by without you even noticing it, and it's a wondrous experience. When I'm deep in my writing, I'm not aware of the time passing. I'm so involved, I'm so immersed. It's a deeply, deeply pleasurable experience of time. It is sublime. And yeah, so I agree with you. I think your distinction's very interesting.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm eagerly awaiting your next book, but we won't rush you.

Robert Greene:
Well, I'm so immersed in it that I could talk for hours, because I also have a chapter in there about what I call the daemon, which is like that voice inside of you that speaks to you, and I'm writing a whole chapter about how sublime 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.

Andrew Huberman:
Fantastic. Can't wait. I can't wait. I'd like to shift slightly to a topic that you've written extensively about, which is power. And not just power, but also seduction, which you've 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 it's not in perhaps some interesting ways. So to me, you talk about, and we will talk about power as a resource. It's something that it's there as a resource. It could be used or not used. And I think of seduction as one form of exchange between individuals. So there's a verb associated with seduction. Power, I'm thinking of more as a noun in this context. You're the word guy. And then purpose is really about finding to what end or ends one is going to devote power, seduction, and the other forces that allow human beings to interact with each other in the world. But power as a resource that can be expressed in different ways and accessed in different ways. Maybe we could just explore that a little bit, because when we hear the word power, I think a lot of people kind of brace themselves, like, "Here we go. Someone's going to try and have power over me. This is about manipulation," and so on and so forth. But I learned pretty early on that every career endeavor, there are power dynamics. There's mentor-mentee. There are teachers and there are students, and both have power. In romantic relationships, there's a power exchange. There are yeses and there are nos. There are maybes. There are covert and overt contracts.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'll do this because I want to.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
You'll do this because you want to. Great. Sounds great. Overt contract. There are also covert contracts. Well, I don't feel safe doing that, so what I'll do is I'll take something from the interaction that you're not aware of so that I can sort of ease my sense of danger and give myself the illusion of feeling safe, and all sorts of kind of complicated human dynamics that have to do with us having this forebrain thing that can do all of that gymnastics. So maybe we could start very simply by just saying, how would you define power in terms of its functional definition, like 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 it so essential? Why couldn't it be something else?

Robert Greene:
Well, the way I define power is I try and take it away from that kind of negative context that most people have and 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 earliest period, it was literally over our environment and wild animals and nature and the climate, et cetera. But now the sense that you have no control over your career, over your children, over your parents, is deeply, deeply immiserating, and it compels us to act in certain ways, either attempts to find positive ways of power or doing what you call covert ways of getting power. Passive-aggressive, traditionally passive-aggressive means. So it's deeply wired in us to want a degree of control over the immediate environment and immediate events. We can never have complete control, and the idea of having complete control is nonsense, and it would actually be very ugly because you want a degree of letting go and letting circumstances come to you, et cetera. So the sense of you You want to feel like with other people in 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 wake up and find and do productive activity to your children, et cetera. You want 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 who's ever lived has that need, and we often don't recognize it because we're embarrassed by it. We're embarrassed 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. If you say, "Do this," and you're talking to your son, he'll do the opposite, or he'll do something else. You can't 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 say, "Yes, Daddy," "Yes, Husband, I'll do what you say," but they're going to resist you deep down inside, right? So people are tricky. They wear masks. They pretend to say one thing and they do another. They have their egos, and you inadvertently wound their egos or trip them in some way, and they react in a way that you don't expect. And so power is this kind of invisible realm that envelops society where people are continually battling each other and struggling in it, but no one is talking about it. No one's being overt about it. No one's saying, "This is exactly what I'm trying to do." And so when you enter the social world and the career world, you're not expecting these battles. No one's taught you, no one's trained you, your parents don't train you. Nobody trains you. And you make mistakes, and you realize how political people are. If you're a sharky character, and there's this certain percentage of them, you realize, "Wow, I can deceive people. I can manipulate them. I can get what I want. I can pretend to love them, and they'll fall for me, and I can do all this other stuff." But for most of us, the 95% 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 of that invisible power games. No one's given you any advice or helped you. And so take it out of the realm of it's just about trying to dominate the world and manipulate and exploit and abuse. It's 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 aligned with your politics or your ideas, you have to be subtle. You have to learn psychology. You have to learn certain aspects of how to almost move people without them realizing in certain directions, which is like the art of seduction. And if you're not interested in that, if you're just going to tell people what you think and what you're going to do, that means you're not interested in practical action. You're not interested in results. You're just interested in venting your own frustrations or your own anger. So learning the subtle little dynamics of power is extremely essential because we're a 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 "48 Laws of Power" is about defense, about how to defend yourself from the sharks about there, how to defend yourself from making classic mistakes like outshining 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.

Andrew Huberman:
It's very interesting. I think as a young guy growing up, it was so important to me to know where I fit in with my friend group, and I didn't think of it so much as a hierarchy, nor when I was in my academic studies did I think of it as a hierarchy, even though it was. Clearly was, right? So much as the goal was to figure out where was my unique slot that I could do the most good for myself and others.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Kind of finding my spot, I don't want to say on a shelf because that gives an image of something vertical, but let's make it lateral.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
A lateral arrangement of different people with different strengths, different life purposes, trying to figure them out. Where should I be in order to express that and also feel connected to others? And in order to do that, I realize now, based on your answer, I did have to figure out who's trying to have power over, who's pretending that they don't want power but is actually exerting power, these sorts of things. And there's an incredible peace that comes from knowing that one is in the correct place, both profession, interpersonally, in relation to oneself, but also in the context of one's peer group. Just kind of knowing, "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.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Seems like a waste of a life, frankly.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
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 pointed out.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Whereas figuring out where am I most powerful in the benevolent sense of the word, that seems like a good pursuit.

Robert Greene:
Well, it's connecting up to mastery again and finding your life's purpose. I knew when I was young that I couldn't exert physical power because I was a skinny little runt. And I wasn't bullied, but people would kind of pick on me, et cetera. So I veered towards intellectual pursuits where I could have power, and in the end, you might've been a jock and you might've done well in high school, but ha ha, look at me now. I'm not saying that it's a beautiful thing, but that's part of human nature, the desire to actually prove yourself and find that niche that you belong to so you don't have that sense of inferiority, which Alfred Adler, 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're now a famous neuroscientist, whereas they're like, "Who knows what they're doing?" kind of thing. So power definitely is connected in some way to that inner sense of what you were meant to do. And you feel it with the ease and the connection that comes from it, right? So I can honestly say that my dislike of working for other people in office politics and egos, I now have an existence where I don't have to deal with any of that. And I'm so blessed, and I wake up every morning, and I pray to God, thank God I found this because it's the perfect lifestyle for me.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, you can be accurately described as an intellectual beast. Which is a compliment, right? We hear the word beast, and we think a ferocious beast trying to harm others.

Robert Greene:
No, I'm happy being a beast.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So I think finding where we can be a beast, and for some people that's painting or-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... gardening or whatever it might be-

Robert Greene:
Sure

Andrew Huberman:
... I think again ties back to these issues or this quest for mastery. Seduction is also a very loaded word, right?

Robert Greene:
It's even more uglier than power.

Andrew Huberman:
Because seduction-

Robert Greene:
For real.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Seduction kind of drips with the idea that somebody is tricking someone else into doing something that they otherwise would not want to do. But seduction is both our propensity to do it and to have it done to us, is hardwired into our nervous system, and has a lot to do with the hypothalamus and a bunch of other areas that I won't bore us with the nomenclature. But seduction to me implies some sort of exchange. I suppose we could seduce ourselves through denial or convincing ourselves of something. But more often than not, when we talk about seduction, we're talking about an interaction between two or more people. So, what are some of the core principles of seduction? And if you care to play anthropologist a bit, and a neuroscientist, I would invite that. Why do you think we have neural circuits in our brain that allow us to seduce and be seduced?

Robert Greene:
Well, I don't know if I'm being kind of an armchair intellectual here, but my theory is some of it has to go back to social events long in our prehistory, which have to do with taboos. And society was initially kind of organized by a series of taboos, right? Most notably, the taboo on incest. And what happened, this is not just my theory, it's the theory of Malinowski. Is that how you pronounce it? So 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 that this is prohibited, stirs the desire, stirs the contrary impulses in humans. And we can be very, what's the word, perverse creatures, right? So if you've ever tried to suppress a thought, you realize that it keeps coming up. You can't suppress it. Don't think of an elephant, Andrew. Whatever you do, don't think of an elephant. You're thinking of it because you can't help it, right? The idea that you're not supposed to desire this person stirs that actual desire. So I believe the sense of something being taboo and transgressive is the ultimate kind of origin of our desire for seduction. But seduction involves vulnerability. It involves 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 a degree, complicit. Because if you just put up a wall and you said, "No, I'm not going to be seduced," nothing will happen. But you have a vulnerability. You're letting that person into your psyche, into your inner space. The paradigm for that is early childhood. So Freud talks a lot about this, so I don't know if people still believe in Freud anymore, but-

Andrew Huberman:
I certainly do.

Robert Greene:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Absolutely.

Robert Greene:
But yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
A genius of both psychology and physiology.

Robert Greene:
For sure.

Andrew Huberman:
Wrong about a lot of things, did a lot of things he shouldn't have done. Let's acknowledge that. I think everyone would agree that sleeping with your patients and being a cocaine addict, bad ideas. But at the same time, he had near supernatural levels of insight and brilliance into human nature.

Robert Greene:
Did he sleep with his patients?

Andrew Huberman:
I believe he did. But if I just-

Robert Greene:
He had like-

Andrew Huberman:
... threw that on him without him doing it, then forgive me.

Robert Greene:
Well, he certainly had emotional attachments to his patients that he shouldn't have had. I don't know if he slept with them. He very well might have. But his idea was that the child is seduced by the parent. You're in extremely vulnerable 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 instance, 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 excited. 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. The surprise lowers our resistance and opens our mind up to what's going to happen next, is a form of seduction. Fairy tales, the stories you were reading as a child, your interactions with your parents, they're deeply, deeply ingrained in you. You cannot be seduced unless you are vulnerable. Right? And so I like to switch it around and get it out of the negative connotations. Being vulnerable is actually a positive trait. 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 their relationships with other people. They don't want to be influenced. They want to be strong inside of themselves. They're afraid of giving in to 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 surrender to your power. So when I'm reading a writer, and sometimes they completely seduce me, like Friedrich Nietzsche is 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'll mention one, it's probably not a good thing, but Steven Pinker. I don't like Steven Pinker. I find him really annoying, okay? But I force 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. It's a kind of an emotional and an intellectual intelligence.

Andrew Huberman:
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, by definition, if you're choosing to do it, implies that you also have the confidence that you can get back to yourself afterwards.

Robert Greene:
Of course.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? That you're not going to get lost-

Robert Greene:
Of course

Andrew Huberman:
... in the circumstances. That you're not going to be hijacked to the point of no return.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Or in some way that's detrimental to you.

Robert Greene:
That's right.

Andrew Huberman:
So, I'm sounding really nerdy here. It's collinear with confidence in many ways. Sure. Take my mind and take it where you will, because I know I can come back at any time.

Robert Greene:
Right. And the same thing in a physical seduction, 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.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, there it gets tricky because the-

Robert Greene:
It gets very tricky

Andrew Huberman:
... Well, because the attachment systems, which are also rooted in childhood, oftentimes can overwhelm one's ability to recover oneself. If I had a dollar for every time someone that I knew in my life saying, "I know they're bad for me, but we just can't seem to disengage." You hear about that all the time. You see court cases about this that are public, and you just go, "Why didn't they just walk away from one another?"

Robert Greene:
Of course.

Andrew Huberman:
Because once those attachment systems are locked in-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... it almost becomes, and here metaphorically speaking, like a parent-child relationship. You can't suddenly decide your parents weren't your parents-

Robert Greene:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... simply because you know better now. Right?

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
You are forever stricken with the reality that they were, and they-

Robert Greene:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... had an influence. And I think that that attachment system is a force that tugs pretty hard.

Robert Greene:
Yeah. And a lot of women have written to me, since "The Art of Seduction," sort of saying that their boyfriend or husband was applying some of these tactics on them, and it was very painful, and they were kind of a little bit angry at me for it. But then they kind of realized that they didn't learn it really from my book. It was already kind of wired in them. But that reading about these tactics and these strategies actually helped them to recognize what their husband or boyfriend was doing to them, the manipulation and the games that were being played.

Andrew Huberman:
Do men write to you and talk about the seductive adornments that women have used to bring them into relationship as well, or are you typically hearing from women?

Robert Greene:
I mostly hear from women complaining about men and how they've abused them and how they used-

Andrew Huberman:
I see

Robert Greene:
... some of the strategies I don't deny have a slightly nefarious 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 censor myself.

Andrew Huberman:
But female-to-male seduction clearly also exists.

Robert Greene:
Very much so.

Andrew Huberman:
I acknowledge that it's less often is it physically abusive. But from an early age, both boys and girls, men and women, are coached by society on the sorts of seductive tactics and adornments, right? Everything from makeup, perfume, hairstyles, cars, watches, jewelry, expression, power displays of any kind. That stuff, the world's filled with that stuff.

Robert Greene:
Yeah, but men are generally kind of happy when a woman seduces them, right? Unless they're after their money or something like that, which happens. But generally, the sense, I talk about this in the first chapter about sirens, which I say is the quintessential archetype of the female seductress, the kind of half-human, half-bird creature on a rock singing so beautifully that you have to jump in the water, and then 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 project 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 men in history, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Joe DiMaggio, all these men, very masculine men, who've fallen for very feminine, siren-like women and been completely dominated by them. And they actually kind of enjoy the process because it's like a sense of, "I can let go. I can enter this totally sensual, physical world, and it's extremely pleasing. It's like another realm outside of my kind of cold, masculine world." So I don't really get men complaining too much about women who've seduced them, honestly. It's usually the other way around.

Andrew Huberman:
I've heard before, and I promise this is not an 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's a power exchange.

Robert Greene:
Definitely.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe you could elaborate on that, because as you were describing some of the seductive power dynamics that exist, a phrase that I've heard before came to mind, that at first made me chuckle but then made me think quite deeply about this issue of the relationship between sexual and power dynamics, which is this notion of topping from the bottom. 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 can be given or taken, but oftentimes, seductive exchanges and sexual exchanges and romantic exchanges, in particular, are about both people buying into 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-hoc, right? But I think the relationship between sex, romance, and power is an important area to explore in the context of this.

Robert Greene:
Well, I wrote "The Art of Seduction" with the idea that it was an art invented by women. It was invented by women who had no power, essentially, socially, politically, in any sense of the word, and domestically, right? But the one power that they could wield over a man was through sex, some physical attraction. And so they developed this art of kind of luring a man into their world through various theatrical effects, Cleopatra being kind of the archetype of this. And then luring the powerful man into this world, he has the illusion that he's the one pursuing her, but in fact, she is the one controlling the dynamic. So oftentimes, the person who appears to be the weaker one in the relationship, who's not doing the pursuing, is actually inviting the pursuing, is actually leading the other person on. So there's a lot of appearance games going on, and you can never really figure out who exactly is in control of the dynamic. Because one person is allowing the other person to lead them on, but the fact that you're allowing them is a degree of power, is a degree of control, right? So it's very hard to figure out. And sex and power and romantic relationships are very much intertwined in us, physically, emotionally, neurologically. You can't avoid it, right? And so I think it's kind of dishonest to say that none of that exists, that there's some egalitarian paradise out of there when it's really not wired in us for that kind of relationship.

Andrew Huberman:
There's a recent scientific publication/factoid that I wanted to share with you in this context because I'd like your thoughts on it. David Anderson, who's a phenomenal neurobiologist, he's been a guest on this podcast before. He's a professor at Caltech, studies basically the functions of the hypothalamus.

Robert Greene:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
So things like aggression, mating-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and things of that sort, and does it so with great detail. He's a virtuoso of the hypothalamus. And he published 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 gone to the dog park will see same-sex mounting between dogs or mounting between dogs that has apparently no sexual endpoint.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And in exploring this literature and some talking to David about it, it's very clear that there are neural circuits that have everything to do with essentially one animal of a species getting on top of the other animal, usually from behind, oftentimes scruffing or biting the back of the neck and saying, "I control you." 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 it essentially says, "I decide whether or not you are mobile or not for this moment." And this is very important. I want to emphasize this. 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. 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 as biting or as striking has its own unique set of circuits in the brain, I think substantiates everything that you put in your books about power and maybe even seduction as well. So as I just kind of toss that out there for consideration, I wonder if you have any reflections on it. If not, 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 it's-

Robert Greene:
Oh, I see what you mean

Andrew Huberman:
... but it's not. There seem to be a host of neural circuits in the brain that are really about defining who's on top, literally, that has nothing to do with sex.

Robert Greene:
Yeah. I'm sure that's true. I've never read anything about that, but I can say that I wrote a chapter 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.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, I love that.

Robert Greene:
And kind of like the antithesis of my "Art of Seduction," where I'm almost contradicting myself. And I was going into the biology of it, and even into the physics of it. So there's a famous French biologist whose name escapes me, I'm sorry, I can't remember, from the '20s and '30s. And he was studying paramecium. And he found that he was studying them, they're in these ponds, et cetera. And he said that there was these moments where these single-celled organisms were suddenly coupling. They were all joining together, just one to one, and they were absorbing the membrane of one inside the other. And then once one couple did that, all the paramecium started joining up together. Then 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 connect to someone so deeply where one is absorbed in the other, is biologically wired into us. It goes back millions and millions and millions of years. And it's a desire, essentially, a biological desire for love. Right? And it's an energy that permeates all the... It's not just about power and hierarchies, and that he was showing other creatures that had something similar going on. And in physics, we talk about entanglement, and we also talk about matter. If matter isn't opposed by a lot of kinetic energy, it joins together. Particles join together to form matter, et cetera. So there's something in the universe that's trying to connect things to each other. So there's this kind of energy that exists in the world where we have a deep need to connect to somebody outside of those power dynamics. Right? Where there's a degree of equality, where we're drawn to each other and we let go of the ego games, we let go of the playing, we kind of surmount our own physiology, our own hypothalamus, and we engage in this, I call it love sublime. 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 permeable to their energy in a way that you cannot control. It releases all kinds of chemicals in the brain that are very powerful. And oftentimes, that sense is too powerful and you react, and you're afraid of it, and you pull back. But if you don't react and you go further, then the mind also becomes permeable to the other person and their energy and their desire. And so then it kind of creates a spiraling effect where the physical and the mental connection reaches this state that I call love sublime. 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 it, and I believe it is a biological necessity for us to feel a deep sense of connection. We normally ascribe that to religion, to God, et cetera. But I maintain the essence of love, the model for love is between two human beings, straight or homosexual, doesn't matter. And that feeling of surmounting our own neurology, our own system, and entering this zone is deeply satisfying. We all want it. And it has to involve letting go of the power dynamics, and everything being equal. It's not that the other person is exactly like you. You recognize their difference. 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 dynamic that we're talking about.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm excited that you're writing about this. So this is for your next book?

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, I'm very excited. I couldn't help but think of some of the parallels between what you describe and what we're observing nowadays in the landscape of politics and social dynamics, where clearly there is no setting aside of egos. Both sides feel attacked. Everyone in between feels confused, like, "Why do I have to pick a side?" And there seems to be no hint of a future where people are setting down their swords. Which means, if we were to go with your earlier definition, which I like a lot, that nobody feels safe enough to be vulnerable Enough to allow the union of people to occur, which is just a way of rewording a bunch of other things, and not nearly as eloquently as you described it. But if setting aside of power dynamics and making oneself vulnerable is the key to accessing love-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in the romantic context, surely, but also in the societal context, what are the channels for that? I suppose there is the argument, not mine, that everyone should just take a boatload of psychedelics and see the interconnectedness of things, but that seems like an unrealistic route. I just don't see that being 12th-grade graduation curriculum, nor do I think it would be healthy. To be clear, I think that we'd end up with a lot of expression of problems there. But short of a magic substance that could increase feelings of connectedness among everyone simultaneously, how are you going to save humanity, Robert?

Robert Greene:
Well, because I'm concerned about young people in particular with hookup culture, with pornography, et cetera. It's kind of rewiring the human brain, and we're losing what I was just describing. And I see, particularly, a lot of young people, and I don't blame them because they've grown up in a world that's very chaotic and very hostile.

Andrew Huberman:
Could I say, I think it's, and not to be nitpicky here, but I love what you just said. I think in my mind, things like that are hijacking the hardwiring of the brain.

Robert Greene:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'm just-

Robert Greene:
You're right

Andrew Huberman:
... no, and I'm not, again-

Robert Greene:
It's true

Andrew Huberman:
... forgive me. The audience is probably going, "Well, like-"

Robert Greene:
You can't really rewire the brain like that, so.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. 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 books so much, among many other things, is that it's about that dance between the hardwiring and the possible of through effort. So anyway, forgive me for being-

Robert Greene:
No, it's very accurate.

Andrew Huberman:
So yeah. How do you get us out of this?

Robert Greene:
Well, you're putting a big burden on me, but-

Andrew Huberman:
I am, but I think you're up to it.

Robert Greene:
Well, I try to do it in this chapter because I wanted to seduce the reader into the idea that this is something extremely pleasurable and extremely healthy, and the feeling of being vulnerable is a very positive attribute that will infect not just your romantic relationships, but will infect you mentally. So creative people are extremely vulnerable. They're extremely vulnerable to ideas. They're extremely vulnerable to the environment. And closing yourself off into your own ego, into yourself, so the chapter is called "Escape the Prison of the Ego." And you're kind of trapped inside of yourself and your own thoughts and your own desires, and it's like a prison. It's enclosing you, and you want to escape somehow. And you escape through drugs, you escape through porn, but it doesn't lead to actually escaping. You want to be able to let go of the self and get out of this prison that you're in, right? And so it's a desire 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's a bit naive on my part, but I want you to at least have that feeling, because a lot of young people write to me and they say, "I can't fall in love anymore. I don't like that feeling. The loss of control is too much." And a lot of their behavior patterns are in creating this sense of control, which you can have when you're locked inside of yourself.

Andrew Huberman:
Hence overindulgence in pornography-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and masturbation, et cetera, as a way to avoid the understandable fear about interrelational dynamics.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Robert Greene:
So, when you're young, you're idealistic, or 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 to the human animal as a social animal, it's like the highest form of interaction that we can have. So my strategy in that chapter was to paint such a wonderful portrayal 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 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 huge impact, but we'll see when the book comes out. But I'm advocating that sense of opening yourself up to the universe, to the cosmos itself, as an energy that permeates the world. And so that you don't want the feeling of being closed inside of your ego, 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 it clear to you 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 the instant, and 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 opposed to virtual. And so that the human spirit can't be completely squashed by technology, et cetera. 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 1960s, like in the 1920s, like in 18th-century Europe with the Casanova, where seduction reached its kind of apogee, et cetera. 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 divisive, et cetera, and suddenly it goes in the opposite direction. I have hope in that possibility, and I structured my chapter to perhaps sweep that a little bit along that tide and see if I can have any effect.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I think what you just described in conversations like it and that stem from it are likely to have a tremendous effect. I think it's exactly what's needed now, and certainly I'll be trying to amplify that message. I agree with everything you said, and not just because you're sitting here as a guest-

Robert Greene:
Oh, good

Andrew Huberman:
... on this podcast, but because it's clear to me that while power dynamics and seduction are wired into our human relations 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.

Robert Greene:
Oh, goodness.

Andrew Huberman:
We hear a lot about the swinging back and forth of the pendulum. Someone, in fact, Peter Attia, online physician's brother actually said, so we'll credit him, he said, "No, it's not a pendulum that swings back and forth. Unfortunately, now it's become a wrecking ball." So it's swinging back and forth and doing damage as it reaches its extremes. And I think that I also look forward to a time where people acknowledge the injustices around them and that have been done to them and others, but somehow are able to transcend that. And the word that I'd like to pick up on there is the word justice. It was pointed out to me by someone I respect very much that having a sense of justice is a wonderful and important thing, and as humans, it's 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 ready availability of pornography, high-density calorie food, et cetera, a bunch of things like that. But that one of the issues with social media, because it 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 that piss you off, and that piss other people off, and for different reasons. 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 or not there's anything that you should do about it. And I think that everyone now feels a bit hijacked by all the injustices we see because we feel like, well, we're supposed to do something about it. But it may be that while we can't let every injustice pass, that being bombarded all day long with things that upset us is hijacking our creativity, it's distracting us from our deeper purpose, it's preventing a sense of vulnerability that would lead to a sense of deep love-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and on and on. So I don't think it's just about the tantalizing lures of sex, food, and looking at bodies and hearing voices on social media. I think there is some validity to that, but that it's also that there's just ample opportunity to go down the gravitational pull forces of injustice. Like, "Ugh, that's so frustrating. Why are they doing that?" 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 it? They're crazy." As opposed to thinking about anything else in that moment. And I try and yank myself out of that. But I think that you're not going to do it alone, but I think you will play a major role in saving us from this. I do. I think because people just need to see themselves through a different lens-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and realize, "This is distracting me from who I'm supposed to be."

Robert Greene:
Well, a lot of what modern life should involve is the ability to ignore certain things. So for instance, I don't know if you know that app Nextdoor.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, right. I used to have it.

Robert Greene:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
But then I'd see all the packages being stolen off my neighbors' porches in Oakland.

Robert Greene:
God.

Andrew Huberman:
And then I started enjoying living in Oakland less, and I love the city of Oakland.

Robert Greene:
Ah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's got its problems.

Robert Greene:
I've lived in Oakland, too.

Andrew Huberman:
It definitely has its problems. But as an East Bay kid, and went to school out there, and I have deep love for the East Bay, and it's always had those problems. But when you see stuff being stolen on your phone in the middle of the night when you wake up, it creates a sense that they're out to get my stuff.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
It's terrible.

Robert Greene:
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 person's dog bit me, there's this rabid dog going around, there's this homeless person that's yelling and attacking people, on and on and on. I feel like I'm living in this neighborhood that's like Beirut or something in the 1980s. I can't even walk out my door. I don't look at Nextdoor anymore. I just ignore it. I don't open it ever because I know that they're designed algorithmically to put that in front of you every single time so that you click on it, because we respond to that kind of stuff naturally. We can't 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 have this visceral 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 that outraged feeling, every time I read an article about it, it just drives me crazy. So the only thing is I stop reading as much as I can. I read things that are kind of rational and intelligent, and I send them money, and I donate 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 in 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 amassing a movement, by dealing with climate change. Not by trying to recycle every little thing in your house, but actually doing something really much more macro in the world, 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 it totally distracts you and weakens you and drains you of energy to fall into those rabbit holes 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 wired to see those kind of red alert buttons on Facebook or on Nextdoor or wherever they are. And it's just negative. It's like a candy rush and you have to avoid it.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's taking us away from our purpose, which we each have. I think to me, that's the most deleterious aspect of it.

Robert Greene:
Unless your purpose is to organize and be an activist. People ask me, I wrote a lot about, in my "Human Nature" book, about the shadow side of human nature, right? And we all have it. We all have a dark side. We all have hidden aggression. We all have feelings of envy. We all have feelings of grandiosity. We all have aggressive impulses. How do you deal with it? And I say the way to deal is to channel it into something positive and pro-social, and that can be putting it in your artwork, venting that anger and that outrage in something that people can identify with, or it can be in organizing something. That could be your purpose in life, in actually doing something positive. So that's the only way that you could actually use that energy for some kind of actual life's task or purpose.

Andrew Huberman:
You've been discussing lately a bit on some of your channels about masculine and feminine, let's say, roles, and crises of the masculine-feminine dance, as well as the crisis of masculinity per se, the crisis of femininity per se. Do you care to expand on that a bit? I think we could probably take three, four hours to explore all this in full. But I was struck by some of the things that you said, because I agree completely that just as we are not given a roadmap when we arrive in the world as to how to find our purpose, I think there's also a very conflicted roadmap that's thrown in front of us and indeed conflicting multiple roadmaps about what it means to be masculine or feminine or some combination of both, which of course everybody is some combination of both, just to varying degrees.

Robert Greene:
Well, yeah. So men have a feminine side to them, which if you try to repress it will come out in other ways, and women have a masculine side to them. I think Jung described this very well with the anima and the animus, which I think is extremely real. It's very, very confusing times for both men and for women right now. We don't know the roles. 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 have be paid the same and should have the same career opportunities. There should be no prejudice or harassment or anything. But at the same time, on social media, it's all about looking perfect, and looks are incredibly important. And if you're not hot, you're in terrible trouble. And a lot of young girls are extremely confused by this. They're getting mixed signals, right? And boys are in perhaps even worse circumstance, where being masculine is seen as something negative. So we don't have any ideals out there anymore of what constitutes a good, positive form of femininity and a good positive form of masculinity. In fact, we even think that there shouldn't be anything like that, that there's no such thing as being masculine or feminine or whatever. It's very, very confusing. And so, I think of masculine traits that I think are very positive and that should be out there to 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, et cetera. But you can take criticism, you can have moments of failure and you'll bounce back, but you have a kind of inner resilience and a kind of inner strength, a quiet calm that I think used to be exemplified in movie icons like a Gary Cooper type thing, right? And that kind of sense of inner calmness where you're not hysterical, you're not getting upset about everything that happens, where you have a kind of an inner strength and a confidence, and you can withstand what Ryan Holiday talks about a lot about with stoicism. You can withstand all of the hardships in life, but you have that citadel within you, is a very, very powerful form of masculinity, as opposed to it's all about ... sleeping with a lot of women, having really fast cars, being abusive and being a bully, et cetera. These are signs of weakness, of insecurity. And to be masculine should be a sense of security and inner confidence and inner strength. Right? And that's what we should venerate in our culture, and we should have icons like that. Okay? It doesn't mean that there's no role for men who are not masculine or who have more of the feminine virtues. There's definitely a role for that, and we see a lot of that in all sorts of arenas of life. And then there should be a positive model for women, where instead of their appearances being judged by their appearances and having to conform to ideals of what's hot or not, it's about being incredibly powerful and competent and have expertise in being really successful in your career, as opposed to being continually judged by your appearances, which is very damaging. So these are terrible times. 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 was a very quiet man, and he was just a middle-class salesman, is basically what he was. His whole life, he sold chemical supplies for one company. But he was very dignified. He treated people well. He was very calm and very quiet, but he also was very empathetic. That was my role model for what I think is a good masculine energy, and I think a lot of people just don't have that, and they're very lost. And so I don't know what the answer is to that. I can't really produce that out of thin air, but I wish I could.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, certainly nowadays there are many more, let's say, examples and options of masculine and feminine qualities out there for observation because of social media and because of the internet. And as you pointed out before, a key feature to becoming a functional human being, especially nowadays, is learning what to ignore.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
There's an interesting idea in the circles around nutrition and health that never before in human history have human beings been able to access such a wide variety of foods that differ from what their ancestors ate. And I don't even mean ancient ancestors. If you grew up in the Bay Area, as I did in the 1970s and '80s, there were a few ethnic restaurants, but we ate the same 15 or 20 foods over and over again.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
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 in the nutrition communities that we are not hardwired to think about and discern so many different food options, and to taste so many distinct flavors. Whereas before, people in one portion of the planet or country ate generally one way in a given season, if there's seasonality, et cetera. In a similar vein, we are now, and children too are now overwhelmed with the number of different options of how to express oneself, both masculinity and femininity, but generally speaking. And so the question is then, how does one choose, right? How does one decide 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 fascinating, ask themselves, "Who am I?" Adults don't tend to ask themselves that question.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But who am I?

Robert Greene:
I still ask myself that question.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. Well, that's good. Maybe I should ask myself that more often. But I think that we clearly have gone over a cliff with this stuff. I don't think we're still at the point where we're veering towards the edge of confusion. I think young people are really confused because the moment one assumes one clear and let's say balanced set of masculine, feminine attributes, or maybe veers a bit more masculine or a bit more feminine, it's like there are a million examples telling you that that's wrong.

Robert Greene:
I know.

Andrew Huberman:
And then sometimes has the tendency to anchor to, "Well, no, I'm right because this is who I am," and then all of a sudden you're in a larger battle. So, Gary Cooper's great. Love his movies. But we now have a million variations on Gary Cooper 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.

Robert Greene:
I know they won't. I know.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. But that's perhaps-

Robert Greene:
I know I'm a dinosaur.

Andrew Huberman:
But perhaps it illustrates the point, no, not that you're a dinosaur, but that there is no single or even set of masculine or feminine ideals. So picking role models is something that I really, truly internalized from your book, "Mastery."

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
There were a lot of lonely years for me, and I won't get into the stories of just wondering, "What am I going to do?" I'm 13, my home was completely broken, no semblance of the reality it was before. Who are the males in my life I'm going to orient to? And fortunately for me, I assigned mentors to me, whether or not they knew it or not-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that really helped me along, and I changed them up as you recommend. There wasn't one.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I understood there was a breaking up process, an integration process, combining and threading together different things. I truly believe that that's what's required. It doesn't have to be 100% Gary Cooper. It can be-

Robert Greene:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... 10% Robert Green, 10% someone else.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
5% this, and creating a pie chart of sorts of who one wishes to be in a given context.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But that takes work. It takes a bit of work and discernment. But gosh, that's powerful. And credit goes to you because you were a mentor of mine. You didn't even realize it-

Robert Greene:
Oh, I did

Andrew Huberman:
... in the way that you forge and organize information. And there were others. But "Mastery" is where I learned to do that. And this is not a podcast that's a sales pitch for "Mastery," but gosh, it really taught me. Okay, I have a graduate advisor. She was wonderful and brilliant, but she didn't know how to explain a lot of things to me, so I'd find someone else for that.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And someone else for the other thing, and someone else for the other thing, and together, create a patchwork of really excellent mentors that made a lot of sense to me.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So I think there's a role for that process that you spell out in "Mastery" in the larger context of who to become as a person, and that includes masculine and feminine ideals.

Robert Greene:
Yeah, and it's an ongoing process throughout your life, so who you glommed onto when you were 14 or 15 will change when you're 19. I had a series of people like you're talking about. My high school English teacher, who 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 at Berkeley, 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, Jos Delfer, who was a book packager who understood the business, et cetera. 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 that I admire. They're not perfect. Everyone is flawed. And so at some point, maybe you see too many of the flaws, and you go on, "I need somebody new in my life." But there's nothing wrong with that. It's not like you're violating 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. Now, you didn't necessarily pick up my energy or spirit from reading "Mastery," although maybe you did. I don't know. But when you're interacting with that professor at Stanford or whatever, it's not just verbally. There's kind of a non-verbal communication going on. You're internalizing some of the positive qualities that you saw in them and finding these series of mentors, because I call it surrogate parents. You can't choose your father and mother, but you can choose these ideals for you. You can choose these mentors in your life. You can kind of rewrite your family history and find that father figure you never had by glomming onto this person. But it has to be the right fit. It has to be someone that you connect to emotionally and intellectually and that has the positive qualities you wish for yourself.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I'll embarrass you 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 I admire and who I'm trying to emulate in some way, not in every way, certainly. And certain names have been crossed off, but most of them have survived. And certainly, after reading "Mastery," your name made that list. And-

Robert Greene:
I hope I'm not being crossed off at some point.

Andrew Huberman:
No, not at all. And through reading "Mastery," there were additional names. I had 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 what everyone says. But by being essentially scientifically orphaned-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because there's a strong mentor-mentee 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-unquote, mother and father myself-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in the context of profession. And I got a lot of help, but I can't emphasize enough how valuable that practice is. And so when one looks out on the landscape of social media options, these are literally just options of people to, we call it following, but it should probably should be called something else, because following falls short of emulating or attempting to emulate. But I think that in the context of masculine and feminine ideals, this is so critical, but it's like the buffet of food is so enormous now, right? You've got every cuisine on the table, so to speak.

Robert Greene:
And we're not wired for that.

Andrew Huberman:
No.

Robert Greene:
And I know personally, I get very agitated and upset if I go to the market, and I have to choose between 30 items, and I have no idea what I want. It makes me really cranky and upset. Whereas if I know, okay, I cannot have this food, I can't have that, I'm only looking for this. Okay, it's easy. It doesn't take two hours and waste my time. Too much choice is very detrimental to the human being, I think. And that's why we're going back to what I originally said. When you have that sense of purpose about your life, about what's important, it not just infects 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 brain active and alive is an incredibly important value. All right, I'm not going to eat all that sugar because it's bad for me, right? It means I'm not going to get outraged by these things on the internet because it's a waste of time. I can't do anything about it. It's just feeding on my, I forget the part of the brain that's like the amygdala or 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 it's good. Some of it's interesting. I can follow Andrew Huberman's podcast, and I enjoy that, and I learn a lot from him. But a lot of these podcasts are useless. They're not helping me in any way. So it gives you this kind of filter and this radar to cut out those 100 different choices that drive us absolutely crazy. And I know maybe I'm partially, maybe I'm a little bit, I don't know, I hate to say that maybe I'm partially on the spectrum or something, but I can't stand too many choices. It completely drives me nuts. So I always have to kind of funnel my energy into something, to things that are productive, and having a sense of your purpose whenever you discover it in your 20s, hopefully, gives you that ability to say, "These are the positive role models I want in my life. These are the mentors." And the thing about following people On social media. It's so easy. It's just a click. It doesn't mean anything. A mentor 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 write to me, say, "I'm afraid of asking this important, powerful person to be their mentee." So it involves a sense of social courage, where you have to literally engage with another human being who you admire and who you think is powerful. So it's building your social skills, et cetera. But it's a skill you develop. You can't just follow someone. You can't just watch their lectures. You have to engage with them, and you have to get over some of your fears and your anxieties in the process.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, and I might add to it, I think everything you said is absolutely true, and I think engaging in the various tools that they recommend is immensely helpful. I think hearing about a book is great. Reading a book is even better. Thinking about a book that you've read is even better than that. And then writing down your own ideas and writing a book, well, that's the big win. And I believe that's what the universe wants from us. Not necessarily to write a book, but translate what I just said to any number of different endeavors.

Robert Greene:
Yeah, you want to be able to think for yourself. So you're not just absorbing ideas from other people and kind of mimicking them and kind of just learning the exteriors of their ideas. You want to kind of digest them and then have them slowly become your own ideas by interacting with them and by putting them through your own lens. So someday, it's a book stirring 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 podcasts, which might be the seed of a book, but it's the difference between dead thinking and alive thinking. Ideas can be either alive, or they can be dead. And an alive idea is something that enters your brain from an external source, a philosopher, 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 it around into this, and I'm going to make it alive, and it's going to make it something that's part of me." Another part of an alive idea is 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 and on, and you reflect on it, 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. On and on and 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 life. It'll determine whether you will be successful, whether you will find your career path, or whether you won't be able to. I don't know if you can follow that idea at all.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Robert Greene:
But anxiety is a signal to you that you don't understand something, that there's a problem out there that you can't resolve. And so what happens to most people, if you're insecure, is you glom onto something instant and easy to get rid of your feeling of anxiety. "I don't understand this problem. Oh, A must be the answer because this person said that." And so you don't develop the ability to think. You don't develop the ability to go to the next level. But if you take that anxiety and you go, "All right, maybe A is an answer," and then you start going through A, and then you go, "No, maybe A isn't the answer. Maybe B is the answer," you're able to surmount your anxiety and go past it, come further and further and further. You don't rush for the first available answer that's out there. 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 going to make the wrong choices. But if you're able to deal with that anxiety and say, "Maybe I have to think more deeply about where I'm going. I have to come up with other alternatives," then you're going to make a much better choice on and on and on. If you're a creative person, it's very challenging to have that blank piece of paper before you, that book that you haven't written, that film or whatever. You're filled with a lot of anxiety, and you have to deal with it. And if you're able to turn it into something creative and productive, then great things will happen. You'll create a masterpiece. So the ability to deal with anxiety and to not give in to the most instant gratification that you can get is, to me, a marker of somebody who'll be creative and will invent something as opposed to people who just recycle old and dead ideas.

Andrew Huberman:
Amen to that. I was once told that anxiety makes children of us all, and not in the positive sense of being childlike.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It regresses us to a mode where we feel a complete lack of control, and I completely agree that being able to manage anxiety and work, dance with it-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... since we can't rid ourselves of it.

Robert Greene:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Perhaps nor should we. Because it's a signal, as you point out, that we don't understand something, that there's something to get curious about.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
A process or something out there or both. I think that really resonates.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I think a lot of people will benefit from hearing that because I think we hear the word flow, and we just all imagine... I even catch myself imagining that when Robert Greene sits down to write, it's like there's a blank sheet, and then he just kind of meditates, and then boom, out come these books.

Robert Greene:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
If I get realistic for a second, I'm sure that there's a lot of inner turmoil and anxiety.

Robert Greene:
Oh my God, you have no idea. So, my process is 95% pain and maybe 2.5% ecstasy, and I don't know what the other 2.5% would be. But, so I write a story because in my new book and most of my books, I always begin with a story from history, et cetera. And it is so bad. I can't believe how bad, how flat it is, how it sucks. I'm so embarrassed. I hate myself. And I go and I dig into it, and I start changing the words in it. I start making it a little bit better. The second version, it's kind of palatable, but it still sucks. If I let it out into the world, it'd be very embarrassing. It's anxious. And my wife can tell you, I'm a miserable being when that happens. Everything looks black to me at that point, and I push 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, I go, "That's not real. That's not the actual thing that's going on here, Robert. You've missed the mark." You want to 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 and go, "Here's the chapter." I go, "It's got to be better. It's got to be better." Until finally, after two months of struggling, it seems like it's gone to the place that I want it to be in, right? But I use that anxiety to keep improving and making it better. And then when I reach that point and the story is good enough, and I can let my wife read it and then my editor, I feel great. I have that 2% moment of joy, but it came through all of that anxiety. But I can tell you, the feeling of fulfillment 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 all the barriers. So my process involves a lot of anxiety in dealing with... That's why I'm talking about it and why I want to write a book about it.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you for sharing that.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm attempting to write a book and have been for several years, and now I feel a little bit better, but-

Robert Greene:
Ugh

Andrew Huberman:
... clearly I need to ratchet down harder. But in other domains of life, I am familiar with the experience of tons of anxiety and just, okay, I'm going to just get to this one milestone, and then I'll figure out the next milestone. But even that process of saying, "Okay, I'm going to break this down into milestones," itself is anxiety provoking.

Robert Greene:
Sure.

Andrew Huberman:
It's just that, but at some point, it generates enough inertia that you just-

Robert Greene:
It does

Andrew Huberman:
... sort of stumble forward into the process, and then-

Robert Greene:
That's right

Andrew Huberman:
... you keep going, so try not to bloody oneself-

Robert Greene:
That's right

Andrew Huberman:
... too much.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I think a lot of people will benefit from hearing about that. In fact, I'm certain they will. So speaking of anxiety, you have a clip on the internet that we will provide a link to in the show note captions, which I think is absolutely fabulous, about how to find a romantic partner and/or get more out of an existing romantic partnership.

Robert Greene:
I don't even remember what I said. You're going to have to remind me.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, it's so good. One point in particular-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... that I remember, that I think is oh so true, is that there needs to be at least one and probably several points of real convergence in terms of one's interests or likes that go beyond what food somebody likes or what type of house they want to live in. But that actually traces back to these early forms of delight. And you mentioned, that for you, and therefore presumably your partner, that a mutual love and respect for animals happens to be one of those things within the context of your relationship, right? Not that a love for animals is required.

Robert Greene:
For me, it sure as hell is.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Exactly. So-

Robert Greene:
I could never go out with a woman who didn't love animals.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. My sister used to tease me that if a woman gave me a birthday card or a card that had a drawing of a particular animal, which I'm particularly fond of, I have an older sister, and she used to say, "Oh, no, it's over. He's gone."

Robert Greene:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
Fortunately, it's not that simple.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But, there's some truth to what she was saying. It's necessary but not sufficient.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But maybe you could elaborate a little bit on this notion of convergent interest and contrast it with a lot of what people tend to hear and say about what's important in partnership. Because I think this is something that a lot of people grapple with, both in terms of finding a partner and in terms of building partnership.

Robert Greene:
Well, there's different relationships you can have. Do you want a one-week, a one-month relationship? Are you looking for something longer, more satisfying, that will entail maybe years of being together? And people can get very boring very quickly, right? Particularly if you can't have a conversation with them about subjects that interest you. And so you mentioned animals. Animals is a very good example because I'm not saying that you both have to be Democrats or Republicans. That's too banal and superficial. But the love of animals reaches into your character, reaches something deep inside of you, or your dislike of animals, if that happens to be the case. But it signals something about it that's so primal, that's so connected to a child ... that there's going to be a deep connection there. And it's not 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 they're innocent in their own way. You love the fact that 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 is all about money, power, success, and comfort, and the other isn't really into it, is into spending money, et cetera. A lot of people have endless fights over something like money, right? Where there's no convergence there. And money signals a deeper value about the person. So I'm not saying there's anything wrong if money motivates you. I'm not moralizing about it, because that can signal a value that maybe you grew up without it, and that feeling comfortable and feeling like you don't have to worry about something is very, very important to you. And the not being interested in money reveals something about your character. So I'm telling people, you want to look at the person's character and see a kind of convergence there and something that can last. And I remember I was reading, for one of my books, about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. And the thing of it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt was this incredibly handsome, vibrant young man before he got polio. Very active, very athletic, very handsome. All the women were after him. He was like the perfect match. He was wealthy. And Eleanor Roosevelt was like the ugly duckling. She wasn't very pretty. She was kind of socially awkward. But he saw into her character. He saw that intellectually she was a match for him. He saw that they had similar interests on that level that I'm talking about that go beneath just the surfaces. And he chose Eleanor, and everyone was shocked about it. Nobody was trying to court Eleanor. I forget her last name at the time. I think she might have even been Roosevelt. So it was very shocking. He said, "I looked at somebody who I could last with, who had some qualities that were much more important to me," and it ended up being a very satisfying relationship. Of course, later on, he had his dalliances, so it wasn't perfect, but it was a very positive relationship. So seeing your values in life, when it comes to money, when it comes to 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 have nothing against that. I'm not going to judge that either. But it won't lead to a long-lasting relationship. Sports and athletics are another thing. Is this someone that likes the outdoors, or is it someone who's like Zsa Zsa Gabor and has to be in a Times Square, in a penthouse in Manhattan, kind of thing. So values that reach inside of a character that are deeply ingrained, that you can almost not change, you can't control, there's a convergence there on several levels, is a sign that you can have a deep connection with that person, and it's very important. And if those connections are good and there's a physical attraction, because without the physical attraction, it will kind of fizzle out, you've got a recipe for incredible success, for something that can really last. And having a lasting relationship as I've had is such an anchor in your life. For me, for someone who works as hard as I do, and hopefully for her as well, it just grounds me, and it makes life so much simpler and easier. And it's not just simple and easy. There's a lot of love and a great deal 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. When I first met now my wife, I had a cat at the time. I'd always been a dog person, but this was a cat I had, and I loved that cat like hell. I can't believe he was such a wonderful cat. I brought her over to my apartment on the first date. I wanted to see her reaction to the cat. Because I generally, and I don't know if people misjudge that, women who don't like cats, I can't get along with. Right? Because there's something feline in the feminine nature that I love. And she loved my cat, and boy, that was the best sign of all. And things just blossomed. And she loved me for loving a cat. So there was a great convergence right there that we saw right away. And there were other things, but that was the first one.

Andrew Huberman:
I love that story. And everything you just said suggests, I believe, that in order to find the right partner and to build an existing partnership that hopefully 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.

Robert Greene:
Self-awareness 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 looks sexy and hot and will impress all of his male friends, et cetera. You go by the things that culture tells you that these are the right images for you, right? And then there won't 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 slightly chaotic. I don't 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 matter. You think that sex matters more than anything, physical attraction matters, or you think that the person having a lot of money matters, et cetera. You don't think that this other aspect is important. If you value what I'm talking about, then your self-awareness will kick in because you really basically know these essential basic parts about your own character.

Andrew Huberman:
I think people sometimes get distracted by admiration of qualities that they might find admirable, but that don't mesh with their own character. I've seen this many times before where-

Robert Greene:
Like example

Andrew Huberman:
... well, where someone will start listing off the positive attributes of the person that they happen to be dating. Like, "He does this, blank, and blank. She does this. He volunteers," et cetera. And that's all great. Volunteering for good causes, I'm all in support of that. But then what they're overlooking often, it seems, is whether or not that's a core value for them or whether or not it's just something that they admire.

Robert Greene:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
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 leads me to use the word, sort of a more about energetics. It's like merging of people's energies, which sounds very new agey, and-

Robert Greene:
Sorry

Andrew Huberman:
... that's not my intention. 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 contexts. Like, do we feel at ease? Do we feel a lightness and ability to express ourselves, and do we enjoy and admire them in their expression?

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
As opposed to just admiring what they do.

Robert Greene:
I see.

Andrew Huberman:
"They've accomplished blank, blank, and blank."

Robert Greene:
I see.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? "They manifest these qualities that I wish I had," right, you hear that, and aspire to have, which is very different than a meshing of energies.

Robert Greene:
Also, there are a couple other 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 in my own relationships in the past is that the 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 acted in a way that was very irritating, and it's like a different character, and I really kind of fell out of love with her when I saw her in social interactions. She revealed. So with me, she was almost wearing a mask and playing a game, but the moment she entered a different circumstance, I 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 and are playing along with you. The other thing that's very important is a sense of mystery. So a partner can become boring very quickly, right? After a year, you know every single thing about them, right? They're going to say the same things. Those conversations go around in circles. It's just you've reached an end. There's no surprises. There's no mystery. You want somebody where they have corners that you don't really see at first, that they surprise you sometimes. Suddenly, there's a quality that you hadn't 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, maybe I'm projecting my own values on the world, but people who kind of intrigue you, that you don't fully understand, that make you want to know more, and if they can be like that after two years or three years or five years, wow, 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 enchantment and leads to the end of the relationship.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, the idea of more to learn about somebody perhaps also suggests that they are continuing to evolve and to forage in-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the landscape of life.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That they're not fully baked.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? Which I think is an interesting idea. During the four-episode series that we did on mental health, Paul Conti, a psychiatrist, said that a matching of generative 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, "It matters less whether or not one person likes classical music and the other person rock and roll, provided that their relationship to music is similar or something of that sort." Like, that it's about a drive 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 they approach life is one of perhaps mutual curiosity, desire to find out, et cetera, and that this exists on a continuum. It seems to jive with what you're saying.

Robert Greene:
It does, but the only thing I would add is, if you love classical music and they love heavy metal music, you're going to be driven crazy pretty quickly. It's not going to mesh with you, and I know I would have that problem.

Andrew Huberman:
You'll both be in headphones a lot.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Robert Greene:
So the fact that you both have... Because music is like animals in a way. So I agree completely with what you're saying, but I would say maybe music isn't the best example, because music says something very deep about a person, right? I'm not saying one is superior to the other, but it reveals something that's non-verbal, that kind of gives you a window into who they are. So if they like punk rock, like you do, and I grew up on punk rock, there's a rebellious thing. There's an anti-authoritarian quality that's very strong. You get to see that through them. If they like Mozart and soft string quartets, there's somebody that kind of values softness and tranquility and peace, and you're not like that. So the music kind of shows you something, a quality about their character that can be very telling and be very eloquent. And so it doesn't mean that you both have to love The Clash or the Dead Kennedys or whatever, showing my own generation, but that you both have that rebellious streak, and that rebellious streak could be you like... There's classical music composers who could be pretty damn rebellious and angry, and I actually kind of like them. So that convergence, I think, is a positive one kind of thing. But in general, I agree with that.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm curious about the non-verbal communication component of all types of relationships, but let's stay in the landscape of romantic relationships for the moment.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe include professional relationships, too, because what you just described is really about a resonance around the non-verbal stuff. It can be articulated with words.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I love animals. I love this music. This is the best song. Did you see that? Otters are amazing, right? This kind of thing, but language is just an attempt to place words on a feeling in those instances. So it can be classified as non-verbal. With respect to non-verbal communication, you've written fairly extensively about the fact that people often communicate with their body and facial expressions. I'm certainly familiar with the somewhat, if not very eerie sensation of somebody smiling, like a toothy smile, and then as they pivot away, that smile just dissolving very quickly. And you don't have to be a neuroscientist or a psychologist to realize that there was 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 emotions. Most of us experience emotions with some pervasiveness. Like I was happy walking in the door because of something that happened before, and so I'm going to smile while I'm walking in the door.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
If I see something shocking and dismaying, of course I'm going to frown. I'm going to wipe away 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 some important things to pay attention to?

Robert Greene:
There was one thing that I want to go back on as far as convergence is sense of humor-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Robert Greene:
... is extremely important, right? So it's not like you both like the same comedians, but if one person likes raunchy humor and the other person doesn't, that's a problem. And also the fact that the person doesn't have a sense of humor or doesn't make you laugh is a very, very bad sign. So I wanted to add that one component in there.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm so glad you did. Someone who can make me laugh, necessary but not sufficient, but boy, it's approaching sufficient .

Robert Greene:
Yeah, I'd say so. When it 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 language of how you smell. It's a language that you communicate through the eyes, et cetera, et cetera. And the thing you have to understand about the human being is that we evolved for a much longer period of time without words than the small 40,000, 35,000 years that we have symbolic language. So during that vast period of darkness where we did not have words, we were communicating non-verbally. We were picking up signals from people. We were watching every little detail of their behavior because we didn't have words to decipher it. So it's wired into our brains to have an amazing sensitivity to people's non-verbal 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 mean something, that the words are sincere, which they're often not. At the same time that you're listening so much to words, 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 where it shouldn't tremble. Their eyes are dead. The smile is kind of fake. You're not watching any of it. So the most important thing in non-verbal 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, the words. We want to focus on them, right? But your ability to turn that television off, to mute it, will suddenly open up so many things about people. They reveal so much things. Sigmund Freud said people are continually oozing out all of their secrets through their non-verbal behavior. You can read them like an open book if you master this language. And I have "The Laws of Human Nature," I describe the story of Milton Erickson. I don't know if you're familiar with Milton Erickson. Perhaps the greatest modern master of non-verbal communication He was an amazing psychologist. He sort of is the inspiration behind N... What's it called? Help me out here. Neurolinguistic-

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, the-

Robert Greene:
NLP

Andrew Huberman:
... NLP.

Robert Greene:
It's kind of a bastardization of his ideas, but he created hypnotherapy. He's the person who created hypnotherapy.

Andrew Huberman:
Certainly, hypnotherapy is a valid psychiatric practice.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's excellent clinical data to support it.

Robert Greene:
Well, Milton Erickson had polio when he was 19, and he was paralyzed. His entire body was paralyzed. He couldn't even move his eyeballs. Right? And he sat in bed, and he had a very active mind, and he was going to just die from sheer boredom. And what he did during the two years of being paralyzed like that was just watching people's non-verbal communication and making notes in his brain and learning every single... He learned the 20 different forms of yes, the 100 different forms of no, right? Every intonation, how somebody entered the room, how they left the room, how they looked at him with the pity or empathy or something. He mastered it, and then when he became a psychiatrist and he treated people, they thought he was psychic. He could see everything into them. It's because for two years, that's all he could do was observe them. 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 once you do. It's a lot of fun, actually. And I tell people, "Go to a café one day in your city, wherever you live, and just watch people because you can't hear them. They're a few tables away. Watch their non-verbal behavior as they interact and see if you pick up cues from them." And there are things that are signs of genuine emotions. So for instance, an exercise you can do is you go up to somebody from an angle where they can't see you coming up to them, and you surprise them. You go, "Hey. Hey, Mike," whatever. They turn. For that second, their expression reveals how they really think about you. You'll detect if you can pick up microexpressions, and you can. They're only 1/150 of a second, but they're there. You express a kind of... And they smile. You can see the little disdain in their eyes, right? Then the mask comes on. Right? Or you're talking to them, they're looking at you, but their feet are facing in 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 could just master the ability to detect the fake smile, it will go wonders for you because you're able to see... What you really want to do is to see the person with a genuine smile, particularly in romantic relationships. Someone whose face lights up, a real smile lights your whole face up. It doesn't just light your mouth. These parts of your face go up. Your eyes get alive. There's a neural thing going on in your brain that's changing your whole facial expression, and it means that someone genuinely likes you. They're genuinely interested in you. They're genuinely laughing or connecting to you. Man, if you can see that, it'll help you so much in the romantic realm, and it'll help you get away from those toxic people that are continually faking interest in you. Because a narcissist, a toxic person, thrives by deceiving you with a charming, alluring front that makes you come into their world. Then they can hurt you. Then they can do something to you. Right? Then they have you 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 to you, I don't know if we were on air or not, but deep narcissists have dead eyes. They almost can't help it. They can fake the smile, they can fake everything else, but the eyes. You have to be able to read it because you say, "Well, what are dead eyes?" You'll know it when you see it. There's no life in them. They're looking through you. They're not looking at you. They're looking through you. What can I get out of you? You're what they call a self-object. They're an object for you to use, and that's how they're looking at you, like they would look at a hammer or something.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. The concept of dead eyes and also alive eyes is so fascinating because as audience of this podcast will know, because I've said it too much, but I'll say it again, that the eyes are the only two pieces of your brain that are outside the cranial vault. They're literally two pieces of brain lining the back of your eyes.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And the dynamics of the pupils, those changes, of course, reflect how bright or dim it is in the room, but they also reflect levels of arousal that-

Robert Greene:
Sure

Andrew Huberman:
... are on the millisecond timescale. So as one expresses words of glee, right? The pupils constrict a little bit, believe it or not. Or excuse me, dilate a little bit. I got it backwards there for a moment. And vice versa. As one feels less excited, moments of despair, expressions of despair, the pupils should get a little bit smaller because arousal is going down. And so I think, we pick up on these things at an unconscious level.

Robert Greene:
We do.

Andrew Huberman:
The deadness of the eyes is the conclusion that pops out at us if we're paying attention.

Robert Greene:
But the problem is, it registers unconsciously, but we don't give it any value to it.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Robert Greene:
We trust our words, we trust our rationality as opposed to our intuitions about people. Sometimes when you meet a person for the first time, signals go up in your brain, something's 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 first trust that these intuitions are very valuable. The other thing is, pay deep attention to the tone of voice. The voice, as actors will tell you, is the hardest thing to fake. Right? It's very hard to fake excitement. Your voice either has it or it doesn't. It's very hard to fake confidence. Books have been written about that. I'm not going to go into all the details about it. But a person will reveal so much of the emotions that they're experiencing, particularly levels of confidence, like a trembling voice or something, or a booming, confident voice, which some people can fake, but often it's very difficult, and you can still see through it. And on the level of seduction, men are very, very attuned to the voice of a woman, but we're not aware of it because the voice of our mother had an incredible impact on us in early childhood. Her singing, the tone of her voice, that was probably the first seduction that we ever went through. And a woman's voice has tremendous power over us. Right? And so hearing a voice that grades or irritates you is something that's a bad sign. That goes deeper than all the characteristics that we were talking about. But a woman's voice that reminds you of that mother, that singsongy, whatever feeling it was, that's somebody that can very easily seduce you.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, there's a place for naming this. It's like subcortical courtship.

Robert Greene:
Ah.

Andrew Huberman:
Below the cortex as a-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the geeky neuroscientist like myself say. You're getting down below the cortex with all of this stuff, convergence of real loves and desires. We express with words, we sense the world using, of course, our cortex, but we're really talking about getting into the subcortical stuff that is the stuff of our history, the stuff of our hardwiring, and our uniqueness. I couldn't help but think about the fact that earlier we were talking about the now infinitely vast number of choices of things to engage in, people to engage with, et cetera. But at the same time, as you were now talking about these microinflections and the subtleties of voice and bodily communication, that whether or not it's emojis or people sending filtered 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 qualitative differences between the inputs have been binned into a couple of simple bins. It's as if we've regressed to primary colors only. But the canvas is huge. I don't know if 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 glean the subtlety. But as long as it's emojis and filtered pictures taken at a particular angle, usually from above , ask for the picture head-on and below. Send me a picture of your worst expression. All of that. It seems that there's now increased opportunity for deception, and I don't just mean people misleading others. I also mean us misleading ourselves.

Robert Greene:
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Like, oh my goodness, how could I be so disappointed yet again about a particular landscape of life? It doesn't just have to be romantic interactions. It could be other landscapes like how could I be fooled? Well, you're fooled because the inputs were deficient. Not good data, as we say.

Robert Greene:
Well, the thing is, if 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 restaurant or go to a social event and have to literally encounter another person and deal with looking at their behavior and kind of assessing who they are. It's a muscle that you have to pay attention to nonverbal communication, and if you're just going through the emojis or going through the Tinder apps, that muscle completely atrophies. You have no power. You're not able to decipher anything, and that's what's happening with a lot of people who are using these apps. Social skills are like any skill at all. You have to develop them. It's a muscle you have to develop. And you've all noticed this probably in your own life. If you've gone through a period where you're kind of retreating, you don't want to be around people, and you spend a month like that, and then you go out, you feel awkward. It takes you a couple of days to get used to being around other people. You say stupid things. Your body language is awkward. But if you're in a situation for months where you're constantly interacting with people, you're on a film set and day in, day out, that skill starts developing. But you have to be out there in the world. You have to be interacting. You have to be looking at people's emotions. You have to be gauging them in real time. We're not built for virtual encounters. We're 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 nuances that you can only get in person.

Andrew Huberman:
Along those lines, what are your thoughts about AI and how that's going to shape our sense of self, sense of others, and relationships, as if that's a topic that could be covered in a A series of minutes. But what are your top contour, maybe even deeper thoughts about AI?

Robert Greene:
Well, I'm going to piss a lot of people off, but I'm very concerned about it. I mentioned before about anxiety, the role that anxiety plays in thinking. You come upon an idea, and you go, "Yeah, that's good." Then you go to the next level, and it becomes better, and you go, "Oh, 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 ability to look at yourself and go, "I have biases. I have confirmation bias. I have conviction bias. I have recency bias. I have to counteract these things. I also have a dark side. I have aggression. I have to be aware of how they color my thinking, my emotions." The third quality that goes into... I'm talking about now intelligence, not artificial. Intelligence is the ability to deal with anxiety and go to a third level. Intelligence is the ability to look inside 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, an image comes to your mind of, "Yeah, there's the answer." You see the whole thing. You see the whole gestalt, right? Simone Weil compared it to a square cube. You can only see a cube from one side. You can never see a square cube. You can only see a side of it. If it's rotating, you're still only seeing sides of it. Only in your mind can you picture the whole thing. So the mind has to go through a process to have holistic thinking. 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 self-aware, that can go, "The people who program me have biases, therefore, I have biases. I also have a dark side because people who program me have a dark side." If this machine can also think holistically beyond all of the data points and all the massive information it's combining, it can have that aha 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 Berkeley, going way back, I was 19 years old, I decided one summer, this is a big paradigm shift for me, I'm going to take this class in ancient Greek. In six weeks, they teach you a year of ancient Greek. That means 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'd been doing too many drugs, to be honest with you. Okay. And so finally, at one point, they give us this paragraph of the hardest ancient Greek writer of all to read. This was near the end. Thucydides, or Thucydides, as they say. So I had the whole night to try and translate one paragraph. I couldn't figure it out. You have to understand the weirdness of ancient Greek, all the endings, the weird ways of thinking. The whole picture, that aha moment was eluding me. At one point, I thought I got it, and I translated it, and I gave it to the teacher the next day. I remember he was this kind of hippie that you'd have at Berkeley, Dennis, Classics professor, but also a hippie.

Andrew Huberman:
The fact that you knew his first name is very telling as well.

Robert Greene:
I can only remember his first name, Dennis. He said, "Robert, I can see you're thinking, but you need to go to another level. You didn't have that aha 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. Whenever I have a problem, I have to think harder. I have to go to that next level. Now, what would happen if I had pulled out my translation of Thucydides and just copied that out? Right? Or what would have happened if I put it through ChatGPT and it gave me the translation? That muscle in my brain that I have developed for 40 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 have that engine whirring around, right? But if I just grab for ChatGPT, it's deadened, and then we're going to have a whole generation of people who stop thinking, who don't go through that process. You've heard of Douglas Hofstadter, I think. He said people train to go to Mount Everest. It takes months, physical exertion. It's painful. Then they climb Mount Everest, and they see the top. Whoa, what a great moment. He said ChatGPT would be the equivalent of taking a helicopter to the top of Mount Everest without any of that training and having the same moment. It's not the same, right? You need to go through that process. You need to go through that pain. And the thing of this ChatGPT, 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 whoa. It's like magic. It's like a magician. But it's empty. It's like not your brain functioning, right? It's the pagan part of us. We like that kind of magic as opposed to actually having to go through the thought process itself. So I'm not against having tools. I use tools. I use the internet. I use Google. I'm searching for some factoid for my book. I find it. I use it. 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 people who can't learn a foreign language, who can't master anything, who just immediately grab the first answer that it generates, et cetera. I have concerns.

Andrew Huberman:
I am too, and I was thinking a moment ago that some people might hear what you just said and say, "Oh, well, the same thing was probably said about the automobile." 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 a key difference And this certainly aligns 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 exerts some effort and experiences some anxiety to get there. So it's not the same as automobile versus horse versus walking versus-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... airplane.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's fundamentally different because the journey transforms the outcome.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I'm in agreement with you about many aspects of AI. I'm also excited about it in the context of certain things.

Robert Greene:
I agree with you. It could be a tool, but are we operating the tool or is the tool operating us, is what I'm talking about.

Andrew Huberman:
I am concerned a bit too, especially in the context of what we've been talking about for most of today's discussion about avatars replacing our online personas too much. The avatarization of ourselves is already taking place through filters, through a reduction of emotional expression to emojis, through reduction of language to a diminished number of words to explain one's feelings. A prior guest on this podcast, Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's an expert in emotions, talked about how the moment that a culture has a word for a particular subset of anxious feelings. So for instance, she taught me that in Japanese there's a word for the sadness one experiences when they get a bad haircut.

Robert Greene:
Yeah, I know.

Andrew Huberman:
And so that normalizes the feeling and leads to feelings of less despair-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... as opposed to what now many kids especially grew up learning, which I'm anxious, I'm sad, I'm depressed.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That in science, we say there are lumpers and there are splitters, and they've been arguing for years about like, is that one brain structure? Well, if 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, so to speak, but when you have too many lumpers or too many splitters, things are either overly simple or overly complex that of course the right answer, the best use of naming things arrives someplace in the middle.

Robert Greene:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
That's how a field progresses because if you lump things together too much, a field can't progress. You give yourself the illusion that it's progressing, but it's not progressing. But if you split things up into a million different subcategories, like just even the word adrenaline is also called epinephrine, and it has to do with basically people arguing over who got credit. Crazy, and it's confused people for-

Robert Greene:
Really?

Andrew Huberman:
... for decades. Yeah. And 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 sleeping with other people's partners and love triangles have created more drama of nomenclature in science. I could do a whole-

Robert Greene:
Wow

Andrew Huberman:
... hour on this. In any case, what I'm hearing from you is that we cannot afford to lose our sense of nuance, and also because that sense of nuance taps into what we're really experiencing.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And AI threatens that, that we can become avatars of ourself.

Robert Greene:
Well, look at it this way. We worship technology. It's our new religion, okay? And we worship ChatGPT as if it's a god. Seriously, there's religious elements going on here. What 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 synapses, the number of possible connections between neurons is infinite, practically infinite. It is a wondrous instrument. It is so powerful. We've rarely scratched the surface of what we can use for it. Let us worship that brain that's in your head. You only have so many years to use it. You have only so many years to develop it. It is so wonderful and powerful. It can bring you such pleasure, so much power in life. So tools are fine. We all need tools. We all need hammers. We need nails. We need saws, et cetera. But the real thing is the hand that uses it, the brain that connects the hand to the hammer, that knows how to hit things. I think of the great painter Renoir in the 19th century. He had a stroke or something. In the last years, he couldn't move his right arm, which he painted with. And it was disastrous. So what he did is he put the brush in his mouth, and he painted, and he painted some beautiful paintings that way because his brain had mastered the art of painting, not his hand, but his brain had mastered it so well that he could actually paint well with the brush in his mouth because he could direct it, and he had the knowledge of how to make something perfect. The brain is absolutely incredible. The plasticity of the brain, which I'm discovering after my stroke, is absolutely a miracle. I don't know, is it Professor Schwartz at UCLA who was studying OCD and how he was able to kind of cure people of OCD through certain plasticity exercises that he had, making them aware of their kind of brain lock, et cetera, and getting them out of it? That plasticity of the brain is by far the greatest miracle of all, and it goes on into your 60s and 70s and 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 enamored and worshiping the technology. We would worship the brains that create the technology instead of the other way around.

Andrew Huberman:
I certainly got a fan of brains and their potential for plasticity sitting over here.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I have the benefit of having my scientific great-grandparents are Hubel and Wiesel, who won the Nobel Prize for neuroplasticity during the critical period.

Robert Greene:
Say that again?

Andrew Huberman:
So my scientific great-grandparents are David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. David's dead. Torsten's still alive. He's 96. And they won the Nobel Prize for essentially discovering the critical window early in development where plasticity is especially robust.

Robert Greene:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
They did other things, too. They should've 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.

Robert Greene:
Completely.

Andrew Huberman:
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'd really like to talk about for a few minutes, if you're willing. As you mentioned, you experienced a stroke. And perhaps it was aware to some, but perhaps not to all, especially the people just listening to this podcast and who are not watching on video, that your shirt, while very nicely designed in its original state, also includes some unique stitching. So maybe you could share with us. And for those listening, there's a jagged line of stitching that extends from Robert's left short sleeve to his midline, to where the buttons on his shirt are, and from his right short sleeve also to the midline, offset from one another. This is the sort of stitching that looks like perhaps I had been at the sewing machine, and not somebody with 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 neuroplasticity.

Robert Greene:
It could also seem like a fashion statement, but really, it isn't. Well, it was May of 2018. It was my birthday, and my wife gave me this shirt. I have a love of plaids. It's like, I don't know why. I just love patterns, and plaids, it must be some Scotch part of me, some ancestor thing, but I love plaids.

Andrew Huberman:
Can I interrupt you just briefly? Forgive me. Everyone's going to get upset that I interrupted. Do you know that there is a fundamental circuit in your visual cortex designed to detect plaid patterns?

Robert Greene:
No, I did not know that.

Andrew Huberman:
Yes, and we can talk about why that is. It's tightly linked to your ability to perceive motion.

Robert Greene:
Really?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, and we can go over it some other time.

Robert Greene:
Wow.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. So we'll talk about it.

Robert Greene:
Who knew?

Andrew Huberman:
Just as a cue. So okay, yes, back to your birthday.

Robert Greene:
Okay. So she gave me a plaid shirt, knowing how much I loved it, and I loved this shirt. I loved the colors in it, et cetera. And then two months, three months later, August 17, 2018, I was driving my car. She was with me. I was pulling out into traffic. I started driving, and suddenly she said, "Pull over, Robert. Pull over." I go, "Why? I can drive. I'm fine." And then suddenly everything started getting really strange. Everything looked strange. My voice didn't sound the same, and she was freaking out, but she was actually fairly calm, which was amazing. I was undergoing a stroke. I had a blood clot that was blocking the blood flow to my brain. I actually, at one point, got out of the car. I don't know what the hell I was thinking, and then she pulled me back in, and then the rest goes blank. 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. Either that or you can get severe brain damage. So she called 911 right away. She recognized something. My whole face was looking funny, and they got there. I was unconscious, and essentially, they took this shirt, and they just scissored the thing in half and took it off my head, and then they intubated me, I believe, in my hip area to get something. The blood clot was in my neck, and they were able to free it up, and they rushed me to the hospital. And I'm unconscious, and then I wake up, and I'm in a gurney in the hospital. And for a moment, I'm thinking maybe I'm dead, because I'm lying in a gurney, and I almost 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 tell people we're so curious about death. We think about death a lot and is it final? What does it 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 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 happen to the brain, right? So particularly with a stroke or something like that, where blood stops flowing to your-- oxygen stops flowing to your brain, you have kind of visions and things that you might think are hallucinations, but that later seem like actually you are actually glimpsing the reality as opposed to the illusion that the brain creates. So I've written about this in my new book, but my idea of the brain is that it creates endless series of illusions for you. It creates this seamless version of reality, the sense of a self, the sense of a continuous self through time, right? It creates a linear sense of time progressions. It creates colors. It creates a world that visually seems familiar, and et cetera. 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 a way that you can understand it. Well, when you're 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. And the image that came to my mind, because it 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 it up, and it was all wavy, and you couldn't see what exactly it was. To me, that was the image I had of the self. There are, like, 50 different selves inside of you That 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 an illusion 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 is something very weird. So I had an experience of when I got out of the car and I got pulled in, I thought 10 seconds had passed. My wife told me, "No, that was like 10 minutes." I had no sense of time. Everything was scrambled. And so it was very, very eloquent. It taught me so much, things that 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't communicate with my hand, my fingers. My brain can't communicate with my leg. Right? So you think that walking and writing and handling things is just 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, et cetera, not to mention how you look at life itself after something like that. So it was a terrible experience. It's ruined so many things that I loved in life, but it's given me an awful 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.

Andrew Huberman:
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 sort of behind the circuit board that is your brain, observing how you normally function, and you could see multiple versions of self? Or was it something else, were you sort of outside of your body and brain?

Robert Greene:
I think it was more outside of my body and brain. I also had this other thing that happened where... Sometimes your memory might be playing tricks on you. So I also have to realize that maybe I'm not remembering exactly what happened, or that I've since translated it in a different way. So that's a caveat here, and I'm aware of it. But I had this vision that I was dead 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 it was over my grave, I suppose. And I had this feeling, ah, everything's okay. I'm gone, but life goes on. They're doing fine. It's okay. Right? So I don't know about that sense of self, whether it was like I'm aware of it happening, but I 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 when I was having the stroke was life draining 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 dissolving, et cetera. It was a feeling of all your energy draining out of you, and you're dying, literally. So, reading books about near-death experiences, because that's a big part of my next book, God, it's fascinating. There's so many interesting things to go in because it teaches us so much.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I'm so glad that, A, you survived your stroke, B, that your mental faculties-

Robert Greene:
You're not more grateful than I am, I can tell you .

Andrew Huberman:
Probably not, but still very grateful. So there. It just illustrates how grateful you must be. B, that you've maintained, if not grown, your mental faculties. You seem extremely sharp. I promise you, you're not missing a beat. One always wonders, right? Actually, one of the most common fears people have is that somehow they're losing their mind or their memory, and they aren't aware of it. I have family members who have asked that if they ever start to exhibit signs of severe dementia, that I put an end to them. Which I won't. That's not my place in this world. But I think it's a common fear among people. But you're still extremely sharp, and thank goodness for it. And you mentioned that while you've lost certain abilities, that new appreciation and new abilities have surfaced. Could you perhaps share what some of those are and what they mean to you? Because I think that when one hears about somebody having a stroke, we tend to focus on what's lacking, but clearly this has been a transformative experience also in positive ways.

Robert Greene:
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 they're taken away, and I'm kind of ungrateful for being alive, and here I'm pissed off that it takes me 10 minutes to tie my shoes and I can't really button my shirt. I had to learn what really matters and to have patience and stuff. The other thing was, I used to love hiking and was very physically active, and I'm sitting at my window in my office, and I see people running up and down, bicycling, walking their dogs. God, I'm so envious. 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 this is going to sound really triacly and sentimental, but I see ... butterflies or things in my garden, I'm like, "Wow, that's incredible." Things like that, that I couldn't appreciate before because I'm sedentary and I can't move. I have to suddenly pay attention to what's around me, not take it for granted, and suck all of the pleasure out of it that I can. So now, when I sit at my desk to write my new book, it's four hours because that's all I can stand, maybe three sometimes. Those four hours are such bliss for me. I truly appreciate it now because I know that my brain was almost gone. So it means so much for me. And to just be alive is just a wondrous experience. I have a chapter in my new book called "Awaken to the Strangeness 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 bottlenecks in evolution that we had to pass through, including the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the emergence of mammals, but there are 20 other huge bottlenecks throughout the history of evolution. We had to pass through all of those. We nearly went extinct 80,000 years ago from some virus that infected, there were only 8,000 people, humans on the planet. All these different things, and here we are with Zoom meetings, et cetera. It's like the strangest story you can ever... It's beyond science fiction. But nobody thinks about it. 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 unlikeliness of you ever being born is astronomical. Unless my science is all wrong. 70,000 generations of people meeting, et cetera, finally ending at your DNA. Unless I'm missing something, 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. I have to entertain my brain the way Milton Erickson had to entertain himself by observing people. So it's taken a lot away from me. I can't swim. I'm riding my recumbent bike, which I love, and 80-year-old grandmothers are zipping by me, and I'm like, "God damn it. How awful." I'm so envious. My insecurities all well up. But then I realize, hey, I'm on a boat. I'm sailing. It's wonderful. I'm outside. I have to go through these processes, but I think it's developed me in some way that's, in the end, very positive.

Andrew Huberman:
It sounds like you've had to adjust to a new frame rate on life.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
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 certainly missed in your prior version of self. Is that a fair-

Robert Greene:
Yeah. But also, I tell people this, I totally took my life for granted. I was swimming all this time. It was fantastic. I was bicycling, I was traveling, but I never sat back and thought, "Wow, this is wonderful, how grateful it could be taken away from me." I tell people, "Don't do that to yourself." I try and teach them. It can be taken away from you tomorrow. When you're out walking the dog, think of me that can't walk a dog, and appreciate those things which I didn't appreciate. So I try and help people in that way when I can.

Andrew Huberman:
I think a critical message is also to inspire a sense of urgency in people.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I think people hear a sense of urgency, and they go, "Oh, God, I'm already under so much pressure. Life's so hard." But we're not talking about a sense of urgency to take on more of what life has to offer. I think we're talking about a sense of urgency to find one's purpose, which takes work, and is an ongoing process. But to really get out of modes of apathy, laziness, languishing, and to start, as you've described it, paying deeper attention. 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 rut? You start paying deeper attention to the things around you and inside you.

Robert Greene:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And perhaps not coincidentally, you referred to that as, quote, "death ground."

Robert Greene:
Yeah. So it's a strategy from my book. I wrote a book on strategy, my version of "The Art of War." It's called "33 Strategies of War," but it's really about strategy, strategic thinking. It's inspired from Sun Tzu, the great Chinese strategist, but it has vast philosophical implications. The idea is you can almost think of it like barometric pressure. When necessity is pressing in on you, like your back is against the wall, like you have to get something done, and there's this pressure around you, you find energy in there that you never believed before. William James talks about this when he talks about getting a second wind, which explains it very eloquently. When you feel like your life's in danger, suddenly you can leap over things that you never could leap over before. So Sun Tzu 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 a back to the mountain, and it's either win or die, they're going to fight 10 times harder. You're going to 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 barometric 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 23. I've got all these years ahead of me. I'm going to figure it out, right? I'm not going to die. I got 50, 70, 80 years ahead of me. No, you don't. That pressure now is gone, and you're wasting time. You're doing all sorts of things that aren't leading to any kind of skill. You're not learning or anything. You need to put yourself on death ground. You need to feel that barometric pressure, which is the actual reality. The actual reality is you could die tomorrow. You could have a stroke tomorrow. You could be fired tomorrow. Everything could fall apart. You need to have that sense of urgency now because that's the reality. You're fooling yourself by thinking you have all of this time. And so when you feel that pressure, suddenly you can move mountains. You have energy, you just have focus, et cetera. Neurologically, everything clicks in. And people who've had that experience where they've felt like 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 hope I'm not boring you with all this-

Andrew Huberman:
No. Please

Robert Greene:
... about a-

Andrew Huberman:
Quite the opposite

Robert Greene:
... about a mountain climber who was climbing this mountain by himself, and he was having a great time, but there was a storm coming and he had to get down, and he suddenly fell, and he cut his leg open massively, and there was a branch sticking in it. And he broke all these bones and he was going to die. He was on a ledge. He could see that it was getting dark and storm clouds were massing. This was in the Rocky Mountains. He was alone, and suddenly he managed to get up on his two feet, and he can't explain how, but all of this energy, all this adrenaline started flowing in him, and he said he was like a mountain goat. He was going down the ledge. He jumped. He was able to kind of get down to another ledge. He got out of it. And for the next 20 years, he was haunted by, "How did that happen? I want that feeling again because it was actually the most ecstatic feeling. I had energy that I never suspected in myself." And so he tries everything to get that feeling back. He tries climbing other mountains. He tries going to Mount Everest. He tries it, and it doesn't come back. And finally, he kind of figures out the formula for it and why it happened. He studies a lot of neuroscience. It's a great book. I'm using it in my new book. It's called "Bone Games." It's a 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 or it's the end." And suddenly, adrenaline, dopamine, all the other things were occurring in him, and he found that energy. So, that's the ultimate kind of death ground right there.

Andrew Huberman:
The human will to live is truly incredible. And so now I have to say, as I said before, I'm so grateful that your stroke didn't take you out because clearly there's still so much in there-

Robert Greene:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and you're continuing to share what is really exquisitely useful knowledge.

Robert Greene:
Oh, thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
It's 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 through your books. It's clear you've been on a foraging exploration and that foraging for organizing and communicating information, mainly in the form of written books, but also online content. You have a terrific YouTube channel, which I've subscribed to and follow-

Robert Greene:
Oh, good

Andrew Huberman:
... and listen to with rapt attention. And the other venues with which you share information, including this one today, are really, truly valuable and appreciated. So I want to say on behalf of myself and for those that have known you and your work for a number of years, but also for the many people that are now sure to know who you are and what you're about, that it's just so clear that this stuff comes from the heart, and that whatever early seed planted this- ... that we're all grateful for and better off as a consequence of that seed. So, I could make this list very, very long with the number of specific ways in which you've improved the journey through life and made it clearer. Life certainly can be hard, but it also can be really confusing, and I feel that the Robert Greene roadmap, even though it's but one roadmap, is an extremely valuable map to have and to use. Certainly has been for me. So, just an enormous thank you, Robert. Thanks for sharing today, and thanks for all you do and all that you're still doing and sure to do in the future.

Robert Greene:
Oh, thank you. I wish I could find the word for explaining the kind of weird emotions that I'm feeling when I hear that. There isn't... Maybe Yiddish, maybe verklempt or something, I don't know, but thank you, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, we'll have to have you back here again when your next book comes out. Can't wait, but we will wait.

Robert Greene:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
All right.

Robert Greene:
Yeah. Hopefully, I'm still around.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm confident you will be.

Robert Greene:
Okay. Okay, good.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you. Come back again.

Robert Greene:
Thank you, Andrew. Thanks very much. I hope I will.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Robert Greene. I hope you found the conversation to be as stimulating as I did. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe 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 or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd 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 on many previous episodes of the Huberman Lab 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 support, and for focus. To see the supplements discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to Live Momentous, spelled O-U-S, so that's livemomentous.com/huberman. If you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps 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 hubermanlab on all social media platforms. If you haven't already subscribed to our monthly Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as toolkits. The toolkits are brief PDFs that you can download that give you tools for things like neuroplasticity and learning, for managing dopamine, for enhancing sleep, for physical performance, flexibility, deliberate cold exposure, and on and on. To join the Neural Network Newsletter, you simply go to hubermanlab.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 Greene. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.