Robert Greene - Confronting Your Mortality, Reaching Altered States of Attention, and Understanding Human Nature

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today I am joined by Robert Greene, someone who I have so much respect for, someone I consider a friend and super excited to dive into this episode. Robert, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me. Casey, thanks for coming to my house.

Of course. Thank you so much.

It's been a long journey.

Of course. Thank you for the hospitality. So today I woke up. I read the Daily Law and, and in your book and it talked about this concept of having near death experiences for on December 16th and the way you broke it down and the law really just gravitated towards people who have near death experiences. It tends to stay with them for a while and they have such a, it has such an impact on them. I would love to hear your perspective on, you know, this daily law, near death experiences and, and as you say, confronting your mortality. Because it hit home with me today as I read that and I'd love to start here on this conversation.

Well, you're so young, but it's never too young to begin confronting your mortality, I can tell you that. The weird thing was I finished the Laws of Human Nature in May of 2019. And the last chapter of that book was about confronting your mortality, which is about the last thing I wrote about. And I was trying to, in a kind of an intellectual way, explain the importance of the concept. And then literally two and a half months later, I came this close to dying myself, having a stroke. I was driving here in Los Angeles. Anna, whom you met, was in the car. She basically saved my life. I also could have suffered major brain damage, which I fortunately haven't. So it was very weird to write about it intellectually and then to experience it emotionally and viscerally. Right. And so there's a difference because we all know we're going to die, right? You know, it's, there's no way of escaping that reality. But most people tend to avoid it because even if you think about it, you're just thinking about it and you're still avoiding it because death isn't a thought, it's a feeling. It's something that's going to happen to you. You know, you know, the feeling of being alive, there's a feeling of death itself as well. And you carry it within your body. And so when you have a near death experience, you're experiencing death not as a thought but as an emotion, as a reality is something physical. And for me personally, I literally felt in that moment like my bones were dissolving. Like, like the thing that holds you together is like Melting. And that at some point, you know, I was just like, the life was coming out of me. I also had a moment where I was kind of looking down from above and seeing my family, et cetera, and. And kind of having this sense of, well, everything's going to be okay. Life will go on without you, and everything will be all right. But afterwards, that physical sensation of. Of. Of life leaving me kind of stayed with me. There was also a strange taste in my mouth as well. And to this day, not as often as when it first happened. It's now four years ago, I still have that feeling. And so what I try and tell people is confronting your death can be actually an incredibly positive experience for you. You need to be able to look at it square in the eye and not run away from it and not turn it into this kind of thing in the back of your head. Oh, yes. Someday, like, you know, you're in your 20s, I assume. Yeah, 22.

Yeah, 22.

Oh, my God. Jeez. That's insane. Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember. Yeah. I think when I met you were like, 19.

Yeah. With drama. I was 19 then. That's 20. 19.

So young. That's not fair. Anyway, this idea that you got this vistas of time, decades, you know, ahead of you. You don't have to think about it, but it's not true. It can happen at any moment. And so confronting it is actually a liberating experience, because, first of all, it gives you a sense of urgency. I. Casey, I'm 22, but I don't have 20, 30 years to realize my goals. I could die tomorrow. I need to hurry up. I need to get things done. I need. I don't want to die without this feeling of I could have done so much more, which is the worst feeling of all. It also makes you really, really appreciate every moment. You know, I look out now, and the world around me has a different intensity than before, because I know that I almost was. I'm not here to. To see it anymore. But the thing is, you have to translate it into something physical. It can't just be a thought. You have to feel it in your body. And in that chapter that I wrote in the Laws of Human Nature, even though I had never gone through that experience, I talk about how you can translate this into a visceral connection to the fact that you are mortal and that you're going to die someday. And it's a very powerful, liberating experience.

Absolutely. And you having that experience, is it something that you still think about every day or how have you gone about your life since then? And how have you, how have you changed your actions?

Well, it's not, it's not a morbid feeling. It's not like, oh, you know, death, ghosts, skeletons, cemetery. It's not a morbid thing. But, you know, I meditate every morning for 45 minutes. I've been doing it for 12 years now. And this morning, as in most mornings, I have this fleeting thought of this is all going to disappear from you someday. Right. And I try and translate whenever I have that in my meditation into something kind of positive. And so this morning it was, you're looking out on a world, look out the window and there's a, there's a hill in the distance and trees and I'm going, this is going to still be here when you're gone. This is just the world as it is. So all of this is a little bit weird. I don't know if I can quite put it into words. The feeling, but all of that turmoil that you go through in the day, all of your thoughts, all of your petty worries, your anxieties, etc, etc, I tell myself, when you die, when you're dead, they're all gone. They don't, they're not there anymore. Right. And so what does it matter that you're sitting here fretting about what might happen tomorrow, about your taxes or whether somebody likes you, whether you're getting enough attention on Instagram, it's all going to disappear with you, right?

Yep.

And so it's a weird feeling, but it can be very, very powerful, you know, and so I do, I don't dwell on it, but it crosses my mind every now and then and it kind of snaps me to attention and it makes me, makes my eyes open and makes me go, God, yes, this is, I have to, I don't need to be anxious anymore. I've already come this close to dying. I had that feeling when I wrote the book with 50 Cent, you know, because he came even closer to dying than I did. He had somebody shoot him from like that range nine times, you know, into the side of his head. And this is somebody who doesn't have anxiety, he doesn't have any fear, which is what the book is about, you know, And I always, when I was around him, I could feel that sense of fearlessness and lack of anxiety. I really admired it. I don't have it to his extent, but my near death experience has given me that, that same kind of sensation.

Absolutely. I saw this video recently and there's this guy I Follow on Social names. Prince Ea. And he talked about this. Prince Ea, Prince ea, awesome creator. And he dove into the history of this society or this group of people and they're deemed as the one of the happiest communities in the world. And they came to that conclusion by a simple tactic of just processing and thinking about your own mortality and death more than five times a day. And they equated that to an increase in happiness. And there's this whole study done on it and it had me thinking about your book because I think that for someone like myself, as you said, I'm 22 and there's a lot of young people that listen to this podcast. I am very aware that A, we're all going to die, but B, that the time on this planet is very finite. And I think that overall I am a very happy person. And over the years I've always tried to ask myself like, how do I have this natural happiness and just calming, neutral state about the world? And I think that that is a part of it of just being so hyper aware that you are going to die. So I appreciate your perspective there. Anything you want to add on that before you.

The only other thing I would add on it is oftentimes I remember one time I was walking in New York several years ago and I had this feeling as I watching the hundreds of people walk up and down the sidewalk. I was going 50 years, 60 years from now, or maybe 80 years from, not a single one of them will be alive, right? They'll all be gone. Just like people 100 years ago are all gone, right? And it gave me a weird feeling of like tremendous empathy for humans because sometimes we're so contentious. We're always arguing, you know, people, this person, I hate this person, they're not good. Etc, Etc. There's so much contentiousness now, particularly in social media. And when you look at somebody, even somebody that you even think you hate and you think about their mortality, it kind of melts the differences between you and it gives you a greater sense of empathy. So that's another power that confronting your mortality, mortality will have.

I want to switch the topic and talk about now living. You're. You're someone that has not only inspired me, but millions of people with your, across the world, with your work. And we were having a conversation before we started the show and you were talking about the new book you're writing and how you've put years into it. You said, you said you're going to put many more years into it. What does your writing process look like? How do you spend your time on a day to day basis? And more importantly, how do you choose what to write about? Right. When you think about your time and the way you think about the world, you could write about a lot of different things, but the fact that you're spending time on specific topics and putting it into a book, how do you think about that and what is your process at this point in your life?

Well, the way I come upon the subject of a book is very simple. I have to be able to challenge myself because I have this. I wrote about this in Mastery. When you read a book, it generally has this kind of emotional current to it that makes the book come alive. And a lot of books are quite frankly dead. They don't have that kind of electrical feeling to them. And it's the degree of emotion you feel towards the subject, the excitement you feel communicates itself in the book itself and gives it that kind of electrical current that makes the book spark and makes people excited by it. So the idea is if you're not excited about the idea, the reader won't be. So each time I have to choose a subject that challenges me and excites me. So I wrote the 48 laws of power. I don't want to write the 48 laws of power. Part two is what a lot of people would have done in that situation. There was a sub theme in there about seduction. I've always been fascinated by the subject of seduction. I'm going to write about that. So each book I have to go in a new direction. I have to challenge myself. You know, I can't just repeat what I've done before because I have to be intellectually just thrilled by the idea. Because these books sometimes take years to write. If I start getting bored, it's just all going to fall apart. It has to sustain me for years. So I've always wanted to write a book about the sublime, which is the last chapter of the 50th law of the book with 50 cent and the last chapter of the Laws of Human Nature. Nature. I'd had the idea 16 years ago to write this book. I kept putting it off, but now with my near death experience and all, I go, this is the time to write it. Right? And it's a totally new direction for me. It's a book that's a. I hate to use the word because it's got weird connotation, but it's a little more of a spiritual book. It's not like a Machiavelli and guide to how to take over the world. Yeah, it's about how to kind of change the way you look at the world and, and become incredibly excited just about being alive. So that's that book. And it's, it's exciting. So it keeps me going every day. My process is extremely boring. Casey. There's an expression that Bismarck. Otto Bismarck had Otto von Bismarck. That is, if we saw how a sausage was made, we would never really eat it. Right. If you saw how a book was made, you would probably never read it because the process is really boring and it's very laborious. So I read hundreds of books of research. I organize them with note cards. Later I can show you. Now that you're here, I can show you my note card system. Thousands of cards with different colors and organized into chapters. I'm now past that point of researching. I'm writing my sixth chapter and I have massive amounts of research that I'm trying to cull together. And so the beginning parts of the writing are very boring. They're very tedious, they're very laborious. And I'm in that phase right now with this chapter. And then when I get it all out on, you know, on paper, it starts to get exciting because I can edit it and I can start making it better and better and better and better and I start having more fun until by the time I finish a chapter, it's the same feeling you have when you finish a marathon. Whoa, I made it. I got to the end of this damn chapter. It drove me crazy. At some point I thought I was gonna kill myself. I finished it. Wow, what an achievement. And then when you get to the end of the book, it's almost like one long mental orgasm. I'm sorry, I hate to put that expression, but that's kind of the feeling. So that's the overall picture of my process.

When you finish something like a book similar as you brought up, marathon, I told you before we got started that I just finished my marathon, which for me took a couple months of training. I set that big goal and I worked on myself physically to reach it. And as soon as I crossed that finish line, it was. I feel a sense of happiness and joy, but a sense of loss, of I lost that big thing I'm working towards. And therefore now I'm setting the next thing that I want to do, whether that's a marathon or a triathlon. And we were talking about the guy, James Lawrence, before the show, he ran 101 Ironmans. And in the show I asked him a question. I Already have this feeling of wanting to go do another marathon. What do you suggest to people that are always in that what's next mentality? And he sort of checked me and he said, before you focus on what's next, you have to dedicate 110% of your effort and time and focus on, you know, the step in front of you on that marathon. Because if you don't do that, you're gonna lose focus of that. So, Robert, when you think about this idea of completing a book, you know, you always hear the quote, fall in love with the process, fall in love with the process. And I think as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, we all deal with this, of the constant ups and downs of striving for goals, hitting them, and then focusing on what's next. And maybe there's a sense of greed and ego in these tendencies as humans. But for you, when you put out a new book, how do you feel when you reach that destination, that goal of you've dedicated years of your time and effort, Are you curious about how it lands with people? How do you determine that? Do you spend an equal amount of time processing how it's impacting people or what goes on after you put out a book?

Very simple. The moment the book is done, I turn the page, it's gone, it's finished. I never even want to look back on it. I never read it again. I, I don't look at the reviews, I don't check out what people are saying on social media. It's finished, it's in the toilet. Goodbye. You know, onto the next project. Put yourself into the next thing. Don't sit there in the past and dwell on what happened now. At this point, 48 laws of power came out 24 years ago. Occasionally I do look at it now, well, what a weird book. How did you ever do that? That's such a strange looking book, you know, so it's got like a weird feeling to look back at it with 20, 10 years distance. But when it's finished, that's it, goodbye, onto the next thing. Because I think, I think it's unhealthy to sit there and kind of dwell on what you've done and to be worried about how people will react to it. The way to maintain your sanity is my next project. I'm going to immerse myself in it. I'm going to get outside of my own emotions and concerns and anxieties and pour it into something new. That's how I deal with it for you. Your next marathon, your next triathlon whatever it is.

Yeah, absolutely. I can already sense that it's pulling me to the next big goal. When you think about the world today, there's. There's so much polarity of how people think, whether that's in terms of the economic situation or politics. And people always, you know, you hear these big questions, like, oh, if you were in charge, if you were president, like, what would your. How would you solve this problem? And when you think about human nature and how there's. People are so separated at times, is there a solution to that? Or how do you think about the collective consciousness of America, of the world, and just the time that we're living in right now when it comes to the polarity of opinions and differences?

And you want me to answer that in like, two minutes? Okay, all the time you need? Well, I did a video recently that I recorded, which I was kind of thinking about that, you know, like, we're facing a very grave existential crisis in the world right now, which is global warming, which I definitely believe is a very grave reality. I don't think it's something made up or at all. It could be the end of life on this planet. It's extremely serious, right? And I have this idea that in 70 years from now, people are going to look back on our time. If we survive that long, and I do believe we will, they're gonna go, how could people be so partisan, so bitterly divided, when the stake of our planet itself was. Was, Was, was in, you know, at stake there? It's ridiculous. We're all in this together, right? It doesn't matter whether you're born in Oklahoma or Los Angeles, if you're from Africa or India. We're all in this together. And I remember when I was a kid, and I'm 100 years older than you are, Casey, the big thing would be science fiction movies, right? And they were really strong. Had a very powerful effect on me as a kid. And here would be these invaders from Mars versus some other planet, right? And suddenly the Soviet Union and the United States had to get along together. We had to defend our planet from this alien invader. It made everybody drop all of their petty differences. So I have this idea that 80 years from now, people will reach that point, because we have to. And they're going to look back at this time. They're going to go, God, how primitive people were back in 20. Then when it comes to something like our country, I, you know, I look back on, like, John F. Kennedy, who's somebody I admire very much, and I Kind of read about and written about a lot of my books. And his whole idea was America in the 1950s kind of lost its soul. It became all about money and getting ahead and Madison Avenue and, and, and advertising, etc. It lost it. We lost our soul. We lost our sense of what it means to be America. America. We need to go back to it. And his idea, he called it the new frontier. And the space race was sort of the center of it was we're going back to our pioneer spirit as Americans, right? We're going to recreate this, we're going to be doing that in exploring space, etc. But we need to have this idea, this vision of what unifies all Americans, right? Our country has a different spirit to it, has this different kind of energy to it, which is a kind of individualistic culture in which we're tough, we're exploring, we're innovative, we're not tied to the past like people in Europe are, right? So we need leaders now who have a vision. And I tell people when I do, consulting CEOs of companies, et cetera, et cetera, people who are high level leadership positions. Your number one job is having a vision, an overall vision of where the company is going, of what it means, of what its purpose is, of what its mission is in this world. And you need to articulate that. Well, we need that out of our leaders as well. They need to bring the country together and need to say, I hope it doesn't sound like a platitude because if I ever did work with a candidate, I would, I would know how I could make it detailed enough. But this is what it means to be an American in 2023, moving forward. This is what unites us. This is who we are, right? We're not just. It's not just about making money. It's not just about our standard of living. It's about our soul, our spirit, who we are. And so to me, that's an extremely important skill that a lot of leaders today lack because they're so focused on the short term. You know, I was on the board of directors of the company American Apparel, which, you know, completely collapsed some seven, eight years ago. And that was. I saw how this problem happens where in business you can only think of, like the quarterly report about where things are going to be in four months. And I kept trying to tell Dove, the CEO, let's think of what American Apparel will be like in two, three, four years. Fashion changes so quickly. Where's it going to be then? He wouldn't listen. To me, because he couldn't. The pressures were so intense. And these are the pressures that our political leaders feel as well. They have to think about the next election, in the future, following year. They can't. They don't have the space to articulate these overall visions. So that's sort of how I see the problem.

When you think about that in business as well, talking about, you know, seeing the collapse of American Apparel, when you're speaking to a lot of these leaders of companies, when you do consulting, in a sense, in your eyes, what creates great leadership and what would your advice be to young leaders that are looking to embrace leadership as they move throughout their careers and, you know, have a bit of an advantage from what you've experienced, good or bad?

Well, it's very difficult to be a leader today in the world. It's much more difficult than it was 50, 60 years ago. And there's. There's reasons for that that I could go into. I don't want to take up too much time on that, but. So you have to be very sensitive as a leader nowadays. You can't just be sitting back in your office expecting people to respect you, expecting people to listen to you. One of the reasons why it's so much more difficult to be a leader now is people have so much less respect for authority. That's particularly something that's happening in the younger generations. There's a good side to that and there's a bad side to that. You know, sometimes there are people who are in positions of power who know more than you do, who spent years working at it, and they have genuine skills, and you need to respect that. There are other people's and people in positions of power who don't have that. They're just kind of bullshitting their way through life and you don't need to respect them. You don't need to respect their authority. So as a leader, you have to have this attitude. I don't expect people to respect me. I don't expect their love. I don't expect their admiration. I don't even expect them to follow me. I have to earn it. I have to earn every single ounce of it day by day by day. I used to do a lot of horseback riding when I was a kid. And when you ride a horse, you understand something very basic. The horse is responding to everything that's going on in your body. It feels the tension in your legs. It knows, this person's sitting on top of me. He's very afraid or she's very afraid. They can Sense what's going on in you, right? They know. And it's the same thing when you're a leader, it all starts from the top. So if you're afraid, if you're insecure, if you're not taking responsibility for it, if you're expecting other people to do things for you, everybody senses that. They feel it in the company, right? You set the tone, you set the spirit, not just by what you say, but by your whole body language, all that nonverbal stuff, right? So be aware of the fact that it all starts at the top. Your spirit, your energy, the things that aren't even in words are infecting the entire group, right? So be conscious of that and infect it with the right spirit. Also, don't play favorites. That's one of the worst things about leaders. Oh, this. You know this. You treat some people, you pick on some people and you have favorites because for whatever reason, they're better looking or you like them, et cetera, et cetera. Treat everybody the same, Treat everybody fairly. And then it gives people a sense of, you know, a sense of overall fairness in the group. And they love that, Right? Also work harder than other people. Don't be sitting back in your office and telling people what to do and then let making them put all the hard work in. They have to see you putting in longer hours than anybody else. And if something goes wrong, take responsibility for it. Don't look for scapegoats. So, you know, sometimes it's painful because you don't want people to think that you're, you're fallible. But if a mistake goes on, you stand in front of the group and you say, I was responsible for that. That was my, my mistake. I'm sorry, I, I, I up, etc. People love that in a leader. They love that kind of humility. Those are the elements that today make for quality. Where people will go, I want to respect that person. I want to work harder for you. So, you know, people have willpower, they have their energy. You can either pull them like a donkey, come work for me, work for me. Berate them, you know, yell at them, blah, blah, blah. They're gonna give you half the energy like a donkey will. Or you can inspire them and go, you know, this is what we're trying to do. It's very exciting. This is our mission. We're changing the world. Let's all get together. I'm working harder than anyone. They want to work harder for you. Their energy and their creativity is engaged. And that's just so Much more powerful.

That makes me, that makes me happy to hear. And speaking of, you know, leadership and just I do want to bring up, you know, the, this idea of leadership in the current world and where I spend a lot of time on social media. I think that, you know, people get asked all the time, how do you spend your time on social. There's this whole conversation about screen time and managing what you consume. And you know, we're here sitting in your living room and all I can see is incredible books around you when you were 22, 25. When it comes to what your mind was consuming, how. How has that played a role in your work today? And with that said, I would just love to hear your thoughts on the current state of consumption regarding social media versus, you know, when you were growing up, it was just a whole different state of consumption, of speed of being able to digest information and would love to hear your thoughts on the differences there and really how it's inspired your work and just where you think the world is today. Regarding that.

Well, I think if I were growing up now and if I were 22 like you are now, I think I wouldn't be able to do what I've been able to do. I think it would have changed my brain, it would have changed how I do things. I think I would have found it a lot harder to focus for four or five years on one subject and write books the way I have, you know, attention to something I wrote about in my last chapter. Attention. The attention is an extremely important thing for a human being, right? What we think about becomes who we are. So if we think constantly about bad things, anxiety, etc. That kind of creates who we become, right? Then we end up creating our own circumstances. So what you attend to, what you think about plays an incredible role in your life. And if your attention is continually distracted by this, that or the other, that becomes who you are. You become kind of this divided person who can't focus on anything. So when I'm working on a book, I'm bringing my whole body into it, all the different parts of myself, all the different. Because, you know, all the different parts of my brain, of my life are coming together to write this book. But when you're not focused, when you're so distracted by social media, it's almost like a mirror that has broken and is like 20 different pieces on the ground. You have 20 different personalities. They're not coming together and it's very hard to get anything done. So when I was your age, I was reading a lot I don't mean to say that it's superior because that's very annoying for young people to say, think like I'm somehow greater because I grew up in this different era. There are better things about 2022 than there were about 1980 or whenever the comparable year year would be for me. So don't get me wrong. I'm not preaching. I'm not looking down on you. I actually have a lot of empathy because it's affecting me as well. But when I was that age, I was reading constantly, right? And my whole thing was I wanted experiences. To be a writer, you have to have experiences. You just can't sit in a room and imagine things. You have to go out and you have to have painful experience. You have to have love affairs that turn out badly. You have to go things that you fail miserably. You have to push yourself physically to the limits. I traveled around Europe. I was a bum with a backpack for several years. I worked in a hotel in Paris. I was a construction worker in Greece. I was a tour guide in Dublin, Ireland. I worked in television as a trainee in London. So I tried everything because experiences were the ground for becoming a good writer nowadays. If it was all. It was so much virtual, I wouldn't feel the need to go travel to explore. I know a lot of young people are traveling now. They're living in their vans and they're going all around the country. So I'm generalizing here. But if too much becomes virtual, you lose that connection to what it means to be a human being. When you're young, you should be going out and putting your life on the line. You should be doing a hundred different things, should be having all kinds of adventures, things that will enrich you later on and give you kind of a wisdom about life. You shouldn't be spending all of your time like this, you know, with your phone. So that's the difference.

It's so cool to just hear those glimpses of adventures for you. I'm sure we could talk all day about them. Is there one in particular that really made a profound impact on your life that you'd like to bring up today?

Casey, I had some very is going on. I can't even reveal all of them. I spent several months living in a cave on the island of Crete, on a beach.

No way.

And it was like.

In a cave.

Yes, in a cave on the south.

How do you set yourself up to go live in? Did it happen by accident? Did you go say, I'm going to live in a cave?

I was literally. I was 21, actually, I think at the time, maybe 22. So I wanted to go to Greece because I'd studied in college. Ancient Greek, that was one of my. My majors. And I love languages and I loved ancient Greek culture and the whole thing about Greece. And I ended up in Crete. This creates a mythical, magical place. And I had this backpack and I'm wandering around, and then I go to the south of. Of Crete, which. Where there are no tourists or anything. And I encountered these Germans because back in those days, Germans loved Creed and they were a lot of hippies, et cetera, et cetera. And this one girl who I had a crush on, she took me to this beach, which ends up being kind of a nudist beach. So I wasn't living nude in this. In this cave. So don't go. I'm not going to go that far. But they're literally these caves in the rock. You just set up your sleeping bag in the cave. You've got this beach there, and there are restaurants nearby where you can get food, Right. And it's in the summer, so you're warm and, you know, you kind of made a pillow out of your. Out of your clothes, etc. Etc. And then you washed yourself in the ocean. You washed your. You know, and then you didn't have anything at night to entertain. But we were. There was like 30 of us, so we were all having incredible fun at night. You know, we didn't have to need a light. Yeah, it was one of the most intense, weird experiences. And then I took my backpack and I hiked through this gorge in the island of Crete. That was like the most euphoric experience of my life. It's like you running the marathon 20 miles of this backpack in the most beautiful location with all of this history, all of these owls flying around at night, all this weirdness. I felt like I was on drugs and I wasn't taking any drugs. So that was one of the most intense experiences. And then working in the hotel in Paris, I mean, I can stop now. That was another great experience because I. I love Paris. And this was a hotel where all of the models were staying. So, like these incredible.

Great spot for young Robert.

I was very young. You know, that's where the Art of Seduction, the book for it, was later, the seeds for that were planted. Wow, that was an amazing experience. But those were so the two most intense moments, I think, in my memory.

And you brought up something on that. Just these experiences, they're. They're your. They're Euphoric, in a sense. And I heard you talk about on a podcast with Tom Bily where you said, you know, so many people take drugs and they'll do these things to feel a certain way of euphoria. And you talked about how the human mind is capable of achieving that without the need of drugs. I'd love to. I'd love to have you expand on that. Like, what does that mean? How. What does that mean to you? And how can people channel that amount of energy in their mind to experience life and in a euphoric way whenever they desire?

Well, it's the subject of my. Of my. The last chapter that I finished in my new book. That's why I was talking about it with Tom. And don't get me wrong, I have nothing against drugs. When I was your age, I took everything you can imagine. Right. You know, particularly in college.

Yeah.

So I'm not preaching against drugs, but the idea of trying to write in my sublime book, you can have the experience of something awesome and something, what I'm calling sublime without having to go live in a cave in Greece without having to take mushrooms or peyote or LSD, etc. It's all in your head. You have all the tools that you need. Right. So I try to. Each of the chapters in the book, I give you exercises that you can use, practical ways to kind of reach these kind of what I called alter states of attention. Okay. So in the book, I give all kinds of advice and ideas about it. Right. I talk about this one incredible kind of mystic, whatever you want to call him, spiritual leader named Gurdjieff, an Armenian. And he had this idea that your level of attention, we were talking about it earlier, can lead you to these states of euphoria. So when you meditate, like I meditate, and you focus on one thing over and over and over again, either on a project or just in meditation, you know, it could be just om the sound, whatever. It leads to very strange things happening in your brain. Right. The level of focus kind of opens your eyes. It's so intense, it's so powerful. Pure focusing on one thing can change your brain chemistry and lead to that running, long distance running. I have the book I mentioned to you about bone games. How you can change your body, your body chemistry. Do you realize how much of your mood and emotion and thinking are influenced by hormones in your body? Adrenaline, serotonin, dopamine. Dopamine was the hormone I was thinking about for long distance runners. You are a product of the physical chemistry of the in your body. Humans have the ability to alter their own chemistry. Animals do it as well. But you have the power to consciously alter your own chemistry. And doing mountain climbing and doing long distance running is an incredibly powerful way to do that. I also talk about how just looking at the world in a certain way, how you can train yourself to have what I call pure consciousness, where you're not thinking about thoughts, you're not thinking about words, your mind is just out there in the world seeing things in their immediate glory. Just colors and animals and things. And I have ways of training you how to drop all of these things that what I call mediate your experience. I have one thing about pure vision, how looking and seeing the world can be almost, almost a form of sex in a way where you're getting such pleasure out of just looking at the world, just looking at the, all the variety around us, right? And going to these states. I have like hundreds of ideas about how you can enter these states without a single drop of alcohol or a drug.

I know we don't have all the time in the world today, but I'm so excited to read this when you publish your book. But how does one do that? Even just giving us a direction, people may hear this and say, how is that possible? When you talk about, you give the tips and the examples. What is the first step to achieving that? And we don't have all the time in the world. And you're writing about this in depth, but I'd love to get a glimpse of, you know, how you describe a step in that direction of what humans are capable of there.

Well, okay, so I begin, I mean, not, I don't begin the book, but I have a section of the book where I explain what you're talking about. And I'm trying to say think of your consciousness, right, as a kind of circle. And this circle encompasses all of your thoughts, all of your experiences, all of your emotions in your day to day life. And that circle can either be this small or it could be this big. But it's a limiting factor. You don't go outside of this circle in your day to day life. You have sort of the same thoughts over and over and over again. You generally have the same emotions over and over and over again. Every now and then something happens that shakes you up. You meet someone, you fall in love and something incredible happens. You have a near death experience, on and on and on. But generally it's the circle. I'm saying this is a chapter about how to expand your consciousness beyond that circle. Right. So first step is to be aware that you are limited. You are trapped in this, this kind of self imposed prison where your thoughts and emotions are repeating themselves day by day by day. You want to step outside that circle, okay? So you have to be aware of that first and have the desire and the hunger for it. And then you have to realize that your circle is composed of your daily emotions, your daily thoughts, your daily feelings and sensations. All right? I've got to have new ones. I have to try different things. Okay? So just to take the example of thinking, you tend with your social media, etc. And your friends to always have the same ideas. You live in an echo chamber of the same ideas over and over again. And man, is it oppressive. After a while it feels like you're in a prison. Right? Okay, Break out of it. Read a book that has nothing to do with anything you've ever heard of in your life. You know, go, go pick up something from the Middle east, from the 12th century, from the Sufis, right? Brilliant people. Or go pick up a book from the ancient world or from some writer you've never even heard of. Go explore, open your mind. Go listen to some podcast of somebody that you would normally never listen to. Okay? Be adventurous, not just in your body, but with your mind. Right? Expose yourself to different kinds of intellectual food. Right? Just be aware that you're living inside this circle of consciousness and you choose to live in that. You can choose to break out of it at any moment and experience the world on a different level. Okay. I mean, Casey, it's a very long chat.

I, I could, I have a hundred.

Other ideas I can go into.

No, this is great. And then I could ask questions all day about this, this one topic, but we won't. And again, I'm excited to read the book, but a couple more questions before you wrap up. Robert, this idea of where the world is going, something that has been very intriguing for me as of recently has been AI, Artificial intelligence. Are you familiar or do you spend time researching or studying what AI is doing to the world and kind of, what's your thought process on AI overall in terms of the impact positively or negatively?

Well, I'm not, I'm not an expert on it, so I'm gonna. I don't like talking about things that I don't know that well, but I do know that that technology is not just this sort of neutral thing that's out there. We create it, we build it. It reflects the human spirit, the human mind. And so what we build in AI will be coming from us. Right. So this idea of the singularity of robots that are going to take over, they're going to have higher levels of consciousness than we are. I don't necessarily believe all of that because all of our frailties that I dissect in the laws of human nature are going to be inputted into AI. We can't escape that. We are who we are. And so our biases, our prejudices, all of the nasty stuff about human nature is going to filter its way into AI just as it filtered its way into cryptocurrency, as it filtered its way into the Internet, you know.

Yeah.

So it's inevitable. Look what people are doing in China. The kind of the scary part of AI. So I don't deny that there's a liberating, exciting element, a frontier of some of the things that we could do based on this technology, which is a tool that we can have some of the things for art, for creating images, etc. It's fantastic. I don't, I don't look down on that. But the scary side is so fucking scary that I almost don't even know if it's worth it.

And I'd love to hear your perspective as a writer when it comes to things that can, you know, create poems and scripts and songs within an instant that are, you know, derived from us. Yes. And what's out there. But it's very fascinating to think about just the future of that. And I'd love to get your perspective.

Well, I mean, I read an article recently about how AI is this, this chat thing you're talking about is going to get rid of like high school English and writing papers and, and there's written. It was an article by an actual teacher of English at high school and how students were turning in these papers, he could not decipher whether it was real or not. Right.

Yeah.

So what are you going to do in the future? You know, you can't sit there and, and determine whether they got it from this, this chat or not. Right. So he's saying it's going to be the death of teaching a subject like English. And the scary part of it is, is it's going to make people not develop their own writing skills. Right. So the sad part about human nature is we're so focused on on the end game, on writing a book, on getting attention, on, on making money, etc, etc, etc, that we forget that the process is what changes us. So when you develop your own writing skills, as you should be doing in high school and in College. And once you're finished with college, it changes your brain, it alters your brain chemistry, right? You are. You are learning, you're developing a skill that involves the entire picture, right? And it's very. Writing is a very arduous process which you have to face a blank page. You have to create something from nothing. And it's a very difficult process. It's can be very frustrating, it can be very depressing. But you have to go through that. You have to develop those skills, and that's what's going to create great literature and great things. So I'm sorry, but I don't think chat, whatever it's called, is going to be able to create a novel is brilliant as something that Dostoevsky created because it has the kind of rote things where it puts the senses together, but there's not a spirit behind it. There's not one single human being with their own spirit, their own energy, their own experiences behind it. Right? So if this chat thing was given the prospect of writing the 48 laws of power, it could probably do it. It could probably give it the themes. You could write it, but there would be something missing. It'd be like a. Like a food that was created by. By some piece of technology but wasn't. Like a chef putting in their own spices and. And giving their own individual spirit to it. Something would be lacking. I had all of these horrible experiences in Hollywood, you know, with horrible psychotic bosses who were mean and manipulated, manipulative. Right. I put them into the 48 laws of power with a vengeance. I'm sorry, but your AI isn't going to be able to do that because they're not having these experiences. So let's not get so drunk on these things. Use it as a tool, have some fun, maybe write some poetry. I'm. I find them, the image part of it, more interesting than the writing part of it, maybe because I am a writer and I'm worried it's going to make me obsolete. But I think the images are more interesting and exciting than the writing stuff.

I appreciate your perspective on that and I'm sure many people listening will as well.

Well, many people will disagree and hate.

No, I think it's so true. It's so easy to say, oh, because you can type in there. Write me an essay about comparing these two different topics in this tone, and I'll show you after it, if you haven't played around with it. And it's wild to see what it creates. But I think just hearing that perspective and the chef analogy is so real. And I totally agree with you on that. Last question before we wrap up. When you think about the future of the book you're writing and your work, what impact and purpose do you want to leave here in this world across your different books and just across your work overall?

Well, since. Since I was a kid, I have a certain way of looking at the world, right, that I've. It's been pretty consistent over. Over so many decades now. And I put that into my books, into my. Particularly the 48 laws, which started the whole thing and the whole game that I find my purpose in writing to not entertain you, to not give you some ideas, but to change you, to change how you look at the world. You can call it Machiavelli and you can call me evil. I don't really care. I want to get inside of your brain and I want to literally alter how you look at things. To me, that's power, right? But not in a negative way. I'm not trying to give you nasty thoughts. I'm not trying to turn you into a racist or a sexist or anything. The very opposite. I want to open your mind. I want to open your spirit, but I want to alter the way you look at it. We were talking about altering your consciousness. I want to expand how you think about things so you literally change your day to day life. Okay, now that can sound kind of grandiose on my part, kind of arrogant, and maybe it is. Maybe there's a Dr. Frankenstein element to my character. But I get. I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, so please. Maybe I am. I don't know. I can't help it. I get lots of emails from people saying how much the books have changed their lives. And that's like the greatest thing for me of all. You know, I am so stoked when I hear something like that. That makes me feel like it's all worth it. Because when I write books, you know, it literally writing is what created my stroke. You know, I put too much stress, too much energy, too much focus into it, but I get a reward from it in the sense of, you have changed how I think about things. And if 50 years from now, long after I'm gone from this planet, it's still having that effect on people, that to me is a form of immortality that I can have and I'm extremely happy about. So that's the fate that I want. So many books that I read, they don't leave me with that. Occasionally I do read a book that transforms me that literally shakes me up. But so many books lack that. They're just skimming along the surface. They're just kind of giving you a couple of ideas that are repeated over and over again. They don't go inside of you. They don't get hit the core. I want to go inside of you. I want to like, hit you here and literally alter how you look at the world. So I can't remember what your question was, but is that it?

You answered it flawlessly. Just what impact and how do you want your work to impact people? And very well said.

Okay.

Well, Robert, I just want to say I genuinely appreciate your time today. I know we've had the pleasure of having having you on the podcast once before where we dove back really into your story. And if you're listening and you want to hear more of Robert's story and what led him to becoming an author, we talked about that before. But I really enjoyed this conversation and I just want to thank you so much for taking the time today.

Oh, no, my pleasure, My pleasure. We'll have to do it again.

Absolutely. Well, everyone that is listening, thank you so much. And Robert, last thing. Where can people follow you and stay up to date with your new book that you know will be coming out here in the near future? Whether that's a year or two years, who knows? But how can people stay up to date with it?

Well, after I ran it all so much against social media, I'm now going to tell you all the things that I'm involved in. I have an old website, I mean really, really old, that's power seduction and war.com the and is spelled out power seductionandwar.com there you'll find links to my now seven books that you can buy. Also have links to my Instagram, my Twitter, my tick tock, my YouTube, all the things that I was telling you not to pay attention to. Yeah, I'm. I'm immersed in. So you're on there all those things as well as a link for contacting me. But please understand that my time is limited. I read your emails. I don't necessarily have the time to respond to them all, but that's the main gateway to kind of know about my world.

Absolutely. Well, I will be sure to notify people as well. Whenever the book does come out, it will reference this podcast. So thank you so much again and I'll make sure to link that all down below if you're listening or watching. Last but not least, please make sure you subscribe and I will talk to you guys soon. Thank you so much.