Access the Sublime & Live Your Best Life | Robert Greene | Andrew Huberman Transcript

Andrew Huberman interviews author Robert Greene on accessing the sublime in daily life

Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, speaks with Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, and his new book The Law of the Sublime.

Summary

Robert Greene joins Andrew Huberman to discuss his new book The Law of the Sublime, which Greene describes as his most personal work — written entirely by hand following a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Greene argues that the sublime is not an elite or extraordinary experience but is available in daily life to anyone willing to slow down, pay attention, and step outside the purely human social world. He contends that modern technology, social media, and the compulsion to report experiences in real time are actively blocking people's access to richer, more transcendent states of consciousness. Greene also discusses the love sublime — arguing that falling completely in love, with all its vulnerability and terror, is one of the most profound transcendent experiences available to humans — and connects the loss of religious and spiritual life to a broader cultural unraveling. The conversation ranges across neuroscience, childhood memory, time perception, near-death experiences, the hand-brain connection, and Greene's plans for future books, including a possible work of fiction about the tech world.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Introduction and the concept of the new book

Andrew Huberman: Welcome back, Robert Greene.

Robert Greene: Thank you, Andrew Huberman.

Andrew Huberman: I'm not shy about my adoration of your book Mastery. Long before I had a podcast, I recommended it to students in my courses related to biology and neuroscience when they would ask for book recommendations. I have a signed copy, thanks to you, on my shelf. I return to it often, and I'm thrilled you've written this new book, The Law of the Sublime. I'm so excited — I haven't read it yet because I just got it from you today. My question is pretty straightforward. If 48 Laws of Power was about how the world is constructed and how to navigate it, and Mastery was about mentorship and how to realize our unique gifts and potential, and Laws of Human Nature is about how we understand ourselves and others in the context of general principles — what is The Law of the Sublime about?

Robert Greene: It's about experience. It's about how you experience your day-to-day life — not in terms of success or power or dealing with other people, but just your sense of how you experience being alive and how you open yourself up to the strangeness of this world that we inhabit. I think a lot of our experience now, how we process our thoughts and emotions, is being programmed and controlled in ways we're not aware of.

I like to think of consciousness as a kind of mental space that we inhabit. I envision it in this book as a circle — although there are really no limits to our consciousness, this is a circle in which our thoughts move around within certain limits: our behavior, our emotions, what we think of the world, what we think of as reality. Within that circle, our experience of life can be constricted. Everything seems familiar. You'll have experiences that might stand out, but they're all still similar. You go on a vacation, you climb a mountain, you come back to your daily routines, and it doesn't really stick in you — not the way Maslow describes peak experiences that actually change you.

I'm interested in that level of experience that shakes you up, that gets you out of that circle, that makes you aware that there is another reality out there. I have a chapter in the book about how the brain constructs what we consider reality — how it constructs our perception of the world, constructs an ego, a self, and all these other things. But there's something else out there. There's another way of experiencing the world.

The sublime is something that lies outside that circle. I compare these points to doorways. The word "sublime" in Latin means "up to the threshold of a door" — sub limen, meaning a threshold. In these doorways to something outside the circle, you're moving closer and peering through, realizing there's something else that's not part of your daily experience. It shakes you up. It gives you a kind of shock. The sublime is a mix of pain and pleasure. The pain is that it's outside your comfort zone, not what you're familiar with. But the pleasure is the newness of it, the novelty, the excitement it generates.

When you were a child, when you were born, that circle was rather large because the world was so new and fresh and unfamiliar and you were excited about everything. Your imagination was animating everything around you. Then as you get older, it gets smaller and smaller, gets constricted and flat. You're not using your imagination. Everything gets kind of dead to you. I'm trying to enliven and alter your experience of life itself at its very roots, at the very roots of your consciousness.

Unlike any of my other books, each chapter ends with exercises you can use to bring the ideas I've introduced in that specific chapter into your daily experience. I don't want this to be an academic book about the sublime and the brain. I want it to be something you incorporate into your daily life.

Andrew Huberman: Do you march through these sorts of — I want to say "doors of perception," but that was —

Robert Greene: That was Huxley.

Andrew Huberman: That was Huxley, right. And he championed the use of LSD to get access to and go through some of those doors, and mescaline — he was heavily into mescaline. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about psychedelics and altering perceptual windows. But I think most people are very familiar with the fact that their daily life and their perceptions are very heavily constrained — certainly once we reach adulthood. Our experiences might not be mundane, but they're certainly repetitive. In the book, and just in general, are you a fan of accessing what you refer to as the sublime on a regular basis? Is this something we can do daily through micro-practices, or is there real value also in things that really take that sphere of everyday experience and turn it into a completely different shaped object?

Robert Greene: I think both. What happened to me — I did a lot of drugs when I was in my early twenties and late teens, and they had a lasting effect on me. I can remember taking one particular trip on peyote in the town of Mendocino, up on the coast in Northern California. I'll never forget the experience and how it altered how I look at life itself — the simplest things.

When I had the original concept for this book twenty years ago, I was going to do all of those things. I was going to take drugs, do ayahuasca, go to the Amazon, swim with dolphins, see chimpanzees in Gombe National Forest. Then I had my stroke. My stroke made it so that my near-death experience kind of brought the sublime back to me in a very real sense. I wanted to write this book, but I couldn't travel. I couldn't do any of the things I thought I could do. I could take the drugs, but it would be a little dangerous considering I can't walk very well and my balance is bad.

So sitting there in my office, how do I write this book without those kinds of experiences? I recalled that just after my stroke, sitting in the hospital bed the first day, trying to process what had happened to me, I was looking out the window and everything looked so different. It was as if I had just been born. Everything looked strange. The sky is blue — it's weird. Clouds are passing. I'm seeing birds. I'm seeing trees swaying in the wind. God damn. This world is insane. It is so beautiful. It is so marvelous. I've never noticed it before. It has this incandescence to it. Then that feeling faded, because it was the shadow of death that had come over me.

Then I'm home, and that feeling is kind of missing. I start looking out my window again and the feelings start coming back. I sit out in my backyard — which is not very large — and I'm seeing this whole world in the backyard. It's not the Amazon. It's not Africa. But it's filled with all these insects, all this life, flowers, trees. My point is the feeling starts coming over me that the sublime is part of our everyday life. It's everywhere around us.

You could look at this cup here in front of us. Normally we just see a cup that we use to drink out of. But in the sublime — and sometimes on drugs, and sometimes after a brush with death — you look at it and it's this weird shape, this funny color, this handle. It maybe even seems to be alive in some ways. It's got this material aspect to it, nothing to do with its use value. When you take drugs, even on cannabis, something goes off in your brain where you're looking at things as they are and not as their uses and functions. The colors and the shapes and the materials strike you just for what they are. And they did when you were a child.

Your body is the product of 800 million years of evolution. Your nervous system — the first eyes in the Cambrian explosion, when they first evolved eyes and optic nerves and a nervous system — it's inside your body. I just had surgery on my eye because I had a small cancerous melanoma there. The surgeon cut into it, had to take skin from my ear and replace it there. It's only ten days later and the skin is growing back. It's insane. It's miraculous what the body can do. The sublime doesn't have to be these extraordinary things. Your day-to-day life is filled with these quasi-miracles.

Perception, attention, and the practice of self-remembering

Andrew Huberman: Two weekends ago I was up at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. One of the founders, Michael Murphy, is now 96. He was describing — we don't know if it was a stroke or some other event, but he had a sort of blackout and fall recently. He's very clear-headed and fortunately still mobile. He was talking about the aftermath of that experience and how his sort of pixelation of the world was altered in some way that has now allowed him to appreciate all these different colors and shapes in the same environment he's spent so much time in. It matches very well what you described.

Robert Greene: And artists like Chuck Close, who had visual deficits that allowed him to do incredible art at a different kind of spatial scale. The famous example is the painter El Greco — with his odd shapes and how he figures the human body. It's so weird, like looking through a concave mirror. He had some kind of eye problem. There are lots of examples of artists like that.

Andrew Huberman: So it raises this question: to access the sublime, is it sufficient for us to just think about our current perceptions differently? Taking away drugs, taking away strokes — the level of perception I have now, my perceptual abilities to hear music a certain way, see the world a certain way, feel touch a certain way, they're constrained, but they're pretty vast. This is true for everybody. But I do have the option to think about them differently. Is that one portal into the sublime? Or do we actually need to change our default perception? Because what you described — or what Michael Murphy described — was forced upon them. You turned it into gifts, not the least of which is components of the book. But for most people, is there a portal to the sublime through just thinking about our current perception differently — sans drugs, sans brain events — just to decide, "I'm going to look at this mug differently," and have it produce some meaningful output?

Robert Greene: Yes. I talk in the book — there's a chapter I call the neuro-sublime, where I discuss how the brain constructs the world around us. I discuss Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke and what it did for her. But then there's this Armenian mystic named Gurdjieff — an amazing man at the turn of the twentieth century. He visited all of the most esoteric cults in the Middle East and the Far East because he had this idea that they were about to disappear and he wanted to glean all of their secrets and create a new kind of philosophy that would alter human consciousness.

He had this idea that what makes a human being human is our attention. An animal's attention is generally somewhat limited to what's in front of them, to their needs to survive. They're not looking up at the sky and wondering about what's going on. They're not thinking about what's on the other side of that mountain. We have the ability of this incredible attention. When we pay attention to something and focus on it, we alter our brain chemistry and something magical can happen.

He had this notion that people are just sleepwalking through life, that they're not awake. He said if a human being were truly awake, there would not be wars. We would not be killing each other. There would not be all this misery that we inflict on fellow humans. We're asleep. He had this exercise he calls self-remembering. You have an experience, a moment in life, and you focus on it deeply and you tell yourself you're going to remember it. What happened three years ago on a day in July? You'll never remember, because you were asleep. You weren't paying attention. There are moments in life where you're paying attention, where you get some kind of shock, and you remember it. He wants you to have that kind of focus every day.

He had this pupil named Ouspensky, a very famous Russian mystic who was deeply depressed, suicidal. He becomes a disciple of Gurdjieff and starts practicing this. He looks at a vase of flowers in his room, focusing and attending to it. "I'm remembering it. I'm seeing it. I'm here today. I'm looking at it." After thirty seconds, his mind wanders. He can't do it. But then after a minute, he notices that the flower starts looking different. The degree of his focus and attention on it — as he's telling himself, "I'm going to remember it in three years, it'll be stamped in my memory" — he gets better at it. Then he walks outside after months of practicing this, just looking at things, simple objects, and suddenly the houses look different to him. They look almost alive. Everything is intense. He's walking outside with this attention, this focus, and the world is altering.

Then suddenly he finds himself in a tobacconist on completely the other side of Moscow — or St. Petersburg, I don't remember which city — because what happened was he realized that at some moment he fell asleep and wasn't remembering things, and three hours later he was on the other side of town buying cigarettes. What he realized was that he had this intense focus where he was awake, and now it made him realize that normally in life you are asleep. We don't realize how asleep we are because we don't have that contrast to what it's like to be fully awake.

My point is it's an exercise that can literally alter your neurology in some way. It can alter how you perceive things. It doesn't require drugs. It requires this kind of intense focus. Meditation can have the same effect. I do meditation every morning. They've proven that meditation literally alters your brain. Your thoughts can alter the wiring of your brain. So you don't need drugs. Drugs are a wonderful gateway, and Huxley describes it beautifully. But there are practices among Tibetan Buddhists, Zen Buddhists, where they get similar effects through meditation.

Andrew Huberman: There's this wild finding in visual neuroscience that comes to mind. We assume that when we look at something, our perception of it is pretty stable. But there's this really cool set of experiments where they paralyze the eyes of people in a reversible way. You quickly find that if you look at something, they can perceive it and then it disappears, because our nervous system has our eyes move — these saccades, as you know. It's all about change. In the same way that you walk into a room and it smells really good and then the smell disappears — but it didn't disappear, you got habituation. This happens everywhere in the nervous system. And there's this wild finding that if you continue to have people look at the same location, the percept of what was there changes in a significant way. Of course the physical attributes of the thing didn't change, but the perception — the conversion of those photons into what we perceive, the abstraction of what's out there — changes.

I think it matches precisely with what you're describing. What's so incredible in the example you gave is that the person was able to maintain that shifted perception for long periods of time. It's almost like it enters the memory system. We can get back to the perception but also the state that we were in of being quote-unquote awake.

The mug, the vase, the flower — they're beautiful, certainly flowers, but in some sense they're trivial too. There's nothing inherently interesting about a mug until I start creating a story about it. So the question I have is: given how malleable our perceptions are, what quality of meaning is actually meaningful? On drugs — and this is one of the problems with psychedelics or MDMA — one has to be very careful, certainly on MDMA, which is an empathogenic drug. You can hear a song and fall in love with your love for that song on repeat for four full hours. There might be an insight or two there, but in some sense one could say that's trivial — you assigned a meaning to something trivial.

I think that's where people get scared that if they start to go through these portals to the sublime, they're going to end up kind of weird. They're going to be the person who says, "Did you see how many ants are crawling up that curb?" And you're like, "Yeah, it's cool." But most people don't want to be that person all the time, because we have a name for that and it's not kind. None of us want to be the crazy person who's creating meaning out of the trivial. So how do we cope with that? Because the way I'm looking at it is you're actually seeing things as they are — your brain is filtering things down and creating this familiarity and sameness so that your mind isn't overwhelmed with chaos. Aldous Huxley in Doors of Perception was calling it the "mind at large" — if you didn't have this filtering, you would be seeing all of these incredible things, but the mind is like a little funnel that just prunes everything you see.

Robert Greene: I'm talking about the sublime not as something crazy, not as "oh, there's a bunch of ants." I'm talking about how the world actually is. You're awakening to how things actually are outside of the pruning of your brain.

I talk in the book about the artist Cézanne, who was obsessed with vision and the visual arena and how he could alter his vision by focusing on things. His expression was, "We humans are given consciousness so that we can spread consciousness everywhere." His saying was, "I am the consciousness of the landscape. I am making the landscape come to life and think and be alive." He had this idea that mountains are actually living, breathing things and that his mind is giving them life. He looked at trees like that. He would stare at one tree outside of his house — it was like an apricot tree — and he would just focus on what it actually was. We don't look at things like that anymore. We just see the word "tree." We see the category "tree." He was seeing the apricots on it, seeing the apricots getting larger as the sun was hitting them, getting sweeter and sweeter. To him it was like an erotic relationship between the apricot and the sun. You might say that's insane. I don't think so. I think it's actually beautiful. Our minds are allowed to do that. We're not just rational creatures. We are creating emotions through everything we see.

I get a little bit frustrated with how rational our culture has become. AI, which everyone's talking about now — people are continually anthropomorphizing AI. It is a machine. It's not conscious. It is a machine that we have programmed. And yet even very rational scientists are talking about it as if it's conscious. We are creatures that are constantly putting emotions into things. I don't think that's irrational, because I think science has that basis in it as well. Our thoughts have become so limited and constricted that the ability to see a vase of flowers and see it as this intense, strange, miraculous thing — to actually focus on its colors and the life that it has, and how in cutting it and putting it in this water you're keeping it alive, but it's actually cut, so it's not really living — it's just strange. It's not your imagination putting something there. It's actually seeing things as they are, which we don't do.

Time perception, childhood, and the experience of being alive

Andrew Huberman: Many times growing up in California — I've been here fifty-one years — I can remember driving along Highway 101 and I would stop and I'd see some beautiful fence lines. I love fence lines. I would think, this fence line looks so old with barbed wire. And I would need to get someplace, so I would get back in my car and drive away. But inevitably when I got out and looked at the fence line, I'd think there's so much interesting detail just in this little interface between the barbed wire and the wood. I used to think — and I still have this thought — I could spend all day there. But I have to go someplace else. And then I realize there are an infinite number of spatial scales at which we can look at things, and an infinite number of temporal scales at which we can experience things.

The spatial scale is pretty straightforward for most people to digest. You can look at something very small in your environment — the texture of something — or you can look at the whole environment. We had Dacher Keltner on the podcast. He's a Berkeley scientist who studies awe. He said that the experience of awe comes about when we transition quickly from focusing on small spatial scales to big spatial scales — like walking through a forest and suddenly there's a huge vista. Or vice versa, big to small. But most people experience going from small to big.

The time domain is one that is very intriguing to me. On a daily basis we're constrained by the circadian rhythm — when we're awake, when we're asleep, no escaping that. But we tend to move through life with the same kind of snapshot speed, the same frame rate. You make your coffee, you do your thing. But you can slow this down by taking a higher frame rate — you can stop and watch your espresso pour with immense amounts of temporal detail. You can also slow things down by lying in the yard and looking at the clouds pass and taking bigger snapshots.

This feels like a critical piece of accessing the sublime, because what your story about Ouspensky tells us is that the space-time filter — how we move through life, the speed of our camera, the pixel density of our camera, the resolution of our camera — is everything.

The best example I have is my graduate adviser, who died at fifty — a remarkable woman dying of cancer, two girls, married to a scientist. I was very close with her family. I will never forget our final conversation. She was telling me about some of the goodness she had experienced recently, and she shared with me that she had started, in the realization that she was going to be dead soon, to think about the tiniest things in the space and time domain. They're all redheads in that family, bright red hair. She was describing the curls of her daughter's hair moving when she walked into the room to see her. Her frame rate was changing. And I find this to be moving and also in some way informative for those of us who are not close to the end.

Robert Greene: I had this thought a while ago that what made childhood so interesting and weird, and why we remember it the way we do and why it was so intense, was that there was this space between thoughts that had a big play on our conception of time. Now our stream of consciousness is broken up into a million different fragments — I'm thinking of you right now, in two seconds I'll be thinking of my cat, it'll bounce back and forth. The thoughts are just continual. But when you were a child, there was like this space. You would think something, then there would be this kind of emptiness. A minute would go by, there wouldn't be another thought, then there would be another one. That space in between thoughts created a different rhythm of life.

Particularly nowadays with the Instagram model, where your attention is broken up into millions of little splinters, time has a rhythm that's just not life. It's just not how life should be. It's way too fast, way too broken up. But that sense of there being a space between two thoughts, that emptiness, creates a flow of time that's much different.

I talk in the book about the childhood experience of time, which fascinates me. I have the example of the writer Nabokov, the famous novelist who was obsessed with his childhood. He had this magical childhood growing up in Russia — his father was wealthy, they had this amazing villa in the country, his life was full of adventures, he studied butterflies intensely. Then the Russian Revolution breaks out. His father is murdered. They have to leave Russia. His mother dies in an apartment in Berlin. He has to flee with his Jewish wife to New York because the Nazis are there. His brother dies in a concentration camp. His whole family is gone. He can never return to Russia because Stalin is in power. He has no photographs, no memorabilia, no family left. But he has this memory of this magical childhood.

He wrote a book called Speak, Memory in which he tries to recreate the experience of his childhood in the adult mind — not remembering facts, but remembering the experience. He talks a lot about time. The image is that when you're a child, time is something that's inside of you. Our adult concept of time is something outside — it's abstract, the minutes are passing. When you're a child, you're in the river and you're feeling the flow and moments are passing by. It's living inside of you. When you're an adult, you're on the shoreline looking at time passing by. You can look at the past, the future, wherever your mind takes you. Time has a different rhythm.

He remembers thinking, "My god, we're all alive at the same time. All these humans bathing in this river at the same time. We're alive. We feel it." In my meditations, I will feel that time is inside of me, that I have this flow. It's a physical sensation of time passing. I'm alive moment to moment. I'm inside the present moment. Time has this different rhythm, and that is a sublime experience of time. I take readers through an exercise of the actual river — actually feeling yourself inside the river and feeling the flow of time. It has a much different effect on our consciousness when you go through this process.

Andrew Huberman: I have an absolute obsession with time perception, in no small part because of that conversation with Barbara — our last conversation before she passed. I went on to realize it's not uncommon that as people get closer and closer to the end, provided they are lucid — and she was — it's as if there was an avalanche of new and beautiful information pouring in. She was not drifting away. That was part of the sadness of it all. She was very present, but in that presence she was able to extract what seemed like many years of experience. She was a very calm person always, and in a very non-anxious, non-urgent way, it's as if the end was coming and instead of freaking out, her perception — the camera onto the world — just became super high resolution, near-infinity frame rate. And she was just reporting these things.

Robert Greene: I have a whole chapter on death and the death sublime and near-death experiences. What often happens in the death process is the brain is dying as well. As the brain dies, some of the constructions of the brain — such as time, vision, the self — start breaking down, start dissolving. Near-death experiencers sometimes have this sense of ecstasy as they're dying. Not all of them — the studies of near-death experiences show that a large majority are positive, but there's also the hellish near-death experience. But a lot of people are dying and they feel the ego dissolving, the sense of abstract time dissolving, all the social pressures of life dissolving, and they're ecstatic. It's like a liberation.

The first person to study near-death experiences was in the nineteenth century — a man named Albert Heim. He was a Swiss alpine climber. When he was about twenty-one, he fell while climbing. He was going to die — it was like a hundred-foot fall. As he's falling, he remembers his whole life. All these things he starts revisiting. Later he wants to analyze it and realizes that in fifteen seconds of a fall he had experienced like years of things happening. The condensation was insane. He wrote an article about it and suddenly hundreds of other accounts start coming to him — people who had fallen in climbing accidents and had the same experience, people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. The few who survive speak of the same thing: their experience of time as they're falling and as they're about to die is completely altered, and in just those ten seconds it's as if they lived like five years.

Our sense of time is not so logical and rational as we think it is. We can alter our perception of time literally by how we think and how we experience life.

The octopus, other species, and entering different time scales

Andrew Huberman: One of the reasons I love aquaria and have so many fish tanks is that whether there's one fish or an octopus or many, when you look at a fish tank or an ocean scene of any kind, the mind enters this weird state because you can't control nor predict what's going to happen next. If a fish is swimming leftward, you sort of predict it will continue to swim leftward, but then as soon as you predict that, it moves. You sort of have to let go of your anticipation of what's going to happen next. It puts my mind into a state where the expectation component just has to unlatch. And in that, I think you get additional perception.

Robert Greene: This is slightly off what you're saying, but there's a story in the book about a man who had a relationship with an octopus. He did that famous movie, My Octopus Teacher, right? He wrote a book about it. He essentially decides he's going to cold-dive off the coast of South Africa where he grew up. Incredibly cold temperatures. There's a kelp forest — a strange concept, a forest underwater of all this magnificent kelp, and the weirdest creatures live in there, including octopus. He's not going there looking for octopus. He's free-diving in this very cold water exploring this insane landscape and he comes upon an octopus, and they slowly become friends. They have a slightly erotic relationship — it's clear the way he describes it that there was this love interest and this eroticism, because at one point the octopus grabs his arm and he can feel it, and at one moment the octopus has grabbed him and they float together to the top. And then, as you know, the octopus dies, and he's heartbroken. That's when he decides he's going to create this film.

My point is that in the six or eight months he had this relationship with this octopus, his whole concept of time was altered because he was living in her time. It was a female — obviously laid eggs and died. Imagine an octopus lives for three years at most. He saw all these intense experiences: it got attacked by a shark, it lost some of its limbs, the limbs grew back. What is its sense of time, compressed in those three years? Just all of these incredible experiences. He felt that in being close to this octopus, he was living in her time period. Time was passing at a much different rhythm as he was living in her world.

There are animals and insects that live for like a month. Our experience of time is relative to our time span as well. In these kinds of encounters with other species, we can in some ways alter our concept of time. If you try that experiment with your dog, you might find something similar.

Andrew Huberman: Having had dogs and now another puppy, I'm familiar with the rhythm. You entrain to their rhythm and they to you. This is a big part of the relationship. The daily walk becomes a prerequisite. It's not an option. The dog needs it, and you learn to love everything about it. That word feels really relevant here — entrainment. We're bound to this circadian rhythm, this twenty-four-hour rhythm. Nobody escapes it. But everything else, we're sort of entrained to a particular schedule, and our body learns to anticipate things and adjust our perception, our energy levels, to when we exercise, when we work, when we see our significant other or dog or both. The idea that we can access different time perception references through interactions with other species is absolutely thrilling to me.

Having had several octopuses now and cuttlefish prior to that — I had many cuttlefish in my lab in San Diego, I think we had forty cuttlefish at one point — they're like little underwater Hufflepuff monkeys. They're incredibly intelligent and do all sorts of wild stuff. Beautiful camouflage ability. They can camouflage half their body. The males will sometimes in the wild camouflage as females and then enter a clutch of females and mate with them. They're referred to in the scientific literature as "sneaky."

Robert Greene: Doesn't sound very scientific to me.

Andrew Huberman: Well, evolutionary biologists — the joke is they tend to hyphenate their names even if they aren't married, and they love to insert cursing into their scientific papers. In any case, my mom's an avid gardener and she spends time with her tomato plants. I think we can access these different time portals through interactions with plants.

Robert Greene: Of course. What you're describing is that the richness of life is available to us when we let go of our mostly human-made things. I'm concerned that something about excessive use of social media is that — as I said earlier, we're being programmed — with each passing year we're becoming more and more locked to one space-time relationship, and an expectation of dopamine updating and novelty. Going away for a weekend without the phone, or getting a total night's sleep without the phone in the room, not looking at it for the first thirty minutes of the day — I think anyone who's done those things will say it significantly alters and improves one's experience of the rest of the day.

Andrew Huberman: So maybe we are being programmed — not to sound paranoid.

Robert Greene: We are. And whose interests are we being programmed for? Is it just to make money? Because if people's attention spans are constantly being splintered, it's harder to focus. You're much more vulnerable to influence, to advertisements, to all kinds of gimmicks and things that are being implanted in your brain because you're not able to focus deeply enough and think independently.

And then on the level of mastery — talking about how the human brain functions and what it wants and what it needs as nourishment — it needs slowness. It needs the slow pace of learning bit by bit by bit, progressing, and then the brain alters as new pathways are created. You are literally in charge of your brain and the landscape of your brain. When it's this other rhythm that people are programming for you, it's like a desert. There's no life coming up in it, no connections happening, and you're so much more vulnerable to people's influence. That's the scary part.

Andrew Huberman: One of the most impressive things I saw in the last year or so is this gold medalist at the Olympics, a freestyle skier from Stanford — I think her name is Eileen Gu. There's a press conference where somebody asks her what she does to train her mind. She seems so articulate and sharp. Her answer was about slowness, not about speed. Her answer was that she spends a lot of time in her head thinking about her thinking, pressure-testing her beliefs and understanding. From that she realized she can shape her thoughts through neuroplasticity and become the person she wants to be. And then in a very delightful way she throws in that she's young and therefore she also still has plasticity, so she's not done. The interesting part was that the speed she can access is the reflection of the slowness — the slowing down of her process to get there. We only see the end product and we think she skis and she's brilliant and everything for her must just fire off at twelve cylinders.

Robert Greene: I read a quote a long time ago from the quarterback John Elway, the great Denver Broncos quarterback. He said the secret to his incredible success was that everything slowed down on the football field. Normally things are happening at hyper speeds. He says he got to a level where everything was just slowing down and he could see exactly where things were moving. His brain, through mastering a process — which is what I describe in Mastery — was able to literally slow things down and see things that other people couldn't see.

Reporting versus experiencing — technology and the loss of presence

Andrew Huberman: I'd love your thoughts on experience versus the report of experience. I think people are experiencing things, but a lot of times they're recording them now as they do it in order to share with other people. The motivation is entirely understandable. You look at a concert — everyone's filming the concert. If somebody goes on a big adventure, a long backpacking trip in Yosemite or down to the Amazon, because of camera phones and social media, most people are thinking about if and how they will report the experience they're having, if not in real time, later.

You, on the other hand — although there are clips of you on podcasts and so forth on social media — you've chosen to do the long time-scale reporting of your adventures and experiences. Movies are like that too. And you beautifully described this thing about entering the time scale of the octopus's life or the dog's daily experience. I was thinking to myself, the movies I've fallen in love with, the concerts that transformed me — they required that I actually just be there and not think about the export of that experience at all. So once again, I'm wondering: are we limiting ourselves? Are we getting locked into technology that is really limiting our experience? And what was the value for you in doing a long-term writing of this book?

Robert Greene: It was more than long-term writing because I couldn't type. My left hand is still kind of frozen. So I had to handwrite the entire book. I had a system of two bookstands next to each other, a notebook. I would write a story in the notebook by hand, then edit it by hand, recopying what I had written and occasionally changing a word, then going back and doing the same thing again. It altered my thought processes because I was used to typing very fast. This was a whole different layer of thinking I had to go through, because when you're handwriting, your thinking really has to slow down. You have to focus very deeply because you can't quickly change things.

Part of the sublime is getting outside the human realm. We live in a period where we never interact with anything that's not human. Even if you're in the wild, in Yosemite or wherever, you're still with your phone. You're still navigating with your phone. You're still recording it so people can see you. You're immersed in the social human world. It's this little bubble that you live in. But life is much greater than the human. There's a universe, a cosmos, there are animals, landscapes, the weirdness of being alive, time — all these things you can explore. But if you're so locked into the human social world, you cannot access the sublime.

In ancient cultures — and I'm obsessed with our indigenous and ancient ancestors — they looked at the world and saw plants coming up out of the ground, enormous mastodons and bears twice the size of what bears are now. They were obsessed with what isn't human, and that's where religion starts from, that's where spirituality starts from — all these things that transcend the human. How insane it is that life dies and then reemerges out of the ground. Part of being human is this obsession with what isn't human, what transcends us as a species.

Climbing a mountain can be an incredibly sublime experience. You're literally climbing up the side of something that's millions of years old, that predates humans, that emerged out of the ground through this incredible process. You're climbing into the sky. The oxygen levels are changing. Your brain is changing. Mountain climbers have reported some of the most sublime experiences because at every moment, particularly rock climbing, they could die. The intensity of life and death just makes it an addiction. But if you're climbing the mountain and filming it and navigating through your phone, you're not experiencing the mountain itself. Technology is a major roadblock to experiencing the sublime.

It doesn't have to be. You could use it as a tool. I looked online for things going on with space and the new telescopes that have been launched, and the images from NASA about our universe are utterly sublime. I can't access that directly. I can't climb into the sky and see these things. So I'm not totally against technology. You can use it to mine these incredible things that science is uncovering. But it's not about reporting it back to other people. It's not about the social aspect. It's just about the experience itself.

Andrew Huberman: Is it fair to say that when we try to experience life at the same speed that we're going to report those experiences, something crucial is lost?

Robert Greene: Yes. One of the great joys for me in doing laboratory science — which I haven't done in a few years — was that I would spend years looking at things down the microscope, collecting data, observing things. The process of writing a paper is a whole different business. Going to seminars and talking about the work — it's at a completely different speed, a completely different spatial scale. But the adventure was down the microscope. The report of the adventure was in papers and at meetings. I never thought about the meetings or the paper as I was doing the work. It was a totally different set of brain circuits.

Andrew Huberman: And that's sort of a bit of what you're describing here. Our mutual friend Rick Rubin talks a lot about how he encourages artists to forget about how they're going to be perceived in order to do their best work, which then of course is perceived in the best way. You have to get out of the delivery mode. Going to a concert and filming yourself for the rest of the world — it's like a collision of brain circuits, and it almost detracts from the experience.

Robert Greene: Yesterday I was driving back from Topanga. I was being chauffeured back to my house and I'm listening to music — a recording of Scarlatti, this composer, by Horowitz, the famous pianist. I'm trying to get inside each note and follow the music as it flows. It's very difficult. My mind was continually wandering. But as I'm going inside the flow of the music — which alters your experience of time, by the way — I'm starting to see things in the music itself. The rhythms and the patterns and the falling of certain notes have this emotional effect that's very interesting. I'm thinking along with the music, inside the notes, inside the progression, inside the composer's mind who composed it. I'm reliving his experience as he composed the music.

Music takes us back to our preverbal roots. Birds sing. Language probably evolved from music itself. Instrumental music doesn't have words, but it feels like the essence of our emotions, of our consciousness. When you're able to enter into music — and I have an exercise where you think musically and follow the notes and the logic and the progression — it's a very sublime experience.

I remember — I'm going to date myself — I would go to Grateful Dead concerts in the seventies when I was in college, and I could do what I'm doing with Scarlatti with some of their long instrumental pieces, which were quite sublime. When you're doing that, you're inside the music. When you're recording it, you're just outside it. It's just entertainment, something to stimulate you on a base level. There's a way of experiencing things where you're inside them and not outside. Movies are the same way. When I watch a movie, particularly of a different period of time, I like to feel like I'm inside the actual movie itself, that I can experience it as if I am there.

When you're so immersed in how other people are looking at you, and your only way of thinking about it is in terms of how other people are seeing it, you're not experiencing the actual cultural moment. And culture can and should be sublime if you experience it differently.

Andrew Huberman: It seems that our best experiences will always come about from being really present to that work and those experiences. Going to a concert and choosing to not merge with the performers, but rather merge with people who aren't there, means that you are in many ways not there. I get the motivation of people wanting to share, but it's a bit of a trap, because ultimately the sum total of your life is these experiences — mundane ones that you can convert into sublime experiences, and the big peak experiences. There's no reason to not report things. But the speed of the reporting, and the fact that it happens separate from the experience, seems very important.

I think about a news anchor: "I'm here at the storm and the storm is so—" They're experiencing the storm but they're also just trying to get the message out. You can convey something about the storm, but they're not really in the experience. They're in the experience of reporting it. There's this way in which we fractionate ourselves through technology.

Which raises a question. You opted to write the book by hand as opposed to using audio recordings. Why was that? You could have easily just sat with hands still and dictated.

Robert Greene: In the end I filled over a hundred notebooks with my handwritten things. At the very end, when I thought things were good enough, I would use Whisper transcription. Then I would print it out and edit by hand again. Then finally dictate it one final time and edit it with one hand. So the slowness was intense.

As a neuroscientist, you know the relationship between the brain and the hand is a very powerful one. It has very ancient roots. So many of the neural pathways involve the hand and the brain because that's where our intelligence evolved — picking up things and manipulating them and creating tools. When you handwrite, you're using the brain differently than when you type and look at a screen. It's a different flow of time. And if you just dictate into the computer, it's even more alienating in a way because your hands aren't involved at all.

When I tried to immediately dictate, something was lost. I didn't feel like I was expressing something deep because my hand literally has to be involved in the creation of it. And the transcription things — AI is sophisticated, but the transcription things are actually quite primitive. They don't do punctuation. They don't exactly hear what you're saying. It's not like I'm creating oral literature. I'm not Homer. I'm not singing a ballad I've memorized. It's this immediate thing coming out of you, whereas writing by hand, you have to think. You have to sit there and ponder each movement of your hand and the ink.

I also got heavily into ink. Handwriting is a very sensual experience. I got all these fountain pens and I buy all these different colored inks from this company in Italy. The inks had this beautiful flow to them, a feel to them. To actually see ink on a page — handwriting is a kind of sensual experience if you go through it. Calligraphy can be a very sensual experience. People would say, "Why don't you just dictate your book, Robert? It's so easy." But it wasn't me. It wasn't natural to me. So I had to have recourse to the handwriting.

Andrew Huberman: What color ink are you — black, blue-black, or blue?

Robert Greene: I had different colors. There's this company called Visconti, an Italian company. They make wonderful fountain pens. They have this one fountain pen called Homo Sapiens, which is my favorite. They have these beautiful bottles of ink. I have sepia, which I love — a beautiful color, this weird brown-yellow-brown for an ink. It's magnificent. I have black, turquoise, red, and green, though I don't use the green very much. I would mix up the colors because each day I'd think, what color do I feel like today? Oh, I feel like writing in red. But then I'd always end up going back to sepia because I love that color.

Andrew Huberman: This is clearly being communicated through the universe to us. The origins of sepia is from the ink of the cuttlefish. We worked on — or had, as I prefer to say it — Sepia bandensis, which is the dwarf cuttlefish. The Latin name of the cuttlefish is actually Sepia, and their ink was the original source.

Robert Greene: Is the ink that color that comes out of them?

Andrew Huberman: It is, depending on the water environment they're in and the lighting. You may or may not know — I learned this from my good friend Eddie Chang, the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF, one of the leading expert neuroscientists on speech and language and epilepsy — he told me that the hand representation in the brain isn't just close to but is nested inside the language areas.

Robert Greene: The Italians tell us this right away. They move their hands as they speak.

Andrew Huberman: Recently, when recording my audiobook — the first book I've ever written and then recorded — I found that if I didn't allow myself to move my hands and gesticulate, it was harder to enunciate properly. He said, "Of course, because there's all these feedback loops." You start to look at this across cultures and across individuals, and you see that when people are trying to formulate their sentences very carefully and punctuate them in their mind as they speak them, their hands tend to go still. Then when they hit a sort of verbal flow, their hands spontaneously start to move.

Robert Greene: There's a direct linkage there. Also our language reflects that — "I grasp an idea." People have analyzed the number of words for thinking and knowledge that have to do with the actual grasping and use of the hand. Our particular consciousness has a pattern to it that is very much constricted by language and grammar. We have a subject and an object, which makes us think of cause and effect. We think of past, present, and future. We have those tenses. So we're always thinking in terms of sequences.

I have the thought experiment in my head of an alien form of life and intelligence and consciousness that had a different structure of grammar — not based so much on the hand and these abstract concepts. What would their language be like? It would be very different from our own. But it makes you realize that our language sometimes restricts what we think. The relationship of thinking and the hand, and also vision — so many of our thoughts about knowledge have to do with seeing. "I see what you mean." You don't literally see, but we use visual metaphors all the time, and hand metaphors.

Finding your life's task — excavating childhood

Andrew Huberman: I'd like to talk a little bit more about childhood. Long ago, when I read Mastery, I was just clubbed over the head — in the best possible sense — with the statement you made that some event early in life for each of us kind of portends what we should or ought to explore later in life. There's some unique event that places some unique capacity, curiosity, hunger in us to go do something that is uniquely us. What is your suggestion for people who want to think about what that seed event might have been if they don't know? How do we know what that thing was for us if we're twelve years or older?

Robert Greene: I was always clear for myself about what that was, because I was obsessed from a very early age with words. I just thought words themselves are very strange and very weird — that we have these words that mean things. I remember I think I was in the third grade, my teacher put up the word "carpenter" and she said, "Now try and see how many words you can form out of those letters." For some reason that just excited me so much — that with these little individual letters you could create all these different words. I can't explain it. There's no logic behind it. But letters and words seemed magical. I always felt a connection to them. I knew I had to be a writer because I had that weird connection to words themselves — not just what they meant but the sounds of them.

But after writing Mastery, a lot of people would come to me because I talk about your life's task, and I also have a chapter on this concept in the new book. They would say, "But Robert, I don't know what my life's task is. I'm in my twenties. You write about Da Vinci, you write about all these other people. I have no idea." I had to try and understand their perspective, which in teaching means you have to put your mind inside the minds of students who don't know enough. You have to get inside their less knowledgeable experience.

So I had to go: why wouldn't they know it? Because if you think about your early childhood, you had those moments. You knew that you would love this. You loved kicking a ball. You loved music and sounds. But thinking deeply about their experience, I came to realize that first of all, they've lost a deep connection to those childhood experiences, to those moments. They've forgotten about them. Why have they forgotten? Maybe they weren't as intense as mine was. But also what happened was all these other voices intervened. Their parents told them what they should love, what they shouldn't love. They had to learn math and they didn't want to learn math. The teachers told them what they were good at. They get funneled through this system which constrains your brain into a certain career path. They hear a thousand different voices in their head and they have no connection to what they really love — to what Abraham Maslow calls your impulse voices, voices inside of you that are natural, that are physiological. They don't hear it anymore.

I had to realize that we have to cut out all of those voices. I would go through this process — I compared it to archaeology. We were digging and digging into their childhood for little fossils of information. What are your earliest childhood memories? What are memories of things that were very exciting to you? We literally had to go back into their childhood to uncover those moments where something sparked and they were excited — not because their parents told them, but because it was them.

I would also go through this process: you're in your twenties, what is it that you hate? What repels you? For me, I hated working for other people. I hated the egos, the political games. It wasn't about results — it was about currying up to the boss. I hated it. I never lasted more than eleven months at any single job in my entire life. Knowing that I could not work for other people, the only thing I could do was write books. It's the only profession where I essentially didn't have a boss.

What is it that you hate? What are the things that when you do them just feel wrong? A lot of it is when you were frustrated — that's a key moment. What is frustrating to you? Listen to that voice, because it's part of that life's task, that inner voice saying, "This isn't you. This doesn't fit you." Don't just see frustration. See something positive. It's telling you something about how you've taken a wrong path in life.

It's not easy. I sometimes spend days and weeks trying to help people. But it takes time. You have to be willing to commit to the time. You have to journal. You have to write about yourself. You have to go deep into your memories. You have to think about your childhood and go back into those moments that had nothing to do with what other people were telling you.

Insight, the stroke, and the emotional shift

Andrew Huberman: I've heard two different notions about how great ideas and insights come to us. One is in the doing — we're drilling away at ideas or a physical thing. The other is that they come to us spontaneously away from the attempt to get to an answer — in the shower, while running, doing something else. Has that process of insight and epiphany changed for you comparing before to after your stroke?

Robert Greene: I'll tell you what happened, and it's very interesting. I noticed after my stroke that I was more emotional. I had less control over my emotions. I would suddenly start crying and I didn't really know why. I would suddenly feel a wave of ecstasy. Why is it happening to me? I did a little bit of research — and you would know more about this — but a stroke affecting the right side of the brain often has that effect on stroke victims. The left side is language and logic and reasoning powers. The right side is a more holistic and more emotional part of the brain. So I was feeling on a deeper level. I was also feeling so much more empathy for people. I would see other people who were handicapped, still in a wheelchair, and I would almost want to cry. I understand your weakness. I understand the feeling of helplessness. My brain shifted into something more emotional.

I saw a quote from the poet John Keats, one of my favorite poets: "Oh, to have a life of sensations instead of thoughts." You can think emotionally. You can think through sensations. You can empathize. You can feel your way into things. It's a different form of thinking. It made me realize how much the brain and the structure of it alters how you think and how you relate to the world. Something I had no control over — a stroke — altered me in this weird way. It made me more emotional. It makes you realize how much the brain controls who you are and how you experience life.

I had this much more intuitive feel for the subject. The sublime was no longer an intellectual thing like it would have been twenty years ago. It was a feeling inside of me. When I wrote a story, it would resonate inside of me and I knew that it was right. If it felt too intellectual, I said, "This isn't working for me."

Andrew Huberman: Would you say your stroke sort of freed you up to some extent to allow certain things to come out that maybe before you would have self-edited?

Robert Greene: I think so. It's going to sound woo-woo, but it felt like the stroke happened for a purpose. If I see it as a curse, I become a bitter person and I just shrivel up. But if I see it as a blessing, it's a much different experience. The blessing was that I had to find the sublime in the smallest details. Readers aren't going to be able to trek through the Gobi Desert. A lot of them can't swim with dolphins. They can't have these adventures. But everyone lives in a house, in a room. We all feel kind of constricted. I could now bring the sublime to the level of your daily experience.

The image that came to me when I sat in my little office trying to write the book was that I was a bird in a cage. I used to be flying around and having all this fun, and now I was in a cage and I had to accommodate myself to it and find a way to sing inside my cage. A lot of people are like that. They don't have access. They don't live in mansions. They don't have magnificent gardens. They live in small apartments. I don't want to give the feeling that the sublime is some elite experience that only rich people can have.

The point of the book is that the need for transcendent experiences — which is what the sublime is about in many ways — is as important a need to humans as clothing, as shelter, as companionship. It's deeply embedded in our nature. If a stroke victim whose life is so limited can find their way to the sublime, then anybody can find their way. And that's how I wanted to write the book.

Power, mastery, and the sublime — intense lives and early deaths

Andrew Huberman: What I'm about to ask is somewhat of a merge between some of your prior books — about power, about personalities, about performers — and the newest book about the sublime. There are these people throughout history who seem to have so much energy and to focus that energy so intensely and do incredible things in art, in oration — what we might call charisma. And they often died early. I've been really intrigued by this. Maybe their energy was packed in space and time and focused into such a dense beam that they couldn't go on a long time. In researching and writing The Law of the Sublime, did you ever think about what was the experience of some of the people you had written about earlier — like the intense life of somebody like 50 Cent, the intense lives of some of the people you wrote about in The Art of Seduction — these extreme examples of life energy funneled through a particular personality and style? Many of whom die early. Did that ever come to you as an idea — these are people that burn hot, make huge contributions, and the flame goes out?

Robert Greene: The sublime is often an experience of intensity — concentrated in a particular moment, a very intense experience, like a candle that's burning. 50 himself had a near-death experience. In the last chapter of the book I talk about him and his near-death experience, and I feel like it completely altered him. Although we see this figure of this entrepreneur and this kind of thug and this guy with beefs who's always putting people down — that'd be the last thing you'd think of as sublime — I know 50. I was with him. I spent six months by his side. I studied him deeply. His closeness to death altered him, and he actually has great access to that kind of energy that came from his near-death experience.

Now, other people whose sense of power is only about the social — I don't really feel a sense of the sublime in them. But if you're a great writer or a scientist like Albert Einstein, he didn't die young.

Andrew Huberman: No. And biologists on average tend to have good long careers. Mathematicians have briefer careers.

Robert Greene: The mathematicians are interesting because it's a known fact that the greatest math discoveries are in your twenties and early thirties and then it just kind of dries up.

Andrew Huberman: I think the Fields Medal can only be given to people forty years and younger.

Robert Greene: Biology is a more cumulative type of career. You have long careers that are successful along the way and accumulate a rich amount of knowledge. Math is a quick burn. I wonder why. It's very weird like that.

Andrew Huberman: I'm intrigued by the fact that child prodigies — their peers eventually catch up to them. People catch up. With mastery, people who go deep, deep into a field and then burn themselves out —

Robert Greene: The sublimity is in the sense of flow that they have. The sublime is a kind of transcendent experience. You're getting outside of your ego, outside the narrowness of your own limited world, and you're experiencing something wider. When you study chess deeply, or Einstein with the theory of relativity, or whatever the field — painting or whatever — you have these moments of intense flow where you and the thing you're creating are one. You're outside of yourself. It's almost like an out-of-body experience.

I talk in the book about the feeling of inspiration, which goes back thousands of years and people report it. I've experienced it myself — where ideas seem to be coming to you from the outside. You can't explain why this epiphany happened. There's no logic, no order to it. It's almost as if somebody is breathing inside of you, which is the origin of the word "inspired" — to breathe into something. When you're so deeply immersed in a subject, you're having this moment of flow, this transcendent experience, and ideas are coming to you from the outside and you don't even know why or how. It is utterly sublime.

So that is a connection between some of my earlier work and the later work. But a lot of these master manipulators — like a Bismarck or like some of the Cesare Borgias — I can't really find anything sublime in their experience. The feeling when you're playing the piano and you feel like you and the keyboard are one, or you're playing chess and you and the chessboard are one — that is a totally sublime experience. Of all my books, Mastery is the one that's closest to the sublime.

The love sublime — vulnerability, falling, and the prison of the ego

Andrew Huberman: Several times you've said that accessing the sublime is about relating as a human to things that are not human. Is there any way to access the sublime through human-to-human interaction?

Robert Greene: Yes, most definitely. I have a chapter called the love sublime. It's not The Art of Seduction — people are going, "Robert, have you changed?" Well, seduction is a book in itself. Love is something different. I talk about the sense of falling so deeply in love with another human being that you lose a sense of your own ego. The chapter is called "Escape the Prison of the Ego: The Love Sublime."

The idea is that human beings have two sides. We're physical — we have an animal side — but we have something else. I would hate to use the word, but I would say it's spiritual. If the only interest in the other person is about sex, there's some level of satisfaction to it, but there's also an emptiness that goes with it. But if it's just about religion and going to church or whatever, there's nothing physical in it and it doesn't feel so deeply human. Love is an area where you can combine the physical and the spiritual into something very, very profound. I say it's the ultimate human experience we can have, because your physical attraction to someone turns into something spiritual.

People are objects that we cannot see inside of. But in love, that object becomes a subject. They become something you can feel from the inside. You can feel their experience. They become a part of you.

The metaphor we use is "falling in love," and it's very eloquent. It's literally a sense of falling. And falling has an element of fear — that's what you have to understand. Love isn't about comfort and security and Russell Stover chocolates and red roses on Valentine's Day. There's something dark and terrifying about it because you're falling. You're letting go of your defenses and you're being vulnerable like an animal that's exposing its belly. And that's a frightening experience.

What happens to people is that as you start falling, you stop and go, "I don't completely trust this person. I'm becoming vulnerable. And if I become vulnerable — this isn't conscious, it's unconscious — they can hurt me. They could abandon me." The feeling of abandonment is perhaps the most primal, horrible emotion for a human to have. It goes back to our early childhood experiences. So we stop falling and we start going, "I'm not so sure about that. Maybe they don't love me as much. Maybe I can't trust them." As you go through that process, the other person senses it in a very primal way as well and they stop falling, because they can feel that you're not following along with them. If you fell completely and lost your defenses, the other person would be invited to fall along with you.

The reason you've never experienced this in your life is that you don't want to be vulnerable. That's very natural in the modern world because our life is harsh and there are so many intrusive things going on. You want to defend yourself.

I'm trying to tell young people in particular that you live in a culture that does not want you to be in love with someone. They demean love. They think of it as sentimental and old-fashioned. And I want to tell you that the act of loving a person and letting go of all your defenses is a form of rebellion against the ugliness in this world. You're doing something different. You're rebelling against all the narcissism and all the defensiveness and all the closed-off elements in our culture, and you're saying to that culture: I'm going to fall in love with a single individual and it's going to be an incredible, transcendent, sublime experience.

I want to bring that back into the culture. In the thirteenth century we had this new thing called courtly love, and it's where our whole notions of Western love came from. The troubadours were writing about it. The sense of love was a physical and a spiritual experience. It was kind of sacrilegious because only Christ should be a spiritual experience. So there was something very rebellious about this idea that loving a man or a woman could actually be a spiritual experience.

I'm hoping in that chapter to bring back that value, particularly among young people, because they're so afraid of being vulnerable, so afraid of being hurt. Being hurt is okay. It's a very important human emotion to go through. Rejection and feeling hurt is actually an experience that will grow you in a way. Never allowing that falling process to occur — I don't know, you're going to miss something very deep in life.

Andrew Huberman: It does seem that people are in a very self-protective mode these days. Part of me wants to say it's because of the need for every experience, including love, to be reported on.

Robert Greene: I have this thing I call the demon. It's inside of you. It's a voice that's constantly telling you to mistrust the other person and to feel like something is wrong in the relationship. A lot of it is social — your friends will fill you with doubts about the other person. It's not cool to be so involved with another person. You're going to hear these voices. The social element is actually playing a very large part in the fact that you don't want to make a fool of yourself. You want people to think that you're cool, that you can sleep with many different women, that you're not a sap. It's a kind of cynicism and hardness that I find very dangerous, because the sublime is about letting go of things. It's almost like softening yourself to the world and letting the world enter into you and transport you. And that's what this kind of love sublime is inviting you into.

Andrew Huberman: The incel movement is the ultimate extreme of this. Although now, largely because of recent events, we're also seeing something kind of analogous to the incel movement on the female side.

Robert Greene: Just addressing the Andrew Tate kind of experience of the world, and the alienation from the opposite sex and seeing them as the enemy — it's a very troubling thing. And what it is, is a fear of your own self. Because every man has a feminine side to him unavoidably. Why? Because our closest relationship as a baby was with our mother, a female. We internalize her voice. We internalize her energy very deeply in a way you can't even remember. Our attractions to women are very much impressed upon us by our relationship to our mother. We were helpless. A woman was dominating our lives. We were dependent on her.

So imprinted in you — besides the fact that as a man you have a fair amount of estrogen in you as well — there is a female component to your psyche. Women have the same thing. There's a masculine side to their psyche. When you split it off and women are the enemy, men are the enemy, you are actually the enemy of yourself. You are denying something deep about your own nature.

The idea of a man and a woman — you're bringing together your feminine side and their masculine side and you're merging it. There's something complete and wondrous about it. You're opening yourself to your own nature. When you're angry at the other sex, you're actually angry at yourself in a deep way. You're afraid of the feminine that is deeply embedded inside of you.

Spirituality, religion, and the death of God

Andrew Huberman: You've touched on spirituality and religion and notions of God. I think any conversation about the sublime — at least this one — would be incomplete if we didn't address that. For many people, a literal love relationship where they love God and they feel that God loves them is a profoundly important part of their life experience. It's not just consoling, but it really gives them access to levels of perception and experience that are irreplaceable by humans. I don't get the sense that you're a religious person — you can correct me if that's wrong — but where does the concept, and for you the experience, of spirituality, religion, and God match up with the sublime? Where does it not square with your own experience?

Robert Greene: It's a very complex issue. In Buddhism, there really isn't a concept of a higher being. It's that you yourself are Buddha. Buddha is mind and mind is Buddha. It's inside of you. There are some elements of Christianity that way too.

But when I look at the earliest religions — indigenous religions and spirituality in the pagan world, because I have a chapter on pagan religion in the book — I say that this need to feel transcended, to feel connected to something higher than the individual life, is deeply sublime. It's a deep human need. Why do we have this need for belief in something higher than ourselves? It's because we're aware of our death. We're aware of our mortality unlike any other animal that we know of. Animals intuit the moment they're going to die, but they don't think about it. We have the ability to think about our death, and it cripples us. If I'm going to die, why write a book? Why spend all these years doing things? It's going to cancel everything out. There's no meaning or purpose to my life.

So our awareness of death makes us go in search of something higher, of something deeper inside of us. Religion for centuries played a huge role in satisfying that need. It was a very important need and it kept, to some degree, a level of sanity among humans.

Then in the eighteenth century — we can pretty much pinpoint it — religion really started to fade in Western experience, at least, with the Enlightenment and certain philosophers and the birth of science and then the industrial revolution. The sense of God faded from our experience. People are still religious today, but this sense of it being a living presence that was with you every moment — if you study Western civilization in the fourteenth century, God was a part of everything that you thought and did. Every food that you ate, every element of life was embedded in the sacred. We humans lost that.

Then in the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution happened. Science. The world was changing. People started to rebel against that. They were frightened of it. There was the Romantic movement, and that is when the word "sublime" came into our language and became very popular. The Romantic poets and philosophers popularized the word "sublime."

My point is we've reached this point where the really deep sense of spirituality, the really deep sense of something larger than you that lives inside of you, that you are a part of and that is guiding your life — that is lost. And with it, a very important part of our life is lost. Religion was an anchor in our lives and now it's gone.

I'm not saying that I'm a believer. I'm just noting this phenomenon. The loss of religion, the loss of a sense of something transcendent, is what is partially making us insane right now. I look at the world and I feel like it's a madhouse. People are just going berserk. They're so disconnected from their bodies, from their lives, from their environment.

In an odd way, I find that the discoveries of science have a very deep kind of spiritual component. What we're learning about the human brain is insane. Learning about the cosmos, learning about the Big Bang — to me it's like a spiritual experience. We can recover some of that in the modern world. We don't necessarily have to go back to organized religion, but a sense of feeling like we are part of something much larger than our individual lives is an actual critical component to our experience.

Andrew Huberman: I was thinking about your book The Law of the Sublime as a portal into richer experience. Were you thinking about the macro offering and hope for the book to have that impact as you wrote it? Because you wrote it across many years — seven years you said — so it sort of happened in parallel with the madness taking over the world.

Robert Greene: It was always in the back of my mind, but it's a grandiose ambition. Recently I saw a film that I love by the director Pasolini — the Italian director — called The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Pasolini, who was a homosexual Marxist and pretty much an atheist, grew up in Italian Catholic culture. He kind of fell in love with the idea of Christ and did a film literally recreating the Gospel according to Matthew. He uses all of the words from that chapter and chronologically goes through all of the experiences of Christ. He uses non-professional actors. The guy who plays Christ is like a nineteen-year-old Spanish student of mathematics — he just plucked him out. The movie is actually a very spiritual experience because it literally feels like you're there.

I went back and reread the book of Matthew. And I'm going: how can a philosophy that is so much about love — there's an expression in there where somebody asks, "Should I love my neighbor?" And Christ says, "Anybody can love your neighbor. What you need to love is the person who's not your neighbor. You need to love the person furthest away from your experience, the marginalized, the people that normally are hated." How can a religion that expresses that end up now being this kind of philosophy of division and hatred and marginalizing and polarization and victimization? How is it that we take something and turn it into its opposite? It's a phenomenon that fascinates me. My reflexive response is: by taking something that's not of humans and humans contorting it, perverting it into something that's of them.

Andrew Huberman: Is it fair to say that one of the major barriers to the sublime is focusing on things that are of humans too much? And is it then fair to say that maybe the world's losing its mind because we have too much awareness of what other humans are doing all the time, and it's blocking our awareness of all the other stuff around us?

Robert Greene: I was reading the newspaper this morning — which I do every morning — and there were two articles. One was about how they're beginning to alter their idea of where alien life could evolve. There are these planets out there around a star that is much larger than our sun and therefore burns more slowly. They're perfectly round, not marked by all the meteors that hit planet Earth. Because they're a perfect distance from the star, they probably have water and life forms could evolve on them. They were calling it a paradise of evolution. It took us almost four billion years to evolve intelligent life on planet Earth, and that's probably why we haven't encountered other alien intelligent life forms — because it takes so long to develop. But these planets, their star won't burn out. They've probably been around much longer. There could be intelligent life there.

I'm thinking: that's one article in the paper. People should be exploding over that thought, because what it does is make you realize how weird it is that life evolved on our own planet, and how precarious that experiment was. It almost never happened.

The other article I read was about dinosaurs and a fossil discovered in China of an early bird — the most preserved fossil of a bird in the dinosaur era. Birds evolved from dinosaurs. We know that. But there were also flying pterosaurs — flying reptiles that weren't dinosaurs. They were explaining how beautiful the flight was, how they took to flight, and the different forms of flight that occurred. Thinking: my god, on our planet, just imagine what that life was like back then. How insane it was that there were dinosaurs.

My point is we could be immersing ourselves in all of these insane things that science is revealing to us. It could literally alter our minds and our relationship to people, to life. When you realize that life was this thin experiment that almost never happened, it alters how you look at things.

Scientists are the ones who are uncovering it. Humans are this insane creature that is able to uncover the secrets of the universe. In essence, I try to say in the book: we are sublime. We can uncover what is not human and the laws of the universe. Science is built up of hundreds of thousands of individual research papers, people immersing themselves in details and then uncovering these fantastic things. To me, science is a sublime phenomenon.

I can remember the early days of the internet, back in the early 2000s, where it wasn't what the internet is now. It was actually a realm of kind of freedom. I could connect to somebody in Thailand who was interested in Nietzsche, who I am, and was interested in John Coltrane, who I am, and we could talk and connect. It was this realm of freedom. It was like a giant human brain. So technology could be sublime. It could lead to a paradise. But look at what the internet has become. It's become something very ugly and very dark.

Barriers and tools — sensitivity, the senses, and daily practices

Andrew Huberman: I have thought for a while now that the real problem with humans is our propensity to get absorbed by drama and by numbing out. In fact, my mental practice in the morning — I do a short meditation, very brief, do the sunlight thing and the rest — but I have this imagery that I implant in my head of a thin, almost like a tightrope that I have to walk, and on either side is a slide down: on one side is drama and the other side is numbing out. I do realize that you have to get a certain distance and then that tightrope turns into more of a flat surface that you can rest on and stay. But those early hours — there are too many things, algorithms and so forth, that can just yank me down either side of that tightrope.

I'm pulling from what we've discussed so far. I'm hearing that an important component to accessing the best of what is human, but also the nonhuman, in order to enrich one's life and access the sublime, is a slowing down. That means intentionally not leaping onto the time scale, the rhythm of just anyone or anything. To be very deliberate about that. And I do hear you saying that humans have a tremendous amount of value to offer our lives — not just in love, although certainly there. But it does seem that it's getting harder and harder to have a great life, even with resources.

So if you want to just toss out a couple of other tools or ways to access the better version of ourselves so that we can get to the sublime — you mentioned meditation, writing by hand. Do you keep your phone out of the room when you work, when you relate to other people?

Robert Greene: I do, but of course I'm human and it tempts me. I understand the addiction. I have to take the phone and put it in the drawer, and I'm getting better and better at it.

But you talked about numbness. I think a lot of the sublime is a function of your sensitivity to the world. You were born with these senses — like any creature — that are open, constantly giving you feedback from the environment. That's what senses are for. That's what they're designed for. Your senses are there to connect you to your environment, to connect you to the outside world.

I have a story in the book about this Russian scientist at the turn of the twentieth century who's a geographer sent to Siberia to map the forest there — called the Taiga — and he encounters an indigenous hunter named Dersu Uzala. It's a famous book and a movie was made of it. Dersu is part of this indigenous culture called the Gold, which is on the brink of extinction. He's a lone hunter and trapper. The Russian scientist invites him to join their expedition as a scout because he's intrigued by this man. He slowly realizes that this man has an intelligence and a sensitivity to the environment that is far superior to anything he possesses. He can read the sky and the climate and knows the weather that's coming. He can see the birds and know what it indicates.

At one point they encounter a tiger. They hear a tiger growling through some bushes. A Siberian tiger is not something you want to mess with. The Russian guy gets frightened, picks up his rifle, and Dersu screams at him, "Put that rifle down." He walks up to the tiger, which he calls Amba, and says, "Amba, calm down. We don't want to hurt you. We understand you. This is your forest. We respect you. We will not harm you." The Russian guy's freaking out, and the tiger walks away.

At the end of the story, Dersu ends up getting murdered by some people who were stealing his trappings. The Russian scientist goes: "We humans have lost something. If only we could keep our scientific culture but also have these powers of our senses, we would be insane. We'd be insanely powerful and we wouldn't be so destructive."

We have powers that come through the senses. It's a form of intelligence. When our sensory experience is so limited — as it is when we live in towns and cities, where everything is the same — we're not really listening to sounds, not really smelling things, not really looking. Our thoughts become constricted. We think we're just intelligent animals, but we're physical creatures. Our intelligence is modeled after our senses. If we only see the same things, our minds kind of atrophy. Our creativity and inventiveness came from being in environments that were dangerous, where we had to see and think and feel our way into things.

A lot of the sublime is a function of your sensitivity. You can recover that. It's not like your atrophied senses are forever like that. You can put yourself in these environments. You can go to the desert and walk through it and feel the emptiness and the silence and the lack of vegetation and let the environment inhabit you, and your senses will awaken. You can go to a mountain. You can swim in the ocean. You can sit in your goddamn backyard and encounter it like I did writing this book. Your senses are waiting to be awakened.

If we took somebody who was like a stockbroker on Wall Street with the most atrophied senses you can imagine and gave him a shot of LSD or peyote, suddenly it would all open up. He would have these experiences as well. So the point is it's not dead. It's there. It's wanting to be awakened. It can happen at any moment. But it's a function of your sensitivity to the world and how you use your senses to let the world inside of you.

Andrew Huberman: What I'm gathering is that our ability to be sensitive, to feel things with a lot of intensity, and to really be curious explorers are key portals to the sublime. And one thing I love about you so much is that you talk about power, sensitivity — but in particular power through this really benevolent lens. Even the way you describe the sensual and the erotic — these are also loaded terms now, unfortunately. But I have great hope for this book to not just educate people but to transform them and to transform the way they interact with the world and each other.

If you would, I'd like to ask you one final question, and it's the meanest question I could possibly ask.

Robert Greene: Good. I look forward to it.

Andrew Huberman: You know, as somebody who just finished a book by hand after seven years, and who has written all these other amazing books — what's the next book? Or is there a seed of something in your mind that you're willing to share? And no is a perfectly good answer.

What comes next — the invisible, and a possible novel

Robert Greene: I have two strains. I know I can't do another book like this one because I'm heading into my late sixties and I don't have the energy. I had a stroke and I just can't put myself through it. I can't wait seven years because I don't know how much life I have left.

But I'm obsessed with something that's very hard for me to describe verbally. It has to do with the invisible — how many things affect our lives that you cannot actually see, that are very powerful, but that if you could see them, it would alter your experience. To give you an example: we can't see the future. We have no knowledge of the future. But things are happening right now in our present moment — little trends that are going to create the future. If we could somehow see them, if we could crystallize them into some form, we would have this kind of knowledge of where we're headed, and it would be very powerful. There are people in history who demonstrated a high ability to predict what was coming. They fascinate me. They liked to live outside of their time.

We live in these abstract spaces where everything is symbolic to us. We're not aware of the influence of these invisible things on us. I want to make visible all of these things that you don't think about but that are affecting your life. It's a weird concept. I've detailed some examples on pen and paper, but it's going to be a shorter book. It's going to be about negative space — about seeing what's not there as opposed to what's there, what's missing in the picture.

The other thing I'm toying with is writing fiction, because it would be an insane challenge for me. I'd be using a different part of my brain. I'm fascinated with the tech world and how it's so misguided — where did it come from, and what is it about humans that have created this kind of slightly monstrous future that we're headed towards? I've known some of these tech overlords. I've met them. I'm interested in their psychology and where it came from and what is the origin of this form of thinking that I find very, very dangerous.

It's very inchoate, very nebulous, but I'm toying with these characters and researching the origins of this — deep levels of alienation that are being birthed in this present moment through technology. Fiction will give me the ability to go inside their minds in a way that I can't really do with non-fiction. What I want to express about this dangerous world we're headed to is more suited for fiction than non-fiction. So I'll see — those are two ideas I'm toying with, and hopefully my life goes on long enough to try and create them.

Andrew Huberman: I really appreciate you sharing where your deliberation is around that. I have great confidence you'll be around a while. You're doing all the right things. You're exceedingly sharp and exceedingly kind in taking the time to come talk about the book and share these ideas with us. You're a real role model to me and have been for a long time. Ever since I read Mastery, I was like, "Oh man, this book, this guy." And you're a few years older than me, not terribly much older. That's always been a goal of mine — to identify people for whom I could really model some components of my life and career after, even if the specifics are different.

Robert Greene: I'm very humbled by those words.

Andrew Huberman: You didn't know it, but I apprenticed myself to you without asking your permission. You're like a giant in this world and I feel very humbled by that.

Robert Greene: You were truly in your light.

Andrew Huberman: Thank you so much, Robert, for coming here. Let's get together soon. Maybe we do that psychedelic journey together.

Robert Greene: I'd love it.

Andrew Huberman: We won't live stream it. We're just going to have the experience.

Robert Greene: No one's going to hear about it, right?

Andrew Huberman: Just thank you. Thanks for being you. Thanks for being such an incredibly powerful and thoughtful writer and keep going.

Robert Greene: Thank you so much, Andrew. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for the opportunity.