Robert Greene: "Nothing Is Real, And I Can Prove It!" Your Brain Creates A Fake World | Jack Neel

Robert Greene (0:00)

What Jeffrey Epstein was, was a master middleman. He could connect you to anything you wanted. He knew your weaknesses, appealed to people's self-interest.

Jack Neel (0:09)

Today's guest is the number one expert in the world on power, seduction, and the law of the sublime.

Robert Greene (0:16)

It's not that the sublime is something spiritual and invisible or something that you can't see. You start seeing things as they are. The brain loses that functioning. It's no longer able to construct this kind of matrix world that we're living in. It's totally fake.

Jack Neel (0:32)

One of the best-selling authors alive, he's taught a generation of founders, rappers, and world leaders the hidden laws of influence. But after a wasp sting nearly killed him, he's written the final book of his career on death.

Robert Greene (0:45)

I try to take you through a death ritual in which I lead you through feeling your own body dying.

Jack Neel (0:53)

Can you walk me through my own death? This episode will explore why the most powerful people are obsessed with living forever. Reveal the habits in your life that are keeping you asleep, and question if he really believes he died. What exactly did he see at his own funeral?

Robert Greene (1:07)

I was up above, like in the sky somewhere, like a drone, looking down, and there was my girlfriend and my mother, and they were attending my funeral. And all I can remember was saying to myself, Robert Greene, welcome to the Jack Neel Podcast. Thank you so much for having, Jack, my pleasure.

Jack Neel (1:25)

Yeah, it's great to have you back here.

Robert, a good place to start here. You spent the last 30 years of your career studying the most influential, powerful people that have ever lived. What do the most powerful people in the world fear the most?

Robert Greene (1:45)

I think they fear losing their attention and becoming kind of forgotten and neglected. You know, so being powerful and being in the limelight is kind of like a drug, and you get addicted to it.

And then when it disappears, like let's say you were president and then you're no longer the president, you go into your private life, you miss that excitement, that jolt, the adrenaline, the intensity of it, and the fact that people aren't really paying an attention to you anymore.

I remember I'm not in that league, so don't get me wrong, I remember I would be like early on with my books, I'd be on national television, and it'd be kind of exciting, the glamour and meeting famous people and being interviewed. And then I would go home alone to my hotel room and I would feel so depressed. Like it was gone, it was just all that attention, now it's nothing.

I think they fear most of all oblivion of being forgotten. And that is sort of like a slight intimation, a slight hint of death itself. But I think that's what they fear most.

Jack Neel (2:51)

Right. I guess when you think about death versus the material world, like mastering, seduction, power, control, you have a new book, The Law of the Sublime.

Robert Greene (3:07)

Yes.

Jack Neel (3:09)

What has that taught you about the material world versus this other world you describe?

Robert Greene (3:17)

Well, it's not that the sublime is something spiritual and invisible or something that you can't see or that it's different from the material world. In fact, it is very much about interacting with the material world on a very deep concrete level. Getting outside of your smartphone, getting outside of all of your virtuality, getting outside of social media, and actually encountering life itself. The blood flowing through the air that you're breathing, people and being kind of immersed in reality, right? And so, it's not like a dichotomy between the spiritual and the material. But the book, you know, it was a very difficult book to write because I had so much to overcome.

And it made me kind of confront myself a lot.

While my books do that, like my human nature book, I had to kind of come to terms with the fact that many of the negative qualities in the book that I describe about human nature, I had. So, but this book, I had to confront my own limitations. I had a stroke. I couldn't physically do the things that I love doing because I'm a very physical person. I love movement. I love sports. I love, you know, doing activities, climbing, hiking. To have that, all of that taken away from me like overnight. And then to try and write a book and have that discipline and to get deeply into the material.