Robert Greene almost died. Here’s what it taught him about living

Have you ever taken psychedelics? Have I? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪ ♪ I know I can be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it like no days off on a road less traveled ♪ You wrote this new book, Sublime, and it's interesting because if I look at the books you're popular for, you're famous for, you've got 48 laws of power. Power, I mean, it's self-explanatory. It's like a very masculine, very sort of forceful, grab it by the neck sort of word. You have seduction, another one, control, mastery, another one about control. And it seems like Sublime is saying almost the exact opposite. It's about letting go and being small rather than being larger than life. Can you explain what the book is and how it relates to the other books? It comes out of personal experience, I have to say. As you probably know, I nearly died eight years ago. People are suffering from the narrowness of their experience, a lot of it coming from technology. There's something incredible about just simply being alive. And so many things that science is uncovering about the world that we live in is so awesome and so amazing, and we have such hunger for something larger than just the daily struggle. And I felt it very deeply in Coming So Close to Death and how the world looks and feels differently after that experience. And I want people to feel something like that in their own lives. It's a book where you don't have to nearly die in order to have it. I'm trying to show you how you can bring these kind of experiences into your day-to-day life. It's a very practical book on that level. But I feel like there's something people are really, really, really missing, a sense of not being connected to other people, connected to their environment, to the world that we live in, and to themselves, disconnect from themselves. And so that's what this book is about. There's this funny Louis C.K. bit. It's called Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy. And he's on Conan, I think, and he's talking about how everything's great, but we're all miserable. And I think it was 48 Laws of Power. I forget which book it was, but you, there was one story that I might be butchering, but I think you said that some of the first bits of writing ever discovered was about one generation complaining about the next generation, saying, they're lazy, they care about all this new technology, their music sucks. Is that real? That's one of the first writings ever? Is that true? Yeah, it was on a stone tablet. I think it's ancient Babylonian or something like that. And it's one of the oldest pieces of writing, and it's complaining about the young generation. And, well, my takeaway when I read that was like, it was this really important feature, which is like, everyone thinks something is different with their generation. We are either better, or you'll hear people say all the time, they go, in this economy, what are you talking about? And it's like, well, the economy could be booming, and everyone will always say, in this economy, it sucks. Or they'll always say, well, crime these days, it's so high. It's like, no, it's actually way lower than ever before. But there's something where you wanna say, this period is the worst. And my question to you is, is that actually true? Is this time actually different? And how do I be happy? Well, it's a very legitimate question. And I don't think you can quantify the problem, because you look in movies from the 20s and 30s, and everybody is smoking and drinking like you can't believe. They're like four or five whiskeys at dinner. They're having martinis left, right, and center. That is the equivalent in the past of antidepressants. So people were feeling that then, most definitely. And cigarettes, they needed all of these stimulants continuously. It's kind of shocking. And then in the past, in England, for instance, people didn't drink water. They drank ale to quench their thirst. And so people were continually drunk and all sorts of things throughout history. So it's a very good point. How can you compare that to now? We have technology on this new level, social media on this new level. And in some ways, it's altering people. It's altering our minds. It's rewiring our brains in ways that aren't necessarily healthy. And this is a new phenomenon. So if your experience is coming so much from your phone, if you're interacting so many hours of the day with your phone, a lot of that is stuff that is, if it's on Instagram or X or TikTok, it's being programmed by other people, algorithms, et cetera. It's not your own experience. People are telling you what your life should be like. They're programming what you see, what you feel, what you hear. This isn't like a human quality. We are animals that want agency. We wanna be able to control something about our own lives. I feel like people have a sense of powerlessness, that they're on this ride that technology is taking them on. And particularly with AI, the fears that, you know, we're creating something that we're not gonna have any control over. That is the only element that I think is different now that would make me say that there's a level of crisis that maybe didn't exist in the past. But as I said, I don't have data to back that up and I could be wrong. Well, we do have firsthand kind of experience with the way the world around us feels and how it operates. You know, if we just kind of as a thought experiment, I think of Americans who are like, you know, of adult age, 90 plus percent have a smartphone. Of people who have a smartphone, how many would you say are addicted to their phone? Meaning they are using it more than they want to. And it is in some ways kind of like become the main source of pleasure in their life. It's taking a larger and larger chunk of their life. I would say that number is probably also like- Everyone I know, myself included. So you have this thing that exists in the world where if, you know, somebody came from the past and you're like, yeah, there's this thing now, it's affecting 90 plus percent of people. And of the people who have it, 90 plus percent of them are addicted to it. And then how often do they take the dosage? Like seven hours a day. You know, it's like, whoa, what is that? That is like a wild state of the union, you know, just to walk into. No, your point is very valid. I know I've told this before in other podcasts, but I have a special bicycle because I can't hike or anything. It's a recumbent bike. And I got like the lightest weight one I can because we have these incredible hills here. And I go way up where there are no cars, way up into these hills. And it's incredibly beautiful. And I'm just like, whoa, this is so therapeutic. And then people are walking by me and they're like this, you know, they're walking in the most spectacular, they're in Los Angeles, in this beautiful, you know, bucolic part nature, part park. And they're like this, right? They're talking to someone or they're like reading something on Instagram while they're walking outside. That to me is like mental illness to me because being healthy, you have to be observing, you have to be connected to your environment. You have to be connected to what's around you. You know, you have to have situational awareness to use a military term, you know, and that level of disconnect is very troubling. The other thing is, and I talk about this in my sublime book, we're gifted with this brain that is one of the most incredible, amazing things in the universe, this insane product of evolution, the human brain. And in a very short period of time, on the scale of evolution, 40,000 years, we've taken this brain that we evolved with language and look at the world that we've created. And that brain operates with certain laws and has certain tendencies. It's extremely restless. It consumes a lot of our energy, physically a lot of our energy, right? And it wants to learn, it wants to conquer things, it wants to develop skills. And when you have generations of people that everything is fast and easy and quick, you can get things at the tip of your fingertips without any effort, it's rewiring the brain, it's rewiring human nature. It's creating people who are spoiled, who expect everything to be fast and easy, who have no patience to write an essay, who have no patience to read a 400-page book because, wow, I could just get AI to give me the paragraph on it. That, to me, is what scares me and it's very dangerous. Well, I think everyone agrees with you, but what's the, how do I fix that? I mean, I'm an addict as well. Like, and you said something cool. Hi, I'm Sam and I, too, have a problem. Okay, yeah, right. It's like smartphones anonymous here. By the way, everybody listening to this is listening to this on their phone instead of enjoying wherever they're at in the moment. But you have this thing in the book where you talk about the circle. You're like, life's a circle and a lot of technology would be on your phone. It shrinks that circle, so you're only looking through this small thing. And I noticed that. We actually did a podcast on the feeling of awe. And in my opinion, my circle is tiny right now and the only way I'm ever able to expand it is through travel, like being in places or experiencing the emotion of awe. Or your kids, getting your kids to experience awe, then you start to notice it, too. Like, wow, look at this. Yeah, and what I want to know is like, what can I do to get out of this? So I normally tell people like. You only have to listen to a few minutes of Robert Greene to realize that all the information that he's getting for his books, which are amazing, by the way, is from reading tons and tons and tons of other books. Well, I try to do the same as well. I read about a book a week. I devour books and they've changed my life. And so what I did with the HubSpot team was they asked me which nine books shaped my year, shaped 2026. So I put together a list and I also added a whole bunch of information on how I read so much. Hint, I'm not actually a fast reader. I just have a methodology for consuming a lot of information and I think also retaining it. And so if you want to see which books have changed my life this year and how I read so much information, how I retain it all, then click the link below and you can get the guide right now. Get outside your house, go out into nature, go out into Central Park or go into Connecticut somewhere and leave your goddamn phone behind, lock it in a drawer. You can't possibly access it now and you're hopefully with a friend who didn't bring their phone along with you. So you're forced cold turkey to go out there and what it'll do for you just on that one level is you're gonna have like that addiction sense of, wow, I need to know what's going on with sports. I need to know who won the election. I need to know, but you can't do it. And so your mind is now gotta be focused outwardly. It's gonna be focused on what is around you, on the sounds, on just the sense of your body moving, right? Like climbing a mountain is incredibly, it can bring you that sense of awe as you get higher and higher up in the sky and you're forced to interact with things that aren't human where I have to take you out of your daily little, that little small circle and will give you that sense of awe. I had planned originally to write the book. I was gonna go travel all over the world and have all these sublime experiences before my stroke. And then obviously with my stroke, I can't do any of that. I'm like trapped in this room that you now see me in where I spent practically seven years writing the book. I had no outlets for doing the things. I couldn't travel. So I was forced to find it in everything around me in just looking up at the sky and just interacting with my pets, my animals, with my wife, just watching people, just looking, just the sense of being alive. And in the book, I try and make it clear the things that science is uncovering about the strangeness of the world that we have been born into. You're born, you're kind of thrown into this world. And when you're a child, you're three or four years old, you don't understand it. It looks, everything looks strange. And you've got that sense of awe and wonder like constantly, like a two-year-old is like, whoa, what is that? What is this? What is that color? They're just looking at everything. You once had that feeling and you've lost it, but you can get it back by slowing things down, by putting your phone away, by doing simple things like taking a walk, by just giving yourself some time to be alone and withdrawn to yourself and just reconnect to your body. It's a lot of it is putting a lot of that technology away and opening your senses up to the world. And each of the chapters in the book, I have exercises at the end of the chapter for kind of realizing what I've just talked about. So I have a chapter in the book about childhood, because as I said, when you were a child, the world was naturally sublime. I mean, unless you had a very troubled childhood, don't get me wrong. But for most children in the world, it's naturally weird, strange, and wondrous, right? And I have exercises for how you can recapture the feeling of time that you have when you were a child, where it wasn't all schedules and past, present, and future. I gotta get this done and blah, blah, blah. But to feel the flow of time within you. It's not gonna make you more successful in your job, but if you have moments like that where you can spend an hour doing some of these exercises, slowing things down, feeling just the sense of actually being alive inside your body, you will naturally return to something that is more human and that will connect you in some way to the sublime. You had this amazing line in your book where you're talking about how, why chasing things. Adults feel flat inside, and there's something about us that feels flat, so we chase things. But then even when you get them, you still feel that sense of flatness. Why is that? Because it becomes like an addiction. So you're constantly chasing things. looking for external stimulation as I said you're born to this world with this restless mind and if you ever tried to meditate and and just sit down it on some cushions and kind of empty your brain empty your mind you will realize how it's impossible the mind is just going like mile a minute thoughts are just coming left right and center it's in a very very restless organ so we humans need continual stimulation and you can get that stimulation in one of two ways you can get it externally and nowadays that is the source of possibly our problems you know if you born you want entertainment two seconds flat you get something on Netflix you get something streaming watch it on your phone you know you don't have to you have to do anything to get this kind of external stimulation that you that you crave right and you get it and then it leaves you kind of empty because now you want more you want something else right so you have to find another source of external stimulation even travel can get like that if you know you just bring your own problems to Bali for instance and you're sitting on the beach and you're just thinking about your schedules and about your social media and your Instagram feed you're just bringing your problems with you and then you come back to your job wherever and you're back to your nervous self you know so it can't come from without I mean I'm saying like when you take your hike here you're absorbed in the world but that is a sense of something coming from within you that is your own experience and when you do it through your own experience and it could be love of another human being because I have a chapter on love or it could be coming with your connection to an animal or could come through some physical adventure the experience is your own nobody is programming you nobody is telling you what to feel what to think it is yourself and as you go through that the feeling is very exciting and fulfilling and you want more of it it's not like this addiction where I need somebody you like this baby that needs constant stimulation from somebody else you can climb a mountain and you can feel not only spiritually uplifted but physically uplifted your body and your mind are responding to these things and you can't get that from your goddamn phone you can't get that feeling of climbing a mountain I did something difficult arduous but I feel wow look at this right there's no there's no experience that could be programmed on you stupid phone that can ever give you that kind of sensation the best part about your writing is you find the the best stories which do an even better job of teaching this stuff versus just the theory which is also good can you give some examples of what you're talking about with some cool stories one of the I have a chapter in there I think people are going to relate to most because it's similar to my other chapters it's called measure yourself against the immense and the impossible and the idea in it's called the dynamical splendor the idea is we humans have powers that we don't even realize that we have if I plucked you right now on to an island in the Pacific that's uninhabited and you're alone suddenly you would discover because you had to all of these skills hopefully other you're gonna die that you may have for like finding food sources for making things for building a shelter right we have we're incredibly inventive persistent willful creatures that's who we are and when we face something that's impossible it's so difficult something almost superhuman can happen and I tell the story and there's a famous story of this plane that crashed in the Andes in Argentina in 1971-72 with a rugby team from Uruguay going to Chile and there were like 45 people on the plane and a lot of them died in this crash they crashed at the foot of this incredible 14,000 foot Papai Mountain so they were trapped they had only like their spring clothing because they didn't expect to be trapped in the Andes they were just traveling to another city so it's spring clothing they had no equipment there were these young kids that have never climbed a mountain before I got in such a situation and they were facing death every single day it was horrifying they ran out of food and so they ended up having to like eat the corpses of some of the people who had died already just to stay alive and one of the young men Nando Parado he lost his mother and sister in the crash and he was thinking of his father and his father back in Uruguay if he died Nando died and the mother and the sister died the father would die because he was a family man it was his whole life and so he goes I've got to get out of here I've got to get out of I've got to find a way out of this trap right people had tried to climb it in there in their group and they couldn't get halfway up this hill because the altitude would kill them the cold they had no equipment to climb a 14,000 foot high mountain in the winter in the Andes you need you need all these kind of ropes and pylons and all sorts of equipment they had nothing he decides I'm gonna get over this mountain I don't care what happens I'm gonna I gotta get back to my father and so he chooses two people and they start this climb that two other people are like ready to give up he keeps climbing and climbing the altitudes making his heartbeat like crazy but he keeps climbing climbing he reaches what is close to the summit and it's like the side of a skyscraper it's just pure rock and ice how the f*** am I gonna get up that right he just takes he's got like the equivalent of a pick that was built from the the detritus of the airplane and he kind of cuts a little bit of a hole in the ice rock puts his hand in there he's able to put his foot in there he climbs like for two hours that way because he's so determined he gets to the top and he realizes that he that there's more mountains are surrounding them so now they're gonna have to somehow get over in another set of mountains there's no way they could do it they don't have food so but then he sees that maybe there's this like gap between the two mountains that could possibly be a way out toward the green fields of Chile outside all these mountains and he convinces one other person to go with him on this and first of all then on top of this mountain they spend night they're probably the first humans who've ever seen this the stars and and at night in this particular location and he's like amid all this suffering and death this world is so beautiful it's such a strange thing anyway climbing down the mountain on the other side is harder than going up because it's the steepness of it the long story short they finally get to the bottom they finally find people they finally get rescued and about 18 of the 50 people on the plane survived and they get a helicopter to go back and rescue the people that they had left behind the original crash they're going how the hell did you ever get up this mountain experienced climbers can never get up this mountain how did you do it it's impossible I don't even believe that you did it and so the story to me is about having a sense of purpose like my father the love of my father I have to help get back for him and facing an impossible situation we put limits on what we think we can do but there are actually no limits you put people in difficult situations that either crushes them or they rise to a new level they discover new resources in themselves and that kind of power and that determination to me is what makes the human animal incredibly incredibly sublime so that's one of the stories that's a great story I kind of messed up I like reading a lot of hot like a world war two and holocaust books and it to it's crazy like there's this one called the escape artists and it's one of the only guys to escape from Auschwitz one of the Jews I never heard of this it's fantastic I mean it's you know I don't know fantastic as you describe it but it's definitely riveting and he tells the story about how he basically hid under a bunch of dead bodies for many hours and for the three days actually and then he eventually walks across Poland and it's like when I read these stories my instinct I started reading some of these crazy stories because if I ever feel a down and depressed I'm like I got to read this so I know that like life is perfect but it's actually cool to have a different takeaway now reading a bunch of these books where it's more so like I can do anything if these guys can do this surely I could have a difficult conversation well there was a man of Viktor Frankl who wrote a book man search for meaning very famous book he was in Auschwitz he was in concentration camp and his he later became a psychotherapist and his discovery was that the people who survived that kind of the most awful circumstances were the ones who had some kind of purpose for their life they had something to get to live for once they got out if they ever got out right they had a book they had to write they had a family member they had to save they had some reason for trying to stay alive and that's what kept them alive hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from HubSpot can help it works right inside HubSpot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out HubSpot comm the agentic customer platform for growing businesses I've Robert do you have a definition for yourself and what your purpose is well it tends to make me seem kind of arrogant and grandiose but what the hell I'll throw it out there anyway I felt like all of the miserable jobs that I had I had 60 different jobs back in the 80s and 90s cuz I'm an old guy and I was very depressed and very miserable in my mid 30s and no success but in the back of my mind I'm living for writing because I've always wanted to be a writer hadn't quite given up my dream and then I got a chance I met a man who was the book package who asked me at one point in Italy if I had any ideas for a book and I kind of improvised what turned into the 48 laws of power and he ended up paying me to live while I wrote the book and we became partners on the project it felt like to me that all that misery all those bad jobs all that stuff in Hollywood that I'd gone through there was a purpose for it and the purpose was for me to be able to write that book that I think call me as I said grandiose has helped a lot of people deal with very difficult power situations and then I had my near-death experience I was driving a car in Los Angeles my girlfriend now my wife was sitting next to me and she basically saw something going on that was very wrong she called 9-1-1 she didn't pack she called 9-1-1 and it was a matter of seconds if they had arrived 30 seconds later or a minute later I'd either be dead or I'd have intense brain damage and so I survived that I'm alive there must be a reason for that there must be reasoned a purpose behind it and the purpose was for me to write one more large book the sublime despite all the physical limitations that I had and that I was staying I was kept alive for a reason to write this particular book so and quite honestly without that sense of mission or purpose I would never have made it because it was such a difficult thing to do when you can't type and you have to handwrite an entire book so I definitely have had that those feelings of something larger pushing me forward I think I read a lot and I've noticed that reading should fall into one of two categories the first one is just entertainment and the second one is education and when I really want to learn something it's most people tend to get ten books on the same topic and they think that's gonna master it and what I have found it's probably better to get one cornerstone piece and reread it multiple times and truly master it and I have felt this way you're gonna think that this is too grandiose and ridiculous I have felt that with 48 laws of power mastery art of seduction or maybe maybe art of war but for sure it sounds like sublime and 40 laws of power as well where I was like man I wish I would have dedicated two years to mastering these like four texts because like human nature I'm like this is applicable to everyone why wouldn't this is the number one thing I should ever learn actually is there a world where this should just be like a two-year or one-year mat like course like a like a college thing where I'm just going to like master some of your texts I mean that exists for I would imagine for Machiavelli that probably that exists for some of the great philosophers and psychologists yeah you could take a course on Shakespeare and go through all his works right yeah like has anyone ever proposed doing that for Robert Greene books yeah I mean I would have to probably get involved in that because there's a there's a gap a gulf between the knowledge that's in a book and putting it into practical effect I've consulted with individuals before the problem with the course is if you're I think it would have great value for the 48 laws of power for instance if in college somebody were to teach that but I don't know where because college isn't supposed to be practice supposed to be teaching you about power it's supposed to be teaching about things that are useless that you're never gonna do in your life but I could see a course you know it would probably have to be like in the business school to be honest with you this is the work world you're going to enter and here's some law that you're going to learn, that are going to help you deal with the egos and the politics of people in power. If we were sitting there and it's lesson one, or there's like, you know, a 15-minute thing that actually stuck with people, what do you think that thing would be from the power course? What would it be? I'll always say less than necessary. People talk way too much. They're always talking, talking, talking, talking, particularly in the era of social media. They're just revealing way too much about themselves. Learn to withdraw. Power is about absence and presence. If you're always present, people take you for granted and they grow bored with you. If you're always absent, there's nothing to talk about. But if you know the dialectic between presence to disappear sometimes, to not talk, to not be there, to not be there for like a week or so, and then people are starting to talk about you again. So I would teach them that. That would be my first course. The second course, the second week would be about egos. Never outshine the master. Know who you're dealing with. Play the perfect courtier. These are the dangers of people's egos out there and you've got to be careful and you've got to not inadvertently offend the wrong person. So that would be like the second week or so. How do you apply that to like Sean and I or yourself as well? I'm looking at your Instagram page. It's awesome. You have five videos that you posted yesterday. They're amazing. I follow you. How does that apply to people who are trying to like promote shit? Well, I'm out there now a lot because of the Sublime book, but I disappear for quite a long time and I never ever post about what I had for breakfast or photographs from where I've traveled to or my cats in the house. I only post interviews from podcasts that have information that are practical that are going to help people. You don't know my private life. So there's a level of mystery there. If I was completely transparent about my private life, then I'd be violating a lot of the 48 laws of power. But I know certain things that I've got to like withhold from the public. Do you guys... So you're a Laker fan. I was going to ask you about this guy, but I was like, I don't know if he knows about this, but if you're a Lakers fan, you do. Do you know who Josh Kushner is? He's the new owner of the Lakers? Yeah, man. Josh Kushner is interesting. Brother of Jared. So Josh Kushner is someone who would fit in your book in a variety of ways. So basically Josh grew up in a very wealthy, prominent New York real estate family. His father had a fall of grace because he did some messed up stuff and went to prison for it. And then Jared married Ivanka Trump. And he became Trump's right hand man. Very polarizing. But Josh, I believe he's a liberal. He speaks about it occasionally. And he became an investor where at the age of 21, he was one of Instagram's first investors. And he's probably had the best probably 10 year run as a venture capitalist. And he is so wealthy now. He's probably worth $15 billion. He's 41 years old. He is so wealthy, he just bought the Lakers. And Josh is interesting because he is a textbook case study on implementing a handful of the laws of power. He really doesn't have social media. He is quite silent. You know that he dates this beautiful woman, but you don't really see him ever take photos. He enters with boldness into certain situations. I mean, he bought the Lakers when he's 41 years old. It's a very interesting case study. Would you agree, Sean, on like how this guy has risen? Because money, when you're investing, money is a commodity. So a company, whoever's taking your money, has to choose you based off a variety of weird characteristics. And the characteristic that he has is this mystique about him. And I think that it's been... I think he knows exactly what he's doing. And it's like, he's just like playing the game perfectly. Yeah. It could be a combination of he might be somebody who's not comfortable in the limelight. And then he leans into that and he creates a kind of a weird sort of power out of it. I get a lot of, not a lot, but I get some celebrities who come to me, whose name I will not mention, who say, you know, Robert, I've got to be out there all the time. How do I create an air of mystery when social media depends on always having something that people can see? And I tell them, you know, you can disappear for a week, it's not going to kill you. And in fact, it's going to make people wonder, where have you gone during that week? So I say like Beyonce would disappear for like a year and a half without posting anything at all. And then would suddenly emerge with a new record. And now she would be out there in that time that she wasn't out there. People are going crazy speculating on what's going on in her life. So knowing that you have to some points, even if you're a celebrity, even if you depend on people's views and likes, disappearing for a while and creating some air of mystery is absolutely critical because people are going to grow tired of you. There's an attention economy. And if you're flooding them with your image, at some point, oh God, I'm so sick of that. And then somebody else will come along who's like younger and fresher and different. And they'll be looking at them. So you have to learn how to withdraw sometimes and create that mystery that makes people want to hear you when you come back. Given that you've read thousands of history books and you have seen cycles, do you have any predictions on what will happen with AI in the next 10 years or so? It's the same thing as this time is different. That energy is happening right now and people are saying crazy stuff like this is the last machine that will ever need to be built because this will build everything else. Do you have an outlook? Well, I'm a born pessimist. I have a negative bias to my brain. And I'm always the one that will raise my hand and say, I don't really buy that hype. So first of all, I think there's deep, deep wells of resentment and fear among the public about AI. And that you have that on the bottom, the huge numbers of people and then you have the people at the top who are kind of dominating the field and are kind of controlling this new technology. And the people from the bottom can eventually have a very, very powerful effect on the evolution of AI in the sense of politically, people are so upset that they demand that there are laws in place that are going to regulate AI, they're going to put, they're going to limit cap these data centers that people are getting tired of. And so there's an energy and that level of fear among the public can actually translate into something very real. But on the other hand, I mean, I know the scenarios of the singularity and it takes over. What drives me crazy with these new technologies is that I wrote a whole book, Laws of Human Nature, about how humans have a dark side, irrationality, grandiosity, envy, short-sightedness, you know, on and on and on. There are 18 of them. I only miss in four, self-absorption, okay? When you create a new piece of technology like this, it's not like something that's that just comes out of nowhere. It's humans that created it. And now that dark side of human nature is going to be able to use this new technology for very, very dangerous purposes. The levels of phishing and scams that we're now receiving on our phones is mounting every day and just imagine what it's going to be like in a couple of years, you know, how criminals are going to be able to use this for all kinds of nefarious purposes, how the information to build a dirty bomb, a biological weapon, is at the hands of some crazy person somewhere I don't know where, right? Yes, it could cure cancer. Yes, it could cure climate, global warming, I don't know. But it could also lead to an apocalypse just as easily. So I'm very fearful of that scenario. And I'm very afraid of what it's going to do to the human brain among young people. Being able to write an essay and read a 400 page book is absolutely an essential skill in the 21st century, right? But you're not developing any mental skills, you're not developing any discipline, you're not developing the ability to put something on paper and then edit it and then change it with your own thoughts. And eventually that's going to catch up to you because you're not going to be able to ever think on your own, you're going to always be depending on technology to answer every single one of your questions. I have fears, you know, and those are my fears is the dark side of human nature takes it over. People aren't going to be having the patience to learn anything anymore and that it's going to create massive amounts of resentment among the masses of people who feel like they have no control over the future of their career. Why did I study this field? Why did I become a lawyer? The profession of lawyers is going to be decimated by AI. Absolutely decimated, right? Why have a lawyer? I mean, it's actually, this is one possible good thing about AI, I don't deny. But you can get any answer you want about some lawyer, a legal problem, so you'll never need a lawyer anymore. Were you using it for sublime, for research? Never. Not once. Well, nowadays, if you Google something, a question, that the little AI box comes up. So I should say. Close my eyes, scroll past it. No, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to lie to you occasionally, but I never did any like major, no research things, just like little itty bitty things like when did that person die or facts like that, but. Besides the apocalypse, mass resentment, and the loss of human mental cognition, it's great. I think it'd be great. Love AI. Yeah. I have, I had to write in notebooks for the sublime book, and I had two notebooks, I'd write in one and then I would rewrite it in another notebook, literally rewrite word for word and edit as I'm rewriting it, right? In the end, I probably have 120 of those notebooks. Have you seen that guy who bear crawled a marathon? That's like you. Well, like I think you and Ron Chernow are the two authors that I'd like to read most. And whenever I, and whenever I get into either one of your books, every sentence is important. Who had to type that out? What did you guys do? Well, um, so I wrote it in one notebook, I edited in another room, then I'd go back and rewrite it that way. Then I'd go back probably four or five times. Then when it finally seemed decent and not suckable, because a lot of my first drafts are absolutely awful, I would dictate it and then I would print it out and hand edit on the paper, right? And then eventually that was good enough. I dictated again. And then with one hand, I would edit it on the computer because I only had one hand that was available. Holy shit. No wonder it took seven years. So a lot of times people at the podcast, they'll reach out to me and they're wondering, Hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least 3 million in revenue, although we do on average something like $25 million a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figure, of Bluetooth. All these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to my first million, we have a very unique high trust environment. When people apply and go through the vetting process, they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs, and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business. And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least 3 million in revenue, and you just want to go ahead and pull forward five or 10 years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL joinhampton.com. Robert, can I ask you a question? You had a near death experience. You hung out and wrote a book with 50 Cent who had this kind of near death experience. There was a guy who came on the podcast that was, he had studied a lot of people who had near death experiences. I think there's books written where, you know, somebody dies for 15 minutes and they come back and you want to know, what'd you see? What was it? Have you kind of looked into that? I haven't. What do you find if I go talk to people or go read about people who've had near death experiences? What do you find? I have the last chapter of the Sublime book is about the death sublime. And I go into near death experiences and I described four of them because the literature literally since the 1960s and advances in medicine, millions of people have had near death experiences. So we have all of this data on them. It runs a gamut. So 85% more or less of near death experiences are actually quite positive. You feel uplifted. You feel like not just that you were grateful to be alive, but that death isn't something horrible. There's something peaceful and beautiful about the experience. Your eyes were opened to a different way of perceiving the world. 15% or so, don't quote me on the exact number, are hellish experiences of near death experiences where it's absolutely a nightmare and you're so grateful that you got out of it. So there's a gamut. You can't completely generalize. Some people have like religious experiences where they see angels, where the presence of God is there, where they go through their whole life's history is recounted in a matter of seconds, you know, things like that. And in among that group is very interesting. There'll be people who are hardcore atheists and rationalists like Richard Dawkins type who suddenly come out of it and now they believe in God and now they believe that there is an afterlife. It is very strange literature to read a lot of this. Some people don't go that direction, they still remain kind of skeptical, but something strange has happened to them and they'll never be the same. There's a very great book I enjoyed a lot, but by a skeptic, and I'm not a skeptic, but I like reading all the different aspects, this book called Dying to Live by this woman, I think it's Susan Blackmore is her name. She's a neuroscientist and she tries to explain why all of these things happen, like you have visions of a tunnel and light coming through and you relive your whole life's past. She explains it as something strange happening to the human brain as it's dying, right? And it's scrambling how you normally perceive the world, how you normally experience time and all these other things. And so the brain dying has a very powerful effect on you. And that I think is the most I can generalize about it because it happened to me, that strange things are going on neurologically and physiologically as the brain is beginning to die, as it's preparing you for it. And you can have visions, you can have sensations, they're impossible to describe, but they make you aware of the fact that your brain constructs the world that you see. You don't realize that it isn't reality, what you're experiencing right now. Your brain is constructing what you consider to be reality. And when the brain is dying, that reality that it's been constructing for you throughout your whole life breaks down. And now you're actually seeing things as they are without the brain meddling in this. That's to me the most fascinating aspect of the near-death experience. Has it worn off? Definitely worn off, but it comes back. It keeps coming back. So I had sensations of my bones dissolving and a weird taste in my mouth and kind of strange things with light. Upon times that it comes back in a sensation, I go, wow, it's there. And I can access it. When I first woke up from my coma, the sky looked different to me. And in California, Los Angeles, we have insanely blue sky. That's one of the most beautiful things about here. But the sky was even more bluer than I've ever seen it before. It was incandescent, like on fire. And I can still see that because it's buried deep in my unconscious, and I still feel it, and I can still see it. So these sensations come back to me in waves. Sometimes it can be months that I don't, and it gets a little depressing. I mean, it sounds like taking psychedelics a little bit. Yeah, yeah, a little bit. Have you ever taken psychedelics? Have I? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Is it similar? It is in some way, but when you have a very powerful LSD or something, I think you're almost hallucinating things. You're seeing things that aren't really there. You're seeing colors and waves of light that I can't necessarily say are actually there when I'm not on LSD. But when I'm seeing the sky this way, I believe that I'm actually seeing what it looks like when you actually stare at it and look at it. And without the brain and without the familiar film that the brain puts over everything you see, I believe I'm actually seeing what things are. But there are some similarities. They have demonstrated the effect of psychedelics on the brain, and it kind of removes that filter that makes everything look so familiar to you. Well, did it make you fearful? Are you afraid to die now? I mean, I think it's impossible for a human being not to have that fear because it's part of our life instinct. But no, I'm kind of not really afraid of it. Sometimes I almost like yearn for the peace that it represented. Because of your experience or because you were... Yeah. Wow. Yeah, of course. I go back and forth. But I had a feeling of deep, deep connection to something. And when you feel like you're connected to something greater than yourself, then it takes a little bit of the sting out of the fear of dying. I don't think I'll ever lose that fear because it's inherent to every living creature. But it's been kind of softened. The blow is softened by what I experienced. I don't fear it nearly as much. That's crazy. It almost makes having a stroke sound envious. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't go there because it's... You have cancer. I had a friend who had cancer. He completely recovered. And now he's walking and doing those other things. Jesus Christ, I wish I had cancer. Then you have people with heart attacks and they recover. With a stroke, you don't recover. You don't get back your leg. You can't hike. You can't walk. You can't swim. I would not wish this on my worst enemy. I'm sorry. But I mean, it has its positive elements, as I've mentioned in my book. But please, please don't have a stroke. Noted. Take it back. I'm curious, as a guy who has spent decades of your life studying both people who have executed the ideas as well as the core ideas themselves of power, of seduction, of mastery, of all these things. And then you get a chance to work with this guy, Tim Ryan, and obviously, he didn't become president. So did you go in and believe that, hey, these tools, these ideas, if executed, could actually do this? And were you humbled in some way? I'm just curious what you make of that. Well, first of all, I didn't work for his presidential campaign. We've been contacted through texting, and then we've met several times. And it was more after he lost that. And he ran for Senate in Ohio and lost to J.D. Vance, of all people. And so, you know, we were kind of, in that period, I was talking to him a lot. And we were despondent about the return of Trump and what it would mean and the corruption and the cruelty and what was happening to the American soul. We were deeply, deeply upset about it. And so I didn't really think that it was an attempt at a particular election, because he wasn't running for office anymore. He was trying to create some kind of committee or group. And he had Republicans in that group, like Steve Schmidt. And so it was kind of a cross, you know, it crossed party boundaries. And it was a look at, you know, how can we rebuild this country? And, you know, it didn't amount to anything. I can't say we had any effect, although we started a conversation that maybe in some way rippled out and spread somewhere. But when I hear what Tallarico was saying last night in Ossoff and Roy Cooper in North Carolina, and so many, so many, I was really amazed at how many women are now going to be in the Senate, in the House of Representatives, which I think is a very, very positive thing. But there's so many people who are articulating ideas that we were discussing. So I can't say I had any effect. I really don't think I did. But we were trying to widen the conversation, widen the vision beyond just because Democrats, what's the undoing of Democrats is they just give a laundry list of policies. We're going to do this with healthcare. We're going to do this with gasoline prices. Yeah, it's important. Affordability is a very important issue. But there's got to be something else. There's got to be something a little more kind of mythic, I'd have to say, that kind of crosses party boundaries. And that's sort of what we were discussing. Can you actually elaborate on the mythic thing? Because I actually totally agree with you, where there's this like je ne sais quoi, there's this like thing with certain leaders where half the time I'm like, you know, I don't actually know what they stood for. But there's something about that guy that I want to like get behind you. And Sean was actually talking about that. And JFK to me was a little bit like that. When it comes to great leadership, what are the qualities necessary to have that mythic, that mythic ability where people are willing to follow you because you have this special thing that most people can't verbalize? Well, we haven't had a leader like that in a long time. So it's almost hard to visualize. It comes from a different ideological angle than I do. But Reagan had a little bit of that. He had the kind of folksiness, and he was trying to appeal to a larger vision of America. A lot of it was looking back towards the 50s, but not completely. The thing about JFK is you're right to talk about charisma. I heard you earlier. It is an extremely important component in the media age with social media, with television. You have to have that kind of presence before the camera. And Kennedy was the very first president who actually used the medium of the television in a very, very powerful way. He was obsessed with Hollywood, and he decided that he was going to be like that actor Montgomery Clift in one of the John Wayne, John Ford movies. He kind of modeled himself on that kind of coolness, that kind of cool charisma. He was like the new sheriff in town, and he wanted to see how he could kind of exude charisma for the television camera. And he had that very famous debate with Nixon, in which people who heard it on the radio thought Nixon crushed him, but people who watched it on television thought Kennedy crushed him. Yeah, and Nixon was all sweaty. He was all sweaty. His makeup was bleh. He was like a Halloween figure. That kind of element where you kind of create something a little bit larger than life, where you're something something mythic, as I say, appearing. And what is the myth of America? Well, to me, what made America great was how we're builders. We create them. We're practical people. We're not ideological. We're practical. We like to build things. We like to make things. And that's always been our genius. And to go back to that kind of vision of individuals who are rugged, who aren't just so weak and are always complaining, but know who have that kind of, I guess, pioneer spirit. To me, that is the American myth. And we've completely lost it in the age nowadays where everything is so easy and fast and people have no patience for making anything. And so a lot of people are rebelling against that. And I think that kind of sense of, and I talk a lot about it actually in my new book, The Spline, is going back to things of the past and going back to who we actually are, what our spirit is, is to me a way to kind of connect to what I consider that American myth. You see it a lot in sports. You know, you may not see the most charismatic people in politics necessarily, but as a sports fan, there's these people that just seem to rally or moments or leaders that emerge in different things. Sometimes it's coaches that have an aura. And aura is something people say a lot. What is aura? Aura is basically nonverbal charisma. It's without even having to do anything. It's just there. And every athlete eventually gets old and it ends. So it doesn't last forever. But there are these eras. Sam and I are both fans of UFC and MMA. And there was a window of time where Conor McGregor went from this guy who was a plumber living on welfare, but almost spoke into existence in a mythical way. In fact, he nicknamed himself Mystic Mac because he would say, I predict these things. And he carried himself with such self-belief that you didn't even have to care about fighting or Ireland or any of those things because the guy stood for a different concept, which was self-belief. The guy believed in himself and bet on himself more than anyone he'd ever seen bet on themselves. And so that was really inspiring to a lot of people during that era. And there's this famous tweet that Jalen Brown did a few years ago, four years ago, the Celtics were struggling. And Jalen Brown didn't go talk about X's and O's and policies and what they're going to do to make changes. And he just said, the energy is about to shift. And he tweeted that. It's a very famous tweet. They're the most winningest team since he did that. This is years ago. And they just went on this run. They went to the finals and they won the championship. And all these things happened over the next era. But people who almost can simplify in a way, I think one of your laws of power is speak less. And one of the things that you do is you don't over-explain how it's all going to happen. You just simply, with certainty, assert that the energy is about to shift. And that's kind of mythical in a way. Yeah. Well, you're talking to a diehard Laker fan here. Me too, me too. I hated it. I hated that the energy shifted. That's all right. No, I can appreciate what the Celtics did. Yeah, sports has that definitely, for sure. But the great thing about sports, because I'm a sports fanatic, is, you know, as they used to say, scoreboard. It's like you win and there's no denying, there's no crying, there's no saying, you shouldn't, you cheated or whatever. And so there's clear-cut winners and losers. The problem in American business and politics is a lot of people rise to the top who don't really deserve to be there. There are no metrics for determining why they are where they are, as opposed to sports, where you can pretty much look at statistics. I thought Phil Jackson kind of embodied that. So in The Art of Seduction, I tried to literally kind of define charisma, because as you say, it's kind of this intangible thing. And how do you actually describe or where does it come from? And in the research that I did, you will find a very interesting phenomenon. About a huge percentage of people that we would consider charismatic come from very troubled backgrounds. They had very difficult childhoods. They were either abused or abandoned or orphans, had very, very difficult childhoods. And so their whole life, their whole sense of getting power and love was through the camera, was through the public. They emanated this need to appeal to the public to get the kind of attention they never got from their family or their parents. And so they're very outer directed. And the other thing is a quality that's very charismatic is to have this kind of inner intensity. A lot of it is can be anger because that's a very powerful, powerful emotion, but could be love or something like that. But you don't have to say anything. You don't have to say a word. You don't have to say exactly how you feel, but people can read it in your face. Your whole face is lit up with this intense emotion that's inside of you that's driving your gestures, your tone of voice, all the nonverbal things. And it's read through the public as here's someone brimming over with this confidence and this inner power that they don't need to have to say anything, but it's there. It's in that aura that you mentioned. Can you teach someone to be more charismatic and what would you teach them? Well, confidence is by far the most charismatic quality that you could have. As you may know, I spent six, seven months with 50 Cent writing the 50th Law, my fourth book. And 50 has intense charisma. And his charisma comes from this incredible sense of confidence and inner strength. And where did that confidence come from? So many people from his background in South Side Queens never made it. They don't have it. The difference is he had this near-death experience that transformed him. And what are you going to be afraid of after you've got shot nine times at close range through a car window? You're not going to be afraid of anything. Shit, man, I survived that. You can't kill me. And so that sense of calmness and confidence that he had to me is very charismatic. Can you teach it? Well, you can't teach people coming from troubled backgrounds, but you can have a sense of your attention is outer directed, because as I said, it's a quotient of confidence. You can't fake confidence. You can, but people will read through it because it comes just as bravado. It has sort of an emptiness to it. But if you feel inwardly very secure and you're kind of on fire with some idea or some cause that's important to you, and you kind of exude that confidence that I'm talking about, it will communicate as charisma. It may not be on the level of a Kennedy or a Malcolm X, who I think exemplifies charisma, or a Marilyn Monroe, but it will have some of that power to it. So it's teachable to that degree, but the really, truly powerful, charismatic people like a Churchill, et cetera, they're kind of creatures of certain circumstances. But all the people, except for Marilyn Monroe, all the people that you mentioned, Malcolm X, Churchill, JFK, one was leading America to space. One was trying to save England from Nazi Germany. The other one was fighting for black rights. Those are all, to play the devil's advocate, those are all the easiest causes ever to rally behind and say, I'm going to dedicate my life to this. So do you find a... I'm sorry, but I disagree with that. Great. I'm prodding here on purpose, but like... Well, as a prime example, he came from a very bad family background. He was mostly pretty much abandoned and he felt completely unloved. And for years, he was in the wilderness. During World War I, he had the Gallipoli campaign, which was a disaster. And he was a man that suffered deeply from bouts of depression. And so when World War II came about and when Hitler rose to power, all the qualities that he had that would make him charismatic were kind of dormant in him. And they just came to life in that particular moment because he had suffered so much politically in his life as well that he could rise to the moment. He had learned so many valuable lessons. So he wasn't just a creature of Hitler because there were a lot of English leaders at the time, like Chamberlain, who completely failed in that role. There was something about him that was different, that came from within. But what I'm saying is, are these people, did they become great? If I wanted to be more confident, would it be because I am a confident human or I found a cause that was worthy of me becoming that? Well, having a cause is extremely important to have that, because as I said, it kind of creates this radiant thing emanating from you that's very, very powerful. But you have to be able to embody that cause, and it has to not be something that doesn't seem opportunistic. So obviously, Malcolm X was in prison. He was a hustler, a drug dealer. And in prison, he discovers the prison library, which was his salvation. He discovers books and the power. And he researches the history of African-American oppression in this country. And it comes from within, this anger. He had tremendous feelings of anger for all that he'd been through in the prison system growing up in Boston, tremendous wells of anger. And now he was able to draw on this using all that he had learned from history. So it wasn't like he was an opportunist that simply glommed on to the cause of fighting for African-American rights. It was something deep within him. Churchill, there was something deep within him. I'm bringing up Marilyn Monroe because it's not a cause. It doesn't necessarily have to be a cause. But because it is a quality that actors and people in the limelight can exude. And in her case, she was an orphan who never really knew her parents, but who had this tremendous desire, hunger for love. And the only way she could get love was from the public, was from the camera, was from kind of creating this neediness in the camera that she wants. It is drawing your attention and drawing your love is a quality that a lot of actors can have. And it's something that some have learned. But in her case, once again, it was a function of really of where she came from. Can I ask you, charisma, when somebody says charisma, I think that's a good thing. I want more of that. And what you're saying is two things. You said, well, by far the most charismatic trait is confidence. That's an internal thing, security internally. But then you're saying that a lot of these most charismatic people that you studied, because of their upbringing, they have this outer orientation. They crave the love of others. And it pulls them towards this highly external validation-seeking path. And in that way, charisma almost in these highly charismatic people almost seem broken. And it's almost like, I wouldn't want that. Actually, that sounds like a negative thing. And I shared on this podcast recently that I hired this coach who did this personality test on me. And I scored extremely high. All my things were really low. And it was one bar that was over 100. I was like, what is that? And it was narcissism. I was like, oh, no, the worst. I'm a narcissist. There's no redeeming part about a narcissist. And he said, well, what it means to this orientation was that you believe there's something special about you. You maybe can't put your finger on it. And you look to the world to validate that that's true about you. And you get that. And I'm like, oh, well, I guess I do have a podcast that's me basically sitting here showing everybody how smart and funny and interesting I am. I guess that is kind of what's going on every week, twice a week. So I guess I can't really argue with this idea that I guess I do seek some of that. I get high highs when it's validated and low lows when I'm not seen as special. That is true about me. So I guess in that way, it's true. Can you, I guess, is what I said, does that resonate with your research and what you believe? Of course. I mean, when the attention leaves you, when the camera isn't following you, when you're not in power, you're not fighting a Hitler, you can get very, very depressed. And obviously, Marilyn Monroe committed suicide. Churchill had these, I forget what his name was, black something or others that he would kind of fall into where he just was deeply, deeply depressed. Kennedy, you know, he was he had a lot of physical ailments. I don't really know because he died. He was assassinated when he was quite young. But so the idea is you become addicted to the attention and to the need to have a public all the time. And that can be debilitating. But, you know, a lot of very great people aren't necessarily the nicest people on the planet. And that's and they're maybe not necessarily the happiest, but they create great things. One of my icons in sports was Kobe Bryant, because that guy was dead, set levels of determination and persistence, channeling a lot of anger that he had from probably from his childhood. And, you know, he was just so fierce on the court. And he was probably a difficult person in many ways to be around, although I think later in life, he kind of mellowed a little bit. But I think we have to get over this notion that being great and powerful also makes you a wonderful, loving, kind person, because a lot of very creative people in the arts or in politics or in business get very far, but they're not the nicest people in the world. But so what? Why does everyone have to be these paragons of virtue? Steve Jobs was a raging asshole. He was terrible. He was the worst manager in the world. He learned some lessons later on in life, but but he was he was genius at what he did. And we need people like that. So we can't just be always looking for the most virtuous, saintly person and elevate them because those necessarily aren't people who are going to get anything done in this world. That's awesome. Is there someone who you look up to where they've checked the checks, all the boxes or many of the boxes where you think that they are a great person and also ethical? And I admire them for how they treated their family, things like that, because we have a lot of great people on here. And there are very few people who we are like, I would trade my life's with that person or I admire them as a whole person, whereas most people it's like, I like that thing. I like that thing. The rest, I don't need that. Who do you admire the whole of or who who is the outlier that accomplished the greatness but was a great being as well? Well, I mean, it's kind of personal, but my former mentee, Ryan Holiday, I very much admire him because he's incredibly successful. He's built this empire. He's a very decent, good person. He's raising a family. He's a great father. And I used I got him to be my researcher because I saw that he had like a really good character. And so you ally that character with someone who's very smart and ambitious, and you've got a really kind of great person. I've been I've been blessed to be friends with an NBA basketball coach. I hope he doesn't mind me mentioning a Mark D'Aguino of the Oklahoma City Thunder. They won a championship and two years ago. And the thing about Mark was he's very young. He was in the he was a G League coach for the Oklahoma City Thunder G League team. He was very successful there. And then he gets offered the head coaching job, which he wasn't really a silly wanting because he had a really good job. And to be an NBA coach, you have no idea because I've talked to him how insanely stressful that is. Imagine having to lead 15 men, young men who are making incredible amounts of money, who have their egos, who have their needs, who want all of this attention, who want to be stars, who are thinking of their future. You have to meld them into a team. And he had like three or four or five years where the team sucked and they were like at the bottom of the standings. And yet he had faith and he built a system and he's a very high character person. He's a very decent person who believes in treating his players well, not spoiling them, but treating them well. And I was so gratified to see someone like that within a very short period of time, reach the pinnacle in sports and winning a championship for a team from Oklahoma City. Okay, the Lakers, they can buy whoever they want, but you're not going to buy it. I don't know anything about Mark. Can you tell me the story? What made him special? He started out young as a G League coach. He might have been like 30 or something or 31. I don't know. And he's a strategist. So he's very, very intelligent. And he's always studying. He's a student of the game. And he pays deep attention to where the game is headed towards and what are the new kind of strategies he can devise. So he's very smart. And he's kind of an intellectual type coach in the same stamp as Phil Jackson. But at the same time, he's very empathetic. And he is able, because he's young, which helps, he's able to identify with his players. He wasn't like a pro. He played, I believe, in the college level. Don't quote me on that. So he wasn't a player that could bond with his players that way. But he was young enough. And he had a deep, deep empathy. He understands the pressures that they have. And so you You mix that quality of someone who's social, who understands human beings, who understands human psychology, but is also a brilliant strategist. He created this new way of playing in the NBA that was unheard of, which was all about going for rebounds. I'm not gonna get into the weeds here, but instead, he loaded all his players up there to get offensive rebounds, which was unheard of, because it was like you're exposing yourself, that kind of counterattack. It was a strategy that now most teams employ. He was ahead of the game, so he's creative, he's strategic, and he's got human social skills. I wrote a book called Mastery, and it's about mastering your career, mastering your profession, reaching that level where you almost don't have to think, where you just have a sense, a fingertip feel for what's going on, okay? But one of the components in mastery that people have to learn is social skills. You could be brilliant in business or whatever, but if you're horrible with people, it's gonna neutralize everything. So you get somebody with high analytic skills, technical skills, and you ally that with good social skills, you've got a very, very powerful person. Also, as I said, somebody with a very good character. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I'm glad you came on. I like having you on the podcast, because you're so different than everybody else that we have on the podcast. How so? Well, many ways. Your pace is different. Oh, yeah. That's the first thing, because people bring an energy into the podcast before they bring information. I think you bring a different pace of presence, like a gift of presence. I don't feel like you're anywhere else but here when you're doing this, and that's something I wanna do more of and be more like. I think also, a lot of people who come on the podcast are helping you be successful, but at a certain surface level of life, right? It's successful in your work, successful in your business, successful in your job, but you kind of go, tap on the shoulder, like, hey, come down a few levels. There's more to the game than just that. It's a different sort of, it's life wisdom. It's not just sport wisdom. And I think that the life wisdom, especially this book, this book is interesting to me, because I feel like, my honest thing was like, I feel like, nobody even says the word sublime. I don't think there's anybody out there, like, if the TAM of people who are searching for a book on sublime is zero, maybe three, and they all work for you. And so I think that it's amazing. One thing I respect as a artist, and also just as a man who just decides, like, this matters to me, and therefore that's enough. That's something I kind of wish I had more courage of in my life. I think there's always a voice in my head that's looking for the, well, the guarantee of some good result if I do all this work. If I handwrite this book for years and transcribe it from notebook to notebook to edit it, like, I would wish that there's like a clear pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. And I just really respect that you did it because you just felt like you were called to do it. There's an artistic courage to doing what you do that I envy and I want, and I, you know, so I admire that part about what you're doing. Yeah, I mean, it's, a lot of, some people are gonna be disappointed because they want the 48 Laws of Power Part Two. I understand that. It's not the most sellable subject, but my strategy is you write a good book, you put all of the effort into it, you have interesting ideas, you try and do something that hasn't been done before, and you will find your audience. And if you don't, then screw them, it's their fault. It's not my fault. So, it's my attitude. There was a, I did a podcast with the music artist, Mike Posner, and he has this great line, which is, because his first songs were mega hits. It was like, I took a pill of the Beezer, and Cooler Than Me, so he went like triple platinum. Then his second record was double platinum. Kind of a little, single, and then it was like no platinum. And then he got shelved, the record label was paying him and owned his life, but didn't even want to pay to produce the music, so for years he wrote songs that then would become Justin Bieber's hit, or somebody else's hit, and he was just sitting there, not even out there. And as he went through the whole thing, and he came out the other side, and he's back to having fun making music, he was like, his kind of guiding words that he said that stuck with me, he goes, I just make what's cool to me, and sometimes the whole world agrees. And that was enough for him, and I just thought, I really love that. I think that's just such a better attitude than I think the default mode that most people have when they want to go make hits. Well, you either have one or two paths you can do. You can write for what the market says will be the most marketable and lucrative, or you can write for what will satisfy you and what you need to express. Now, I believe that if you do something that you need to express and you feel very deeply, like it's something I have to communicate, and a lot of books are written nowadays that don't have that, I believe, that sense of purpose behind them. If you have a reason for writing or creating music, it will find an audience because the level of excitement and pleasure you feel will translate to the listeners, I believe. Maybe you won't go triple platinum, but you'll go probably platinum or something like that. So that's always been my guiding philosophy, to listen to myself, and as I'm listening to myself, to then think about my readers and how I'm gonna connect to them on using the subject of the sublime kind of thing. Well, thanks for coming back, man. We're big fans, so I agree. This is always a nice change of pace, and it sort of feels like we're in a good type of class whenever we talk to you. Almost like mentor vibes, and so we appreciate you kinda letting us learn from you for a little while. Well, I love it. I really enjoy it. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm very honored. That's it, that's the pop. ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪ ♪ I know I can be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪ ♪ On the road less travel never looking back ♪ All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit, and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're gonna hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.