Robert Greene on Sleepwalking Through Life, Phones, and the Pursuit of the Sublime

Host Shaan Puri pointed out that Greene's best-known titles, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and Mastery, are about control, while The Law of the Sublime seems to say nearly the opposite, focusing on letting go and being small rather than larger than life. Greene said the book comes out of personal experience. He told the hosts that he nearly died about eight years ago, and that the experience changed how the world looks and feels to him.

Greene said people are suffering from the narrowness of their experience, much of it coming from technology. He described a hunger for something larger than the daily struggle and said he wants readers to feel the sense of awe he felt after coming close to death, without having to nearly die. He called the book very practical on that level and said it shows how such experiences can be brought into everyday life. He added that people are missing a sense of connection to other people, to their environment, to the world and to themselves.

Greene acknowledged that he had no data to support his view that there is a level of crisis today that may not have existed in the past. He said, however, that firsthand experience offers a guide. He estimated that more than 90% of American adults have a smartphone, and asked how many of those people are addicted in the sense of using the phone more than they want to, with the phone becoming in some ways the main source of pleasure in their lives and taking up a larger share of their time. He said that number is probably high, and that it includes everyone he knows, himself included.

Greene described a recumbent bicycle ride into hills in Los Angeles, where he felt therapeutic calm, while people walking nearby in a beautiful park were talking on the phone or reading Instagram. He said that to him this is a form of mental illness, because being healthy requires being observant and connected to one's surroundings.

Greene told listeners to get out of their houses and into nature, such as Central Park or somewhere in Connecticut, and to leave their phones behind, locking them in a drawer where they cannot be accessed. He suggested going with a friend who did not bring a phone either, so that they are forced to go cold turkey. He said that the urge to check sports scores or election results would arise, but that it cannot be satisfied, so the mind becomes focused outward on what is around it, the sounds, and the sense of the body moving.

Greene said that climbing a mountain can bring a sense of awe as one rises higher and interacts with things that are not human, taking a person out of their small daily circle. He explained that he had originally planned to write the book by traveling the world and having sublime experiences. After his stroke, however, he was confined to a single room where he spent roughly seven years writing. Unable to travel, he found the sublime in looking up at the sky, interacting with his pets and his wife, and watching people.

Greene distinguished between experiences that come from within a person and an addiction that needs constant stimulation from someone or something else. In his account, the feeling of an internal experience is exciting and fulfilling, and it makes a person want more of it. He used mountain climbing as an example, saying a climber can feel uplifted spiritually and physically, with body and mind both responding to the experience.

Greene said that such a feeling cannot be obtained from a phone. A person cannot get the sensation of having done something difficult and arduous, he said, and no experience could be programmed on a phone that could give that kind of sensation.

The host said he reads a lot of World War II and Holocaust books, and mentioned one about one of the few Jews who escaped Auschwitz, who hid under dead bodies for about three days before walking across Poland. He said reading such stories gives him a different takeaway than feeling down: if these people could do such things, he can have a difficult conversation.

Greene cited Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, was held in a concentration camp, and later became a psychotherapist. According to Greene, Frankl's discovery was that the people who survived the most awful circumstances were those who had some kind of purpose for their life, something to live for if they got out, such as a book to write or a family member to save.

Greene recounted that his girlfriend, now his wife, was sitting beside him when she saw that something was very wrong and called 911. He said that if the ambulance had arrived 30 seconds or a minute later, he would have been dead or would have suffered intense brain damage. Having survived, he said, there must be a reason and a purpose, which he identified as writing one more large book, The Sublime, despite his physical limitations.

Greene said that without that sense of mission he would never have finished, because it was extremely difficult to write an entire book when he could not type and had to handwrite it. He also described his reading habits, saying he thinks it is better to take one cornerstone text and reread it many times to master it, rather than collecting many books on the same topic, and said he wished he had devoted two years to mastering four of his own books.

Greene said he is out in public a lot because of the new book, but he disappears for long stretches. He said he never posts about what he had for breakfast, photographs of where he has traveled, or his cats. He posts only podcast interviews that contain practical information that will help people. He said that because people do not know his private life, there is a level of mystery, and that being completely transparent about his private life would violate many of the 48 Laws of Power.

The conversation then turned to Josh Kushner, the new owner of the Lakers. Greene said Kushner fits the themes of his book in several ways. Kushner grew up in a wealthy New York real estate family, and by 21 he had become one of Instagram's first investors. Greene described Kushner's venture capital career as probably one of the best 10-year runs of anyone he knows of.

Asked for predictions about AI over the next decade, Greene said he is a born pessimist with a negative bias, and that he tends to be the one who says he does not buy the hype. He said there is deep resentment and fear among the public about AI, while a small group at the top is dominating the field and controlling the technology. He argued that people at the bottom could eventually have a powerful effect on AI's evolution, politically, by demanding laws that regulate AI and limit data centers, which people are growing tired of.

Greene said that he wrote a book about human nature, describing a dark side of humanity marked by irrationality and grandiosity, and that this dark side will use the new technologies. He mentioned scams and the possibility of dirty bombs and biological weapons, while noting that AI could also cure cancer. He worried that young people will not have the patience to learn anything anymore. He also said the legal profession could be decimated by AI, and noted that one possible good thing about AI is that people can get any answer they want.

Greene said he sometimes lies to the reader, but never in any major way with no research, only in small things such as when a particular person died. The hosts joked that the consequences would be the apocalypse, mass resentment, and loss of human cognition.

Greene described how he wrote The Law of the Sublime by hand. He wrote in one notebook, rewrote the text word for word in another while editing, and went back four or five times. He estimated he had about 120 notebooks by the end. When a draft seemed decent, he dictated it, printed it, edited the printout by hand, then dictated again and edited on the computer with his one usable hand.

Greene said the effects of his coma have worn off, but the sensations return in waves, sometimes months apart. He described sensations of his bones dissolving, a strange taste in his mouth, and odd effects of light. When he first woke up from the coma, the sky looked more intensely blue than he had ever seen it, as if it were incandescent. He said he can still see it and feel it.

Greene compared the experience to psychedelics, but said that with a powerful drug such as LSD a person may hallucinate things that are not there. When he sees the sky this way, he believes he is seeing what it actually looks like without the familiar film the brain places over everything. He said he will never fully lose the fear of death, but the experience has softened it.

Greene reflected on a group he had been part of, which discussed how to rebuild the country and crossed party lines, and said it did not amount to anything, though he hoped it started a conversation. He said he was impressed by the number of women now entering the Senate and House, and by people articulating ideas the group had discussed. He argued that the undoing of Democrats is that they give a laundry list of policies, on healthcare and gasoline prices for example. He said affordability is important, but that something more mythic is also needed.

Asked to elaborate, Greene said Ronald Reagan had some of that folksiness and a larger vision of America, and that JFK had some of that quality as well. He said charisma is extremely important in the media age, with social media and television.

Greene defined aura as basically non-verbal charisma, which exists without having to do anything. He said that an athlete eventually grows old and the era ends, so it does not last forever, but there are windows of time when such figures appear. He used Conor McGregor as an example, saying McGregor went from a plumber living on welfare to someone who seemed to speak himself into existence in a mythical way. McGregor nicknamed himself Mystic Mac and carried himself with such self-belief that people were inspired by the concept he stood for, which was self-belief.

Greene also cited a tweet from Jaylen Brown a few years earlier, when the Celtics were struggling. Brown did not talk about X's and O's but wrote that the energy was about to shift. Greene said the team went on a run to the finals and won the championship.

The host argued that Marilyn Monroe aside, the figures Greene mentioned, including Malcolm X, Churchill, and JFK, were leading America to space, saving England from Nazi Germany, or fighting for Black rights, which he called the easiest causes to rally behind and dedicate one's life to. He disagreed that such figures were simply products of their circumstances.

Greene responded with Churchill's background. He said Churchill came from a bad family background, was largely abandoned and felt unloved, spent years in the wilderness, suffered in the Gallipoli campaign during World War I, and had bouts of depression. Greene argued that the qualities that made Churchill charismatic lay dormant until World War II, and that his earlier political sufferings had taught him lessons, so he was not just a creature of Hitler. He said there was something within Churchill that came from inside himself, and that having a worthy cause is extremely important because it creates a kind of radiant force.

The host said that when he hears charisma he thinks it is a good thing and that he wants more of it. He summarized Greene's point as two things: the most charismatic trait is confidence, an internal security, but many of the most charismatic people Greene studied had upbringings that made them crave the love of others, pulling them toward a highly external path of validation seeking. The host said that this makes such charismatic people almost seem broken, and that he would not want that.

The host then recounted a personality test given by a coach, on which he scored over 100 on narcissism, which worried him. The coach explained that the orientation means believing there is something special about oneself and looking to the world to validate it. The host said he could not argue with it, because his podcast amounts to showing people how smart and funny he is, and that he has high highs when validated and low lows when not seen as special.

Greene pointed to a coach he said combined strategic brilliance with empathy. He said the coach started young, perhaps around 30, is a student of the game, and pays close attention to where it is headed. Greene said the coach can identify with his players because he is young and has deep empathy, understanding the pressures they face. The coach also created a new way of playing in the NBA, loading players up for offensive rebounds, a strategy most teams now use. Greene summed up that he is creative, strategic, and socially skilled.

Greene said he wrote a book called Mastery about mastering one's career and profession. He argued that a person who is horrible with people will have their brilliance neutralized, and that the combination of high analytic and technical skill with good social skills and character is what matters.

Greene said that some people will be disappointed because they want a second part of The 48 Laws of Power, and that it is not the most sellable subject. His strategy, he said, is to write a good book, put full effort into it, have interesting ideas, and try something that has not been done before, and the audience will find it. If they do not, he said, it is their fault.

Greene told the story of the musician Mike Posner, whose first songs were mega hits, with the record label later shelving him after his second record sold less well. For years he wrote songs that became hits for others, including Justin Bieber, before returning to making music he enjoyed. Greene quoted Posner: 'I just make what's cool to me and sometimes the whole world agrees.' Greene said he admired that attitude more than the default mode of people trying to make hits, and that when you either write for what the market says will sell or for what will satisfy you, he chose the latter.