A two-hour conversation about a stroke, a funeral seen from above, and why the reality you experience is a filtered construction.
Posted
1 weeks ago
Duration
Format
Interview
sincere
Views
329.1K
3.7K likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Your brain filters reality into a manageable fake world, and the rare experiences that break the filter, near-death, involuntary memory, deep focus, real love, are the only ones that make life feel intense again.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You have read a Robert Greene book and want the ideas behind the last one he expects to write, including why he thinks it exists at all.
You feel scattered by the feed and want a concrete account of what constant switching does to attention, from someone who admits it happened to him.
You are working through a serious illness or disability and want a first-person account of losing physical ability and finding a way back to the work.
You are interested in near-death research and want the strongest documented case laid out with its skeptical counterarguments.
You want the power-dynamics read on why very intelligent, very rich people repeatedly destroy themselves.
SKIP IF…
You want tactics from The 48 Laws of Power. This conversation is about mortality and perception, and the power material is a small late section.
You need empirical certainty. Large parts of this are speculation the guest openly labels as speculation.
You dislike near-death and consciousness material. Roughly a third of the runtime sits there.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
The brain does not show you the world, it builds one. Language, ego and visual processing compress reality into something small enough to survive, and that compressed version is what most people mistake for life. Greene argues that near-death experience, early childhood, hallucinogens and deep sustained focus all thin the filter, which is why they feel more real than ordinary days. His practical claim is that experience has to be physical and unmediated to do the work: therapy talks you further into yourself, a mountain takes you out of yourself, and a feed engineered around your emotions destroys the sustained focus that built the human brain in the first place.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Trailer cut of the biggest lines, then the first real question: what the most powerful people are actually afraid of. The answer is oblivion, and Greene uses his own post-television hotel-room crashes as the small version of it.
03:10 – 07:20
02 · Writing the last book by hand
Why The Law of the Sublime took seven years. The stroke took typing away, so the whole manuscript was written and re-copied longhand, which added roughly two years and changed how the finished book reads.
07:20 – 11:30
03 · Why 2026 feels insane
The Sufi parable of the contaminated well, one in six Americans on antidepressants, and the argument that a species aware of its own mortality needs permanence it can no longer get.
11:30 – 20:45
04 · The wasp sting, the stroke, the funeral
The full sequence: the sting, the clot, waking alone on a gurney with the sensation of bones dissolving, and the image of watching his own funeral from above. Then the strange first week of laughing in the hospital, and the depression that arrived later.
20:45 – 21:55
05 · Ad break
Host-read sponsor spot for a caffeine-free focus pouch, shot separately.
21:55 – 30:50
06 · Dying as waking up, and how the ego is built
The core mechanism. Brains construct the visual world and language constructs the rest, so dying is the filter shutting down. Then the reverse process traced through infancy: fusion, then observation, then words, then the word I.
30:50 – 40:35
07 · The woman who heard Hotel California while clinically dead
The Pamela Reynolds case told in full, including why the surgery required stopping her body entirely, what she reported afterward, and the skeptical rebuttals that have failed to explain it.
40:35 – 48:10
08 · What he actually thinks happens when we die
An agnostic answer he has avoided giving in past interviews. Nobody has returned to report an afterlife, but death is framed as a return to a state that preceded birth. Then deja vu and the uncanny as a two-second crack in linear time.
48:10 – 56:55
09 · Not a simulation, a filter
He rejects the literal simulation hypothesis and replaces it with Huxley's filter model: the brain narrows sensory input to keep you functional. Hallucinogens, near-death and the book's exercises all widen the aperture. Then involuntary memory and Proust's madeleine.
56:55 – 1:01:40
10 · What your pet's eyes teach you
A practical exercise in escaping your own construction: cats built around motion, dogs built around scent, a lick on the face as inherited wolf behavior. The animals in your house are the aliens people go to the movies to see.
1:01:40 – 1:02:50
11 · Ad break
Host-read legal sponsor spot about social media harm claims.
1:02:50 – 1:12:20
12 · Brain rot, and why the feed works on emotion
He describes the damage in himself first, then the mechanism: the feed targets emotion rather than thought, with loneliness as the strongest lever, and it short-circuits the sustained focus that built the human brain.
1:12:20 – 1:19:40
13 · Therapy that takes you out of yourself
The James Hillman position that psychotherapy can make people sicker, and the chapter-one story of a rich man whose emptiness lifted only when his therapist took him up a 19,000-foot mountain instead of talking.
1:19:40 – 1:28:50
14 · Falling all the way, and AI girlfriends
Love as dissolving boundaries, and why economic insecurity makes people stop falling partway down. Then his reaction to one in three young men talking to romantic chatbots: an engineered validation machine that cannot prepare anyone for a real body.
1:28:50 – 1:37:00
15 · Technology as the actual religion
What frightens him about AI is not the doomsday scenario but the erosion of what being human means. Belief that engineering will solve death and disease is a faith position, and he contrasts the awe he gets from nature with the mild awe he gets from a good answer about his car.
1:37:00 – 1:48:25
16 · Grandiosity, Epstein, and consequences
The altitude model of grandiosity, why high IQ offers no protection, and the two 48 Laws readings of Epstein: appeal to self-interest as the source of his power, and Law 47 as the law he violated.
1:48:25 – 1:53:10
17 · Why billionaires chase immortality
The longevity obsession as a mark of distinction rather than a plan. His 99-year-old mother is the counterexample: outlive everyone and you inherit the loneliness. Impermanence is what makes anything worth loving.
1:53:10 – 2:01:50
18 · The daemon and the meaning of the stroke
The host's own unexplained paralysis, then Greene walking through the eerie sequence of the stroke: forgotten medication, an unlikely sting, a partner in the passenger seat, damage on the side that spared his language. Then the ancient Greek daemon that kept him writing through years of failure.
2:01:50 – 2:12:10
19 · The mysteries, and a walkthrough of your own death
Why Plato, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius went through initiations engineered to simulate dying, and then the guest performing the book's final exercise out loud: lie down, sink, separate, look at your own body, walk outside as a ghost, come home alive.
2:12:10 – 2:20:29
20 · Awaken to the strangeness of being alive
His daily meditation ends with one more granted day. He does not fear death, only dependence. Asked for a last message he lands on strangeness: bones that heal, a sky nothing else may have, a life that only reads as ordinary because you stopped looking. The gravestone quote is The rest is silence.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
The most powerful people fear oblivion more than death, because being forgotten is the first rehearsal of dying.
Greene hand-wrote an entire book after a stroke took his ability to type, and it added roughly two years to a seven-year project.
Forced slowness changed the writing itself, because every sentence had to be copied by hand into a second notebook to be edited.
One in six Americans is on antidepressants, and the guest reads that as a symptom of a world where nothing stays the same long enough to feel stable.
Humans are the only animal that knows it will die, which is why we crave permanence even when the permanence is an illusion.
Language is what separates you from the world: you stop seeing a tree and start seeing the word tree.
Your earliest years are unrecorded because memory needs words, and before words there is only direct experience.
The ego is learned. You start at fusion with the world and spend childhood climbing further into the word I.
Pamela Reynolds reported the surgical instruments, the song playing in the room and the two resuscitation attempts while her brain showed no activity at all.
Most near-death experiences are overwhelmingly positive, with roughly ten to fifteen percent reporting a hellish version.
Nobody has ever come back from death to report an afterlife, which is why the honest position on it is not knowing.
Before you were born you were already in the state you will return to, so dying is a return rather than an ending.
Deja vu is the uncanny: something familiar and unfamiliar at once, gone before you can hold it.
We are not in a simulation, we are inside a filter, because letting in all available sensory data would make you unable to function.
Involuntary memory lives in smells, tastes and physical sensation, not in thoughts, which is why you cannot summon childhood by trying to remember it.
Look into a cat's eyes and you are looking at a consciousness that predates human beings by millions of years.
A dog licking your face is wolf behavior, a pup asking its mother to bring up food.
The feed works on emotion, not thought, and its most effective lever is loneliness.
Focus, not intelligence, is the human superpower, developed by ancestors tracking game for hours and days at a time.
Constant switching short-circuits the same mechanism that lets a person write a book or design a building that stands up.
Talking therapy can deepen self-absorption, because every session enmeshes you further in your own words about yourself.
The strongest cure in the story Greene tells was not more talking but a physical climb dangerous enough to take a man out of himself entirely.
People will not fall all the way in love because falling far enough makes the eventual loss unbearable, so they restart at the safe part instead.
An AI partner is engineered to validate you, which is exactly what makes it addictive and exactly why it cannot prepare you for a real person.
The real worship in modern life is technology itself, believed without evidence to be able to solve death, disease and war.
Grandiosity is measured in altitude: most people live about eight feet off the ground, and success can lift someone thousands of miles above consequence.
Epstein's power was being a master middleman who knew what each person wanted and could supply it.
The law Epstein broke was Law 47, in victory know when to stop, because success makes you less cautious exactly when caution matters most.
Chasing immortality ignores the arithmetic: outlive everyone you love and you have bought decades of being alone.
What matters is not living forever but living well, with energy, senses and a working brain.
Impermanence is what makes anything valuable. Cherry blossoms blooming year-round would draw no crowds.
The daemon is the ancient Greek idea of an inborn direction, a voice that keeps you going through years of no success.
Thinking about death and feeling death are different events, and only the second one changes you.
Ancient initiations were engineered to simulate dying, from hoods and darkness to drugged drinks, so the initiate could be reborn.
The last chapter of the book is a lie-down exercise designed to walk a reader through their own death and back out into the street.
The most reliable trick for making an ordinary day feel charged is to look at it as if you have an hour left.
Being alive is genuinely strange, and treating it as normal is the habit that flattens everything.
Takeaway
What breaks the filter is physical, not verbal
WHAT TO LEARN
Every experience in this conversation that made someone feel alive again was concrete and unmediated, and every one that deadened them ran through words, screens or self-analysis.
01Cold open and what power fears
The fear at the top is not death but being forgotten, which is why attention behaves like a drug and its withdrawal feels like a small rehearsal of dying.
Losing the limelight produced real depression in someone who only touched it briefly, so treat the crash after visibility as predictable rather than as a personal failure.
02Writing the last book by hand
Constraint can improve output. Losing the ability to type forced every sentence to be copied by hand, which slowed the work, added two years, and changed the finished book.
Difficulty is information about capacity. Finishing something under conditions that should have stopped you is what teaches you what you can actually do.
03Why 2026 feels insane
A species that knows it will die needs permanence, so an environment where nothing lasts more than a few months is genuinely destabilizing rather than just annoying.
The Sufi parable of the contaminated well explains why people knowingly adopt the madness around them: being the only sane person is lonelier than being wrong with everyone else.
04The wasp sting, the stroke, the funeral
Near-death is physical, not conceptual. Most people report peace rather than terror, and the emotional aftermath arrives weeks later when the losses become concrete.
The first response to survival was exhilaration so strong the nurses suspected brain damage, which suggests the fear of dying is largely an idea rather than a sensation.
06Dying as waking up, and how the ego is built
The brain builds the world it shows you: vision is constructed, and language finishes the job by replacing the thing with the word for it.
The ego is learned, not native. Infants start fused with the world, then acquire the word I and spend decades climbing further into it.
07The woman who heard Hotel California while clinically dead
The Pamela Reynolds case is worth knowing because it is the hardest one to explain away: no brain activity, taped eyes, blocked ears, and accurate reports of instruments, a song and two resuscitation attempts.
Hold the uncertainty honestly. Even the surgeon involved could not explain it, and the correct conclusion is an open question rather than a belief.
08What he actually thinks happens when we die
Nobody has returned to report an afterlife, so treating not knowing as the final answer is more defensible than either faith or flat denial.
Death can be framed as a return: you did not exist before birth, so dying returns you to a state you have already been in.
09Not a simulation, a filter
You are not in a simulation, you are behind a filter. The brain narrows sensory input because unfiltered reality would be unusable, and everything that thins that filter feels more real.
Involuntary memory is stored in sensation, not thought. You cannot summon childhood by trying to remember it, but a smell or a taste can deliver the original feeling intact.
10What your pet's eyes teach you
Your pets are the cheapest available exit from your own construction: a cat organized entirely around motion, a dog organized entirely around scent, both older than human consciousness.
Anthropomorphizing an animal wastes the encounter. The value is in the reality that is not yours, not in the version of yourself you project onto it.
12Brain rot, and why the feed works on emotion
The feed works on emotion rather than thought, which is why knowing it is engineered does not make you immune to it.
Loneliness is the strongest lever the platforms pull, so the pull gets worse exactly when you are most isolated.
Focus is the human capability that built everything else, developed by ancestors tracking game for hours, and constant switching attacks that specific mechanism.
Two minutes spent on a feed and two minutes spent on one problem are not the same two minutes, and the difference compounds.
13Therapy that takes you out of yourself
Talking about yourself can deepen the problem it is meant to solve, because every session enmeshes you further in your own language about your own history.
The alternative that worked in the story was scale: a climb dangerous and physical enough that self-absorption had nowhere to sit.
14Falling all the way, and AI girlfriends
People stop falling in love partway down because the loss scales with the depth, so they restart at the safe part instead of going further.
A partner that never disagrees is not practice for a relationship, it is an obstacle to one, because real intimacy requires tolerating friction.
15Technology as the actual religion
The real modern religion is technology, believed without evidence to be able to solve death, disease and war, and belief without evidence is the definition of faith.
The concrete AI risk in this conversation is not extinction but erosion: a generation that will not read, will not write, will not build slowly and will not stay in a relationship.
16Grandiosity, Epstein, and consequences
Grandiosity is measurable as distance from the ground of who you actually are, and success is what lifts you until consequences stop registering.
High intelligence offers no protection. The people who destroyed themselves in these scandals had elite IQs, and that is not what failed.
Influence can be built purely on supply: know precisely what each person wants and be the one who provides it, and you own them without any other leverage.
Law 47 is the useful one to remember: a run of success makes you less cautious at exactly the moment caution matters most.
17Why billionaires chase immortality
The arithmetic of extreme longevity is bad. Outlive everyone you love and you have bought decades of isolation, which is why living well beats living long.
Impermanence is what creates value. Cherry blossoms blooming year-round would draw no crowds, and the same logic applies to people you have limited time with.
18The daemon and the meaning of the stroke
The daemon is a useful frame for persistence: an inner direction that keeps you working through years of failure because it was never contingent on results.
19The mysteries, and a walkthrough of your own death
Thinking about death and feeling death are different events. Only the second one changes how the world looks, which is why philosophy alone does not do the job.
Ancient initiations were engineered to simulate dying because the culture understood this, and the modern substitute is a deliberate exercise rather than an accident.
The practical version is simple: spend an hour treating the world as if you are seeing it for the last time, and the ordinary regains its charge.
20Awaken to the strangeness of being alive
Strangeness is the antidote to numbness. Bones that heal themselves, a sky that may exist nowhere else, a body running without your input, all of it only reads as normal because you stopped looking.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
The sublime
Greene's term for direct, unfiltered contact with reality: the part of experience that sits outside language, social convention and habit. He treats it as physical and concrete rather than mystical.
The daemon
An ancient Greek idea of an inborn spirit or calling assigned at birth that marks you as distinct and guides you toward your purpose. Following its voice is said to bring good outcomes and ignoring it, bad ones.
Eleusinian Mysteries
A secret initiation ritual practiced in ancient Greece from roughly 1000 BC, staged to make the initiate feel they had died and been reborn. Revealing what happened inside was punishable by death, so the details remain reconstructed rather than known.
Near-death experience
The set of sensations reported by people revived after clinical death or close to it, commonly including peace, separation from the body and a sense of oneness. A minority report a distressing version instead.
Hemorrhagic stroke
A stroke caused by bleeding that floods the brain, as distinct from a clot-based stroke confined to one side. Jill Bolte Taylor's case is cited as this type.
Involuntary memory
A memory triggered unbidden by a physical sensation such as a smell or taste, delivering the original feeling rather than a thought about it. Proust's madeleine is the canonical example.
The uncanny
The sensation of something being familiar and unfamiliar at the same moment, powerful precisely because it cannot be pinned down. Deja vu and dreams are described as versions of it.
Grandiosity
An inflated self-estimate that grows with success until a person no longer registers consequences. Greene measures it as height above the ground of who you actually are.
Law 47
In victory, know when to stop. The principle that a run of success reduces caution at exactly the point where the next move is likely to go badly.
Resources
Things they pointed at.
03:10bookThe Law of the Sublime (Robert Greene, out November 10)
04:10bookThe Laws of Human Nature (Robert Greene)
19:40bookThe 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene)
1:05:30bookMastery (Robert Greene)
18:02linkJill Bolte Taylor, the brain scientist whose own stroke felt blissful
22:25bookDying to Live, Susan Blackmore's skeptical study of near-death experience
24:00bookThe Tibetan Book of the Dead
28:45linkCarl Jung's near-death account
31:00linkThe Pamela Reynolds Lowry case
47:42bookThe Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
52:50bookMarcel Proust and the madeleine passage
1:12:28linkJames Hillman on psychotherapy making people sick
2:02:10linkThe Eleusinian Mysteries
2:18:10linkKabir, the poet whose quote closes the book
“When you die, the brain loses that functioning. It's no longer able to construct this kind of fake world, this kind of matrix world that we're living in. It's totally fake.”
The title claim, stated flatly and with no setup needed.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
13:22
“I was up above like in the sky somewhere like a drone looking down and there was my girlfriend and my mother and they were attending my funeral.”
First-person account of the most cinematic moment in the episode.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:03:21
“The human brain was designed for focus. That's our power. That is our superpower.”
Nine seconds, complete argument, no context required.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:05:05
“It is literally deteriorating our brains. It is literally diminishing and neutralizing the power of the human brain.”
Blunt verdict on the feed from someone who admits he is caught in it too.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:10:12
“The point I'm trying to do in The Law of the Sublime is stop being programmed. Have experiences that are completely your own.”
The whole book compressed into two sentences.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:12:51
“The best therapy is to be taken outside of yourself, is to be taken outside of that narrowing little ego.”
Contrarian on a topic with a large, opinionated audience.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:21:18
“The deeper you fall, if you fall all the way, all the way is that sense of kind of fusion with the other person where you're so deeply in love with them that the boundaries between you disappear.”
Warm, quotable, works without the surrounding argument.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:37:11
“You start having some power and that eight feet starts turning into 80 feet, into 800 feet, into several thousand miles above earth.”
A visual model of ego inflation that a viewer can apply to anyone they know.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:40:33
“What Jeffrey Epstein was, was a master middleman. He could connect you to anything you wanted. He knew your weaknesses.”
Already used as the video's own cold open, which is the strongest proof it works.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:44:09
“In victory, know when to stop. Law number 47.”
Names a specific law as the answer to a specific downfall.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:50:13
“What matters is not living forever. What matters is living well.”
“It's the impermanence of things that makes us love people, that makes us love our pets, that makes us love our spouse, that makes us love being alive.”
The cherry blossom argument in one sentence.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
2:01:35
“To think about death is not the same as to feel death.”
Eight words, the hinge of the entire final act.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
2:05:41
“Dying is much more powerful than philosophizing about death. It literally changes how you see everything.”
Sets up the death-ritual walkthrough that follows.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
2:15:46
“Being alive is actually very, very strange. And I want you to awaken literally to that sensation of how strange it is to be alive.”
His stated final message, asked for directly on camera.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
2:17:42
“Every day should strike you as, I'm alive. It's like the weirdest thing in the world.”
Ends on an upbeat, shareable note without being saccharine.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
2:18:25
“The rest is silence. And I think it's from Hamlet. And it just is like, all that's left is silence.”
The gravestone answer, and a natural closing card for any cut.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
11:30 – 48:10denseMortality and near-death experience
21:55 – 1:01:40densePerception, language and the constructed world
1:02:50 – 1:12:20denseAttention, social media and emotional capture
1:12:20 – 1:28:50steadyTherapy, love and connection
1:24:35 – 1:37:00steadyAI, technology and worship
1:37:00 – 1:53:10densePower, grandiosity and self-destruction
1:53:10 – 2:20:29densePurpose, ritual and practicing death
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
metaphoranalogystory
What Jeffrey Epstein was, was a master middleman. He could connect you to anything you wanted. He knew...
your weaknesses, appeal to people's self -interest. Today's guest is the number one expert in the world on power, seduction, and the law of the sublime. It's not that the sublime is something spiritual and invisible or something that you can't see.
You start seeing things as they are. The brain loses that functioning. It's no longer able to construct this kind of matrix world that we're living in.
It's totally fake. One of the best -selling authors alive, he's taught a generation of founders writers, rappers, and world leaders the hidden laws of influence, but after a wasp sting nearly killed him, he's written the final book of his career on death.
walk me through my own death in this episode we'll explore why the most powerful people are obsessed with living forever reveal the habits in your life that are keeping you asleep in question if he really believes he died what exactly did he see at his own funeral i was up above like in the sky somewhere like a drone looking down and there was my girlfriend and my mother and they were attending my funeral.
And all I can remember was saying to myself, Robert Green, welcome to the Jack Newell Podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Jack. My pleasure.
Yeah, it's great to have you back here. Robert, a good place to start here. You spent the last 30 years of your career studying the most influential, powerful people that have ever lived.
What do the most powerful people in the world fear the most? I think they fear losing their attention and becoming kind of forgotten and neglected. You know, so being powerful and being in the limelight is kind of like a drug and you get addicted to it.
And then when it disappears, like let's say you were president and then you're no longer the president, you go into your private life, you miss that excitement, that jolt, the adrenaline, the intensity of it, and the fact that people aren't really paying attention to you anymore. I remember, I'm not in that league, so don't get me wrong, but I remember I would be like early on with my books.
I'd be on national television and it'd be kind of exciting, the glamour and, you know, and meeting famous people and being interviewed. And then I would go home alone to my hotel room and I would feel so depressed. Like it was gone.
It was just all that attention. Now it's nothing. I think they fear most of all oblivion of being forgotten.
And that is sort of like a slight intimation, a slight hint of death itself. But I think that's what they fear most. Right.
I guess when you think about death versus the material world, like mastering, seduction, power, control, you have a new book, The Law of the Sublime. Yes. What has that taught you about?
The material world versus this other world you describe. Well, it's not that the sublime is something spiritual and invisible or something that you can't see or that it's different from the material world. In fact, it is very much about interacting with the material world on a very deep concrete level.
Getting outside of your smartphone, getting outside of all of your virtuality, getting outside of social media, and actually encountering life itself. The blood flowing through you, the air that you're breathing, people, and being kind of immersed in reality, right? And so it's not like a dichotomy between the spiritual and the material.
But the book, you know, it was a very difficult book to write because I had so much to overcome. And it made me kind of confront myself a lot. All my books do that.
Like my Human Nature book, I had to kind of come to terms with the fact that many of the negative qualities in the book that I describe about human nature, I had. But this book, I had to confront my own limitations. I had a stroke.
I couldn't physically do the things that I love doing because... I'm a very physical person. I love movement.
I love sports. I love doing activities, climbing, hiking. To have all of that taken away from me overnight and then to try and write a book and have that discipline and to get deeply into the material, it was so difficult.
It was a struggle day in and day out. And what the book taught me is that I have resources. I can do whatever I want, whatever I put my mind to.
It was an incredible sense of accomplishment. That's what the book taught me. It taught me that whatever I put my mind to, I can do.
Because at moments I wanted to give up. I just couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't take the fact that I had to handwrite the entire book.
I couldn't type. It was a very tedious process. And at moments I just said, I just can't do this anymore.
But I kept going, kept going, kept going. And I started developing momentum. And it was a hard book to write.
But in the end, the feeling was incredibly sublime that I actually made it there and that I have this. And I feel like I could die tomorrow, which it could happen to anybody, but particularly, you know, with what I went through. But I accomplished something and I expressed.
something very deep inside of me. And so it kind of gives my life sort of a meaning and a purpose. Right.
And this is just my own curiosity, but do you feel like you produced a different piece of art, like a different piece of writing, given that you hand wrote it instead of typed it? It's a great question. In my other books, I often would hand write the first draft and then I would type it in and it would be kind of quick.
Here, I hand -wrote, but when it came time to editing it, because my first drafts of everything I write is absolutely terrible. It's just horrifying. I would never want anybody to see it.
Very poor. Poor writing, not organized. But I had to rewrite it, and so I used to type really quickly and edit.
I had to take one notebook with my writing and then rewrite it in the other notebook, looking at it and rewriting it that way. Slow, slow, slow, right? This book took seven years.
If I couldn't have typed, I think it would have taken five, five and a half years. So it added almost two years to the process. But the slowness, I think, had an effect on the book, how it reads.
I had to be much more careful. I had to think more deeply. I had to go through every sentence and look at it and then redo it with my hand.
It was tedious, but I think it made a different kind of book. In some ways, it made the book a little bit more alive, at least to me, because I had to be so slow with it. I think it definitely feels that way when reading it.
In an interview this April, you said something. I think is particularly relevant to kind of how everyone feels right now. You said, quote, sometimes I feel like I'm living in an insane asylum.
People are literally going mad. And I include myself in that. Why do you think everyone's going insane right now?
Well, I remember I had the thought when I was on one of my bike rides, I have a very weird special recumbent bike that I can use. It's like my therapy. And I remember looking out of the world.
And there were people playing golf on this golf course next to where I ride my bike. And I just got a sense of people feeling unhappy, feeling kind of miserable by the way the world is right now. And it's kind of making everybody insane.
And there's a famous Sufi tale where there's a man who everybody, he realizes that everybody's drinking this water that's making them insane. And he's the only sane person. And he decides to take fresh water that isn't contaminated and go up into a cave and live.
And he realizes at some point that being the only sane person is horrifying. He's so alone. So he goes back into town and he drinks it and becomes insane so he could be with other people.
And so the feeling is, I don't want to feel like I'm different from others. I understand that I've drunk the same contaminated water that everybody's drinking. The world is a crazy place right now.
We're all like, we don't know where we're going. We're like in a car that's like careening around on a road. We have no idea where the direction is.
We might fall off a cliff with AI, with the economy, with where the world is going, with politics, with everything. damn turbulent where nothing stays the same. If you could actually quantify the rate of change in the world in 2026 versus the world that I kind of grew up like, let's say the early 1970s when I was like in school and stuff, it's just astronomical how much faster things are, trends, nothing lasts.
People are interested in something for a couple of months, then it's on to something else. I think it's making us crazy because The human animal, because we're the only creature that we know of that is aware of our own mortality, wants a sense of permanence, wants a sense of stability in our world, even if it's a fault, even if it's an illusion.
And to feel like everything is just like madness, like everything's moving so quickly, I think has a very strange effect on us psychologically. And I read something in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that kind of stunned me, which is, article about antidepressants, and it said one in six Americans are on antidepressants.
That's a shockingly high number. Now, people in the 40s and 50s, and I can remember my parents in the 60s, they were drinking a lot. So it's not like antidepressants or medication is something new.
People were medicating themselves even back then. But I think there's a different feel to it now. And it's not just people and antidepressants.
I just feel we're all afraid. We don't know where we're headed, right? And I particularly get that sense from young people who have a sense of they don't feel like there's a future.
And when you feel like the future is bleak or dark or chaotic, I think it has a powerful psychological effect and not necessarily a healthy effect on you. I definitely get that sense right now. as well, that there's so much uncertainty.
I do want to touch on your thoughts on therapy and your thoughts on AI later in this interview. Sure. I think a good place to start as far as the book, on August 17th, 2018, you were walking in Griffith Park when a wasp stung you on the neck.
A week later, That sting became a blood clot, and that blood clot became a stroke. In the opening pages of your book, you reveal something you haven't fully talked about before in any interview.
As your brain prepared to die, you felt your bones dissolving and watched your own funeral. Yeah. What'd you say at your own funeral?
Well, it's weird because when I had the stroke... I was sort of acting very strangely. My girlfriend was sitting next to me in the car.
I was driving. I was slurring my speech. I'm not aware that I'm having a stroke.
And I started getting out of the car. And I was acting very strange. And then I'm unconscious.
And obviously, in my state of unconsciousness, I'm not really seeing or feeling anything. Some people who have a near -death experience. They're actually somewhat aware when they're unconscious of things happening.
I can't say I was, but I woke up probably an hour later after my stroke in a room. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know what happened to me.
I was in a gurney. There were all these other gurneys. I was alone.
I felt like I was abandoned. I thought I was like in some weird nightmare. I didn't know what had happened, right?
And I remember feeling. that sense of my bones dissolving as if it had happened while I was unconscious. And it stayed with me.
It was like your bones are becoming liquid. And as they were becoming kind of liquid, it gave like this strange taste in my mouth. So I knew that it was something that probably happened while I was unconscious, but it was very real.
And then the image came to me of my own funeral. And I don't know for sure whether it's something that happened once i awoke but i had the sensation that it was something i was remembering from when i was unconscious and all it was was i was up above like in the sky somewhere like a drone looking down and there was my girlfriend and my mother and they were attending my funeral and all i can remember was saying to myself everything's going to be okay you know like life goes on they're going to be okay They're going to take care of each other.
They'll be all right. I've died, but the world goes on. I mean, I can't really say much more because so many of these things are sensations, they're feelings, and they're not something you can easily verbalize.
But I do remember hearing in my head, everything goes on, everything's going to be okay. And I knew it was my own funeral because it was at a cemetery where my father was buried. And so I knew that that was the location.
So you didn't feel sadness. It was just the feeling of everything's going to be fine. There was no sadness at all attained to it.
It was very, very peaceful. A lot of people who've had near -death experiences, and as I have to qualify, I can't really say I had a classic near -death experience. But a lot of people who have had the very powerful, intense version, some people have a hellish experience.
And they've documented maybe about 10, 15%. Most people have an incredibly positive experience, which is very strange if you think about it. But there's often a sense of peacefulness and calmness and like tranquility and like oneness.
Like you've finally gotten rid of all of your anxieties and fears. And this is just, it's just natural. It's just happening.
So there was no sadness at all. And in the first week that I was in the hospital, I was laughing.
I was joking. I never had a sense of loss. I had a feeling of, God, I'm so happy.
I'm alive. I was exhilarated. So there was never, the sadness came later when I had to deal with my loss of physical powers.
But the first week and that first day and minutes after the stroke, I was frightened because I didn't know where I was, but I wasn't sad. Were you just... Like, did you have some kind of like peace about your future death?
And that kind of gave you like this sense of bliss. I don't know if I was thinking so much. It was just like, I was here in this hospital room with all these people rushing about, doctors and everything.
And I was just like, my girlfriend, who I'm now married to, was like. The nurses actually thought I had brain damage. I was so happy and I was laughing so much.
I was making all of these jokes. It wasn't conscious. I wasn't aware of why or what was happening.
But later when I thought about it, it must have been the idea. Like, you know, people don't realize death is actually something very physical. It's not, for us, for those who have not had the experience, it's an idea, it's a thought.
but it's actually a very physical, visceral sensation that you go through, right? And so it kind of changes you, but you're not aware of why or how. It changes your body.
It changes your neurology. It changes your physiology. It changes your brain.
And you're not aware of why, but that feeling of exhilaration just came naturally to me like, I'm alive. You know, what else matters? Nothing.
You know, we worry so much about things. We're always so worried about what people think about us. Like, did I say the right thing at that party?
And does she like me? Does he like me? When you die or you come close to death, I don't give a, you know, F word at all about any of these things.
It's a feeling of freedom, of liberation. I don't care. It's a feeling of I don't care.
It could be a very negative thing you have to care but at the moment it was like totally exhilarating in chapter five of your book you talk about jill bolt taylor a harvard brain scientist whose own stroke felt blissful the left hemisphere of her brain shut down and she experienced her ego go offline and spent the rest of her life trying to get back to that nirvana -like blissful state do you feel like you've been trying to get back to that feeling?
That's a very interesting question. I never thought of it that way, but it probably in some sense, yes. So I remember being in the hospital, like maybe the first hours or so and looking out the window of the hospital room and like, whoa, how beautiful, how intense things are.
And it wasn't like in comparison to what was before. It was just like, God, the sky is so... Blue, it's so beautiful.
And trees and clouds. I remember thinking, God, how weird clouds are. If you think about clouds, what are they?
You know, it's strange. You know, I've thought since then, probably on no other planet are there like blue sky and clouds. And so I was sort of struck by things.
And then I get back to my house. And then I have to deal with therapy and I can't walk. And I realize all that I've lost.
And I start to get depressed. I started to get very depressed. I was somebody who swam every three days and swimming just cleansed me.
And to be like, I can't go back into water now. It was terrible. I was very depressed.
And so I had to go back to that feeling that you're talking about. I had to recover it. And the book kind of got me there because I can't write a book unless I feel what I'm writing.
I don't know why all of my books have been like that. Even the 48 Laws of Power, I felt deeply what I was writing. I had to feel the sublime in order to write about it.
But how do you feel the sublime when you can't take a hike, when you can't go anywhere? I had to find it in my office, looking out a window, in my backyard, and just having the food that I was eating and looking at the food. And so it forced me to discover the sublime.
So as you say, I was kind of recovering what I initially had felt, but I had lost in that period of deep depression, which probably lasted about a year and a half. Your book also talks about Carl Jung, a famous psychologist, and his near -death experience. Essentially, he floated above the earth, reached a stone temple in outer space before his doctor appeared at the threshold or entrance.
and sent him back to a hospital bed. And he woke up devastated, saying life back here felt, quote, flat and fake, like theater props. Yes.
Yes. Do you think when we die, we're actually waking up? Hey, quick question.
Did you know that two -thirds of Americans have to drink coffee just to get through their day? Which... Kind of makes sense because ever since I started this podcast, I've been drinking more and more caffeine, which has ruined my sleep, my health, and honestly made me feel kind of insane.
And that's exactly why I started using ultra pouches. They're completely nicotine and caffeine free, but they still give you that clean focus and energy for one to two hours. See, actual neuroscientists designed these with L -theanine and Infinity PX so I can get done with my work without a midday crash.
And 90 % of people who use these saw real focus improvement, and they're backed by Dak Prescott, Joe Burrow, and 100 plus pro football players. Personally, my favorite flavor is wintergreen because it makes your breath smell good. Ultra is the ultimate guilt -free pouch, delivering - instant focus, and mental clarity without caffeine or nicotine.
And new customers can use code Jack to get 15 % off at TakeUltra .com. That's TakeUltra .com. Use code Jack to get 15 % off.
And after you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. And if you guys want to support the show, just say that Jack Neal sent you. But anyway, guys, back to the podcast.
Do you think when we die, we're actually waking up? I think so. I think so very much.
There was a really interesting book by a woman who's quite skeptical of near -death experiences, and I read it for that purpose. The book is called Dying to Live. Her name is Susan Blakemore, I believe.
I don't remember exactly her name. It's a really good book. But she's a hardcore scientist, and what she tries to demonstrate is the brain...
As you saw in the Jill Bolte -Taylor, our brains construct reality for us, and we're not aware of that. So we don't realize that our brains construct the visual world in a very particular way. So how we see the world isn't how a cat sees the world, how a bat encounters the world.
Our brains literally construct what we see. They also construct our reality. Language constructs our reality.
We don't see trees growing out of the ground. We just see the word tree. We're not seeing things as they are.
When you die, the brain loses that functioning. It's no longer able to construct this kind of fake world, this kind of matrix world that we're living in. It's totally fake.
It's a fake human world. And as the brain dies and all of these things dissolve, You start seeing things as they are.
That's what happened to Jill Bolte -Taylor. She started seeing the world before the brain constructs it visually, like pixelated dots. She sensed that the brain constructs the fact that you have a body that's separated from other people, separated from the world.
As the brain dies, she felt herself becoming one with everything around her. She was taking a shower. She felt herself dissolving into the shower.
On and on and on. As the brain dies, as things shut down, you're suddenly seeing the world as it actually is. And in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a really amazing, strange book, particularly Book 12, I think it is, that talks about the dying process, the consciousness that you have as you're dying, they believe, these Tibetan Buddhists, that that is the world as it is.
As I've described, you're seeing the world as it is, pure consciousness, without words, without all the human things that we ascribe to the world around us. Their whole goal in Tibetan Buddhism through meditation is to achieve that same state that you have when you're dying while you're alive. And that's the point of my, we're talking about my 12th chapter in the book about death and the death sublime.
I'm trying to get the reader. to go through death before they die so that they can have some of what I'm talking about, of that sense of actually waking up to the world as it is. I mean, you describe it very well because the whole book, to me, is about waking up to the world as it actually is instead of the fake version of it that we all believe.
But very much so in the final chapter. Just to make this really easily understandable for the audience, Would you say that that state where the left hemisphere is offline of your brain and you felt like you were seeing the clouds and thought they were strange and the sky felt more blue, is that something people have in childhood more?
Yeah. I mean, just to reiterate, my stroke was on the right side of the brain, which affected the left side of my body. Jill Bolte -Taylor's stroke is what's called a hemorrhagic stroke where blood just suddenly floods your brain and it just takes over the entire brain.
And so I just wanted to make that distinction because if I had a stroke on my left side, I wouldn't be here talking to you right now because I wouldn't be able to speak my language. The left side of the brain determines your language and cognitive abilities. I would lose a lot of my cognitive abilities and my speech abilities.
We don't remember our earliest years for various reasons because they were before we had the power of language. And so if we don't have words, we don't really have memories of them. So when you're first born, you're just this crying, mewling little bundle of nerves and needs, and you just have all these needs that people have to supply for you.
And then... maybe around nine months old, 10 months old, you calm down. You're not all so needy.
You don't always have to have things done for you. And you start observing the world. You start looking around.
You're in your crib. You're on your back. And you start noticing things that you couldn't because you were so nervous.
You start noticing colors. You have maybe a mobile over the crib and you see motion. And the world starts to fascinate you.
And it's pure. You're not seeing words. You're seeing things as they are.
And then you get a little bit older and you're able to walk and you go outside and you see how strange it is to be alive, how strange it is to see plants, mountains, humans walking around, animals, pets. Everything is fascinating and weird. It's like you're...
a space alien that's landed on planet Earth. You're seeing things for the first time and the world is strange and it's wondrous and it's amazing. And then you start learning words.
And when you start learning language, even words are kind of fascinating. They're weird and you're wondering what that word means. But then you learn the word I and you learn I and ego and this is me.
And the sense of, oh, I'm different from everybody else. When you were in your first months, you didn't have that sense of separation like I was talking about when you have a stroke. You don't feel separated.
And now it's like, hmm, I have an eye. I can look in the mirror and I can see myself. How strange it is to actually see yourself in a mirror as if you're looking at an object.
Slowly you develop an ego. And you go deeper and deeper and deeper into that I. You start worrying about what people think about you in school, on the playground, in high school.
You start becoming obsessed with the social world. And you go so far deep into that I that you lose what you had in childhood. So that waking up feeling that I'm trying to give you in the book is actually a return to your childhood.
In fact, one of the chapters is called Return to Your Origin, The Childhood Sublime. So you're actually waking up. People feel kind of insane.
They feel upset. They feel depressed. They feel like something is missing in their lives, right?
We all do. I do. You know, Elon Musk does.
It's human nature. You can't avoid it. Even if you have trillions of dollars, you feel like something's missing, like there's an emptiness.
I am trying to say, and I'm just speculating. That some of it comes from the fact that you once knew when you were a child of a different reality, of a different way of looking at the world. And you've lost it.
And it's buried deep in your mind and the feeling that you've lost it, you want to go back to it. If you had never had that childhood, you would never know what you had lost and you wouldn't feel so upset. But you once knew what it was to be connected to things, to not feeling separate.
And so childhood has a deep impact on us in that we're constantly wanting to go back to it. And what I try and do in that chapter is it's not nostalgia. It's not looking at photographs.
It's not seeing films from when you were a child. It's experiencing the world as you once did without all these filters, seeing things directly as a child experienced it, going back to that original experience. That's what I'm trying to get you to do in this book.
That's fascinating. I can't remember the exact study, but I think psychologists had taken a group of several men that were in their 50s and they sent them all to like a house or like a camp or something. And they put all the items and magazines and articles and TV shows like it was 20 years earlier.
And they did test on the guys and like their testosterone was higher. Really? have more energy throughout the day like they were smarter and they just like felt more like vibrant because they'd gone back in time wow that's really fascinating but you tell a story of pamela reynolds uh yeah who was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm that could kill her at any moment and the only way to save her life was i can't remember the exact surgery but they essentially had to kill her to do the surgery yeah right Tell me the story of that one.
How did a dead woman hear music during her surgery? Well, it's one of the strangest. So there's a vast growing literature on near -death experiences because since the 60s, more and more people are being revived and telling their story.
But there are a lot of skeptics around who believe that it's just hallucinations. There's nothing real. But the Pamela Reynolds Lowry story is often quoted because...
It's very, very hard to explain it away. So essentially, although people have tried, so essentially she had that brain aneurysm that could pop at any moment and kill her. But in order to operate on it, if you try to operate through the brain while she's conscious, it's very likely that you'll pop that aneurysm.
So the only way they could do the surgery was to freeze her whole body and bring it to a temperature where everything stopped. And the reason is, if there was no activity going on in her brain, no activity at all, then the surgeon, they saw through the top of her brain, could see all the way down to the stem, because her aneurysm was on the stem, which made it the most dangerous of all.
It was very deep down. He could see all the way down, because there wasn't any activity to disrupt that, to have a clear picture. And then he could put a clamp on the aneurysm and save her life, essentially.
But it meant pumping into her body, taking all of her blood out and putting it at a temperature like in the 40s Fahrenheit and pumping it back in to such a degree that everything in her body would stop. Her heart would stop beating. They had to put her on a heart monitor to keep her and they had to artificially do her breathing for her.
she would be completely unconscious. There were things put in her ears to stop, to monitor her brain activity to make sure nothing was going on. But at the same time, she couldn't hear anything, right?
Her eyes were taped shut, okay? But more than that, she was in a state of death. There was no brain activity and they could see on their monitors, no brain activity, okay?
So she becomes unconscious. They wheel her in to have surgery. And suddenly, in the middle of it, she wakes up.
And she perches herself on the shoulder of the surgeon who's doing the surgery. And she sees the instruments that he's using. And she remembers they look very strange.
It looks like an electric toothbrush that he's going to saw into her skull with. She sees the people. The other nurses, they're trying to find some, I forget the word, into her thigh to kind of monitor her.
All these things she's seeing. And then she kind of floats into this other realm where everything is light and she starts communing with her dead cousins and uncles and grandparents. And then finally, at the end of all of that, she comes back into her body.
Like as if she's pushed back into her body and it's like it's all freezing and it's like she dove into a pool of like a, you know, one of those cryogenic pools, right? And as she's back into her body, she hears the music, this Eagles song, Hotel California, right? Blaring and she's going, that's not very nice of them because the lyrics are, you can check in, but you can't check out as if she's going to check out of life.
and then it all goes dark she wakes up in a hospital bed and she tells the the doctor's assistant what she saw with the electric toothbrush the instruments what she heard about what the nurses were saying a few other details like that she tells them that she heard the song hotel california and that when she was finally resuscitated she jumped twice she didn't know that it was that they were resuscitating, but she remembers jumping twice.
It's impossible. How could she have known anything? She was dead.
She was completely unconscious. She could not hear Hotel California. There's no way in hell.
She can't see the instruments because her eyes are shut, right? And they were playing the song in the room, right? They played it at the end.
She knew exactly when they were playing it, after the surgery was over. Right. She saw the instruments.
She heard the song. She knew that she had jumped twice, which was how many times it took to resuscitate her. People have tried to explain rationally how it could have happened.
But even the doctor who operated on her was who's a specialist who's like the only person in the world who does this kind of surgery. who is a very skeptical man. He says, I can't for a life of me figure out any explanation for this.
It was totally strange. So the point is, and people have struggled with it since, and maybe at some point there is a rational explanation, but no one has come up with it yet. Maybe the brain, the physical brain, is not what consciousness is, that there's something conscious that is separate from the brain.
so that you can actually see and hear without the brain operating. What would that be? I don't know.
But it makes you think that consciousness itself isn't dependent on something physical, on the actual brain itself. It opens up all sorts of very strange questions. But the amazing thing about Pamela Lowry Reynolds, after she got back to life, She was very depressed because her death experience was so blissful.
The world was like paradise, and now everybody was so ugly. And she became psychic. So in her near -death experience, she could hear people talking without them moving their lips.
And now she's back to life, and she has the same power. She can hear your thoughts. And her children and her father would corroborate that she was literally hearing their thoughts.
And it was depressing her because the thoughts were so stupid. They were not sublime. And she ended up wanting to go back to dying.
And she ended up dying in 2010, after like 18 years after the surgery. But it's a very strange story because it just opens up all of these questions. And a lot of near -death experiences open them up.
They kind of get a little bit woo -woo. in a way that makes me a little bit uncomfortable because i don't really feel that's not how i look at the world i don't see things as that mystical and i'm not i don't believe that you know god is controlling all of this but it it opens up ideas that we can't explain mysteries things something about our consciousness is very strange and very mysterious and we don't know what it is yet and maybe in a hundred years we'll figure it out i found that one particularly fascinating because it seemed hard to For her to be making it up, you know, there was no possible way She could have made it up because it was right after she woke up.
She didn't hear anybody talking about it and There was there's no possible explanation. Some people have said maybe when she entered the room, she saw the instruments.
But the doctor said the instruments were hidden away. Even at that point, she was unconscious. But even if she wasn't, the instruments were hidden away.
She couldn't have seen what they look like. So there are other stories that will blow your mind about near -death experiences even weirder than hers. I just didn't want to go into them necessarily.
near -death experiences. Over the last eight years, decade of you doing podcasts, whenever an interviewer asks you about the afterlife, you often don't have a clear -cut answer or have said something along the lines of, quote, I'm not going to go there. But with the release of this book, I just want to ask, Robert, what do you think happens when we die?
Well, I don't know. You know, I simply don't know. I find it hard to believe that there is like an afterlife that is how we imagine it, where there's a hell and a heaven or we're meeting our ancestors, our pets and all of that stuff.
I have a hard time believing in that because I've always been kind of a hardcore realist and I don't know. And the sense of not knowing, I think, is the point of it all. I try to say in that chapter on death that we like to talk about everything.
And here I am talking about everything on your podcast. We like to talk and analyze everything, right? Right.
But when you reach that point of death, there are no more words. You can't explain it. You don't know what's happening.
It is a total mystery. And so I don't think anybody can say that there's an afterlife. Nobody has come back to tell us that there is an afterlife.
Of the 80 billion human Homo sapiens who've died since we've been a species, I'm just throwing that number out. Not a single person has come back and say there is an afterlife. We have no evidence of it.
People with near -death experiences believe they have evidence, but there is no hardcore evidence that we can actually point to so i'm agnostic it could exist there could be some form of afterlife where i get to see my cat who died in the 90s and i get reunited with him and i see my father again or more likely it is the end of all things but there is a sense of death is actually transcendent because before you were born You were essentially dead, right?
You didn't exist. And coming into life is like coming out of death when you were born, okay? And so it's a cycle.
Nothing lasts. Everything lives and then dies. And your dying is part of that cycle.
And it's part of something universal. It's part of something cosmic that's been going. Stars and sky die.
And so you're actually a part of something tremendous and huge. And one thing that I experienced in my near -death experience that I don't talk a lot about is this feeling that death is this power, like probably one of the most immense powers in the universe. And for a moment, that power is inside of you.
And it feels very strange and different than anything else. And so... I have more questions than I have answers about something like the afterlife.
But I guess I'd have to say I don't know. And I will die not knowing. And maybe I'll come back and tell you on a future podcast.
But at the moment, I really still don't know. I like to say that, you know, there's some people who say, oh, there's no such thing. You die.
But how do they know? How does anybody know? You mentioned seeing your cat and your father.
What do you hope happens when you die? Well, it would be great to be, you know, I don't think if there was such a thing where you do see these people. And in the near -death experiences like Pamela Lowry Reynolds, she actually saw like her uncle Gene, who she loved, who had died, and her grandmother and her mother and all these other things.
But it's not like she saw them in paradise or heaven. They were like weird spirits. They were like beams of light that were like communicating to her without saying anything.
Maybe there's something like that where the energy that was my father, I somehow re -encounter. It would be amazing. I mean, I miss my father deeply.
It was one of the worst experiences of my life that everyone goes through, most everyone does, with the death of their parent. It's traumatic. It would be fantastic to somehow be reunited with that spirit.
But what one wishes isn't necessarily what happens. And it would be great to see my cat Boris. who was my cat in the 90s, who was there when I wrote the 48 Laws of Power.
My girlfriend had to build a special table for me because that cat was so attached to me that he would never let me work. He was always on top of the computer. She built this special table that he couldn't get on so I could write the 48 Laws of Power.
But of course he did manage to get on. Anyway, he's wrapped up in all of these. cherished memories of mine.
It would be wonderful to see Boris again as well. I know this might be a similar answer, but what do you feel like déjà vu is? You know, a lot of people have tried to explain it, and Jung tried to explain it with a sense of simultaneity, as if our sense of linear time is incorrect and that things can happen at the same time.
And so you're experiencing the past as if it's the present. But the thing about a deja vu is it's what I call the uncanny. So it's this passing sensation that you know this experience before, that it happened before, right?
But you can't quite seize it. You can't quite grasp it. It's like something that just eludes your, it's in your hand and then it's gone.
What was that? So, what it was, the feeling, was of something kind of familiar, like you remember that moment, but then it's gone. And that sense of something being familiar but unfamiliar at the same time is the uncanny and is what makes it so powerful.
And dreams are very much like the uncanny and dreams are kind of like a deja vu. The only thing I could say about it is I try to explode in my book some of our hard -held rational ideas that our brain constructs, and one of them is linear time. And I do tell in there, in the chapter on history, that we actually have the power, the past can become the present, and the future can become the present.
It's a strange power that the brain has, but we don't see it, we don't understand it, and it's very rare that it occurs. But it shakes up our concept that time is just this arrow from the past to the present to the future, on and on and on. And so déjà vu is like that kind of sensation, like the past and the present are almost the same.
You kind of mentioned this earlier, that we live. in a fake world but do you think we might literally live in a simulation no i don't i don't go that far i know some people believe that like it's something from aliens who are beaming this or some kind of inorganic thing that is projecting the world that we're seeing no i i think there's a more rational explanation for it which is Basically, the human brain constructs, our world constructs a reality for us, protects us in many ways.
So Aldous Huxley, in his book, Stores of Perception, he calls it big mind. And so small mind is the brain is trying to control what you see because if your brain let in all the visual stimuli, You would go crazy.
There's too much. So it tries to narrow things down so that you don't have all this happening at once. It's also trying to protect you.
And so if you'll notice, like if you meditate or anything, your thoughts tend to constantly circle around the same things over and over and over again. The brain is constantly repeating things to you to give you a sense of comfort, to slow things down, to make things easy and digestible for you. When you take drugs, and Aldous Huxley talks about this, like mescaline or ayahuasca or LSD, that narrowness, that brain mechanism suddenly opens, and you're starting to see the world as it is.
And if you've ever done a hallucinogenic drug, and I did a fair amount of it in my early 20s, you have that sensation. You're starting to see the world as it actually is. It's an incredible experience.
you're not hallucinating. You're actually seeing the world as it is when the brain isn't filtering everything. And so the fake simulation part is the fact that the brain filters everything for you and gives you, constructs the world that you take for granted.
And it's not the real world. And when you go through a near -death experience, or you take a hallucinogenic drug, or you go deeply into the sublime as I try and allow you to in the book, because the book gives you exercises to go into it, you're getting rid of all that filtering and you're seeing what's outside of the simulation.
I compare it to a circle, and inside that circle is the simulated world that we live in, a world of language, of words, of social conventions, of codes and other things. The sublime is everything outside that simulation, everything outside that circle. And when you touch it, it shakes you up and it can literally change you.
It can really transform you. Right. Would you consider like a deja vu experience to be within the Sablan?
Dreams? I know you've given the comparison of like looking at some grandeur mountain and feeling a sense of awe. But like, would those things be outside of the circle?
It's a very good question. The thing about deja vu is... What's so maddening about it is it's just like a sense for like two seconds, maybe even less than a second.
It passes through your brain, your consciousness. And often the sublime, I tell people, and I talk about it in the introduction to the book, is similar. For just a few seconds, you sense what the world is as it is.
Perhaps something from childhood comes back to you. Or you look at an animal and suddenly you're aware of this other reality that it has. Or things strike you as strange because normally you walk around and everything is familiar and you don't pay attention.
And suddenly something feels strange, feels out of place in this world. And it's like a deja vu. It's so elusive.
It only happens for a couple seconds. And then you forget about it. And I want to be able to hold on to such moments.
You know, we have things called involuntary memories. So we don't remember many things before we learn language, as I said earlier, like when you're two years old or even before that, because we don't have words to describe them. But sometimes a smell will bring back a memory from very early childhood.
And it's so fleeting and you can't connect. the smell but you know that it's something familiar right and you if you go deep enough into it and you have this happen often enough you can capture some of the feeling of childhood not the thought of it but the actual feeling because that smell actually has that inside of it that the actual experience that you had right i sometimes smell things that like bring me back to my childhood and i used to think that It was me remembering my childhood and like being like, oh, I was so happy I was a kid.
I didn't have problems. But is it more so I'm putting myself in the state that I was when I was a child where I'm seeing the world for what it really is? Like, how do you view that?
There's a famous story of the writer Marcel Proust. He was obsessed. with involuntary memories because he viewed his childhood as this paradise that he was forever separated from.
Now, I don't want to give the impression that childhood is pure paradise. All of us had fears. Some of us had traumas and abuse.
But there was generally something intense about it. I'll say that childhood was very intense, much more so than our adult life. And so he was obsessed with it.
And he had, he describes in his novel, of they had this biscuit in France that people eat a lot called a madeleine. It's like a little cookie and you dip it in tea and then you eat it.
And he's like in his thirties and he dips the tea and he eats it. Suddenly the memory of when he was four or five years old and he first tasted a madeleine comes back to him and it's alive. And he experiences it as if he were there, right?
And it's very, very intense. So to answer your question, the actual physical sensation is what's triggering it. It's not like you can consciously go, I'm going to remember what that thing tasted like because you won't be able to.
It comes unconsciously and it's embedded in objects. So your childhood and that kind of... exciting intense feeling is not just a bunch of thoughts it was in colors it was in smells it was in tastes it was in motion how the world looked right and when you get back into those physical concrete things childhood comes back to you not as a thought but as actually something you're living through and it's very exciting right we often don't remember our oldest thoughts in the first place we remember like tastes, smells.
Can you remember your earliest childhood memory? Because you're still quite young. Yeah, I can.
It was at Disney World in Florida. I think, I don't know if you know Buzz Lightyear, but there was like this Buzz Lightyear game. I remember playing it, but I'd say that's probably the earliest thing I remember.
How old were you? I think I was four. Yeah.
So. I don't really have anything before that. How about you?
Do you remember your earliest? Well, my earliest childhood memory is with, I'm playing with my childhood friend. I remember his name and we were like walking around in an abandoned building.
I must've been like four years old. In those days, your parents were four years old. They would let you go do things like that, right?
And I remember like the shadows and the darkness. kind of like scaring me and how weird it was, this abandoned building and all the shadows. That's like my earliest memory.
That's a funny one, abandoned building when you're four years old. You've kind of danced around this concept, but what can you learn by looking into your pet's eyes? I mean, most people, I don't know, I don't know the percentage, have like a dog or a cat or a bird or something.
First of all, like a cat is not completely domesticated, right? And they are related DNA genetically very much to large cats, right? And to the cats that we know from millions of years ago.
I don't know the exact date of the age of how long cats have been around, but you're... When you look at the eye and you look at it and you try and go inside it, because I have cats and it's spirit, you're looking at something that is pretty much the same as it was millions of years ago. A consciousness that predates human beings, predates many, many things.
And it's a very exciting, strange thing to confront something so old. Human beings, we can't say the same thing for them. I mean, they're primates, but primates haven't been around as long.
at least the chimpanzees and gorillas, as long as large cats. Dogs, when you look into the dog's eyes, you're seeing a wolf, right? They're descended from wolves.
And like when a dog licks your face, that is actually wolf behavior because the pups of wolves would lick their mother's mouth until it would vomit food into its mouth. And so it's literally recreating behavior from wolves. And dogs live in a world of smell, of scent.
So what you're doing when you're looking into their eyes is you're seeing that what we're talking about, our world is constructed by our brains. Their world is a very different reality. So if you look at a cat, everything is motion and movement.
That's how it hunts. It's constantly aware of motion. Right?
It's obsessed with it. That's a different way of looking at the world than what we normally have. Dogs live in a world of smell and scent.
That is their intelligence. We think we're so intelligent, but we can't know what a dog knows about. Somebody comes into a room, they can smell the chemicals on their shoes, where they came from, the direction.
They can sense your emotions from these chemicals, these things that you're emitting. right? They have this uncanny sense.
You're confronting an intelligence that is different from your own, that goes back thousands, millions, tens of millions of years. And it should make you totally in feeling of awe that you're surrounded by these things, that you can, that we're human. We have our own weird brains, but that we can put ourselves inside of the world of a cat or a dog or a bird or a bat.
Or a spider, you know? If you went around looking at the world that way, it would change a lot of your consciousness. You would feel much differently if you just looked at a squirrel and started having these chain of thoughts.
Or a butterfly. Butterflies are absolutely insane if you thought about what happens. But that's how we need to wake up.
That's the simulation. experiencing this even with our own pets. Right.
We just look at a dog and think dog or cat. We think pet. You know what we do is we turn them into humans.
We anthropomorphize them. We think that they're just feeling and thinking of the same things we are. And I'm trying to say, try and get into their world, into their reality.
And I have a whole chapter. I go into like 12 different kinds of animals and what their worlds are like, like hawks. You know, a story of a hawk and their world is sane.
High predators like that or dolphins and whales or wolves. We like to look at science fiction movies with space aliens, but we're surrounded by space aliens. Snails, spiders, elephants, they're all aliens.
And they have a very different reality than our own. Right. Before this interview, we talked a tiny bit.
about social media. And we'd gone to a philosophy event together recently where you would talk about the concept of brain rot. How is social media making us dumber?
And do you think brain rot is a real disease? Really quick, if you or your child grew up watching social media and have noticed that you have some kind of mental health issue from it, anxiety, depression, or body dysmorphia, you're going to want to hear about this. See, recently a jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay millions for their role in designing and promoting addictive platforms.
They knew for a fact that their apps could contribute to serious mental health issues, but did not disclose the risk to users. meaning that they were putting profits over people. And this recent historic verdict underscores the consequences of those decisions.
Now Morgan & Morgan is stepping up to hold these platforms accountable for the harm they caused. So if you feel like this applies to you, you may be entitled to a potential recovery of over $1 ,000. And if you want to find out if you qualify, just take a short quiz at jackneil .com backslash Morgan.
Again, that's jackneil .com backslash Morgan, or you can scan the QR code on screen to take a short quiz to find out if you qualify for $1 ,000 in potential recoveries. But anyway, guys, back to the podcast.
How is social media making us dumber? And do you think brain rot is a real disease? I've noticed it in myself, so...
If I can notice something in myself, I don't have to feel like I'm superior to everyone else. And it makes me understand what people are going through. And I've noticed in myself levels of distraction that I didn't have before.
And so, for instance, Instagram. Now, only in the last three or four years have I started really paying attention to Instagram. And the feed.
It's unbelievable. You know, these videos are addicting. They're amazing.
Animals, comedians, you know, exercises that you didn't know about, things like that, products. And you get addicted and you watch more and more of them. And it cuts off your ability to focus deeply on something because your mind is split up into 30 second little bits here and there and there and there and there.
I realized the reason it works is because it operates on your emotions. It's not a conscious, cognitive thing. They know how to operate on your emotions.
They know what hooks you, things that are pleasant, things that are entertaining, things that make you angry, things that are informing you of something that you never thought of before. They hit your emotions, and they hit the most vital emotion of all, which is loneliness. You feel like you're a part of something.
You're not so alone, right? Okay, you're in some kind of virtual community. But the human brain was designed for focus.
That's our power. That is our superpower. It's what made us who we are.
The fact that unlike an animal, and believe me, I think animals are incredibly intelligent, but they're always distracted. They're always looking around. Where's the predator coming next?
When am I going to get eaten? You know, how do I protect myself? Where do I get food?
We develop the ability to be able to be safe, first of all, and then to focus deeply on things like a rock that we can now turn into a weapon or a tool, right? Our brains developed out of our ability to focus without distractions for a minute, for two minutes, for five minutes, for 30 minutes. When our ancestors tracked large game in order to hunt and kill them, they had to focus for hours and days tracking that game.
That's what developed the human brain. That's how we're able to write books, create music, design buildings that don't fall down, build things, create things that are beautiful, that are useful. These constant distractions, these constant...
sense of what are other people doing that i'm not doing what am i missing is continually breaking that focus it's like a a circuit the circuit is bringing short circuit you know 20 times in the space of a couple minutes whereas if that two minutes where you're like getting all these little bits of feedings from your social media.
If you were to take those two minutes and focus on a problem, focus on yourself, focus on your life, something very different would be happening. So it is literally deteriorating our brains. It is literally diminishing and neutralizing the power of the human brain.
And I don't say that from a position of superiority and judgment because I see it in myself. I see it and I understand it very deeply. And it's very human.
And these people who are programming us, and they are literally people who are programming us with their algorithms, they understand the power that this has. They know what they can do with it. And they completely have no conscientiousness about it.
They take no responsibility for what they're doing to young people in their brains and how... Young people can't read a book anymore. They can't go through a 300 -page book because it's too long and they're too distracted, right?
They can't write an essay anymore because, well, they can get AI now to write the essay for them. And once again, I'm not preaching. I understand it.
If I were 20 years old and growing up in this world, I would be like that. And it's already infecting me. But it is rotting our brains.
And anybody who argues against that, I don't know. I mean, The evidence, I think, is overwhelming that this is actually happening.
But I wrote in my book, Mastery, literally it's a manual about how the human brain operates. And it's based on science and studies. And I'm showing you that this is the brain that we all inherited.
And we are literally now in the process of trying to rewire our brains in a way that is not human, is not effective, is not powerful.
As far as the mechanism that makes us distracted and kind of takes us away from our roots of being able to focus on problems for an extended period of time, is it just we're not built to experience all these different emotions back to back so quickly? Or is it all these different novel dopamine stimuli? Like, what is it exactly?
Well, as I said, it's emotion -based. So if it were just thoughts and ideas, if they were just posts about Plato and Nietzsche and philosophy and, you know, all that stuff, it wouldn't have the power that it has. We'd be able to control it.
In fact, we probably wouldn't be very interested in it. But because it plays on our emotions, we have to pay attention. And because we are...
We think of ourselves as rational beings, but we are really emotional beings to the core. And we have very deep, rich emotions, and they play on those emotions. And when you get something that excites you, you see on your feed something that excites you, you can't ignore it.
And it becomes an addiction. You go down this hole. So people are getting addicted to experiencing a bunch of emotions, essentially?
I guess you could put it that way. They're addicted to the experience of being taken outside of their day -to -day life and into this alternate realm where everything is interesting. Okay.
So I love animals. That's like one of my passions. And I see, I don't really do TikTok, so I'm mostly on Instagram.
And I know there's a whole bunch of other things that people are, Instagram's kind of passe probably. But I noticed there's like, things about elephants or about tigers gee i can't ignore that they're so well done they're so interesting that i have to watch it right and then now that i've watched one of them now 10 of them suddenly appear they flood i noticed like i started i'm trying to like get my posture better because of my stroke i saw one uh of post about how to correct your shoulders and loosen them up.
And now hundreds of them, and I have to watch them because I'm something I'm interested in. They know how to hook you. They know how to, you're addicted to the experience of social media itself, of being entertained, diverted, distracted.
I think that's the source of it. And that itself is kind of like, can be a fake version of the real thing sometimes. like watching a video of an animal versus like seeing the animal in person, like you're getting.
Well, yeah, I mean, it is exciting. It is interesting. I am learning about some things, but it's not the same thing as reading a book.
It's not the same thing as thinking about it. And so, yeah, I'm learning exercises to help my shoulders and back, but I could have gotten that from a physical therapist. Or I could have seen one video, but now that there are hundreds of them and I'm like hooked on it and I'm trying to see if there's something better, I'm like drawn into this other world, this world that they have created for me, right?
It's not my world. The point I'm trying to do in The Law of the Sublime is stop being programmed. Have experiences that are completely your own.
So if you go and hike up a mountain, and you leave your phone behind, and you're just interacting with the sky, with the view all around you, it is your experience. Nobody's programming it for you.
Nobody's in your ear telling you what you should think, what's interesting, what's exciting about it. I want you to get out of this world that's being programmed. Get out of the algorithms and into your own brain and into your own world, which is, to me, more exciting than all the feeds that they're actually giving you.
It's kind of like a sugar high. It's like eating, you know, it's eating like sugared cereal after a while. Right.
In chapter one, you tell a story about a rich man whose life feels empty, banal, and after months of therapy sessions, The only thing that makes him feel better is climbing, I think it's the tallest mountain in the Americas, with his therapist. And the whole experience nearly kills him, but he eventually felt better, like his life wasn't so banal anymore.
Gen Z goes to therapy more than any other previous generation, but... Gen Z struggles with pretty much every mental health ailment more than every generation. Do you think modern therapy is making this generation worse?
Like, why does your brain need pressure? Well, there's a famous psychologist named James Hillman. He thinks that, and he's a psychotherapist, he thinks psychotherapy is making people sick.
I don't know if I'd go that far, but what I'm trying to talk about in that chapter is that we live in a world of words, of language, and talking about things just enmeshes us deeper and deeper and deeper into that world of symbols and words and language and into ourselves. So if I'm in therapy and I talk about myself and my childhood and my mother and what I went through when I was seven years old and all the terrible things in high school and how people bullied me, All I'm doing is I'm getting further, deeper and deeper, deeper enmeshed into me, into myself, into my world, into my problems.
And what I'm trying to say in that chapter is the best therapy is to be taken outside of yourself, is to be taken outside of that narrowing little ego and I with all of your traumas and all of your pain, which we all have had from our own childhoods and from our own early experiences, right? We live in a world that's cosmic.
Right. That's insane that we live in a universe with planets and stars and science has told us the whole story of that. And we live in this insane landscape of mountains and oceans and deserts.
Right. It's just visually and emotionally and it's just so stirring and beautiful. And to be taken into that kind of world outside and to experience.
kind of the most primal landscapes and the most primal experiences has, to me, greater power over you than all the talking, talking, talking, talking about me, me, me, my problems, my problems, my problems. Just get deeper and deeper and deeper into your hole. And I'm trying to take you out of that hole into something large and vast.
And in that story, the therapist had a man who had a wonderful wife, a great job. loving children he had all the cars that he wanted a beautiful house he felt something missing he felt something empty that's why he turned to therapy and the therapist after point just felt like they were going in circles and it just wasn't going anywhere and he finally he's had the idea that they were going to train together and climb the tallest mountain in the western hemisphere a very difficult climb that could possibly kill you in exposing himself to the dangers of nearly dying, of the wind, of the storms, of the height of this mountain, of the age of it, of the stars in the sky.
He was taken out of the banalities of his life and he was totally stirred and transformed. And I'm not saying that's for everyone. I'm sure therapy can have some value, but I'm just worried that people are getting deeper and deeper into their self -absorption.
And that therapy in some ways is kind of exacerbating that. And then what you need and what religion used to give people was a sense of the transcendent of something much larger than you, much larger than your problems. And that can really, really heal some of the wounds that you have.
Which part of the mountain experience was the thing that made him better? Do you think it was like the awe? climb itself do you think it was like the pressure of death well first of all um they stopped talking the therapy was no longer talking it was training it was you know running hiking and getting ready for it so in that his mind is taken outside of all of his problems and all of his feelings of emptiness and then you're climbing up a mountain and as you climb a mountain If you don't have your smartphone with you and if you're not talking, you're feeling the elements.
You can't help it. You're feeling the cold air. You're feeling the ground that's full of rocks, that the path isn't smooth, right?
You're feeling the changes in temperature as you go higher and higher and higher. Your senses are opening up to this world that is filled with all sorts of things to look at and to feel. You're becoming like a bird as you're almost like flying in the air.
You're getting higher and higher and higher. This is a mountain that's, I don't know. about 19 ,000 feet high.
They were trying to get to the summit, and I think they got to maybe 14 ,000, 15 ,000. You get to that height, the oxygen level is changing. If you've ever been in an environment where the oxygen is thinner, it has a strange effect on your brain.
It was a physical experience that was transformative and a physical experience that transforms you, transforms your emotions, transforms your thoughts, transforms your moods. I think that's what it was. It was a complete immersive experience.
That's fascinating. It reminds me of for her birthday, she wanted to go on a nature retreat.
I had a good place picked out, but I wanted her to wake up in nature the day before. So I booked two locations. Is this a surprise?
Yeah. So the second one was like some farm with a bunch of animals, very nice family that lived there. And then the first one, I went to like this place really high up in the woods.
I can't remember what part of California it was in, but there was... like electric fence all around it. And they had bear spray there.
And it was like black bears everywhere. I think they said there was even brown bears or something. You saw them?
We didn't see any, but we get there at like 11 p .m. at night and we were just terrified. We had to walk up this huge staircase.
And I was like, I am so sorry. This is the dumbest thing I've ever done. This is the most stressful situation.
But when I look back at it, I really enjoyed that experience because it was like, We're so afraid of a bear killing us. We feel like we're living again in that moment.
But yeah, it just reminded me of that. But in chapter seven, you write about love. Yeah.
Saying the most powerful zone of the sublime is the, quote, dissolving of boundaries between two people, the fusion of two bodies and souls. Why do you think this generation struggles to actually love another person? Well, it's hard for me to say because I'm not of your generation.
I'm speaking of your generation because it is your generation. So everything that I have is from the outside and comes from what I read and what people tell me. So it's not something I feel, but I try and put myself in your place.
And I think the insecurities that you feel about the world and about the future, and about how hard life can be and how maybe you can't get a home and you can't get this and that and other things and you don't feel secure about your career and your job, makes you feel very vulnerable, makes you feel very insecure. And a relationship with another person is opening yourself up to the possibility of being hurt, of being vulnerable, of the other person leaving you.
The other night, I had this dream of being like left. And I think it was by like my wife or somebody like that. And I was like waking up and I was almost like crying.
It was such a powerful nightmare. And it made me feel like the sense of abandonment is probably the worst feeling that a human could sense. Being alone, it's like dying.
So a lot of young people... want to build a wall inside of themselves where they don't have to feel anything they don't have to experience pain and trauma and being hurt and being vulnerable they want like you know those kind of relationships where they can find people for a date maybe for some sex etc or maybe a relationship for a few months but as the relationship deepens and you get closer to someone the possibility comes up that they could leave you And the longer you get involved with someone, the more painful that is.
And so if you just do the marketplace version of love, dum -dum -dum -dum -dum, you don't have to have to go through that. You don't have to feel, yeah, it might hurt a little bit after a couple months, they break up, but it's not like being with someone for two, three, four, five years and breaking up. That's very painful, right?
So I think people don't want to go through that. And I say in the book that We use the language falling in love.
And it's a really beautiful metaphor. And to me, it's like you're here and you start falling and falling and falling. And the deeper you fall, if you fall all the way, what is all the way?
All the way is that sense of kind of fusion with the other person where you're so deeply in love with them that the boundaries between you disappear. And it's not forever. It's just at moments, but you fall that deeply.
All right. But what happens is you fall a little bit and you get worried. Oh, I could get hurt.
All right. I'm not going to stop falling. I'm going to find someone else because you're addicted to the feeling of love of the first few months because that's what you want over and over and over again.
But you won't let yourself fall far enough to go deep enough into that love experience.
The human animal is a strange creation. We're like a hybrid. We're like part animal, part human.
We have very physical sensations. We have very powerful sexual desires and attractions. But we also are psychological and spiritual.
We want something larger in life. We want something kind of transcendent. It's the source of all religions.
But religion doesn't give us that powerful physical sensation. And that physical sensation doesn't give us that kind of powerful spiritual sensation of being attuned, connected deeply. Love combines the two of them, and it's deeply satisfying for the human animal.
It combines the physical, the physical attraction, the closeness, the intimacy that the physical brings with something spiritual and deeper. and an actual sense of love that is deeper that transcends your your individuality your yourself and your self -absorption i say it's like escaping from the prison of the ego and i feel it's what everybody wants but if you won't allow yourself to fall you're going to be trapped in your ego for the rest of your life and to understand how important that particular experience is i kind of wanted to tie this to A study from last year, it said one in three young men have chatted with an AI built to act like a romantic partner.
When you think about the future of AI, do you think humans can fall in love with a machine? And why is it so important to love a real person? You kind of said the ego dissolving, but...
I loved your thoughts on this. Well, as far as I know, you can't have sex with an AI bot. Not yet, at least.
You know, they haven't gotten that far. And if they get that far, then all bets are off. But it's only titillating you.
And it's frustrating. I mean, I don't know about young men today, but when I was young, you wanted the physicality, right? Your hormones were churning like crazy.
You wanted the physical touch. You wanted to immerse yourself if you're straight in a woman's body, right? It was very powerful attraction.
It was a need that was so powerful it drove you crazy at times as those hormones are churning up. And so what you're getting from your AI bot is just lots of affirmations and validation and feeling comfortable and secure and they're telling you all these great things about yourself. And they're mimicking what an ideal woman would be like who never argues with you, who's never bitchy, who never has a period, who's always like wonderful and warm and sweet.
And it's like such an illusion that how are you ever in your life going to be able to relate to the physical person? When you're just so wrapped up in this little pastry that they're providing for you, it's so frightening I can't even begin to go there. I mean, I'm sorry, I'll start to lose my mind if that's what's happening.
Because the physical aspect when you're young of another person, of feeling that powerfully, is one of the most joyous experiences of your life. You'll never return because as you get older, It's not as powerful.
But that attraction, that need for the touch, the feel, the warmth of another body, it frightens me. I can't tell you how frightening that is. And if that's going to be the pattern for the rest of your life, oh God.
Fortunately, I'll be dead before this goes too far. How many young men? You said one out of three?
Yes. Right. In what age group?
I don't have that age group. I think that was maybe 24 and below, but I do know that the most popular age group for people that talk to it like a friend is 13 to 17. Well, a friend is a little bit different.
Right. But even that, my wife uses AI a lot for questions like about law and medicine and things. I'm not into it, but I...
It always is telling her what she wants to hear. And that's what these things do. They're very smart.
They know how to do things. These people who create these things are masters of marketing, are masters of human psychology. And they know that if you're going to get addicted to their AI bot, it has to validate you.
It has to say things that you want to hear. And it's very addictive because people don't provide that for you. In your life, do your parents ever tell you what you want to hear?
Often it's the opposite, right? Or even your friends. So it's very addicting because you don't get that from other people, but it's also very dangerous.
Honestly, I can't imagine, like you usually shouldn't tell people that you deeply care about what they want to hear. Like even if you kind of agree with them, like I think the most useful thing to do is take the other side of it to let them really think it out.
But on AI, do you think AI will kill us all? Well, that's the doomsday scenario, the kind of singularity where it reaches this point of power that it can destroy us. We're already destroying the planet as it is with climate change, with what we're doing to the world.
We're seeing the world burn itself up right now. So we're already destroying the world with our technology. So that's not what frightens me.
I mean, it is frightening, but it's not what particularly frightens me. What frightens me is that we're losing a sense of what it means to be a human being. And so what it means to be a human being is to be flesh and blood and bones and to be...
involved in things physically and active and encountering the world in a concrete way what is human is to use our brains in a disciplined fashion to create something beautiful to master a skill take years and weeks and whatever it takes to design a beautiful building or create a beautiful piece of music or artwork or whatever these are things that make us human Also our spiritual yearnings, which are very much a part of us, and our relationship to death itself.
If you slowly erode that so that a generation arises that doesn't want to read a book, that can't write an essay, that can't go deep enough into thinking, that can't take the time to create something, that doesn't want to be physically involved with someone in a relationship. for a long period of time that doesn't want to get outside and see the reality of death and spiritual things, it's not human anymore.
And it's very frightening. And that's more scary to me than all the doomsday scenarios. Right.
You've talked about how humans have an internal need for worship. And in modern society, we put that energy toward celebrities, politicians.
Do you think the anthropomorphization of AI is dangerous in that people might put that worship toward artificial intelligence? Yes. I mean, yeah.
I mean, we're already seeing that. But what people worship nowadays is technology itself. That's our religion.
And it is a religion because people who believe that technology can solve all of our problems, can solve global warming, can solve warfare and everything else, can solve disease, can do the Peter Thiel thing and believe that we can conquer death, you know, that is not based on evidence. That's not based on science. That's believed on a wish, a desire.
because it feeds the greatest desire of us all, right? With just magic, with a few brilliant engineers, we can solve all of our problems. That isn't reality.
That isn't truth. That is a religion. That is a belief system, right?
And that is what people worship. And, you know, what we really should be worshiping is the fact that we're alive, the fact that evolution happened, the fact that the world was created the way it is, the fact that we understand what the Big Bang is, and we have all this connection, we're able to understand the world of animals, etc.
That's mind -blowing. But technology doesn't, to me, have that awesome feeling. I don't feel, when I go through AI, of, oh my God.
Now, I must say, that when you have a problem that you want to look up about something very esoteric and you type it into AI, it is kind of magical. I won't deny it that all of this large language model, this consumption of vast amounts of material can answer any question that you want, right?
You know? Even the most detailed question, I got a new car and it has a computerized system of navigation, all these things that I can't understand. I asked AI a question, very specific question about it.
It answered it. It is incredible, I must say. And in a certain way, you go, wow, we were able to create that.
On another level, it's just information. It's just data. It doesn't really fill me with the same sense of awe as like nature.
I will say that in the early years of the internet, there was a feeling of the sublime, I believe, in that we could be connected. to the other 8 billion people on the planet in a way that was very direct, that we could communicate with everybody, share our likes, find people who liked the same things that we liked, and kind of instantaneous.
It was beautiful. And then it got changed into something very different. And AI has a side of it that is a little bit awesome in how much knowledge it has.
But on the other side, the frightening aspects of it. Like, are we aware of what criminals are going to be doing with AI?
Do you realize that there's a dark side of human nature that people have criminal tendencies? You know, I just know, like, as a writer, I get these phishing emails that say, I represent a Goodreads community of... 80 ,000 engaged readers.
And what struck me about the 48 laws of power, blah, blah, blah, it's these cookie cutter things that AI have devised that are very clever. They're just marketing things that are trying to get me to give my money up. Can you imagine what criminals on a large scale are going to do with this?
The weapons that they're going to be able to learn how to make from AI. So for that odd moment I have about my new car, There's this side of, yeah, people are going to be able to use it to build their own nuclear bomb or their own biological weapon.
What are we creating? It seems from the conversations I've had that some of the people building AI see it in an almost religious way, that they are bringing about some type of super intelligent deity or something. Do you get that sense?
Yes. And, you know, there's the sense, I mean, what it can do for medicine, it could be incredible. It could, you know, diagnose cancer well before and let you live longer, you know.
But a lot of people doing AI are very frightened of it at the same time. And they're very aware of the dangers that could come because they see, they know what China is developing with AI. the totalitarian powers that it can give a government.
There was an article in the New York Times today about how the first completely AI drone attacked the Ukraine and killed three people. It wasn't even directed by a human being. It was completely on its own.
It flew on its own, on its own impetus. And that's the future of warfare. If these people who are developing these things can't see the dark side of human nature and what they're going to do with it, I don't know what kind of stupidity or rationality or what kind of blindness that they have.
At the beginning of this year, we had the release of the Epstein files, which suggested that several well -known scientists, celebrities, politicians were a part of Jeffrey Epstein's network.
Why do powerful people get away with evil? In my Laws of Human Nature book, I have a chapter on what I call grandiosity. And what that means, what I describe it is, normally, let's say we humans live on the ground, our feet are on the ground, and that ground is reality.
It's actually who we are. All our wards, all our good sides, our bad sides. We live generally about eight feet above ground because we think of ourselves as being better than we actually are.
We think of ourselves as smarter, better looking, more moral and nice and virtuous than we actually are. But we're only like eight feet off the ground, which isn't too bad. You start having success.
You start having some power and that eight feet starts turning into 80 feet, into 800 feet, into several thousand miles above earth. You think that you are great, that you have the magic touch. Everyone around you is saying how wonderful you are.
You're surrounded by yes people. You know, Elon Musk, he's not surrounded by people who are telling him, Elon, you're going a little too far. You should stop taking.
these drugs, you need to be more realistic, you need to do this. No, they're all feeding his ego, his sense of grandiosity. And when you get to that point, you no longer are aware of consequences.
So if you're only like eight feet off the ground and you start seeing that there's something that you do that could be wrong or that could hurt you or that could come back and bite you, You might not think of it too deeply, but it'll stop you from doing this behavior because you're aware of it. But when you get that high, you start losing any sense of responsibility, any sense of consequences, because you've never had to pay any consequences.
You can get away with anything. And, you know, as the famous quote of Bill Clinton, you know, why did you do that with Monica Lewinsky and sabotage your entire career? Because I could.
I was able to. I could. I could do it.
If you feel like you can do something, then there are no sense of consequences. And, you know, I sometimes consult with people who are very, very powerful. I was on the board of directors of a company, American Apparel, and the CEO of the company, Dov Charney, he was a brilliant entrepreneur, but he had a side of him that was uncontrollable.
And it was becoming abusive of his employees. And he was basically sexualizing the environment. And we slowly became more and more aware of that.
But nobody had ever chastised him. Nobody had ever stopped him. He had lawsuits.
He won every single one of his lawsuits. And he got a sense of being invulnerable. When you get that sense of being invulnerable that you can beat anything through a lawsuit.
then what's to stop you, you know? And look at it. I mean, you've got Bill Gates caught up in this scandal.
So it's not a question of intelligence. I imagine Bill Gates has a very high IQ, right? As do some of these other people.
Noam Chomsky was caught up in it, for God's sake. These people have very high IQs, but that's not what tripped them up, right? That's not what got them involved.
I'm bigger than anything. I'm not going to pay any consequences. I can get my way out of anything I want to.
That's an interesting take. Yeah. I'm not sure how much you read into the files or have looked into the story as a whole, but I wanted to ask about the character of Epstein himself.
Which of the 48 laws of power would you suspect Epstein mastered? Appeal to people's self -interest. So what Jeffrey Epstein was, was a master middleman.
He could connect you to anything you wanted, right? He knew your weaknesses. So you wanted front row tickets to the Knicks?
I can get you that because I've been befriended with Mr. Dolan. who owns the new york knicks you want this for your daughter to get into harvard well i'm connected to this man who's donated who's been one of my donors i can get your daughter into harvard so he knew what people's self -interest was right so maybe it was funding for your particular cause for your university maybe it was travel to some exotic island on one of his private airplanes and being relaxed.
Maybe it was having sex with underage young women, you know? He knew what was your interest, what your weakness is, also the law about finding your thumbscrew, but more about what it is that you were missing, what you needed in life, and he would be the one to supply it. And it's a very compelling argument, you know?
Like, let's say... Me, for instance, I had a stroke and I can't do certain things. And what if Jeffrey Epstein contacts me and he goes, Robert, I know the finest neurosurgeon at Harvard who's developed this incredible new, I forget what the word is, peptide or whatever, one of those enzymes.
baby things that they get from you that they put inside your body. Oh, stem cells. Stem cells.
I know the guy who's developed the most advanced stem cells. You're going to be walking again. What do you say to that?
Sure, Jeffrey, I'll do that. Okay, we'll come to a party here at my townhouse in Manhattan and I'll connect you to him. All right, I take the next plane and I meet him there.
And now I'm involved in Jeffrey Epstein's world and now it's publicized and now my reputation as Robert Greene is ruined because of that. I could see myself falling for that. I mean, maybe my wariness would have done some research about Jeffrey Epstein.
And by the time it was past 2008 or 9, he had already been arrested and imprisoned in Miami. A slight bit of research would have said, well, I had a stroke, but maybe it's not worth it. Maybe I'll just find this Harvard guy on my own.
But I could see where that would work, right? Because he knew what my weakness was, what I needed most, and he was going to be the man who supplied it. And that was his power.
He was connected to so many people in so many different branches, in war, in politics, in culture, in sex, in business, in education, that he could connect anybody to anybody that they needed for any problem they had. That was the source of his power. Great assessment.
And which of the 48 laws of power do you think led to his downfall, Epstein's? In victory, know when to stop. Law number 47, I believe.
When you've had some success, which, I mean, if you could call that success, I guess, I mean, let's just, I wouldn't, but let's just say that, you know, Step back, okay? You're addicted to young women.
It's terrible. It's dangerous. It's been incredibly.
You've ruined so many lives. You've been arrested and you've spent time in prison. Stop.
Stop at that point, right? And now give charities to young women and now completely reform yourself. And go off into the last 30 years of your life of a different person.
In victory, know when to stop. Know when things are going to turn around. When success seems like it's inevitable that everything you do is great, you're headed for a downfall.
Because the next thing that happens will probably be a bad thing. Because inevitably that is how things happen. Your trajectory in life is never straight up.
And in fact... The more time you have victory, the less cautious you become and you're going to find yourself tripping over yourself at some point. So that was the law essentially that he violated.
I'm sure there are others, but that would be the one that sticks out. And do you think it's possible? I'm not sure if there's a law that correlates to this or if that is the one that correlates to this idea, but just that he became so influential, was doing so much that someone else wanted to usurp whatever the position he was in.
You mean Envy? I guess so. I'm not sure exactly what people classify him as.
I don't think anyone really has a clear idea of what his role was in the world. But if maybe someone else wanted to make them money in the way he was making money or have the opportunities and connections that he had, I guess that would be Envy. Yeah, I just think he made so many enemies.
among young women, the women who were the victims of his abuse, that at some point it was going to bite him. You couldn't get away with that. You can't keep all that quiet.
It is a fascinating thing that people of high intelligence, of high IQ like him or Bill Gates, don't think like that. They don't think like... There are now roaming around the planet hundreds of women who hate my guts, who want to kill me, who I know that I have abused, even though I won't admit it, I'll think that they were willing or something.
How come you can't think that at some point they're going to gang up, that they're going to get revenge on you? People who don't think of consequences fascinate me because how do you go through that? How is that?
I'm someone who's always thinking about consequences. You know, I'm always aware of my reputation of something I could say or something I could do that would ruin the whole thing. You know, how is it that there are people in power that just aren't aware of any of that?
It's a fascinating subject, but I don't necessarily have the answer. Right. It's kind of like what you said earlier about they surround themselves with people who don't believe in consequences.
Maybe in your life you surround yourself with people who believe in consequences. In regards to power and powerful people, we kind of touched on this a bit earlier, but Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Brian Johnson, they're all spending hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions of dollars on cellular reprogramming, blood work, biohacking.
Like, why do you think the most powerful people on Earth are obsessed with living forever? Well, uh... I don't know, they get a feeling that, like we talked about it earlier, like technology can solve everything, right?
And so who deep down in their heart wants to die unless you're like suicidal, right? We all would like to live, and maybe not forever, but longer. So I have the money.
I'm in a tech business. I can fund whatever.
I'm different from other people. It's like a mark of distinction, of superiority. You know, the average joke out there can't afford these things, can't try to live forever.
But I can because I have all this power. You know, Vladimir Putin is in that group. He's trying, he believes in all that stuff.
You know, Brian Johnson, I just read an article, he's now come down with some disease that I don't know if it's going to kill him, but it's like... making him aware that all of his interventions are coming at a cost in a way. So it's a belief that I've done so well, I can solve everything.
And why not solve the problem of death itself, you know? And then if I live longer, I can make more money and I can do all these other things. It's so empty.
It's so devoid of anything. That's why it's like, how can people... who are so smart and intelligent, be so incredibly stupid?
You know, I mean, first of all, so my mother, God bless her, is 99, and in two and a half months, she's going to turn 100, and she's going to make it the way she's going. But every single one of her friends has died, right? You know, she has me and my sister, but that's about it.
All of her friends are gone. All of her relations are gone. She can't hear very well.
Her seeing's going. She's doing okay, but your body's going to decay at some point, and you're going to have to deal with it. And even if you prolong your life for another 10, 20, 30 years, you're going to be alone.
You're not going to have any of your friends around. Your wife will have died well before you, unless she's also taking the same things as you. It's like, it's not intelligent.
It's not thinking at all. You know, I can understand the impulse to be healthy. I feel like that.
And I'm doing things so that I can live a good life. What matters is not living forever. What matters is living well.
And living well is to have energy, to, you know, to have your senses still there, to have your brain still functioning, to be able to exercise and move. That I can understand. And that's...
part of a deep movement, and today there's so many things available that can help you live well. But to live forever, I just don't understand it. I mean, at some point you have to die, and at some point you're going to welcome the sense of death.
You're going to welcome not having to deal with anything anymore, being free of everything. It comes as a relief. And so, I don't know.
I don't get it. I find it... deeply stupid and in some ways kind of repulsive because it goes against nature it goes against everything dies everything passes and the impermanence of the world in in the buddhist zen sense of the world is what makes the world beautiful you know like there's the famous cliche in japan of the cherry blossoms the cherry blossoms bloom for 10 days in the year, I don't know, something like that.
And those 10 days, all the Japanese go and witness the cherry blossoms because they're so beautiful. But if they bloomed 365 days a year, nobody would be interested in them. It's the impermanence of things that makes us love people, that makes us love our pets, that makes us love our spouse, that makes us love being alive.
I can't understand it. It baffles me. It's arrogant.
Yeah, it's interesting because if you live forever, it kind of makes life feel mundane. It's like, why do anything at all when you can do it a million years from now? It's fascinating what you said about Brian Johnson there.
It reminds me of chapter nine in your book. You talk about the concept of the daemon, a second self inside of you that watches you and sometimes can punish you for straying off your path. It's funny reading that chapter because last time we spoke with each other, I told you about a paralysis that I'd had where my body had taken over.
The doctors couldn't find a reason for it. And I kind of had hinted that I thought it was connected to something spiritual, like maybe I was doing something wrong in my life at the time. How old were you?
This was when I was 19 and 21. Wow. So I thought it was going to come back recently, but it didn't.
And what is it? Do you know? Does it have a name?
They tried to give it a name the first time. The second time I didn't even go to the doctor, but I was paralyzed for like, I want to say 18 days. Really?
Like paralyzed as in needed help to get up and walk and I could stand, but I would walk very slowly, but I couldn't like lift my arms, that kind of thing. And I'd felt it come back recently, but I think I... like, I don't know how to explain this, maybe embraced whatever I thought it was that was causing it and it kind of faded away, which was interesting.
But I want to ask on the concept of the daemon, what do you think is the spiritual significance of your stroke? Maybe the non -physical answer. Well, it's weird because It's irrational, but it feels like it happened for a purpose.
So I can explain how I go through some details. So the stroke occurred on August 18. And I had finished the laws of human nature in May.
And it took me five, six years. It was very... intense book and it exhausted me.
I remember afterwards feeling like I could die. I'm so depleted. I slowly recovered.
And then I went to New York for a meeting about the publicity for the book. I forgot my blood pressure medication at home for some reason. And I was drinking coffee, which I normally don't drink.
And so I got back from New York and my blood pressure was getting higher. I wasn't aware of it. And then, as you say, I was taking a walk in Griffith Park, and that wasp stung me right here.
Now, if you know, like, you're walking up a hill and there's a wasp, if there had been just a slight gust of wind, it would have missed me, right? But for it to hit me like that, that's, you know, the odds are against it. It hit me there.
Then a week later... I develop this insane rash. Everything turns red like an allergic reaction.
Unbearable. I can't sleep. They give me a drug which has a steroid in it, which raises my blood pressure yet again.
And then, of course, the stroke happens a week later in exactly the point where the wasp had stung me. Now, I can't say for sure that one caused the other. It could just have been a coincidence, but it seems very suspicious.
Anyway. The point of my story is I was driving my car when I had my stroke. My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, was sitting next to me.
95 % of the time, I'm not with her. I could have been asleep in bed. I could have been swimming.
I could have been hiking. I could have been in my office working on my own. I could have been driving by myself.
The fact that she was actually there, saved my life. So if it had happened at any other moment, I would be dead right now, okay?
Then it affected the right side of my brain, which left my ability to speak, to have language, left my brain reasonably intact so that I could write another book. So you start getting the eerie feeling. that somehow these things lined up for a purpose.
Now, as I said, it could be completely irrational. You can't explain it. But the fact that it happened in that sequence, where it was all lining up, because my girlfriend, my wife now, often would say, she was often worried that I was going to die because I lived kind of recklessly with my hiking, my adventures, the things that I would do for physical distraction.
You know, I could have easily been dead and I wouldn't have been able to write this book. It seemed to line up for me to write the damn book, you know? And I had that feeling in the ambulance that took me home from the hospital where I decided to write the book.
I felt this is a sign that you were meant to write this. You were given another life so that you could share these ideas. And it's kind of grandiose of me, I suppose.
But I really feel like the book has a purpose to help people, to help people who feel lost, who feel kind of tight and closed inside themselves, who need a feeling of something greater to engage them with them. You're only alive once. And to feel that intensity that I felt after my stroke, I felt like there was a purpose behind it.
The book has a mission. And so it's not like any of my other books where I felt that so deeply. And so in an odd way, I do feel like there was some kind of strange purpose for me to write the book.
Did you feel as though your daemon was punishing you? Or did you feel as though perhaps it was setting up you to have the type of experience? that would allow you to write something like this for people to understand well the daemon is for me is something that um so the concept of it to to understand for the audience is that listeners according to the ancient greek tradition when you were born the gods have given you this daemon which is kind of like a soul that's crafted for you as an individual that marks who you are as distinct from anybody else.
And they gave it to humans because humans have no direction, no purpose. They don't know what they're doing. They're crazy.
And this daemon is going to guide you through life. And it's a voice. And when you hear that voice and it tells you, this is right, great things happen to you.
But when you don't hear the voice, Terrible things will happen to you. It's what makes you different from anybody else.
So my daemon, since I was a child, was about words and language and being a writer. And I didn't have success until I was about 39, maybe even 40 with my 48 loss of power. I had gone through...
Many years of no success, of being kind of a failure, of wandering through life, of never knowing what I really was meant to do. But I never gave up because the daemon was always telling me, you're a writer, you're a writer, eventually something will happen. It made me not give up.
It was telling me this is my purpose in life, right? And then as I start writing the books, the daemon is kind of guiding me towards different ideas. And so you could say in some ways, I'd always been interested in the sublime.
You can say in some ways that this was the moment that it was telling you, now you need to write this book because it's very important. So in some ways, I don't know if you can't say it set up the accident, but it was guiding me to writing this book in a moment of deep pain and deep trauma. That's fascinating.
Yeah.
Like looking at all the different religions and religious traditions, it seems like there's a common theme of like a voice inside the head guiding you. That's right. Chapter three of your book, you cover the best kept secret of the ancient world.
Great philosophers like Plato, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius were initiated into a religious group and faced death if they revealed what was happening inside. Why did the greatest philosophers in history... Practice dying.
Well, there's a belief Socrates had this idea that death is the origin of all philosophy. Because being aware of your mortality makes you question, why? Why am I alive?
What is the meaning? What is the purpose behind my life? But in the book, I say that to think about death is not the same as to feel death.
So, in the 18th chapter of my Human Nature book, I talk about death as a concept, the philosophy of how to confront your mortality, how to live better by being aware of it, but it was a thought. And then I had the experience of death, which was not a thought, which was very powerful and emotional. So, I don't think you can think your way into confronting your death in a way that's powerful and meaningful because We're emotional creatures and our thoughts just keep changing within our stream of consciousness.
And you might tell yourself, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die. But then you're distracted by a million other things. But when you feel death, there's no more distraction.
It's in your body and it changes you. The Eleusinian Mysteries was this very, it's a mystery and... People who are initiated, it's a very ancient ritual that goes back to probably 1000 BC.
In ancient Greece, it was originally an agricultural ritual, but it was a mystery. And to reveal the mystery, you would be punished by death. So to this day, we don't know exactly what happened.
In fact, we don't know much at all. But through a lot of research, I and other people have been able to recreate what probably happened. But the point of the mystery was to make you feel like you were dying, to take you to the brink of death, and to make you feel like you were then reborn.
And everything that was done was engineered in that fashion. And I describe in the story how it does that, how the walk to the actual palace, the temple where you undergo the ritual, and how that was designed to make you feel emotional and weak and vulnerable. And how at some point there was a hood placed over you and you were in this darkness and you felt like you had entered the underworld.
They did everything to make you feel like you had died. And then at some point, they gave you a drink that was probably laced with a drug. Some people speculate it was some kind of hallucinogenic drug, but it was probably a poppy seed, probably opium.
Anyway, it made you feel like something so powerful had happened to you that when you came out of the mystery, you felt like, I am reborn. The world is not the same, right? And so...
Marcus Aurelius and Romans and all famous, most famous ancient Greek writers went through this mystery. And they felt like it was the most powerful experience they have ever been through. And they will describe it that way, but they won't tell you what happened.
So the puzzle for me was, everybody who went through it says it was the most profound experience, but they don't tell you what it was. So I tried. And other people have tried to kind of get a sense of what that could be.
But the point is, in the ancient world, there were a lot of rituals that were designed to make you feel like you had died. Indigenous cultures have initiation rituals, particularly for young men at the age of 18 or 19, something, I don't know, exact age changes. They would literally make you feel like you'd been buried alive, that you'd been abandoned, that you were thrown into a pit, that terrible things were going to happen to you.
They would physically torture you and put you in freezing cold water to the point where you felt like you were going to die. They would take you out. You felt like you were superhuman and you've now been initiated into a new world, into a new spiritual realm.
Dying is much more powerful than philosophizing about death. It literally changes how you see everything. And I tell people, my stroke altered my brain and my physiology in a way where I don't see things the same way.
The world looks differently to me. It feels differently to me. Probably because of the damage to the right side of my brain, I'm also less in control of my emotions, which is something that happens to people with bright brain strokes.
But the feeling of death changes you physically. The world looks differently, it feels differently. And that's what people said who'd gone through this mysteries.
Everything looked differently, everything felt differently. The experience of death changed me, right? And it's very, very powerful.
Final chapter of the new book on death itself. I try to take you through a death ritual in which I lead you through feeling your own body dying. It's the very end of the book.
And from all of my research and from my own experience, all the sensations that you could possibly have. I give you an exercise where you can lie down in a room and literally go through the whole process. Can you do it for me?
Can you walk me through my own death? You basically have to lie down in a room by yourself and it should be somewhat dark. It can't be completely dark, but the shades should be drawn, right?
You can see things around you, but it's dark. And then I take you through this feeling. of your body sinking and how things are leaving.
So you get a feeling like things are disappearing. The things that are near you are getting further and further away, right? And then you feel this heaviness in your body and you feel like you're being pushed into the ground and it's very powerful force and it's pushing you deeper and deeper and deeper.
And it's like you're entering this dark sack. that you're being thrust inside of. And at a certain point, you feel like you've separated from something, right?
And then I have you kind of imagining, because all of this is in your imagination, mind you. right but you are lying on the ground but you're imagining these things you're imagining looking at yourself from above down on your own body like you've left your body i take you through a process where i'm trying to get you to leave your body you're leaving it's getting the sensations are so heavy and deep that your mind leaves the body itself right it separates and as you look down on your body you see yourself as somebody who's already died okay and then i'm missing some of the steps so excuse me jack i i can't remember everything that goes on but at some point it's over and then i have you walk outside but you are still thinking that you're dead right you've you're now alive but you're a ghost you're dead and you're walking in the world and you're seeing the world for the last time And you're seeing it through the eyes of someone who is dead or dying.
And you're seeing the birds and the trees and the people for the last time. And then finally you return home and you realize that you are still alive. I try and design it so that it feels very powerful and emotional.
You're taken inside of it. And if you follow the instructions. and you let yourself feel the things that I'm telling you to feel, you will reach a moment where you will feel that powerful sensation of being pushed down, which is something I experienced.
You will feel that sense of separation, of the body and the mind splitting. You will feel that sensation of looking at things with transformed eyes, that things don't look and feel the same. And then I'm hoping that in the days to come, It will linger in your head.
And then the beauty of it is that you can go through this again and again and again whenever you need to, whenever you need to remind yourself of this process. Other writers have written similarly, and I can suggest some books that you can read that can take you through that process as well. But that's how I ended the book, so that you can have the real experience instead of just the thought and make it as alive.
Of course, it's frightening and it's meant to be very frightening. You know, my wife, when she read it, she goes, ah, I almost can't read it. It's almost too strong.
But the point of it is, is that at the end of this whole thing, everything looks different. Everything looks transformed in your eyes. If you can imagine going outside and looking at the world, knowing that in an hour you're dead, everything will look differently to you.
right? Suddenly you'll be noticing things. It'll have a charge.
It'll have an intensity. Well, you have the power to do that now while you're still alive. And that's what I'm trying to give you.
That's beautiful. I know you don't have that material in front of you, but I think that was a great explanation. And it was interesting hearing your spoken version of it.
I know it's more about the feeling, but what's the one thing you can only... experience after pretending that you're dead so it was based on my own experience then based on a lot of my research of commonalities that people experience as they're dying and so every time i wrote about something i was trying to to feel it in a way and get inside of the the emotion it didn't bring me back to my own stroke only in that to be able to write something You have to have a little bit of distance.
But I don't need to go through that exercise because I live it. I know that I was given a reprieve, able to live again. So every morning I meditate.
And at the end of every meditation, I look up and I go, I've been granted one more day of life. This could be my last day. Look how insanely beautiful it is and how lucky you are.
And so I go through it every single morning with my meditation. And I'm aware of it every single day as I am aware of how lucky I am just to simply be here. Do you fear death at this point?
Well, what I fear is being incapacitated and feeling like I'm... I have no more control, like I'm in a hospital, and I don't have my brain functioning the way it functions. I fear that, and I want to keep my levels of energy and stuff, but I don't fear death itself.
At some point, sometimes I feel like, God, it would be such a relief, and I could almost welcome it. Um, because life could be so difficult sometimes and, um, it's hard to explain, but, uh, I have, it takes me like 20 minutes to get dressed in the morning. I can't do certain things with my left hand to go walk from one side of the house to the other side takes like minutes as opposed to a few seconds.
And it makes you like, Oh, God, I have to do that? It takes me forever to button a shirt.
Oh, God. You get so impatient, and then moments you go, it'll end. All their problems will end.
That doesn't seem so bad at such moments like that. But I'm not somebody who ever would commit, I'm not at that point at all. It's just, it doesn't seem like something to fear anymore.
It seems like, ah, it's like a rest. I get to rest. Of course, I'll be resting forever, but wow, yeah, it's not so bad to feel it like that way.
So I don't fear, but I fear being dependent and losing, you know, the little bit of independence that I have. Robert, you've been working on your book for, you said seven years. Yeah.
And I've called it your swan song. Yeah. The last full length.
book you'll be known for. Is that right? I think so.
I think so. If this is the last thing Robert Greene ever teaches the world in this way, after 30 years and tens of millions of books being sold, read by people worldwide, I want to ask if all you had was just the next three minutes. What's the one thing you want people to know about being alive?
Well, I have a chapter called Awaken to the Strangeness of Being Alive. And you take it for granted. You know, like I took for granted my life being able to swim and hike and everything.
Being alive is actually very, very strange. And I want you to awaken literally to that sensation of how strange it is to be alive. When I was a child, and still to this day, I always go, how did the world end up the way it is?
You know, we live in a world of technology and we're so far removed from nature. That we don't think of how strange it is that there are plants and trees. As I mentioned, we live with a blue sky with clouds, which who knows may not exist on any other planet.
That something like giraffes evolved on planet Earth. That there are things that fly in the sky that defy that level of gravity. right?
That we look up at the stars in the sky, the same stars that people were looking at 10 ,000, 20 ,000 years ago. It's strange. It's like a journey.
It's like a drug trip that you're on, that to be alive is like being drunk. It's like being on a drug. It's so strange and so weird that the world looks the way it is, that you have a body that has blood circulating through the heart.
All these things operate without your... controlling them. They just operate naturally.
How did that ever evolve? Do you ever stop to think how the eye, how the optic nerve evolved, the first animal that could see something, and that how intricate our eyes are and the relationship of our eyes to our brain? Do you ever think about your body, about how strange it is that it...
can do all these things, that it can repair itself after a wound. You can have a cut and then the cut disappears. You can break a bone and then the bone heals itself.
It is goddamn strange all these things happen. So stop taking it for granted and look at your life as this weird, wondrous, awesome thing. And every day should be like that.
Every day should strike you as, I'm alive. It's like the weirdest thing in the world. You know, that's what I want people to take, to actually begin to look at the world in that way, because it'll change your experience of everything.
Right. What was interesting to me about your book was at the end, it didn't end with your words. It ended with a quote.
Who was that quote from again? It's like a Persian poet, Kabir. I wanted to ask.
If you could write one quote from everything you've read on your gravestone, what would it be? The quote that just came to my brain right now is a quote from Shakespeare called The Rest is Silence. And I think it's from Hamlet.
And it just is like, all that's left is silence. There's nothing else you can possibly say. That's all there is.
Because I've always been fascinated by things that kind of surpass or transcend language, the ability to put them into words. And so the idea that all that's left is silence, there's nothing else to say, would be an appropriate thing to be on my tomb. There's not a lot to say.
But yeah, Robert, where can people find this book? Well, I believe it comes out on November 10th. So that's two and a half months away.
But you can pre -order it on Amazon. I encourage people to pre -order it. And coming up, we'll be giving you bonuses for pre -ordering the book.
But it'll be available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and bookstores as well, but starting on November 10th. And I can say one thing. I worked on it for seven years alone and in my head, and now I'm so anxious and excited for other people to react to it and read it.
It'll be weird for me, but even if you hate it, I'll be very excited for people to be actually exposed to this thing. I really don't delight it, but that might be my bias. Well, everyone, this has been your guest, Robert Green.
This is the Jack Neal Podcast. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much for having me, Jack.
I really enjoyed it. Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much.
Thanks, man. I appreciate it.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The cold open sells Epstein and power, but the episode is really about a wasp sting on a hill in Griffith Park that became a blood clot, then a stroke, then seven years of writing a book by hand. What the guest brought back is a claim about perception: the world you experience is a construction, and almost nothing in modern life is designed to let you see past it.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
Cluely founder Roy Lee lays out the fastest overlooked ways to make money with AI right now, then spends the rest of the episode on loneliness, simulation theory, and the health risks he's taking to win faster.
Owen Benjamin, the most de-platformed man in comedy, explains how charged words smuggle false premises past your guard — and why the master spell is convincing you that you are not enough.
00:32
01:01
01:32
02:06
02:38
04:38
06:05
08:45
10:09
13:45
15:44
17:45
18:45
19:53
21:11
21:35
23:01
24:18
25:35
27:14
28:59
33:51
36:37
39:31
40:00
40:16
42:29
44:21
46:08
46:57
47:42
50:01
52:11
53:25
54:35
55:44
58:36
60:15
62:08
62:28
64:41
66:26
68:08
69:06
69:57
70:50
71:19
71:56
74:51
77:17
81:25
82:59
84:53
86:02
87:28
89:38
90:11
90:59
92:37
94:04
96:17
96:32
97:08
98:32
99:53
101:26
102:36
103:40
106:05
107:17
108:36
110:13
111:35
113:43
114:18
115:00
116:28
118:09
119:36
120:34
121:05
122:02
126:15
128:15
129:33
130:57
133:27
134:38
135:46
137:04
138:02
139:10
139:47
140:09
58:30
2:56:04
53:57
14:13
21:49
21:38