Robert Greene: How to Deal with Negative People When They Are in Your Family, Friend Circle or Work

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you about that in a second. Today's guest is Robert Green, the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The forty Eight Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The Thirty three Strategies of War, The fiftieth Law Mastery, The Laws of Human Nature, and most recently, of The Daily Laws. I am so excited to welcome back to the show, Robert. Robert, thank you for being here.

need to learn again, I need to nourish myself. And I really believe that last Christmas, The Daily Laws of Power became my daily read and I have recommended it to so many people. My wife started reading it, my closest friends have started reading it, and it was just such a great book for anyone who's either stuck with reading, someone who's kind of like not sure what to read, someone who's trying to figure out their direction in life. The Daily Laws of Power is a great starting place.

do using myself to everyone. So if that makes any.

deal with negative people in my friends circle? How do I deal with negative people at work? In close intimate circles. I feel a lot of people feel they're dealing with negativity.

has its nature. You know, I just accept it. I accept people for who they are and I deal with them on that level. I don't judge them, et cetera. Now, of course, when you're dealing with negative people, it can be very difficult because negative people like to stir up a lot of drama around you, around them, and that's the kind of power that they get. They like the attention that they get from making people upset, from pulling

on your emotions. Right, So you have to have you have to have this kind of larger look at them where it's not about me, right, They're dealing with their own issues, their own problems. There's a history behind it. It could be their parents, it could be their family, it could be their spouse, their children, whatever, and they're venting it on me in this particular moment. But it's

not personal. I tell people, don't take everything so personally, right, But then you know, so there's all these different levels and it all really depends on the specifics because a lot of people come to me for advice, but a lot of times you're enmeshed with a negative person, like it's your boss, it's your spouse, et cetera, et cetera, And it's very difficult to do what I'm talking about, right, And so you have to try and get a little

bit of distance from them. You have to be able to say to yourself, they're not me, right, they have their own problems. I'm separate from them. The sense of being separate from them is very liberating, right. So they have issues and they're trying to drag me into it, and they're trying to drag me down. But them, I have my own life and I'm not going to get involved. Sometimes you need to have empathy, but sometimes you need

to shut that off. And so the best thing in life, though, is That's why I say, there's just so many angles to approach this from is if they're like a deep narcissist, and that's probably the most common type of negative person you deal with in the world today and we all have come across this. The power that you have is to recognize people like that before you get involved with them, and to not get involved with them, right, And so they have signs things that you can pick up in advance.

People who are toxic. I don't know if we're toxic and negative are the same here. They don't show it immediately. They're good at deceiving you. They can be very charming, they can be very dramatic. They pull you in with their great stories they have. Sometimes they're even charismatic. A lot of important CEOs in the world, people like Elon Musk, are raging narcissists. They appear very exciting and you want to get to know them, but you have to recognize

that these are people that are probably going to use you. Right. They don't see you as an individual, and the people you associate with were very as humans, we're very open to the emotions of other people, right, And so the people you associate with have a huge role on who you are and the energy you have, you know, your daily life, et cetera, et cetera, And so you have to be very very careful who you let into your life, right and God, Jay, I don't know, there's so many

different angles to approach it from. I tell people that don't judge people as far as who you're going to let into your life. Don't be deceived by the appearances. Don't judge people based on their intelligence, on their charm, on whether they're good or bad, et c. Judge them on their character, whether they have a weak or a strong character.

of internal emotional evolution was humility. And so when you met someone who is humble, and you met someone who didn't have false ego, they were considered a high character and we were trained in order to understand that. But in the modern world, that isn't how the material world works. We're almost attracted to people who can come off arrogant and show boats. And even if we sense we don't like that, we still believe that person has power. And so what are things that we have to look out for?

view it as strong or weak character. A strong character is a person who can take criticism right, who can work with other people right, who can deal with stressful situations, who can handle responsibility, and if there's something goes wrong, they take I am to blame for They don't look at other people. There's somebody who can rely on you lean on them, and there's something there to lean on. You can rely on them in situations. A weak character

is somebody who cannot take criticism. That is probably the number one characteristic. The worst trait I think in people, and a definite trait of negativity is somebody who can't take any kind of criticism right. They're so defensive, So that means they can get away with anything, They can say anything they want, and there's just like a wall

of shell around them. Right. So, the ability in a work situation, in a relationship to take criticism and not be able to use it constructively is an incredibly useful and powerful trait to me that reveals strong character. How people handle stress is a really good sign of their character. So in a work situation, people are good at faking

it and pretending that they're very strong. But when it gets really stressful and there's a lot of pressure on it, the mask falls off and they reveal that they can't handle it. They're too weak. They're reacting to everything, they can't get out of the moment. They're so impatient, you know, and fragile. And so the ability to handle stress shows

that somebody has something strong inside of them, right. How they handle power, Right, So, when people are kind of climbing up the ladder in a group or in a job they generally were, they generally try and pretend like they're they're work with the group. But once they have power, that all falls off and they can become abusive and they feel like they can get away with any things that they couldn't get away with before, they treat people below them miserably, et cetera. So when people have power,

how do they handle it? Are they responsible? Do they suddenly become somebody different or do they maintain the character that they had beforehand? Right? What kind of partners do they choose? Do they choose a spouse, a husband, a girlfriend, et cetera, somebody that they can push around, somebody that's inferior to them so that they can feel better about themselves. How do they look when they're playing like a game, or they're in outdoor activities or something that has nothing

to do with work. Are they so competitive they have to win it everything, even when it's like outside of that kind of environment. You know, these are kind of traits that help me sort of judge a person's character.

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who fill that fill that up. Are you going to be drawn to causes and charismatic leaders that pretend to give you a purpose in your life because you don't have a purpose, but have it for you kind of things. So a lot of it has to do, yeah, with ourselves, and we're attracted to We're even attracted to negative people. And there are people who have patterns in their life where they deliberately choose the worst kind of person for them, right and over and over and over again, because at

least that makes them feel alive. At least the pain of it, you know, gives them a sense of something, have something dramatic, and so they deliberately bring on those kind of that kind of pain. So it's complicated.

a human being, that I am who I am. I was destined to write these books, and it gives me every day I wake up and I know this is what I need to accomplish, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's why I read so many books. That's why I'm so intrigued by ideas. That's why I'm writing a book right now about a subject that very much captivates me because it does feel that inner kind of emptiness. But on the other hand, as someone who meditates and practices a form of zen meditation, there is a purpose

to emptiness right there. It's not necessarily good to be always having to fill things up in your brain like you're just pouring food into your system. You know, there is something actually kind of intrinsically beautiful about the idea that there that there is emptiness, that that I don't really have a self, that there is actually not that there is no such thing as a mind. Actually, it's it's an illusion that we create, right, It's something that's

it's something through words that we have. So that sense of emptiness that you know, I'm I don't have an ego, or that I'm confronting the world, that I'm just hearing and seeing things as they are, it is actually a beautiful thing. So you have to kind of have to kind of struggle against this idea of always having to fill myself up.

which is not necessarily a good thing. We all have these attitudes that make us look at the world a certain way. I tend to have a negative bent towards human nature. But I must say people have been very very kind to me since I've had my stroke, and it's sad that you have to have an accident like that to be able to perceive it. But I've seen another side where everyone wants to help me. They kind of empathize with the fact that I'm a little bit

helpless in these situations. And it's also made me kind of feel differently about other people who have disabilities with things that they can help in their lives. But the sense of I'm a little bit helpless and people are really eager to try and help me actually is something that has kind of surprised me in a way.

yourself getting inside the characters. You're getting outside of yourself and you're feeling this empathy for them, you're identifying with them. These are all very powerful emotions, right, and we all have the capacity for that, But the world we live in is actually a machinery to deaden those emotions, that sense of empathy. Right. It's just puts so much emphasis on ourselves, on our individuality, on who we are, Our needs, you know, are the attention that we want, that we deserve.

We're so focused on ourselves that that natural feeling of wanting to get inside of another person. And you know, it's very strange, Jay, because if you think about it, our inner lives are actually quite boring, the same thoughts repeat over and over and over again, the same emotions, the same preoccupations, the same anxieties and other people. They're so different. They have their own worlds, right, They're like, it's like traveling to another country. So we should actually

be much more oriented towards other people. We should have a natural interest in their world because it takes us out of ourselves. It's like therapy. But it's been deadened by so many things in our world, by social media, by the pressures we're under, by just modern lifestyle, and so that empathetic muscle that everybody has is kind of atrophying. And yet there'll be moments where it kind of sparks to life and you feel like, God, I want that. I want more of that in my life, more of

that in my world. How do I get it?

Do you remember that you have to do this? At the scheduling things so unimportant, so trivial, Where I'm trying to open my mind up to something vast and important, it's little things like scheduling and stuff like that. Then there will be other thoughts that we repeat, you know, like if I saw a movie from images will keep popping up from that and such. It makes you aware that you're not in control of your own mind. Right.

It's a phantom, right, it has no reality. Reality is your body, the present moment, the birds outside the sky where you are sitting, the fact that you're alive, that your blood is pumping. These are real. But that thought in your mind is a shadow. It's a phantom. It doesn't exist. It has no reality. And so I go through this process where don't engage with it, and it's really weird because then my mind plays tricks on me and it pulls up a thought that's definitely going to

engage me, right because it wants that. It's like a sugar rush, and so I go, okay, no, I'm not going to engage with it. And it made me realize as I went through that process that this is what social media is based on. Social media has mirrored the human brain on a large scale. We have thoughts that are designed to grab our emotions and make us think about them repetitively, over and over again, compulsively. Right, And there's probably a purpose behind that, but social media is

actually a genius at that. It picking out putting up things up there. They're going to engage our emotions, so we have to pay attention. So I always try, and every time that happens, I withdraw and I say, it's just a thought, it's not real, it's not who I am. This is a very important part of meditation. Your thoughts are not who you are. They're a separate part of yourself. You are something different from your own thoughts. I don't know if that means anything to you.

something that's so so not real becomes so real. And I've been really into seeing how thought editing is so useful as an activity and an exercise, because I've sound so many of my thoughts become my beliefs that become my life. And I think a lot of people don't realize because they don't realize that their thoughts are like clothes that you can change. We do believe that our thoughts are real and our reality and whatever we're hearing in our head is exactly what is, and we don't

realize that. Oh it's like looking in your wardrobe and saying, I don't like the color green anymore. I'm going to change it for blue. It's as simple as that.

upon it briefly. It's not the reality I have every day, but that's the real that's real, and what's not real are the thoughts. But everything is turned upside down in our worlds, and so these delusionary thoughts of about people, about who I am, about my habits, et cetera. They become our reality when it's exactly the opposite, right, you have to be able to be aware of that. And so you know, meditation is all about being aware of is becoming aware of these things because we walk around

like automatons. You know, I'm very into this writer named Gerjeff. I don't know if you've ever heard of Gerjeff. He was this He's basically from Armenia. He was in the beginning of the twentieth century. He was this man who was very interested in mysticism, and he traveled throughout Asia trying to find the essence of all the different esoteric philosophies, and he created his own philosophy and it's very interesting,

very exciting stuff. He wrote a book called In Search of the Miraculous that I highly recommend people, and it's not wooh wo stuff. He was a very very practical man. He puts it in very practical terms. But his idea is that we walk around asleep. We're on automatic pilot constantly. We're not really aware that we're breathing, that we're existing, We're not aware where our thoughts come from. We're not aware of how our body moves, et cetera, et cetera,

et cetera. And so it's a process of slowly becoming aware of these kinds of things that is really kind of I've been doing this fourteen fifteen years now, really really kind of changed the course of my life.

ourself has the answer for how we feel. And while that may be true when you're seeing a doctor or a dentist or something of that professional nature, we don't really know how our body's been feeling for weeks or months until it crashes, and then we've realized that we haven't paid enough attention to X or yoz or a relationship in the same way has to end in order for us to realize that he had lost investment and

energy or whatever it may be. And we're so far away from the self, or at least this version of the self, that yeah, we're not really aware. I love what you just said. About the idea of how conscious are we of the fact that we're breathing, we're here, we're present, we're together, versus how much are we living up here? Yeah, and it's really interesting, isn't it, Because there's almost two realities that we're always dealing and if we're getting too heavy, I'm happy to move away from it.

But it's almost like I've been thinking a lot about how, in one sense what's out here is real and in one sense what here is in and at the same time, actually what's going on here is the real because it defines how I interact with everything else, and it can help me be a better filter, a bit of a chooser selector of the people I'm around and the places I visit.

But how we're processing what we're experiencing is our reality as opposed to the event or what someone said or social media, as you gave an example, like I can either sit here and say like, I know that when I wake up in the morning and I start scrolling on social media, my mind is now moving ten times one hundred times faster than if I don't do that. And I know that brushing my teeth and showering is a much more peaceful process if I haven't looked at

my phone then if I do. And so that choice is being made in the invisible world, and the visible world is simply something I'm interacting with and taking from or being affected by it.

I am about other people. I continually try to challenge it and look at what might be the source of it, and then maybe say it could be the opposite, right, and it actually it can lead to a lot of problems because it's like my mind is always swimming and I never really think anything is certain I'm always you know, seeing the opposite side of it, but I think it's in the end, it's a very healthy process.

our beliefs and values. But like you said, it's one of the hardest things to do because you get into a space of uncertainty, you question your identity, you lose a sense of direction.

in life? Well, it's not given. We don't know it, And a lot of people really really struggle with trying to figure that out, right, because they've been programmed by their parents, by their siblings, by the culture, by their teachers to say, this is who you are, this is what you should believe in, this is what you were meant to accomplish in life, this is what's cool and what's not cool, okay, And so you have to question yourself. You have to say, is this really who I am?

Am I really interested in this subject? Am I really interested in this kind of person and getting in a relationship with this kind of person? And so question yourself on that level, you're getting at a deeper and deeper

core of maybe who you are. At essence, you're cutting away all of the social stuff that's been foisted upon you that it has nothing to do with you, Right, So in some ways you're kind of a mystery to yourself and you're sort of trying to solve that puzzle, and you have to ask these questions, is this something I'm actually really interested in? Is this an intrinsically important thing to me? Or is it something that's in the culture or something that other people have told me? And

questioning that over and over and over again. Is not to lead you into this abyss where there's nothing real. It's to get you closer to who you are, to what really matters, to what that essence of you is, to what you were meant to accomplish in life. And once you reach that that inner kind of gold, then you have a degree of certainty. So I know, I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a writer. Right, I had to struggle to figure

out what kind of writing I wanted. But knowing that that's who I am, probably at the age of eight, it allowed me to go I'm not interested in that. I don't want to do that. This isn't important. Why am I following this career path? Why am I wasting my time here? And then, so, knowing that kind of core, you don't have to keep questioning yourself. So I'm never going to question myself. Why are you a writer? Why are you writing books? You should have been a pop star.

I should have been a rock singer. You should have written poetry, you should been a lawyer. No, I'll never go there because I have that firm ground beneath me, and that's what your questioning is supposed to lead to get to the essence of who you are, and once you're there, you have a degree of certainty in your life.

to be. And I've been spending a lot of time in this to try and figure out and I'll and we'll let's dive into it from different perspectives. But I guess how much, Robert, do you care what people think of you, and how have you made sense of that over your time as someone who obviously writes that a lot of people enjoy your reading. People may disagree with you, they may agree with you. People, as you said, debate, discuss,

But how have you made sense of that? And what's been your process of dealing with how you think people think about you.

heavy philosophy. You know, my wife can tell you all about this childish side of my personality. So you know, it's always been important to me to feel kind of authentic and sincere, and I've always hated and it's probably why I wrote the forty eight Laws of Power. I hate people who are pretending to be something that they're not deeply, deeply wounds me. And I don't know why. I don't know why it's been like that because I was a child. Maybe I suspected that in my parents,

the kind of falseness that upsets me deeply. And so I wrote the forty eight Laws of Power because I felt people are such hypocrites. They pretend that they're not interested in power, but that's all they're interested in, right. They wear this front, Oh, I just want to help people. I just want to make movies and culture, and arn't know you're interested in power. So it's always been deeply important to me to kind of reveal what's really going on in someone and to sort of feel that way

about myself. So when I don't feel like I'm myself, when I feel like I'm faking it, and sometimes to be honest with you, Jay, being a kind of quote unquote self help, gurup, it feels false. It doesn't feel like who I am. I feel like a bit of an impostor. It's not really what I wanted to be. I just wanted to write books. I love ideas, I

love thoughts, I love expanding my consciousness. Right, So the feeling that I'm not being who I am, and that other people are kind of glomming onto that is upsetting to me. I don't know if I'm answering your.

and sharing that. And I don't think I've ever thought of myself as a guru or a guide or a or that kind of individual. But we in society, if someone shares or teaches or gives insight or advice, we box them or bucket them as that's the same as you. We'd go in the same bucket, even though we kind of do similar things about very different things, and we probably have some similar interests in some different interests. And

it's interesting how there isn't a space. Like I often say to people, I'm just trying to be everyone's spiritual friend. Like that's my goal. Like I'm that guy who's introducing my friends to cool things that they may not have come across, whether it's Eastern spirituality or wisdom or whatever it may be. Like, I'm that guy, and that's all I want to be. I don't want to be anything else, right, But it's hard when you almost get put on a pedestal,

even though you didn't ask for that. I didn't want that.

the same flaws that I have. Narcissistic tendencies that I too can feel envy that I have moments of grandiosity. So I'm not comfortable with the idea like that I'm this somebody that I'm not that the perception of me is. But that's what happens to a lot of successful, famous people. They become trapped in what other people are thinking about them. They become trapped in that image. And I honestly think I could be way off base, but I'm thinking of

somebody like Anthony Bourdain who committed suicide. I think he was burdened and weighed down so much by how people thought of himself and it wasn't who he was, and it kind of made him feel deeply uncomfortable. And I'm sure there were many other issues going on, but a lot of times it can make you uncomfortable in your own skin, the way people perceive you, and it can lead to deep feeling links of depression and I and a loss of who you are.

everything's a linear before and after journey. And what we're talking about, and I fully agree with you on this, is that actually all of my challenges are cyclical and they're different. So it's not that I never feel anymore. It's that I feel it differently to how I felt it ten years ago, and hopefully I'm a bit better at dealing with it and understanding it and engaging with it than I was ten years ago. But it's not that it doesn't affect me anymore, right right, And same

with spiraling thoughts. It's not that I don't have anxious or negative thoughts anymore because I'm enlightened. I still have those thoughts. I just deal with them better than I did ten years ago, and I probably have more tools to help.

a different person. It's very strange. But I'm actually the same person that I was when I was living in that miserable one bedroom apartment, you know, and giving out my advice that nobody listened to. Now people listen to it. But the only difference is because suddenly I have this credential, which is very strange.

I enjoy learning, and I enjoy sharing, and I enjoy synthesizing and making things simple and practical for other people's That's what I get my joy from. And I was always inspired by two quotes. One is Ivan Pavlov where he said, if you want a new idea, read an old book. And so that's always been something that my work has been inspired by. It's always based on ideas that seem timeless, but they're.

I'm meant to do. And there's such a beautiful significance and insignificance in that very understanding, Like it's really significant building because I'm like, I know what I have to do, and it's really insignificant because I'm like, it's just what

I have to do. It it's not the best or the worst, or it's not comparative, right, And I think that's how when you're talking in the daily Laws of Power, that's that's kind of how, in different words, how you describe like your life's you know, your life's gifts, your life's work, your life's path.

a truth. But it's in this language that's very weird and primitive and barbaric. I don't know why that excites me so much. It's the same idea that a modern writer might write, but put in the words of seventy thousand years ago, it suddenly touches me.

off what I wrote there. And something about me was not comfortable with that it seemed cheap, it seemed easy, and it seemed lazy. And I know myself that if I'm not challenged by something different, I grow bored. So I have to write something that feels like there's energy behind it, there's anger, there's love, there's something powerful behind it. I have to feel it or it won't be in the words. So if I'm just doing the forty eight Laws of Power Part two, it won't be there. It'll

have an emptiness, and damn it. A lot of artists and writers fall into that trap, and it's why their books kind of have this sort of hollow ring to them, right, They're just going through the motion. It's just repeating what worked before, and I can't stand that feeling. I have to feel like I'm off into a new land if with this new book. So each book has to represent a challenge, right, And so the one I'm writing now is completely different from all seven of the other books,

and it's an incredible challenge. But it makes me excited about every day because I know I cannot repeat the same kind of books over and over and over again. My soul becomes dead and I have to feel alive with each projects.

I've only written two books. But as I'm hearing you, I'm happy to that I feel that I'm thinking about it in a healthy way, because yeah, I was. I was about to write my third book and the topic everyone wanted was so predictable and expected and it made sense, And I was like, I don't want to write about something that makes sense, Like that's boring. Like it's like, I want to write about something that feels like alive

in my life and electric it makes me. I'm like, now that I've chosen, I will tell this to you later, but I've chosen my next topic and I'm just been like writing notes about it. I'm reading about it. I'm seeing connections out.

with that? It's the idea, it's an ancient Greek idea, but it's in many other cultures that we have a second self, that there's something, there's a voice inside of us that is guiding us to something higher or better, but it can also lead us to something lower and worse. It can be demonic, which is where the word comes from, or it could be something. And Socrates had his dameon there's a voice in soide of him, and it said it always just said this is the right way to go,

or this is the wrong way to go. Nothing more than that right. And so when I'm writing, it doesn't feel right, and it's driving me crazy. And I'm going through this right now. It doesn't feel right, it doesn't resonate. It's not truth, it's not real. You got to start over, you got to do it again. And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, God, I've lost it. I'm getting old, and I just don't have my mojo anymore. But then I realized I've gone through this like eighty

five times every single book. It'll come to you, it'll come back. It isn't right because it doesn't feel right, it doesn't resonate, it doesn't have a reality to it. So I have to go through this process where I write something and it excites me and it interests me, and it just flows out of me, as opposed to like I have to pull every word out, And so I learned to trust myself that eventually I'll figure it out. But each time I hit that while I go, this

is it. You're finished. The book isn't going to come out. You're done. The wells are dry, you know.

not making sense. How have you learned the sense whether something feels true to you because it obviously felt true to someone. How do you decipher between this feels true, It feels real to me even if people don't agree.

going to have a personal appeal. Whereas I have a tendency to be abstract and professorial and theoretical, I cross all of that out. If you saw my notebooks, ninety five percent of it's crossed out. And I don't let the public ever see that side of me because I don't like it. I want my books to feel like I'm hitting something that's actually truthful and real that people don't like to talk about. Kind of thing, you know. So right now I'm writing about what is our self?

What is the sense of self that we have in our world? It's a very limited idea of the self. We have a very limited idea of our consciousness, very limited idea of what it means to be a human being in the twenty first century. We're actually much more immense and much more interesting than we think we are.

We have these possibilities, these connections because we're a part of something incredibly vast, and to have consciousness is absolutely an astounding thing, right, So I want to sort of expand what you the reader thinks of who you are, what yourself is. It's much larger than you imagine. But I have to convey that in language that feels right to me, that feels authentic, that feels like everybody in Africa, in China, in India, in Idaho is going to be able to relate to it, you know.

But there's a term in the Vedic literature is called unto akash, which means inner sky. Again, unto akash inner and akash means sky, inner sky. Yeah, in a sky. And it's this idea of how, you know, we're so fascinated by outer space, but there's that same inner sky that exists, so just that like the galaxy and the planetary systems and everything else that exists internally too, But there has to be a just as we have to go and do space exploration, you could do the same internally.

You discover so much.

words don't allow for it. If we're all reading the same memes and the same trends and the same hashtags, and it kind of just creates this very very limited space of consciousness.

we translated to spirit. But then I'm reading the African philosophers who actually know that word, and they go, it's not the same as the word spirit, and then they go out and describe it, and that one word contains all of these other worlds that are so weird and interesting that the word spirit in English does not convey, right, you know, And other languages have that sense, and so language can have that possibility where it opens up. It's

not just this unior this one track meaning. It has other balances, other possibilities to it, right, And so yeah, we're kind of deadening our language in a way. And you know, if you study like other cultures, you know, Eskimos had like a thousand words for snow and we have one word. You know, Russians have like forty words for the color blue and we have one word. Kind of thing. As the language gets smaller and smaller and more uniform, our thoughts become more and more limited in uniform.

So to no here a word like inner sky, it opens up all these other ideas in your mind, whereas we don't have a word like that in English, you know. And then because I'm doing things for Zen, Japanese language is so rich with things that we can't possibly even begin to express in English, you know.

have a big library. And that was one of my most favorite things to kind of put together when I moved here and started spending more time in when I would travel, I've always collected books. I've always and I started collecting expanding my audio library. I realized as I grew When I was growing up, we listened to a very limited form of music in my home, and even I was growing up as a teenager, I listened to like one genre of music, rap and hip hop, like

that was. And again, I love rap and hip hop. I love rap and hip hop history. It's super cool. I have no issues with it. I just think that my audio library was so limited in my teens that now that I'm in my thirties, I'm now listening. I'm trying to listen to so many random, different things, which again inspire different thoughts, different feelings, different emotions. And so I've realized that vocabulary was one thing, audio has been

another thing. What are other things that you've discovered that help open up that consciousness of mind, because, as we both keep referring to social media, technology is almost making us more limited, more singular, more one dimensional.

Greek music. Well that doesn't exist, having no recordings of it, but sure enough there are, and the rhythms and the sound is so weird an alien that it makes it music captures the spirit of a time, right. So if we're only hearing these same melodies, you hear cards going by with that same kind of pop song, it's such a limited circle of harmony, such a limited circle of

what music can be. But when you open up to African music, to music from ancient Babylonia to Greece, to music in South America, other rhythms, other poetry in music and sounds, it's mind blowing. It's interesting. So that's what I'm saying, that the human animal is much more interesting than we think it is. Reading about ancient cultures is a very mind expansive project. You can go on because.

I'm giving them exercises and I'm saying, try to imagine yourself in a world a thousand years ago, and you walk out your front door. There's no mechanical sounds. There's no airplanes, there's no cars, there's no machines. It's just birds. Maybe a saw and a hammer is the most you're going to hear. That's a strange thing. There are no signs, there are no advertisements, there's no words. Everywhere. It's kind

of empty, right, you're just wandering around. There are all these kind of rants and weird, horrible smells because people aren't bathing, there's no but they're very human smells. Right, Your whole sensory experience is on another level. But when you live in this twenty first century world where things are so sanitized, but we don't smell these things. We only hear these packaged mechanical sounds. Your sensory world is shrinking down and down and down, and you realize the

ancient world they had some bad stuff. They weren't very good. You know, they had slavery. I understand all of the negatives. So I'm not painting this portrait. But on another level, their realm of senses, their realm of language, their internal worlds were far richer than ours. And by connecting to them by reading these books, by reading books, not just the daily life thing I said, but actually text from

those times. As I was mentioning, when I read a monk, a zen monk from the eleventh century, and the different thought processes, It opens my mind to a different way of thinking, to a different way of accessing reality. But like I'm reading a lot about Aztecs because I'm sort of obsessed with the Aztecs. I don't know why. And

they had these amazing spectacles. That was the thing about the ancient world, these festivals and spectacles that are far beyond burning Man or any rock concert, right, you know, I could describe the fire ceremony in Astec culture that only occurred every seventy years. There is nothing you can ever imagine in your life that would be like that.

It is so utterly spectacular. And so I have this eight hundred page book called as Tech Philosophy, and it's very theoretical, but God, it gives you an entree into a totally different way of thinking about the world. Right where they have these metaphors that the universe has this energy. Some of the energy is like stream that's being wound around in a certain way. It's like weaving, like other other things like that. This kind of energy that the

world has. Wow, this is fascinating. You know, our ancestors were actually thinking, but they're not. Aren't there us? It's a human being. We're all human. We all have those same kind of consciousness.

and tool. And they were showing us how when a child is born, they used to place the umbilical cord on the ground and they would then draw a spiral around it and that would be seen as a place that the child could always come back to to feel the energy and reconnect with the earth. Oh exciting, and I was thinking, that's spectacular. I wish everyone felt disconnected to the earth. And then we would go out every

morning on a canoe. I forget their name for it, but they had their version for it, and they would pay respects to the Sun and the ocean and we would take part in this ceremony with them. And in India there's something known as Suria Namashkara, which it translates to sun salutation, which again I've talked to Andrew Huberman about This is like kicking off the Circadian rhythm. But the goal is you pay your respects to the sun for everything it offers to you and the energy that

it provides. And so to see that in Hawaiian culture, Indian culture, and then I was in Bhutan recently I went on a trip to Bhutan, which I'd always wanted to visit, and this is a culture that really feels like you're going back in time. You walk out there and it feels like what you just described a thousand years ago, landlocked between Indian China.

of the land mass because they believe they're sacred. You can't trek up to or ski on any of their mountains because they're sacred. They protect them. So there's a really and you almost I almost felt like what you just said there's no signs, you can't hear anything, there's no machinery like it really does feel like that, and we all, all of us who are there, experienced this sense of slowness that you don't experience anywhere else, not

in a bad way in the mind. The gravity almost of the space was really really powerful to experience.

you expect. I mean, I was an Indian just recently on the way back, and it's like there's a Tim Hawtons, like right there, Tim Hortons, which I think is like

popular in Canada or something like that. Is it popular in the US Tim Hortons, it's Canada or my wife was telling me about it, but it was just one of these it's it's And then there was a Starbucks and then it was the same, the same thing, and I was like, I'm in India, like you know, like I don't not expect it, but it's yeah, it's the generic that's what's made the brain so dull it has.

be more forgiving. So instead of thinking, God, I'm never going to write anymore at the well is dry, the forgiving aspect is, Robert, you're tired, you're exhausted, You're doing fine, It's going to come. It will come, just trust it. So it's kind of like, you know, being indulgent towards yourself. I can be indulgent towards other people, but I can't

be indulgent towards myself. So just learning to forgive myself for not being perfect, if for not getting exactly what I want in life, does the hardest thing for me, that's beautiful. It'd be very good for my health if I could, if I could ever get there, that's beautiful.

platform you use. In the YouTube comments section, what resonated with you, What books you're going to read, what you connected with maybe some of the creatives out there who want to shift the way they think, or whether you've got some great insights on what are strong and weak character points. I want to know what hit you, what resonate with you? And thank you so much for listening and watching, And thank you again Robert for your time.