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

0:00 welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Robert Green Robert Green is an author who has written more than five bestselling books including the 48 Laws of Power the laws of human nature and Mastery he did his bachelor's training at the University of California Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison Robert Green's books are both unique and important for several reasons not the least of which is that they explore the interaction between the psychology of self self-exploration and the psychology of human interaction all rooted in history

0:46 and modern culture and at the same time in a way that pertains to everybody I first learned about Robert's work from reading the book Mastery which to my mind is a brilliant exploration and a practical tool for how to think about and pursue one's purpose purp whenever I'm asked for book suggestions I always include Mastery in my top three recommendations during today's discussion we cover a wide range of topics including how to find and pursue and Achieve one's purpose we talk about the selection of a life partner as well as romantic and other types of relationships we also discussed the topics of motivation and urgency and this concept of death ground which arose during our discussion of Robert's recent stroke Robert stroke rendered him certain limitations but also has allowed him to explore how to write how to

1:32 exercise indeed how to interface with life in general in new ways that allow him to continue to expand his sense of purpose I'm certain that by the end of today's episode you will have gleaned tremendous amounts of new knowledge that will allow you to navigate forward along the path to your purpose perhaps find your purpose if you feel you haven't done that yet as well as to greatly enhance your relationship with yourself with others and indeed to the world around you before we begin I'd like to emphas ize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is Roa Roa

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4:36 doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing Yoga Nidra about a decade ago my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app turned out to be the waking up app which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states and that he liked it very much so I gave the waking up app a try and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate other times I have longer to meditate and indeed I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about Consciousness but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of States depending on which meditation I do I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of Yoga Nidra sessions for those

5:22 of you who don't know Yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind it's very different than most meditations and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoganidra and something similar to it called non-sleep deep rest or nsdr can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even with just a short 10-minute session if you'd like to try the waking up app you can go to waking up.com huberman and access a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman to access a free 30-day trial and now for my discussion with Robert Green Robert I'm so happy you're here I'm reallyy happy to be here Andrew thank you so much for inviting me a short story in 2015 I was teaching a course to

6:08 undergraduates this was a big course 450 students where was this this was when I was a professor at University of California San Diego I was about to move back to Stanford um but the course was entitled neural circuits in health and disease but there was a final lecture where I would do a lot of Q&A with the students about science about careers about career paths and what I found was that many of the students had questions about not just science but about how to learn and forage for information yeah and I recommended three books at the end of the course every year that I taught it I taught it for four years and one of the books was the book longitude which is a wonderful story about discovery of timekeeping devices at c um one book

6:55 I'll leave as a mystery um not to be not to be mysterious but because it's not it's it's a science book I'll just tell you what it is it's um uh principles of Neuroscience so I thought that I don't know that one yeah it's a big it makes a better a door stop uh for most than than a book but it's it's a wonderful resource um if you want to learn about neuroscience and your book Mastery W and the reason I recommended Mastery is because these students were soon going to go into the great Jungle of yeah you know post uh undergraduate education and and for me I found Mastery to be an absolutely transformative book in that it taught me so much about how to learn from others how to expect certain types of um interactions when one kind of assigns themselves to a mentor um and

7:43 vice versa and it talked about some things that we'll get into in more depth today but not the least of which is about identifying that um unique seed that exists within all of us that can guide our best decisions in terms of finding our purpose and it and so I will usually end with a great debt of gratitude and I'll probably do that again at the end but I want to start with a great debt of gratitude uh Mastery transformed my entire life and and in many ways this podcast probably wouldn't exist were it not for Mastery because um it really embedded in me this idea that we all have uh a deeper purpose and it explains how to go about finding that purpose so I tell you that and I also will use that as a segue for

8:30 um asking you now since I'm sure people's ears are picked up to this you know how do you find your purpose um could you share with us what what it is to find one's purpose and how early life events perhaps can cue us to what that purpose is for each of us well thank you for that that marvelous introduction I'm almost blushing that's that's fantastic story um well you know being a human being is not easy as opposed to an animal because we're born and nobody gives us like a direction our parents might be a little bit our college teachers Etc mentors but generally we're on our own and it's a very very difficult process you wake up in the morning and you don't really know what you're what you can do you could choose

9:16 12 different paths it can be very confusing and very overwhelming when you find that sense of purpose when you find what I call your life's task everything has a direction everything has a purpose your energy is concentrated it's it's not like you're just going down a single narrow pathway it's not like life becomes boring and it's just about discipline and solving problems it's actually the most exciting thing that can ever happen to you because you never have that lost feeling you wake up in the morning you go yeah this is what I need to accomplish people come at you with all kinds of distractions and boring and irritating things you're able to cut it out it's just the most marvelous piece of internal radar that you can have so I genuinely wish that everybody can find that kind of internal radar and so it's not easy and I

10:04 understand that there's no like instant formula because we're all about instant formulas it's difficult and I want you to know that so it's not like Robert can give me the answer in three minutes no I can't but there's a process involved it's not it's not you know a mystery you can follow a very singular process and the idea is you're talking about childhood the way I like to frame it is when you were were born you are a phenomenon you are unique your DNA has never occurred in the history of the universe going back billions of years it will never occur in the future your life experience with your parents and everything that you experienc in your early years going on up is unique it's yours you're are one of a kind right so

10:51 that is your source of power to waste that is just the worst thing you can do in your life and what what the power is is find finding that uniqueness what makes you you and how you can M that and how you can go deep into it and use that to create a career path right and so I tell people when you're a child when you're four or five or even younger you have what the great psychologist maslo called impulse voices there Little voices in your head that say I love this I hate that I like this food I don't like when Mommy moves this way I like when Daddy comes from here here you're very queued into who you are and what you like and what you don't like and these voices kind of direct you in certain ways

11:37 right and when you're very young they direct you towards intellectual mental Pursuits as well and there's a book I recommend for everybody uh it's Howard Gardner's five frames of mind it's helped me immensely the idea is he talks about five forms of intelligence our problem is we think of intelligence as mostly intellectual but there are many forms of intelligence there's the intelligence that has to do with words there's abstract intelligence that has to do with patterns and Mathematics there's kinetic intelligence it has to do with the body there's social intelligence he has five of them and the idea is your brain naturally veers towards one of them it can Veer towards two of them that happens but generally one of them kind of dominates

12:24 right and it's like a grain in your brain that's going in a certain direction you want to go with that grain and because that's where your power will lie so when you're young if you go back and think about when you were four or five you you can maybe get a picture of some kind of direction or voice inside of you that was impelling you towards this I know for me it was words from I can remember when I was six years old I was just obsessed with words just the letters in Words almost like in almost slightly schizophrenic way I would spell words backwards I would take them apart I would do anagrams I love paland drums right so I had a thing about words and language it's very Primal some people you know Albert

13:09 Einstein when he was four years old his father gave him a birthday gift of a compass and he was just mesmerized by this Compass the idea that there are invisible forces out there in the cosmos moving this needle and he's obsessed with the idea of invisible forces Steve Jobs when he was like seven or eight or maybe younger in Berling game California his father they passed by a store with de technological devices in the window and he was just hypnotized by the design of those devices and the glass tubes and everything so he wanted to go in that direction you know Tiger Woods saw his father hitting golf balls in the garage and he was just like screaming with joy he had to he had to do that right you know I can give you a million different examples of this of course these are

13:55 people who are famous obviously we can go back and find that it's easier but what happens to you and please cut me off if I'm going on too long no please continue please what happens to you is you're seven now you're getting older and you're starting to not hear that voice anymore you're hearing the voice of your teachers telling you you're not good at this field you need to get better at math you know you shouldn't be interested in these sports or anything you should be going this dire your parents are starting to tell you this is the career they want for or the direction they want you to go in right you start hearing that more than your own voice and as you get older it gets worse and worse and worse then when you're a teenager it's all about what other people are doing your peers what's cool what's not cool you know and that

14:42 kind of is more so all of these noise enters your brain and you can't hear that anymore you don't know who you are and so you go to college you kind of maybe choose a a major that seems practical that your parents want you to go in into maybe you kind of wander around you're not sure and then you enter the work world without that inner radar that I'm talking about and you brother you're lost right where should I go well I need to make money right and so you make a choice based on the need to make a lot of money some not everyone but some people do that and I understand that need we all need to make a living but that can set you off on a very bad path because you're not connected emotionally

15:28 the thing is when you figure out that Primal inclination that grain that's inside of you then you have the the energy to to do to be disciplined to go through boring tasks to learn you learn at a faster rate because you're emotionally engaged when you're emotionally engaged in a subject the brain learns twice three times four times as fast as when you're not I always give the example in college I studied foreign languages which was kind of a passion of mine for three or four years I studied French and then I went to Paris and I couldn't speak a word it was it was useless because it didn't teach me anything practical right I was totally confused and then but I was in Paris and I and I

16:13 loved it and I wanted to live there right and I had a girlfriend and I needed to speak French to her and I can tell you in one month I learned more than those four years of University because I wanted to because I was engaged my emotions were there it was like I had to survive survive to learn French whereas so most of us we don't have a need really to learn this subject We're Half we're paying half attention but when you find that thing that really connects to you you're paying deep attention your emotions are engaged you're learning at a much faster rate okay and so the thing is how do you find that when you're older when you're 21 I I I give people a lot of help and it's usually not so difficult we can go through that process it gets harder when you're 30 and you've been wandering

17:00 around but it's not impossible I didn't really start find my exact path until I was 38 39 to be honest so there's hope when you get 40 and you get 50 gets more and more difficult right and it's very sad if you wasted that seed of uniqueness that I'm talking about and I tell people there are ways of going back and we go through a process like archaeology we have to dig and dig and dig and find those bones from your childhood that indicated what you were meant to do but when you find your life's task everything opens up it doesn't mean you figured out okay I've got to aim for this particular job when I'm 28 that's not how it works it gives you a sense of direction you can try different things you can experiment you can have fun when you're in your 20s you're going to learn

17:45 you're going to learn skills but it gives you an overall framework instead of whoa all this confusion this chaos social media the internet I could go here here here you're lost at C it gives you a very important sense of direction a compass as you described this I I have this image of um you know you mentioned animals um that presumably don't have a lot of flexibility in terms of the niches they can exist in but the way I imagine this process is that as a human we're plopped into a environment and here I'm using analogy where um we don't really know if we are an aquatic animal a terrestrial animal or a or an Aven right or an amphibian or an amphibian for that matter um and to make the wrong choice right to be an amphibian who's

18:32 trying to fly although I'm sure they're out there um in the animal kingdom uh it it's not just a waste of time it's probably deadly um and not to overd dramatize the the failure of finding one's purpose but I see it that way whereas um perhaps we could just say that the process of finding one's purpose is to to realize like ah you know um I'm an amphibian I can go in and out of water whereas a bunch of other creatures around me stop at the water's edge right right and this is really cool and a bunch of these other things like these flying things that they can't actually even go in the water some of them might you know be on the surface or dive into it but they they can't do what I can do so the process of self-discovery it sounds like it's about um restricting one's choices to a a a

19:18 sort of wedge within the full landscape of of options and um you know for me I can certainly recall after reading Mastery it helped me recall some early seed emotions that I experienced as a very distinct sensation in my body can you describe that yeah um without making it too um specific to my my unique taste you know as a kid I loved um flora and fauna I loved learning about biology sure yeah no surprise there um but animals and how they move in particular and fish and going to a a proper aquarium store for the first time for me and going snorkeling for the first time was like Wow and even as I describe it it's almost like my body fls I feel it in my left arm of all things and it feels like there's something to do about it it's not just that I'm in observation

20:05 of things that Delight me right it's like there's something there's an activation State created within me like I got to do something with this and typically it's tell everybody about it until they won't listen anymore um but oftentimes it's to also draw those things to think about them and I just Delight in them it's a constant source of delight and so seeds such as those and there are a few other things in that in that landscape of Flora and Fauna and learning about animals and biology including the human animal and then organizing information feels so satisfying to me it's like a drug that um and so it just felt feels like this you know Eternal spring of of life right and so for me that's what it was and to and in 2015 when I was teaching that course the course I loved but I was

20:51 feeling a little bit astray in my scientific career and then I read Mastery and I realized yes I love running a laboratory I love teaching but there's something else for me and it has to do not with a podcast I didn't even know what a podcast I probably I knew what a podcast was I was listening to podcast at that time but um but I wasn't on social media I had no thoughts of having a podcast but what I wanted was that feeling in its total number of forms that's the goal get that feeling in as many forms as possible right is that is that about that's a that's that's absolutely perfect because the connection to what I'm talking about it's not an intellectual thing it's it's visceral it's emotional it's physical right and you feel it in your body and when you're doing it it's like it's at your level

21:37 it's like you're swimming with the current you feel it things are easy everything clicks together there's a delight not everything is going to be delightful there's going to be tedium involved there's going to be moments of boredom but you're able to withstand the moments of boredom because you feel the Deep overall connection so yes that's precisely what I'm talking about I mean it's for me it's a little bit similar thing is I said about words but the other thing that I was obsessed with when I was a kid was early human ancestors don't ask me why I just was so obsessed with our ancestors millions of years ago and how it's possible to be living here in the 60s or 70s with cars and everything but to come to where we are now and I wrote a a short story when

22:26 I was eight years old about a vulture It Was Written from the point of view of a vulture watching the first humans kind of emerge on the planet I'm sure it was absolutely awful Dreadful but the weird thing is I'm writing a new book and all I'm doing in that book is going into ear into early humans and I feel like a kid again I'm so excited I'm so happy so I can very much relate to your story you mentioned these five different forms of intelligence or frame frames of Mind as you refer to them um and I'm certainly aware that you know I lean towards a more intellectual interests although as you pointed out the the excitement the Delight is visceral yeah and the actions are actions they're of the body ultimately right um one has to

23:11 draw speak write books Etc um to to transmute that excitement into something real for people that are not as intellectually tuned but maybe are kinesthetically tuned for instance um I can only wonder what that's like uh I'm not completely uncoordinated but I don't think I have a kinesthetic Attunement uh or frame of mind but I for instance um had a podcast listener mention that they think in feels that they literally experience thought as a Ser as sort of a patchwork of bodily Sensations right and that thought for them is not of the stuff from the neck up but only from the neck down which to me was really

23:57 intriguing and so I only raise this because um there have to be a as you point out there's an infinite number of different sort of um orientations based on our unique DNA and experience but what do you think explains why these particular seeds or uh as you point out like the the the direction that the grain runs in the brain I mean it's it's partially going to be nature it's going to be DNA um but we we're talking about this as if there's some exciting or a inspiring or delightful thing that captures us can it be the other way too can it be um you know one has a bad experience as a child in an intellectual environment and then decides you know I'm I'm going in the D things of the body feel good things of

24:44 the mind of intellect feels bad and does it matter whether or not we are drawn to our Purpose By recognizing what we love or what we hate um or are both useful oh they're both very very useful um you know a lot of intelligence is is not is non-verbal we think in terms of images we're we're very much infected by the emotions of other people so I know for instance uh my mother is very very interested in history she's obsessed with history and I probably absorbed her interest in history I don't think there's a genetic a gene for that interest you know so you're you're going to absorb things from your parents as well so it's not all just genetic but

25:29 yeah what you hate will pay a big will have a big thing but the problem with doing that is if you go into a direction in you're in you're in elementary school Etc and they force you to learn math and you hate it what it tends to do is it turns you off from learning in general you think I don't want to I don't want to I don't want to be disciplined I don't want to go through anything because it's painful doesn't lead anywhere it's not me frustration it turns you off from learning in general so it's really really important for a child to have the love experience as early as possible so that they can know what they hate and why they hate it right and then they can Rebel and they can go into that field as opposed to I hate learning I hate discipline I hate studying I hate trying things over and

26:14 over again if you're kinesthetically oriented and you know a part of me I understand that because I love sports is you have to you have to practice it's going to take a lot of it's not you're not going to instantly be good at something right and that's going to require a love of it right but if your math experience I hate learning you're not you're it's going to transfer to sports you're going to hate discipline in general so it's very important for parents to let that child have at least glimmers of that love moment I know for me when I um finished college and I entered the work world I had to get a job I got worked in journalism I hated it I hated working for other people I hated hated office politics I hated all the egos I hated

27:01 the smarminess I hated the lack of quality it was all just about you know making money and getting things out there and then I worked in Hollywood I hated Hollywood I hated working in Hollywood that formed me very much maybe go in the direction that I went in but only from the basis of I knew that I wanted to be a writer so you know that's very important that it's not just hate it can form you but there also has to be that posit of deep emotional love of something that also is grounded in you in some way what you just said really highlights the fact that energy and motivation can come from either either pressure you know desire for something or desire to get away from something and um earlier when you were talking about

27:48 um how we are so much more engaged and driven toward things that stir us emotionally and and actually we know based on the neuroscience you know too I'm sure that um only by the release of certain neurochemicals in the brain and body would our brain have any reason to change right if you don't feel agitation and you can do everything that you're trying to do of course your brain wouldn't change like why would it right that agitation is a is a signature of the neurochemicals that are saying hey something's different now right right you might need to do something different including rewire yourself right um and that can come from positive or negative experiences I'm obsessed with this idea of energy I mean we all want to have more energy and focus and normally we hear about the concept of energy in the context of caloric energy like what

28:34 should we eat and when and how much and we need to get sleep but what you're really referring to is neural energy like the the engagement of ourselves that's you know uh sitting there ready to be engaged but it requires the right experiential macronutrients right the experiential micronutrients as opposed to of course we need good nutrition but that's not sufficient it's necessary but not sufficient so uh would you say that when um we are let let's say since a good number of our listeners are in adulthood um you know from our 20s on that the things that excite us as adults that really generate some feeling of Readiness or or grab our attention um are still informative toward guiding our

29:19 decisions about best life and life purpose well um what do you what exactly do you mean by that I mean like because there are things that excite you in in a kind of a quick way like you know where you have to relieve some tension and you there's entertainment and there's things that kind of give you pretty immediate gratification and there's the larger P picture of something that will give you fulfillment over years to come so you can feel that when you're older and you can pay attention to it but a lot of the time is we we're paying too much attention to the immediate pleasures of life to what gives us instant gratification and that's what we're grabbing for so this is a much more kind of deeper process that involves that digging that I was saying it it's it's

30:06 deeper than just kind of I like this I don't like that you know kind of thing it's it's more it's more something macro than than just just that and so when you're in your 20s or in your 30s or your 40s you want to be paying attention to yourself and the problem with people in the world today is you're not paying attention to yourself not inside your own head you don't hear those voices you don't hear what you love what you like anymore because as I said there's so many of these other distractions going on and so you're always like attuned to what other people like right because you're in social media this is what people are following this is what they're interested in as opposed to disengaging backing off from that and and looking at yourself and going

30:52 through the process of that's not me actually I don't really like that you know and so what you're talking about is I think very profound is levels of frustration or anxiety are definite signals that you must pay attention to that they're telling you this isn't a good direction for you this is a waste of time for you and in general I tell people selfawareness being able to hear those voices to understand that your frustration is telling you something and sometimes you you just act on it without understanding it but understanding why why you're frustrated why you don't like your career why you're not happy about where you're going is the key to everything it will open up it will actually be able even in your 30s to

31:37 return you to that childhood inclination but if you can't listen to where those emotions come from then they're useless they're not teaching you anything as we all know quality nutrition influences of course our physical health but also our mental health and our cognitive functioning our memory our ability to learn new things and to focus and we know that one of the most important features of highquality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high quality unprocessed or minimally processed sources as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically all the cellular functions in our body including the gut microbiome now I like most everybody try to get optimal nutrition from Whole Foods ideally mostly from minimally processed or nonprocessed Foods however

32:24 one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough servings of high quality fruits and vegetables per day as well as fiber and probiotics that often accompany those fruits and vegetables that's why way back in 2012 long before I ever had a podcast I started drinking ag1 and so I'm delighted that ag1 is sponsoring the huberman Lab podcast the reason I started taking ag1 and the reason I still drink ag1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs that is it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins minerals probiotics and F fiber to ensure optimal mental health physical health and performance if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they're giving away five free

33:09 travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer so it sounds like one of the goals is to engage in what I'll just call for the moment unadulterated self-referencing you know unadulterated uh in the the all senses of the word because um as a child as you point out um at stages of life that are before puberty they're literally prex um which I think is important right because um puberty to me as a neurobiologist who started off as a developmental neurobiologist I can tell you that puberty is the most profound transformation that the brain undergoes

33:55 for in the entire lifespan there's just absolutely no question about it everything is different after puberty because of all of the new relational dynamics that become apparent and our potential involvement in them yeah it's just it's you know it's not talked about enough how dramatically puberty changes the brain sure I mean we are different people before and after puberty hormones that are suddenly raging the hormones are there and it's not just changes in how we view the world but changes in how the World Views us and not just through the lens of sexuality but also expectation of what we are capable of what we are responsible for or not responsible for our learning capacity I mean puberty is like this you know it's also the most rapid stage of Aging in our entire lifespan those kids that go

34:41 home for summer and then come back like shaving you know I was sort of a late I wasn't a late bloomer but I had a long protracted puberty but I remember those kids I'm sure we we all remember those kids um everything changes and so I think prior to puberty these seeds as you've described them of of delight or of resistance to things think they are unadulterated they're not contaminated by the voices and expectations of others and so I can see the challenge of reaching back to those as an adult um I wonder if this relates to um something that I've heard you talk about before although perhaps not as much as some of the other topics you've discussed publicly which is um the real versus the false Sublime oh um could you perhaps

35:26 just Define for us what Sublime really is what a Sublime experience is and and the distinction between real and false Sublime experiences because I I feel like this relates to finding that seed right it's it's about finding authentic seeds of within us as opposed to when emotions can be distracting and misleading wow I never thought I never made that connection and it's the book that I'm writing right now so thank you for that I have to think about that I'm actually I'm writing a book on the sublime and um I have several ways of kind of illustrating I generally like to use a metaphor and the metaphor is that being a human being being a social human being living in a particular culture means that you live inside of a circle and that Circle of that time are the

36:14 conventions of thinking of ideas that are acceptable of behavior that is acceptable this is where you where you can go mentally where you can go physically you know all the codes and conventions so that's Circle for ancient Egypt and for 21st century America they're obviously very different but it's the same Circle it's the same limiting factor you're not supposed to go outside of it these are thoughts experiences Behavior you're not supposed to do the sublime is what lies just outside that Circle um the word sublime comes from on the threshold of it's like here's a door and the sublime is literally at the threshold of the door you're looking out into something else

36:59 right and the quintessential Sublime experience is a near-death experience you're standing on the on the doorway the threshold of death itself right and so in my book I'm illustrating the different kinds of sublime experiences that you can have in relation to the cosmos in relation to thinking about being alive just being alive is the strangest sensation you can possibly have I have I know that very personally after my stroke I go into childhood chapter on childhood and how Sublime your own childhood was I go into animals relation to animals I go have a chapter about the brain chapter about love I'm working right now on a chapter about history okay but what I'm trying to say is the human brain is wired for these

37:46 experiences is wired for transcendental experiences that take us out of the narrow little realm that we live in because we're aware of our death as the only animal truly conscious of it own mortality and it frightens the hell out of us and the idea that we can see something larger than than just the the the banal parts of our life is a doorway that open allows us to kind of transcend the moment to feel connected to something larger to feel connected to some power in the cosmos to Evolution itself right and so we're wired for that and I'm writing a chapter now about 40,000 years ago at the moment where I think the sublime was born is a story that I'm trying to illustrate right now

38:31 with our upper Paleolithic ancestors so it's deep inside of us we need it we have to have it in the 21st century we have very few avenues for it any real Avenues religion used to be the main kind of way of of accessing this and so because it's so deep we reach for false forms of the sublime that give us the sense that we're we're transcending but it's not at all because Sublime has to come from within it's an experience that you have that you're generating in your own mind in your own experience the false Sublime comes from outside it comes from drugs it comes from alcohol it comes from shopping it comes from online rage it comes from

39:17 joining a cause and just getting out all your aggression and violence right it comes from causes it comes from addictions okay it gives you a sense it calms you down and makes you feel like there's something else going on in life besides your job that you're you're sick of but it's not real it's not lasting it's false it's an illusion it's not based on anything real it's not connecting to that deep part of human nature that's wired for these experiences so what happens is you have to have more and more and more and more of it you have to have you know more of this rush you need more of the drug you need more of the alcohol you need more of the sex you need more of the porn it's never going to satisfy you but the real Sublime you don't have that feeling it's like it's transformative once you

40:03 feel it it lasts for you for the rest of your life it's what maslo again called a peak experience so that's the difference between the false and the real Sublime I haven't quite connected it to what you were saying but if I think about it I think you're on something very interesting I mean maybe the connection I was trying to draw was uh doesn't hold but yeah for me um those early experiences of seeing things that just delighted me in a way that felt like that not only is well the the the thought process was a long time ago when something like oh my goodness I can't believe this exists this is so cool this is the coolest thing and so clearly create an activation state within me but then there was also a

40:49 thought and a feeling of again a lot of this is sort of pre preverb it's not truly preverbal I could speak at that age but it was um that's of me and I'm of it right there's a connection there and then it was there's something to do about this the activation State created in the body was you know I I need to learn more about this I need to tell people about this I need to think about this I need more examples of this and see whether or not they're all like this you know etc etc um so certainly it meets some of the criteria of a Sublime experience definitely and I knew again when I was in graduate school and again when I was this young Professor about to transition to tenure that I knew it was going going to do something different it was as if I was on the threshold of something but I

41:36 didn't know what that next thing was but I could trust it because of that early experience of knowing that's the threat like like I'm an amphibian this is my environment and you're an amphibian too right and we're different amphibians but you know we're going to be amphibians together right and then and there's a permanence to it that it does seem to transcend time I'm obsessed with time perception so I have to be careful not to go off on a tangent about that but the human brain's ability to F slice or macro slice time is incredible and and it's been set of um not just addictions but also interactions with toxic people that they murder time that that humans have a I think it was young I I'll look it up but um one of the great psychologists said something to the extent that um addictive behaviors

42:25 thought patterns substances are humans attempts to murder time so that they don't have to address their mortality yeah and that's always made a lot of sense to me yeah we say kill time is our expression kill time through passive engagement but also kill time through um trying to get overwhelmed or overtaken by an experience or a substance as opposed to when you're truly connected you have that sense of flow and 3 hours can pass by and you're not even aware Ware of it so time is a totally subjective experience it can be extremely slow and tedious and you feel very depressed or it can pass by but that passes by without you even noticing it and it's a wondrous experience you

43:11 know when I'm deep in my writing I'm not aware of the time passing I'm so involved I'm so immersed it's a deeply deeply pleasurable experience of time it is Sublime and yeah so I agree with you I think your distinction is very interesting you I'm eager awaiting your your next book but we won't rush you well I I I'm I'm so immersed in it that I could I could talk for hours because I also have a chapter in there about what I call the dayon which is like that voice inside of you that speaks to you and I'm writing a whole chapter about how Sublime that is when you connect to that voice so you are spoton there is something very much connected to master in this book but it's the next chapter that I'm writing fantastic I can't wait I can't wait I'd

43:57 like to shift slightly to a topic that you've written extensively about which is power um and not just power but also seduction which you've written extensively about and of course you've written about finding one's purpose so tell me if the framework that I've just given myself Liberty to create is an accurate one and if it's not I I'm hoping that um it's not in perhaps some interesting ways so to me you talk about and we will talk about power as as a resource it's it's something that um it's there as a resource it could be used or not used um and I think of Seduction as one form of exchange between an individuals so there's a verb associated with seduction power I'm

44:43 thinking of more as a noun in this context you're the word guy um and then you know purpose is uh is really about finding like to what end or ends one is going to um devote power seduction and the other forces that allow human beings to interact with each other in the world um but power as a resource that can be expressed in different ways and accessed in different ways maybe we could just explore that a little bit because you know when we hear the word power I think a lot of people kind of brace themselves like here we go someone's going to try and have power over me this is about manipulation and so on and so forth but I learned pretty early on that every every career Endeavor there there are

45:28 power dynamics there's Mentor mentee they teachers and their students and both have power um in inter in romantic relationship there's a power exchange there are yeses and their NOS there are Mayes there are um uh covert and overt contracts yeah I'll do this because I want to right you'll do this because you want to great sounds great overt contractor they're also covert contracts well I don't feel safe doing that so what I'll do is I'll take something on through from the interaction that you're not aware of so that I can sort of um ease my sense of danger and make give myself the illusion of feeling safe and all sorts of kind of complicated human dynamics that have to do with us having this forbrain thing that can do all of that gymnastics so maybe we could start

46:14 very simply by just saying you know how would you define power in terms of its uh functional definition like in in in interpersonal relations and then why do you think power is so essential to all relationships that's really what I'd like to get to why is it so essential why couldn't it be something else well the way I Define Powers I try and take it away from that kind of negative context that most people have and that you that you brought up and I bring it to something very primitive and very Primal the way the human being is wired the feeling that we have no control over our environment and in the earliest period it was literally over our environment and wild animals and nature and and climate Etc but now the sense

47:01 that you have no control over your career over your children over your parents is deeply deeply am miserating and it compels us to act in certain ways either attempts to find positive ways of power or doing what you call covert ways of getting power you know passive aggressive traditionally passive aggressive means so it's deeply wired in us to want a degree of control over the immediate environment and immediate events we can never have complete control and the idea of having complete control is nonsense and it would actually be very ugly because you want a degree of Letting Go and letting circumstances come to you etc etc so the sense of you you you want to feel like with other people and

47:49 relationships that you can influence them that you can move them in a certain direction either to get you to love you and treat treat you better or either to stop annoying irritating behaviors or either to you know wake up and and find and and and do productive activity if it's your children Etc you want to have the ability to influence people to move them in a certain direction either in your interest or in their interest right and once you have that need and every single human being ever who's ever lived has that need and we often don't recognize it because we're in embarrassed by it we're embarrassed by our desire for power for our need to control every human being has it right and it's not easy because human beings

48:36 are complicated they don't if you say do this and you're talking to your son he'll do the opposite or he'll do something else you can't just force people in a direction right by being overt and telling them this is what you need to do you create resentment you create an enemy they may they may say yes yes daddy yes husband I'll do what you say say but they're you they're they're going to resist you deep down inside right so people are tricky they wear masks they pretend to say one thing and they do another they have their egos and you inadvertently wound their egos or trip them in some way and they react in a way that you don't expect and so power is this kind of invisible realm that envelops Society where people are

49:22 continually battling each other and struggling in it but no one is like talking about it no one's being overt about it no one's saying this is exactly what I'm trying to do and so when you enter the social world and the career world you're not expecting these battles you don't know no one's taught you no one's trained you your parents don't train you nobody trains you and you make mistakes and you realize how political people are if you're a Sharky character and there's a certain percentage of them you realize wow I can deceive people I can manipulate them I can get what I want I can pretend to love them and they they'll fall for me and I can do all this other stuff but for most of us the 95% of us who aren't sharks and I'm I'm including myself in that category it's it's it's very very disturbing to

50:09 suddenly enter that world and see all of that invisible power games on that's no one's given you any advice for helped you and so take it out of the realm of it's just about trying to dominate the world and manipulate and exploit and and abuse it's something inside of you you have this need and your suppression of it will only make you come out in passive ways and you won't be able to control certain things if you want to move people if you want them to follow your ideas if you want them to be more aligned with your politics or your ideas you have to be subtle you have to learn psychology you have to learn certain aspects of how to almost move people

50:55 without them realizing against in certain directions which is like The Art of Seduction and if you're not interested in that if you're just going to tell people what you think of what you're going to do that means you're not interested in Practical action you're not interested in results you're just interested in venting your own frustrations or your own anger so learning the subtle little dynamics of power is extremely essential because we're a social animal it doesn't mean that you're going to get dirty that you're going to suddenly go out there and manipulate the hell out of people most of the 48 Laws of Power is about defense but how to defend yourself from the Sharks about there how to defend yourself from making classic mistakes like outshining the master like talking too much like arguing with people instead of demonstrating your ideas on

51:42 and on and on it's not an ugly thing it actually makes you a better social individual so that's how I I like to frame it it's very interesting I I think as a young guy growing up it was so important to me um to know where I fit in with my friend group um and I didn't think of it so much as a hierarchy um nor when I was in my academic studies did I think of it as a hierarchy even though it was clearly was right um so much as it the goal was to figure out where was my unique slot that I could um do the most good for myself and others you know kind of finding my spot um I don't want to say on a shelf

52:27 because that gives an image of something vertical but you know in the let's make it lateral a lateral arrangement of different people with different strengths different life purposes trying to figure them out you know where where should I be in order to express that and also feel connected to others and um and in order to do that I did have to I realize now based on your answer I did have to figure out um you know who's trying to have power over who's pretending that they don't want Power but is actually exerting power um you know these sorts of things and there's an incredible piece that comes from knowing that one is in the correct Place both profession interpersonally in relation to oneself but also in the context of one's peer peer group it's

53:14 kind of yeah this is where I belong because trying to gain power when one is trying to move to a position that isn't right for them or in a way that isn't right for them just seems so energetically costly seems like a waste of a life frankly right right you know trying to gather resources simply to to have them to give the illusion of power but then being afraid of losing them just sounds like a recipe for for misery as you pointed out you know whereas figuring out where am I most powerful in the benevolent sense of the word that that that seems like a good a good Pursuit well it's connecting up to to Mastery again and finding your life's purpose you know I I I knew when I was young that I couldn't exert physical power because I was a skinny little runt and I was I wasn't bullied but people

54:00 would kind of pick on me etc etc so I veered towards intellectual Pursuits where I could have power and in the end you know you might have been a jock and you might have done well in high school but haha Look at me now I'm not saying that it's a beautiful thing that that's but that's part of human nature the desire to actually you know prove yourself and find that Niche that you that you belong to so you don't have that kind of hum that sense of inferiority which Alfred Adler the psychologist describes very eloquently so a lot of it is kind of compensating when you're a child for things that are your weaknesses and finding what you're so good at that you do have that power and people can't bully you right and you you're you're like now a famous

54:46 neuroscientist whereas they're like who knows what they're doing kind of thing so power definitely is connected in some way to that inner sense of what you were meant to do and you feel it with the with the ease and the connection that comes from it right so I can honestly say that my dislike of working for other people and office politics and egos I now have a of an existence where I don't have to deal with any of that and I'm so blessed and I wake up every morning and I pray to God thank God I I found this because it's it's the perfect lifestyle for me and you're are can be accurately described as an intellectual be Beast so it's um and which is like a compliment right um we hear the word beast and we

55:32 think uh you know a Ferocious Beast trying to harm others but I'm happy being a beast yeah you know so I think finding where we can be a beast you know and and for some people that's painting or or yeah gardening or whatever it might be um I think is again ties back to the these issues of or this quest of for Mastery seduction is also a very loaded word right it's even more uglier than power because seduction right seduction kind of drips with uh the idea that somebody is tricking someone else into doing something that they otherwise would not want to do but seduction is both our propensity to do it and to have it done to us is hardwired into our nervous

56:17 system and has a lot to do with the hypothalamus and a bunch of other areas that I won't Bor us with the nomenclature but um seduction to me implies some sort of exchange I suppose we could seduce ourselves through denial or convincing ourselves that of of something but more often than not when we talk about seduction we're talking about an interaction between two or more people so um what are some of the core principles of Seduction and and if you care to play um Anthropologist a bit um and a neuroscientist I I would invite that why do you think we have neural circuits in our brain that allow us to seduce and be seduced well um I don't know how if if I'm if I'm being kind of an armchair

57:03 intellectual here but my my theory is some of it has to go back to social um events long in our prehistory which have to do with taboos and Society was initially kind of organized by a series of tabos right most notably the taboo on incest and what happened this is just not my theory it's the theory of the malanowski malanowski is I pronounce it um that the moment a taboo enters the human brain like you're not supposed to sleep with this woman the desire arises inside of you to actually sleep with that woman the the the sense of no the sense that this is prohibited stirs the desire stirs the contrary impulses in humans

57:49 and we can be very um what's the word perverse creatures right so if you've ever tried to suppress a thought you realize that it keeps coming up keeps coming up you can't suppress it don't think of an elephant Andrew whatever you do don't think of an elephant you're thinking of it because you can't help it right the idea that you're not supposed to desire this person stirs that actual desire so I believe the sense of something being taboo and transgressive is the ultimate kind of origin of our desire for seduction but seduction in involves vulnerability it involves somebody gets inside somebody gets under our skin right and to do that we have to let them

58:35 in so the person being seduced is in some ways to a degree complicit because if you just put up a wall and you said no I I'm not going to be seduced nothing will happen but you have a vulnerability you're letting that person into your psyche Into Your Inner Space the Paradigm for that Early Childhood so Freud talks a lot about this I don't know if people still believe in Freud anymore but I certainly do okay absolutely a genius of both Psychology and Physiology wrong about a lot of things did a lot of things he shouldn't have done I let's acknowledge that I think everyone would agree that sleeping with your patients and being a cocaine addict bad ideas but at the same time he had an absolute like near Supernatural

59:22 levels of insight and Brilliance into human nature sleep with patience I believe he did um but if I just if I just threw that on him without him doing it then you know uh forgive me he certainly had emotional attachments to his patients that he shouldn't have had I don't know if he slept with them he very well might have but his idea was that the child is seduced by the parent you're in extremely vulnerable position right your life depends on them and they're seducing you with their energy you're letting them in right and that kind of creates a pattern pattern for the rest of your life and so for instance the feeling of being carried by your father and just being taken around physically is a form of Seduction

1:00:08 because you don't know what he's going to do to you you're very excited you want that surprise right and to me it's related to the seduction of a story stories are very seducing to us we don't know where they're taking us we don't know what the next chapter is what's going to happen to this character or not the surprise lowers our resistance and opens our mind up to what's going to happen next is a form of Seduction fairy tales the stories you were reading as a child your interactions with your parents they're deeply deeply ingrained in you you cannot be seduced unless you are vulnerable right and so I like to switch it around and get out of the negative connotations being vulnerable is actually a positive trait

1:00:56 I think a lot of people now in the world today because things are so harsh and invasive that people have become too invulnerable they don't want to let anything in right and this now infects their relationships with other people they don't want to be influenced they they want to be strong inside of themselves they're afraid of giving in to the other person of surrendering to their influence but it's actually a delightful feeling to surrender to the power of another person and then reverse that charge and have them surrender to your power so when I'm reading a writer and sometimes uh they completely seduce me like friederick nid is one of my favorite writers I let go of everything I let him enter my brain and I'm

1:01:42 completely seduced I let him lead me along but then I encounter writers that I don't like at all I I'll mention one you know probably not a good thing but Steven Pinker I don't like Steven Pinker I find him really annoying okay um but I forc myself to try and find a way to be seduced by him to let him into my brain to see where he's coming from to open myself to the possibility that he could be correct so vulnerability letting people into your mental space is a form of intelligence it's a it's kind of an emotional and an intellectual intelligence and forgive me for interrupting but I think it also implies a level of confidence because empathy or allowing oneself to be vulnerable to the point where you're seduced by something

1:02:28 um by definition if you're choosing to do it uh implies that you also have the confidence that you can get back to yourself afterward right that you're not going to get lost in the circumstances you're not going to be hijacked to the point of no return right or in some way that's detrimental to you so it it's um it I'm sounding really nerdy here it's a it's cinear with with confidence in many ways sure like take my mind and take it where you will because I know I can come back at any time right right and the same thing in a physical seduction in a romantic sense right you're opening yourself up to the charm to the energy of the other person but if they start displaying dark energy and you see that they're abusive or something is wrong

1:03:13 you have the ability to retreat ah well there it gets tricky because very tricky well because the attachment systems which are also rooted in childhood um oftentimes can overwhelm one's ability to recover oneself like to I mean so I mean how many if I had a dollar for every time someone in that I knew in my life saying like you know I know they're

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