Robert Greene: "Nothing Is Real, And I Can Prove It!" Your Brain Creates A Fake World | Jack Neel

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, 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. I try to take you through a death ritual in which I lead you through feeling your own body dying. Can you 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, "Frobert Green, welcome to the Jack Neal podcast." Thank you so much for having Jack, my pleasure. Yeah, it's great to have you back here. Ah, 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 are the most powerful people in the world fear the most? I think they fear losing their attention and becoming kind of forgotten and neglected. 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 a 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 an attention to you anymore. I remember I'm not in that league, so don't get me wrong, but I remember I would be early on with my books, I'd be on national television, that 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, and 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. While 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. So, 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, you know, doing activities, climbing, hiking, to have that all of that taken away from me like 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. 'Cause 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 can't do this anymore. But I kept going, I kept going, I 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 with what I went through. But I accomplished something and I expressed something very deep inside of me. And so kind of gives my life sort of a meaning and a purpose. Right. And this is just my own curiosity, but I do feel like you produced a different piece of art, like a different piece of writing, given that you hammered it instead of typed it. It's a great question. In my other books, I often would handwrite the first draft and then I would type it in and it would be kind of quick. Here, I hand wrote, but when I came time to editing it, because my first drafts of everything I write is absolutely terrible. It's just horror if 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 in edit. And now 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 could 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. It made it 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 that I think is particularly relevant to kind of how everyone feels right now. You said, "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 the 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 carining 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 so 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 than 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 madness, like everything's moving so quickly. I think I think has a very strange effect on the psychologically. And I read something in the New York Times a couple weeks ago that kind of stunned me, which is, it was an article about antidepressants and it said one in six Americans aren't antidepressants. And 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. It's not like antidepressants or medication is something new. People were meditating themselves, even back then. But I think there's a different feel to it now. And it's not just people in 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 a future is bleak or dark or chaotic, I think it has a powerful psychological effect, and you're not necessarily a healthy effect on you. I definitely get that sense right now, I, as well, that there's so much uncertainty. And 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, I, on August 17th, 2018, your 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 to 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. You know, 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, and 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 the 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 this 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." 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 have had near-death experiences, and as I have to qualify it, 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 tranquility and like oneness. You've finally gotten rid of all of your anxieties and fears, and this is 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, where 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 let my girlfriend who's now married to, it was like, the nurse has actually thought that 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 that 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 that you have to care, but at the moment it was like totally exhilarating. In chapter five of your book, you talk about Joe 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 it was before. It was just like, God, the sky is so blue, it's so beautiful. And trees and clouds, how I remember thinking, God, how weird clouds are. If you think about clouds, what are they? You know, it's the strange. You know, I've thought since then probably I know other planet are there like Scott, 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. You know, like, 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's like, 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 like to sleep. discover the sublime. So as you say, I was kind of recovering, but 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 in his near death experience. Essentially, he floated above the earth, reached a stone temple and 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 "flat and fake" like theater props. Do you think when we die, we're actually waking up? 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 design these with L-thienine and Infinity PX, so I can get done with my work without a mid-day crash. And 90% of people who use these saw real focus improvement, and they're backed by Dak Prescott, Joe Burrow, and a hundred plus pro football players. Personally, my favorite flavor is Wintergreen because it makes your breath smoke good. Ultra is the ultimate guilt-free pouch, delivering instant focus and mental clarity without caffeine or nicotine. And new customers can use CoJack to get 15% off at TakeUltra.com. That's TakeUltra.com. Use CoJack 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 Neil sent you. But anyway, guys, back to the podcast. I think so. I think so very much. There is 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. Like, more, 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 Bulti 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 Bulti Taylor. She started seeing the world before the brain constructs, and 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 are 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 the talks about the dying process. The consciousness that you have as you're dying, they believe these Tibetan Buddhists. That is the world as it is. As I describe it, you're seeing the world as it is pure consciousness without words, without all the human things that we describe 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 dies 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, I 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. Chill, bolted 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, muleing, little bundle of nerves and needs and you're just 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 don't have, 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. It's not it's not 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, you know, 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 see 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 eye. 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 eye 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 of 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 it's that you've lost it and it's back and deep buried deep in your mind and you, that feeling that you've lost it, you want to go back to it. If you had never had that childhood, you would never know which 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 were 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 for when you were a child. its experience in 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, they were able to like 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 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, 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, there are a lot of skeptics around who believe that it's, you know, it's just hallucinations. There's nothing real. But the Pamela Reynolds Lowry story is often quote because it's very, very hard to explain it away, okay? 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 tried 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 could, they were softer at the top of her brain, could see all the way down to the stem, because her aneurysm was on the stem, which was, made it the most dangerous of all. It was very deep down. He could see all the way down through, because there wasn't any activity to like disrupt that, to have a clear picture, and then he could put a clamp on the aneurysm and save her life essentially, okay? 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 be deaf surgery, and suddenly, in the middle of it, she wakes up, and she approaches 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, okay? 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 lying, she starts communing with her dead, 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 into back into her body, it's like it's all freezing, and it's like if she dove into a pool of like one of those cryogenic pools, right? And as she's back into her body, she hears the music, this eaglesong hotel, California, right? Blaring, and she's good. 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 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 it, but she remembers jumping twice. It's impossible. How could she know 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 at the end. She knew exactly when they were playing it at 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 a specialist, who was 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 its sins. 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 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, but that's not how I look at the world. I don't see things as that mystical, and I don't believe that God is controlling all of this. But it opens up ideas that we can't explain, mysteries, things. Think 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 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 no ex-possible explanation. Some people said maybe when she entered the room, she saw the instruments. But the doctors 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 looked 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. In-ear-death experiences, over the last eight years, decade of you doing podcast, 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? Alright, so imagine you need relationship advice, and you ask your friend who hasn't had a girlfriend since COVID and has about three matches on his dating apps despite paying for premium. Like, why would you do that? There's a reason you wouldn't ask that guy to handle your love life. Just like there's a reason that Morgan and Morgan as America's largest personal injury law firm, not all law firms are the same, hire the wrong one and you might be beat before you even start. Morgan and Morgan has been fighting for the people for over 30 years. years. They've recovered over $30 billion for their clients. And hiring them is like hiring your own army to go into battle for you. They've got over a thousand lawyers and a hundred offices nationwide. If you're ever injured by someone else's negligence, you deserve to be paid. And their fee is free unless you win. So if you're ever injured, you can check out Morgan and Morgan. For more information, you can just go to forthepople.com/jackneil or scan the QR code on screen. Again, that's forthepople.com/jackneil. 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, where 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. We like to, and here I am talking about everything on your podcast, but to talk and analyze everything, 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 in 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 the future podcast. But at the moment, I really still don't know. I like to say that there's some people who say, "Oh, there's no such thing. You die." But how did 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 experience is like Pamela Lowry Reynolds. She actually saw like her uncle Jean, she loved who 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 would be amazing. I mean, I, you know, I miss my father deeply, you know, it was very, 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, you know. But what one wishes isn't necessarily what happens, you know. 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 the 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 deja vu is? You know, there's 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 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 it in there in a chapter on history that we actually have the power the past can become the present and the future we 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 deja vu is like that kind of sensation like the past and the present are almost the same. You know, 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 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 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 Aldo's Huxley in his book Thor's 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 Aldo's 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 Aldo's 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 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 an 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. Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new groupie setting mist from Maybelline, New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day-come-view grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue, just plum, dewy, hydrated skin. That still feels like your skin. Try new groupie setting mist from Maybelline, New York. Maybe it's Maybelline. Right. Would you consider like a deja vu experience to be within the sublime dreams? I know you've given the comparison of like looking at some grander 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 a deja vu is, what's so mad 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 have talked 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 of 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 learned 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 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 in 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 mateland. 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 mateland, 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 settings, tastes, smells, and you remember your earliest childhood memory, because you're not that 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 too, 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 a band in building. I must have 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. The abandoned building and all the shadows. That's like my earliest memory. That's a funny one abandoned building for yourself. 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 half like a dog or a cat or a bird or something. And 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 when you look at the eye and you look at it and you try and go inside it and look 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, I mean, their primates, primates haven't been around as long as, at least the chimpanzees and grill, 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 a cat, everything is motion and movement. That's how it hunts. It's constantly aware of motion, right? It's obsessed with it. Okay, 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. You know, they can sense your emotions from these chemicals that you're, these things that you're emitting, right? They have this uncame. any 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, you know, butterflies are absolutely insane if you thought about what happens. But we don't, that's our, that's how we need to wake up. That's the simulation. We're not experiencing this even with our own pets. Right. We're just looking at a dog and think dog or cat. We think what we do is we turn them into humans. We have through promarifies 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? Look, 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 and 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 a thousand dollars. And if you want to find out if you qualify, just take a short quiz at jacknail.com/morgan. Again, that's jacknail.com/morgan or you can scan the QR code on screen to take a short quiz to find out if you qualify for a thousand dollars in potential recoveries. 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 I, for instance, Instagram. Now only in the last three or four years have I started really paying attention to Instagram. And the feed is unbelievable. You know, these videos are, are addicting. They're, 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 the 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. And I realized the reason it works is because it operates on your emotions. It's not a cautious, 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 are 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 super power. It's what made us who we are. The fact that unlike an animal, and I 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? How do I protect myself? Where do I get food? We developed 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 circuit. The circuit is bringing short circuit, you know, 20 times in a 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 in 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 programs with their algorithms. They understand the power that this has. They know what they can do with it. And they're completely have no consciousness 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 to now to write the essay for them. But 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. It is not effective. It's not powerful. And 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 all that stuff, wouldn't have the power that it has, we'd be able to control it. In fact, we probably wouldn't be very interested. Because it plays on our emotions, we have to pay attention. And because we are, we think of ourselves as rational beings, 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 like 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 and Instagrams kind of pass say 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 ten 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 of post about how to correct your 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 and it's 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 supply 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, you know, 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, but no. 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 soap and all anymore. Gen Z goes to therapy more than any other previous generation, but Gen Z struggles with pretty much every mental health element more than every generation. Do you think modern therapy is making this generation worse? Like why does your brain need pressure? Well, some there's a famous psychologist named James Hillman. He thinks that and he's a psychotherapist. Do you think psychotherapist 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 immeshes us deeper and deeper 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 and deeper and meshed into me, into myself and to my world and to 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 that's insane, that we live in it in a universe with planets and stars and sciences 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. She's could deeper and deeper and deeper into your whole. 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 at 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 and 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 his, 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 so, 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 all of the climb itself? Do you think it was like the pressure of death? Well, first of all, 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, 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, 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 issue, almost like flying in the air. You're getting higher and higher, 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, 15,000. You get to that height. The oxygen level is changing. If you've ever been in an environment where there's less, 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 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. This is a surprise. Yeah. 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 this place really high up in the woods. I can't remember what part of California 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'm so sorry. This is the dumbest thing I've ever done. It was the most stressful situation. But when I look back at it, I really enjoyed that experience because it was like. so afraid of a bear killing us like we feel like we're living again in that moment. But yeah, I just reminded me of that. But in chapter seven, you write about love, 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 channel because it is your generation. So everything that I have is from the outside and it 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 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 of being alone, it's like being 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 can involve with someone, the more painful that is. And so if you just do the marketplace version of love, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, 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 of months, they break up. But it's not like being with someone for two, three, four, five years and breaking up, but 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, 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. And the reason I think that it's such a powerful experience is that 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 transcendence, 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 to connected deeply. Love is 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 individuality, your self 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. To understand how important that particular experience is, I 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 like, why is it so important to love a real person? You kind of said that you go 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 got 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. 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. The traction was in need that was so powerful that 12 you crazy at times, so those hormones are churning up. 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 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 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 have a 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, this goes too far. How many young men you said one out of three? Yes. Right. In what age group? So 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. But even that, my wife uses AI a lot for questions like about law and medicine and things. I'm not into it, but 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 addictive 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're 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. I was seeing the world burn itself up right now, right? 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. that 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. You know, 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 that 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 Teal 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 and et cetera, 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. But on another level, it's just information, it's just data. It doesn't really feel 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 awe, 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, blah, blah, it's these cookie cutter things that AI have devised at a very clever, they're just marketing things that are trying to get me to give my money up. Do 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 all 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, like see it in almost religious way that they are like 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 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, you know, 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 is 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 loss 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 realities, actually who we are, all our words, 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, and to 800 feet, and to several thousand miles above Earth. We 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, 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, no, they're all feeding his ego, his sense of grandiosity. When you get to that point, you no longer are aware of consequences. 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. 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, Dave Charney, he was of brilliant entrepreneurs, 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. But it's not a question of intelligence, I imagine Bill Gates has a very high IQ, right? As to some of these other people, the gnome 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. It's that sense of, 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, 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 road tickets to the nicks. I can get you that because I've been befriended with Mr. Dolan, who owns the New York nicks. 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 underaged young women, you know? He knew what was your interest, what your weaknesses, also that the law about finding your thumb screw, 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, um, I forget what the word is peptide or whatever, um, one of those ins, baby things that they get from you that they put inside your body, 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. I'll come to a party here at my townhouse in Manhattan and I'll connect you to all right. I take the next plan and I meet him there. And now I'm involved in Jeffrey Epstein's world. And now it's publicized. And now my reputation is Robert Green is ruined because of that. I could see myself falling for that. I mean, maybe my weariness would have done some research about Jeffrey Epstein. And by the time it was past 2008 or 9, he'd 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. You know, maybe I'll just find this Harvard guy on my own. But I could see what 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. I think that's a great assessment. And which of the 48 laws of power do you think led to his downfall, Epstein's? And victory no end to stop, law number 47, I believe. When you've had some success, which, I mean, if you'd 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, if 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, no one to stop, no one thinks they're 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 has 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 position he was in me and me. I guess so. Like, 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 like 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 and the women who were the victims of his events that at some point, it was going to bite him and 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 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. I'm always aware of my reputation of something I could say or something I could do that would ruin the whole thing. How is it that they're 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, but 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 touch on this a bit earlier, but Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Brian Johnson, they're all spinning hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions of dollars on cellular reprogramming, blood work, biohacking. Why do you think the most powerful people on earth are obsessed with living forever? Well, I don't know. They get a feeling that we talked about earlier, like technology can solve everything, right? And so who deep down in their heart wants to die unless you're suicidal, right? We all would like to live, and not maybe not forever, but longer. So I have the money, I'm in a tech business, I can fund whatever, and I'm different from other people. It's like a mark of distinction, of superiority. You know the hour. 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, right? All of her friends are gone, all of her relations are gone. She can't hear very well her seeing is going. She's doing okay, but your body is 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, you know, well before you unless she's also taking the same things as you, it's like, it's not until 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, you know, to have your senses still there, to have your brains 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 we 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 can come 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 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 ten days in the year, I don't know, something like that. And those ten 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, it 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? As fascinating what you said about Brian Johnson there, it reminds me of chapter nine in your book, you talk about the concept of the Damon, 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'd 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. This was when I was 19 and 21, so I thought it was gonna come back recently, but it didn't. And what is it, do you know, is 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, you 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 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. Yeah. But I want to ask, on the concept of the Damon, 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 don't 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 gone, 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 developed 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 and exactly the point where the wasp 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, okay? 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 the 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 and distraction. 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 and 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 Damon 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 Damon is for me. It is something that so the concept of it to understand for the audience is that listeners According to the ancient Greek tradition when you were born the gods have given you this Damon 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 Damon's gonna 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 Damon 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 I've never knowing how what I really was meant to do But I never gave up because the Damon was always telling me you were a writer your 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 Damon is kind of Guiding me towards different ideas and so you could say in some ways. I Had 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's 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, I 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. That's right. Ah Chapter three of your book You cover the best kept secret of the ancient world great philosophers like Plato, Siserobe Marcus Aurelius were initiated into a religious group and faced death if they were viewed 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 questioned 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 It our thoughts just keep changing within our stream of consciousness and you might we'll tell yourself I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna 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 elucinian mysteries was as very it's a it's a mystery and People who are initiated it goes it's a very ancient ritual that goes back to probably a thousand 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 I threw a lot of research eye and other people be 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 it was done was engineered in that fashion. I describe in the story how it does that how it the walk to the actual palace the temple where you're under Undergo the ritual and how that was designed to make you feel emotional and weak and vulnerable and how at some point you were There was a hood placed over in your in this darkness and you felt like you would enter 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 speculated it was some kind of a loosening generic drug, but it was probably a poppy seed probably opium Anyway, it made you feel like something so powerful it 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 Arraileus and Romans and and all the famous plus 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 and They would literally make you feel like you've been buried alive that you had been abandoned that you were thrown into a pit That terrible things were gonna happen to you. They would physically torture you and bring you to the point Put you in freezing cold water to the point where you felt that you were gonna die. They would take you out You felt like you were superhuman and you've been now been initiated into a new world and to a new spiritual realm so this idea of A ritual that literally makes you feel like you're 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 gone through this mysteries Everything looked differently everything felt differently the experience of death changed me right and it's it's very very powerful and in my Final chapter of the new book on death itself. It's the very end of the book and I 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 your in a room and literally go through the whole process Can you do it for me? 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 the world 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 sac that you're 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 have 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 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'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's 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 emotionally 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 the 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, she goes, I almost can't read it. It's almost too strong. But the point of it 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 that'll have a charge. You'll have an intensity. Will 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, those. 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. You're 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 feel it in a way and get inside of 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 and I know that I saw 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, but look how insanely beautiful it is and how lucky you are. 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 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 because life could be so difficult sometimes and it's hard to explain, but 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 from one side of the house to the other side, it takes like minutes, this post 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. It doesn't seem so bad at such moments like that, but I don't, I'm not, I'm not somebody who ever would commit, but 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 depended 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, ah, it'll be known for, is that right? I think so. I think so. If this is the last thing Robert Green ever teaches the world and 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, "Awake into the strangeness of being alive." And you think it's, you don't, you take it for granted, you know, like I took for granted my life being able to swim and hike and everything. But being alive is actually very, very strange. And I want you to awake and literally to that sensation of how strange it is to be alive. When I was a child and still to the stay, 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 that, 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 it, a heart, all these things operate without you're 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 in 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 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 is 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. What was interesting to me about your book was at the end, it didn't end with your words, it ended with a quote, ah, 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 or what would it be the quote that just came to my brain right now is a quote from Shakespeare called the rest is silence Um, and I think it's from hamlet Hmm 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. Ah, but yeah, Robert Where can people find this book? Well, I believe it is comes out on November 10th So that's two and a half months away But you can pre-order it on Amazon. I encourage you able to pre-order it, but and there will be Coming up. We'll be giving you bonuses for pre-ordering the book But it'll be available on Amazon and Barnes and 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 got the light it, but that's might be my bias Well, everyone. This has been your guest Robert Green. This is the Jack Neil podcast. I appreciate you coming on. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Jack. I really enjoyed it Thank you so much. Thanks. I appreciate it