The Hard Truths of Being a Writer (Robert Greene Interview)

Robert Greene's on the show today who's famous for writing books like The 50th Law and 48 Laws of Power. [music] So, how does he write books that so many people want to read? How has he written books that are so compelling that people literally want to steal them? Well, we talk about that in this conversation. What I admire so much about Robert, the reason I love spending time with him is that he's been devoted to this craft [music] of writing for decades and you can feel it in his presence. He's labored and labored and now he's out with a new book called Sublime. He wrote it after having a stroke and basically being [music] paralyzed with the right side of his body and I'm telling you this book is his magnum [music] opus. It is a departure from the standard Robert Greene fare and into something new, into the transcendent, [music] into the supernatural, trying to describe the indescribable. This

conversation is beautiful, it's deep, and I think you're going [music] to like it.

>> So, you brought a notebook? >> Yeah, I did. So, my process was kind of crazy and I wouldn't recommend it for anybody. So, this is how not to write a book. Um but essentially because I had a stroke, I couldn't type. So, I had to handwrite the entire book. And what I would do was I would take this style of notebook. They're all in this. I have about a hundred of them for this book. And um I would write um the first versions of of a chapter >> Oh my goodness.

>> handwriting. >> Can I show it on the camera? Sure. >> And this is every page is filled. Um and I would write the first versions of the chapter, then take a second notebook, the same notebook, and rewrite it by hand. And you can't skip sentences because I'm trying to recreate the whole thing, edit the whole thing. So, I had to Sometimes paragraphs would be the same, but I had to repeat them handwriting in this new notebook.

And then I would go back to the first notebook and rewrite what was in the second notebook. And sometimes I would take sticky pads to kind of edit in that way. And so, it just was unbelievably tedious and arduous. And um at some [clears throat] points I couldn't read my own handwriting. I couldn't figure out the sequence of paragraphs that I had. I had to like kind of decipher what the hell was I You won't be able to read it.

>> I cannot decipher what's going on here. This is like Egyptian hieroglyphics. The people come after us, they'll look at this and they'll say, "Wow, what language did they speak in 2026?" >> Yeah. Um so I had to devise a method to compensate for my stroke. And finally, after going back and forth between these mirror notebooks, I would transcribe it, I would dictate it through Whisper Transcription. >> Whisper Flow? >> Yeah, Whisper Flow.

>> They're the sponsor of the podcast. >> Oh, hello Whisper Flow. >> Great product. Yes, it is. I was completely paid to say that, but I believe it. >> It is It is very good. I had very good and I'm not bullshitting cuz I actually had to do this for the entire book. I would dictate it through Whisper and then print it out on paper and then edit the paper printout with my hand. And then dictated again and then edit it with on the computer with one hand.

You have no idea how difficult that was, but it was excruciating and exciting at the same

time. >> So this is the first book that you wrote fully after the stroke. >> Yes. >> You're writing this book Sublime and you want to inhabit the emotion of whatever it is that you're writing about, but now you have a stroke. So how does that change how you go about the writing? >> Well, I have this theory that you kind of bring something You can tell the way a book is written the spirit of the author and what moods they were in. Some things are so dry and so boring and academic that you can almost feel the author tuning out and looking at it from some kind of weird distance.

And I've always I've always had to be very emotional about my books that I write. I have to like feel the spirit almost invade me and inhabit me of what I'm trying to write about. So human nature was just getting into the essence of what it means to be a human being as a social animal. And I had to go draw on all my experiences as a child and my whole life and it all my social experiences. Here I'd intended to write the book um 20 years ago. It was a project 20 years ago. It was supposed to be after my war book and then I got derailed by the 50 Cent project and mastery and etc.

And I intended to like go through the Amazon jungle and swim with dolphins and go through the Gobi Desert and have sublime experiences and adventures and in that mood right in that elevated mood about things. I had my stroke. And a lot about the sublime has to do with death and the nearness of the continual nearness of death for the human animal, our consciousness of death. And so suddenly have I come this close to die literally cuz my wife saved my life.

I'm like this is the time to write the book. Okay? But then it's very hard because I can't go down the I can barely walk out my front door. In the first few months still I have my difficulties walking. And so like how do I get myself in the mood to write this book that is so deeply personal to me? I have the sublime has always been something so important to me because it's about things you can't verbalize. Because we live in in a world of words and language and symbols. But there are experiences that take beyond words and languages. Like reality itself because words are just symbols. They're abstractions. And we all have this feeling of touching something beyond the realm of words, something real. Okay?

And so the book was deeply emotional to me because I've always wanted to write about this and I've had sublime experiences particularly when I was in my 20s, I was doing a lot of drugs and things like that and traveling around the world. But I can't you know, you're you're in your office, you can't move. You can't go out and see things. So I had to put myself in a space where the sublime was like everything I looked at. There's a quote in there, I think it's from Marcel Proust that what you don't need is all these new experiences and adventures.

What you need are new eyes. You need a new pair of eyes. With a new pair of eyes, you're looking at the world looking at this house, everything is of interest, everything is curious like when you were a child. These carvings on the walls, how weird they are, you know? Like who chose these particular birds to go there? What meaning did they have to them? And so you know, with that I had to continually work on myself because I was quite depressed at my physical limitations.

And I had to be in the mood and feel the book as I'm writing it. Music played a large part in this. So each chapter, there was a particular kind of music that I would listen to that was cuz music is the essence of the sublime in that it's not unless there you sometimes there's lyrics, but usually if not, it's just pure emotion, right? And there's something sub something sublime about music because birds have songs, whales have songs, it connects us to nature, to something greater than the human. It's also probably the origins of language with singing and songs and and music itself.

So music played a large part because I could I could write about the cosmic sublime and I could listen to composers who tried to write about the cosmos and the universe. I could do the pagan sublime and listen to ancient Greek music and what that was like, you know? And then a childhood chapter, I listened to the music that I listened to when I was a child. I had to get in the mood and the spirit and so music played a large part.

But it was more like changing working hard on myself to feel the sublime in everything around me, right? Cuz when you were a child, you look at what things for the first time and everything interests you. Everything's exciting. Everything's curious. >> Wondrous. >> Wondrous. Marvelous. Now you walk around, it's like a film in front of your eyes. Everything's familiar. You don't pay attention to anything. Right? And so I wanted to get back I had to have that feeling of everything kind of sparkling with an intensity.

And the near-death experience kind of brought that to me. After my stroke, I look out and sunlight looks different and and the reflections on leaves look different. Everything's had a glow and intensity to it. It would fade in and out and I had to go back and grab it consciously cuz it was something had happened to my brain in in that experience. So I just had to work on myself and bring the world inside of me so I could write it so the book would come to life.

Because if the if you're what you're writing isn't alive in you, it won't be alive in what you write. It'll be dead. It'll have a deadness to it. It won't be completely dead cuz you're a living creature. But there's an element of something I can feel it in in a lot of books that I read that that there's a dead a deadness to it, right? And a lot of the books on the sublime as of these academic books written by professors of art and stuff.

And they're so unsublime, right? The writer's not feeling it. They're going through all these theories. And the sublime isn't that it's an experience that is transcendent. So, anyway, that's that's what I had to go through to try and get this book out.

>> Can we just define what the sublime is? >> There are many ways to approach it. I I like to see it as a kind of a circle. >> Mhm. >> If I I like to create images for the books that I write. And so, um human consciousness, because we're a social animal, we have to live our minds have to inhabit a particular kind of circle, a limit prescribed by the culture that we live in, the society that we live in. >> Sure. >> Certain codes and conventions. This is what reality is. This is what's moral.

This is what's virtuous. This is how you should behave. This is what you should think about, right? Every culture has that limiting circle. Ancient Egypt had it, but it So, ours is different from ancient Egypt, but they still have a limiting circle, okay? And the human being kind of craves something larger, craves transcendence. And I say that that's That's why it's called the law of the sublime. Because it's a deep, deep need in us going back thousands of years. And I explain where the need comes from, largely our consciousness of death.

And so, we want to go beyond that circle. Where we have these powerful brains, right? We're very restless. Our minds are constantly clicking and doing things. And yet, we're trapped in a circle. This is how we're supposed to think. This is how we're supposed to behave. We get bored. We get restless. We take drugs. We get addicted to sex. We get porn, whatever it is. We're so restless, we're almost going crazy in the limits that our culture puts on us, okay? So, you could have these experiences that take you outside the circle. So, it's like a door. And when you peer through the door and you touch up on what's outside, how we're supposed to think.

It's like an electric shock. It's like, "Whoa, that's exciting. That's interesting." It expands the mind, right? It exposes you to something beyond what you normally think about. And I find it I think it's a deep need that people have. And so, the 12 chapters of the book are 12 points outside that circle, right? So, you can pick a circle like a point like one of them is called the interspecies sublime. It's about our relationship to animals.

Normally, you see an animal out there you don't realize that it has a consciousness, that has a way of thinking, a way of perceiving, it has its own life. And by going inside that animal, you touch upon a different way of relating to the world and you could become part of you. This is immense power that humans have of empathy, of putting ourselves inside something else, our mirror neurons. So, you're not looking at animals as just these silly little creatures wandering around. You're getting inside them. And when you get inside their spirit, it changes you. You get you get you that little electric shock I mentioned.

And I have a story in there about a man who was obsessed with a hawk, a peregrine hawk. >> And he's looking at the maps and stuff. >> It's It's one of the greatest I highly recommend reading this book. Like, it was Werner Herzog's favorite book. The The The Peregrine by J. A. Baker. Yeah, he's like looking at maps to see what how the what the hawk is seeing from below. Yeah, right? It was before he had drones, so he couldn't do anything like that.

He becomes so obsessed with the hawk that at moments he becomes the hawk. He starts looking like a hawk does, like with the jerky motions of the of the head, right? And he starts He comes upon a a bird that's just been killed and the and blood dripping and he goes and he tastes some of it. He you know, he's And it it had a transcendent experience for him. It took him out of his He was dying at the time. He had rheumatoid arthritis.

Anyway, it's just an example, but each of the points has that little kind of shock of wow, there is another way of thinking, another way of being in this world. And so that's how I would define the sublime. I could also approach it from other angles. >> This episode is sponsored by Alpha School. When you think of school, what comes to mind? >> [music] >> For me, it was lectures, homework, being stuck in a desk. And the worst part is that it doesn't even work. 54% of Americans read below a sixth-grade level. That's over half of Americans. We need something new, and that's why I'm excited to have Alpha School as the flagship sponsor of How I Write.

At Alpha, you go to school, you get all your academics done in only 2 hours per day, so that then you can spend the rest of the time learning life skills, like running a business, writing a musical, giving a TEDx Talk. You know, the kind of things that make you a capable and well-rounded person. And it's working. They have the academics figured out. Alpha classes test in the top 1% nationally, and more than 90% of students say they love school. Now, I used to live in Austin, where Alpha School started, and I was consistently blown away by what was happening there.

I personally mentored a bunch of the kids, and what stuck out to me is how much their team believes in the potential of kids. Alpha's approach, and the success it's already having, >> [music] >> is why it's the most talked about K-through-12 school in the world right now. And also, where I want to send my kids to school one day. So, if you want to learn more, visit go.alpha.school/howiwite.

If I came to you and I said, "Robert, I'm stuck. I'm stuck in my writing. Stuck in my creative process. I just feel like the world has become a little dull. It's become insipid, and I'm not I'm hearing you, and I feel like you see this life in the world. I look at these flowers. You see these flowers differently from how I see the flowers. I feel like I look at these flowers and all I can see is like how a Dutch master would draw them.

>> Yeah. >> Super rooted in realism and then you're coming here and you're seeing them like Monet. It's so impressionistic and you're seeing this vibrance. >> Yeah. >> What would you How would you counsel me? >> It's not all just intuition and and not language-based. It can be based on like some research and some understanding. So, when I say if you research like I have to a lot of stories about Nabokov. He's one of the main writers in the book cuz he's an absolute one of my favorite writers. He was obsessed with butterflies.

>> Yeah. >> As a child, he caught his He saw a butterfly when he was 7 years old. It changed his life. This thing fluttering and it just it He could feel it inside his heart beating with this flutter. If you've ever watched a butterfly and its wings flutter, it's weird and nervous energy that's so exciting. It's like life itself. >> Yeah. >> He got so entranced by butterflies that he began to read about them. He became a scientist and he went deep deep deep deep deep into the study of of butterflies and then he would go observe them.

It's a mix of kind of poetry and a way of looking at the world that's kind of filled with your imagination and the excitement cuz a scientist could look at a butterfly and not feel that emotion. But then he studied them very deeply. So, when I look at like flowers, I'm thinking of I'm thinking of the history of planet Earth. And I take you through this in the book so that when you see things now, you'll have these references.

Okay, flowers erupted at a certain point in our planet, right? There were no flowers at some point because flowers and insects are uh need each other, right? I forget what the word is. There's a symbiotic relationship between the two. You can't have flowers without insects and you can't have insects without flowers. So, they both emerged at about the same time. And so, when you think about Earth 500 300 million I don't know exactly the date when flowers first emerged, you go there could have been a world without flowers, right? And there could have been a world without insects. What would that be like? It makes you think of flowers as this kind of miraculous thing.

And then there are references like St. Augustine once wrote that flowers want to be admired. >> Mhm. >> And it's almost like why are beauty of flowers? What's the point in nature of flowers being so beautiful? Like what's the point of all these vibrant colors? Is there some evolutionary purpose to being more beautiful than another? I can't really think of one, right? And so, you almost have the idea that they're there for us. They're there for consciousness to see how beautiful they are and how wonderful they are and to inspire us. I know that sounds kind of irrational.

But you can go there where you think that um why is this existing like it is? You know, this is strangeness about the beauty of flowers because there's no evolutionary purpose to them. I suppose certain kind of flowers attract certain kind of insects, but a point is reached where you can't rationally explain that. And so, there's an element of there's a connection between us because we're aware and conscious. We're drawn to them and they speak to us about something.

Perhaps flowers were like the origins of some of our first poetic impulses, you know, even some of our first spiritual impulses. When you immerse yourself you drench your brain in some of these associations, now when you look at flowers with your spirit, your heart, and your on all that intensity, they look different, right? Looking at the world through the sublime lens adds dimensions to everything you see, but it also involves our rationality and our and our scientific understanding of of things as well.

>> How do you go about cultivating the sublime? Is it I think that this is so much of what poets do is they reawaken >> Yeah. >> our eyes. Read poetry. What else do you do? >> Well, you have to defamiliarize yourself. >> Aw, that's a great word. >> Yeah. And a lot of writers and psychologists have talked about this, so I'm not bringing up something that no one's discussed before. But um so you have to when you look at things, you're always in a certain framework that you're seeing it.

And that framework is usually through the lens of language and through your own experiences and your own associations. And once you have that, you're not actually looking anymore cuz you're seeing the framework that you've established in your brain, right? And it's the same time every time you look at it, you're repeating it over and over again. What if you changed the frame of reference? So like you look at a bird and you've got this scientific detached 21st century way of looking at it.

What if you sh- you shifted that perspective and you saw and you saw the bird looking at you? Like what does it see when it looks at me, right? And how strange it is, this human. So in that story I told you about the peregrine hawk, at one point, he realizes that the hawk sees him as this ugly bipedal pink creature that's not very beautiful that can't fly, right? Shifting your perspective and seeing things from other angles gets you out of that familiar framework that you have.

So, defamiliarization is what po- is what poetry is in essence. So, the great romantic poets of the early 19th century, the Keats, the Shelley, Shelley's probably my favorite of all the sublime poets. If you read Shelley, of course he's obsessed with nature, but he's always looking at it from an angle that we don't normally look at and he's creating poetry out of it. He does that with death, he does that with the sun, he does that with birds, he does that with women, he you know, on and on and on. Everything he looks at is from a strange angle that makes poetry. So, poetry is all about defamiliarization.

Painting is all about defamiliar- well, not all, but the whole movement of Cézanne was all about looking at things in from a totally different angle. Cézanne was obsessed with trees. That was his great love of life and he felt like an emotional connection to trees. And he would see them as these like living which they are, they're these living things with a spirit. And he would see the apricots in the tree and he would see and he would paint them as if the sun and the apricots were having making love, you know, having sex almost, kissing the apricots and making them full of juice.

So, he was looking at That's not how we look at an apricot tree. So, he's getting at things from these other angles and painting them. Shelley's doing it with words. That's a weird thing to do that visually, to look at things from these strange angles. And that's where painting can be so powerful because he's looking at it with eyes that are different, from a different angle, a different perspective. >> Look at Van Gogh. Van Gogh's Starry Night.

>> Yeah. >> That's exactly how the sky is. Wait, that's not how the sky is at all. But that's exactly how the sky is. >> It is. >> And it's like which is it? I had the experience with Van Gogh where I'd been to the South of France before I looked at Van Gogh. Then I'd looked at his cypress trees, and then I went back to the South of France, and I was like, "Oh my goodness, I'm seeing these completely differently now because through his work he got me out of the boxes that I didn't even realize I was trapped in."

>> Well, uh I I talk about Van Gogh in the in the book along with Cézanne cuz they're kind of right, they're like both hands, they work perfectly together cuz they're they're doing the same thing, but they're very different. Van Gogh was a little bit more emotional. Cézanne's more of almost a scientist. But Van Gogh had a weird brain issues, right, that we know about whether it came from inhaling paint fumes or whether he was epileptic. He He had uh whatever it's called, frontal lobe syndrome, whatever it is, temporal lobe epilepsy. His brain is wired differently, and he's seeing things differently, right?

Almost like when you're on drugs. >> Yeah. >> It stimulates the brain at So, I got I'm going through a thousand rabbit holes, and you have to stop me at some point. But this rabbit hole is what psychedelic drugs do, and even why you see the world like Van Gogh sees it. Okay, when you're on like LSD or I did a lot of peyote when I was in college. Um and so the brain is a filtering mechanism. It's filtering your experience.

I I have a story in the book of a woman who has a stroke where it's kind of starts slowly destroying all the functioning of the brain, and so she's seeing what the world looks like before the brain visually reconstructs reconstructs, it's called V1. Where it's just data in pixels, and and then the brain sees that, and then it creates an image for you. And it makes everything familiar so that you don't have to spend time trying to figure out what things are.

Drugs get rid of that filtering mechanism or lessen it. And Aldous Huxley describes it as like suddenly you're flooded with how things actually look like, Brian. And so somebody like Van Gogh has that weird brain chemistry. He's actually seeing what the world looks like. You're saying that that is what the world looks like. The fields of energy, the fact that nothing is ever the same. So our brains focus on things to make them stable and permanent, but nothing is stable. Everything is in constant flux and physics has confirmed that. So Van Gogh is seeing the changes and the constant impermanence of things and how they're fields of energy and they're just they're just kind of vibrating.

Everything's vibrating. It's not like he's he's insane. It's like he's actually seeing reality and we're not.

>> The example that's coming to my head is how many times has the average American looked at a $1 bill? I mean, we're talking the thousands. And if you ask people to draw a $1 bill, they basically can't do it. >> Yeah. >> And it begs the question okay, we look at the world, but we don't actually look at the world. But as writers, in order to write well, how do we defamiliarize ourselves with the world in order to see it clearly, in order to see it vividly, and then translate that onto the >> Well, let's take your idea of the $1 bill even further.

What is a $1 bill? It's just this green thing painted on paper that's manufactured. And it represents some abstract quantity that only humans agree upon. What is money? So to defamiliarize yourself, you have to ask these series of questions. Um I I I practice um a form of of Zen Buddhism. I don't like to talk about it too much cuz it's so personal to me, but it's all about defamiliarizing yourself and looking at the world as things actually are and asking questions.

It's all about asking questions. So, there's this one koan in You know the koan is is what is the mind? What is the mind? And so, I I repeat that over and over again and you're like you're focusing on your mind itself. It's not located in any particular place. Right? It's obviously projected from the brain, but it's not inside because you're seeing things outside and you but it's not outside. It's nowhere. And so, if you [clears throat] start focusing on your own mind, you feel these questions and you start realizing it's very strange. It's a very strange thing to be conscious, right? So, to defamiliarize yourself as a writer, you have to ask questions. What is this?

And you ask more and more and more questions about what things actually are. So, I had to do that with each of my chapters. Like I have a chapter on the daemon and like the second self that exists inside of a human being. This other but used to be called your soul. And I had to ask myself, what is the self? What What is it that we think of who we are, right? And to defamiliarize it because we're so close to our feeling of of having an I and identity and ego that we never question it. But if you question it, you go, that's very strange to feel a self because when I was 2 years old, I didn't really have an idea of a self.

So, when did it start? When did I start creating this? I created it. Well, how strange? How did I create it? When you ask these questions, things no longer seem quite so familiar

to you. >> You're talking here about how we have almost these two selves and the daemon is this soul-like self. And when do you want that part of you to actually do the writing and drive the creative process? >> Well, it can't drive the whole thing because you know, you're you're you have to write a book, you have a deadline, you have publishers, you have you have to eat, and you can't just be completely inspired because for a writer, the daemon is a sense of inspiration.

It's a sense of something from the outside inhabiting you, and the book and the idea possessing you and giving you excitement and making it come to life. But you can't completely live like that or or write like that. I have the story in the book of Friedrich Nietzsche. He's kind of the icon to me of the daemon. He was this kind of professor who, because of pressures from his family, took a job as a a university professor with a good income, being a good academic person writing books, meeting Wagner and becoming a a disciple of Wagner, on and on and on.

But he realizes it's not who I am. I'm this very strange creature, right? My father basically this mental illness in my fam- fought my family. I always felt like I was kind of insane, and I love music, and music is sort of kind of embodies that sort of that kind of insanity. And so he finally discovers who that what that second self is. And just books explode out of him, right? >> Yeah. >> He he would write like two books in like eight years. He suddenly wrote like his greatest books in the in these short intense periods. It just poured out of him.

>> Van Gogh was the same way, yeah. Boom, boom, boom, painting, painting, painting. Yeah, yeah. >> But they destroyed themselves. >> Destroyed themselves, and that's what I was going to ask you. So, >> you now if you're a modern writer and you got to make a living and you got a family to support and you got food you got to you can't do that really, right? >> But what is the that? Is it the daemon leading you? Is it the prolificness? Is it the insanity? What's the thing?

>> Well, you're kind of unhooking yourself from social conventions and codes. So, the daemon is who you really are when you strip all of the and when you strip all of the social stuff because we're such social animals, we only see ourselves in reflection in the eyes of other people, you know, they think I'm smart, they think I'm I whatever it is and that becomes who you are. You can't divorce who you are from how people see you and how you've, you know, internalized all those judgments, but it's not who you are.

>> Mhm. >> Right? You have a physiology that's unique. You have a spirit that's unique. You're you're made of blood and your heart pumping blood. You're not this social creature. And so, the daemon is discovering who you really are and that's what Van Gogh and Nietzsche did and it's explosive when you touch that and you realize it, right? But, it's hard to like organize your thoughts and to stay alive and to not go crazy with that. It's too intense.

Okay? But, a writer has to have some of that. You have to bring some of that into it or that's what's that deadness that I talked about. You have to just know who you are, what makes you different, what your soul is and you have to bring your soul into the book, right? Otherwise, it won't come to life. So, it's a balance. It's kind of a middle way. A lot of writers have never really looked at themselves. Don't bring any of that uniqueness out.

Don't bring any of that blood and that heart and that who they are and what makes them different in their books. They're just like any anything else they've ever written. Some and a few select few go absolutely insane. Rimbaud, the poet would be another example of someone who in 3 years wrote in in the age of 18, 19 wrote the most beautiful poems ever, but then just burnt himself out and couldn't go on any further. So, the daemon could be very dangerous, but it's also something you it's like an animal that you have to kind of domesticate this inside of you and bring and use it.

>> How do you see this working out in Flaubert? Because he has a line where he says you want to be regular and orderly in your life so that you can be violent and original in your work. >> Wow. >> But then in the book you you say you quote him and he says it's a wondrous thing to write, to no longer be oneself, but to inhabit all of the world one has created. >> Right. >> There's kind of a tension between those two things.

>> There is a tension, but you know, um not everything is black and white. There's there's kind of a nuance and a complexity to the writing process, to life itself. So, Flaubert was this creature of le mot juste, the right word, and he would sometimes spend 3 days trying to figure out the right word for this one sentence, you know? Right? He had that. But I read that quote comes from his letters. In in these letters he kind of reveals, you know, how he's not this dry person that's just kind of always looking for precisely the right word.

He gets very much caught up in his stories. So, when he wrote Madame Bovary, he was like literally in becoming Madame Bovary. He becomes the characters that he writes about. >> Mhm. >> An amazing process. What makes his book so alive. >> method acting. >> Yeah. But at the same time, he's a very careful, conscientious writer who's poring over every sentence. They're not contradictory. The two go together because if he was just inhabiting Madame Emma Bovary, it wouldn't have it wouldn't have structure. It wouldn't He wouldn't be able to make it come to life. He'd just be so inside her world. But because he's inside her world and he's a very disciplined writer who focuses on how language can create a world, he's able to bring the two together and that's sort of the dance that the greatest writers go through.

>> What do you take from Rilke? >> Rilke was meant a lot to me when I was younger. Uh, so I have a very kind of youthful relationship to Rilke. Whenever I read him, I feel like I'm 20 again, you know, because I read Letters to a Young Poet then and I read Sonnets to Orpheus then and The Duino Elegies. So every time I read him, I'm like and all the books I have at home are from my college years and they still have my little notes in them.

And so he kind of represents something of the adolescence uh of human spirit. He's actually a very deep thinker, which is what's strange because a lot of poetry you wouldn't necessarily say that. But philosophers like Heidegger thought of him as like one of the great philosophers. His poetry is is is very can be very enigmatic and so you have to think about it, you know, and but he was he was a very emotional person.

>> Mhm. >> Right? I don't know. Um, I I like this kind of confluence of opposites in the human spirit. We're all kind of contradictory, right? So he has a kind of very analytical mind. He thinks very deeply about it. And in the notebooks of I forget the how to I don't remember how to pronounce the name. Something something Briggs. He goes very deeply into our relationship to death and that I used a lot of that in the last chapter but about the death sublime. They're these thoughts, these little like snippets of thought in his poetry and in his writing and in his letters that always make me think very deeply about things and have that defamiliarizing effect.

And I don't know where it comes from because he was a very sensitive person and I have this idea in the book and I tried to express it. I didn't go as deeply into it as I wanted to but the sublime is a a is a matter of how sensitive you are to the world. >> Ooh. >> Right? So like you put a a negative into acid and then a photograph develops that kind of how how sensitive are you? How much sensitive is that your chemistry where the world kind of develops and becomes what it is.

But we live in a world that's very coarse. >> Yeah. >> Right? You go to the airport and music is bombarding your ears that you don't really necessarily want to hear, right? Things kind of smell, they don't have you know that you're you're not there's not like interesting different kinds of scents going on. Everything kind of looks sort of ugly and it's loud and it's always in your face and social media is in your face.

>> You're brash. >> You're not sensitive anymore. You're desensitized. And so the sublime is a is a a factor of how sensitive you can be to the world and how receptive you can be which is what a lot of poets are. When I think of Rilke, I think of someone who was supremely sensitive to people to animals because he was obsessed with animals to to the women he met, to everything and the world kind of vibrated inside of him. But he was also a German who was could be very precise and analytical about things. I love that kind of weird combination of qualities. It's about being sensitive to the world around you. So, maybe we need a new word like receptiveness, openness.

>> Porous? >> Porous, permeable. Yeah. So, you're perm- or porous to the world, it comes into you and it vibrates inside you like it vibrated with Van Gogh, and then you now express it in some way creatively.

>> I just saw Kanye in concert and >> an interview? >> No. He'll go He'll go out the show at the right No, I just saw Kanye and his music changed so much. And I was thinking the music by him that I really love, the stuff that he made in the 2010s. And if you look at him and what he was wearing, he would wear sometimes pink pink polo shirts. Loved his mother, had that deep deep songs like Heartless. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> All my In the night I hear them talk, the coldest story ever told. >> Not just a total >> total heartbreak. And moves me to tears, that music. And then now, when I see Kanye, it's really harsh. It's almost like militaristics. It's this grays and blacks and greens. I am a god. Even he walks into the show with like a mask. He leaves the show with a mask. There's no desire to connect with the audience. I think whatever happened, he got really hurt and basically distanced himself from the world. And I don't really like a lot of his modern music now. And so, what I see is someone, and this leads into a question, is do artists, writers have to take the risk of being hurt because maybe with him, he was porous, he was open, made something beautiful, but then the world seeped in. It There was so much pain, and now he said, "Ah." But now that he said, "Ah," and distanced the world, almost isn't able to make beautiful

enchanted music like he used to be. >> I think that happens. I think um and how do you explain that? I think a lot of people when you're younger you have that natural sensitivity to the world to the you were a child and a lot of people hold that child within them that's very receptive and porous. And then as you get older, you have political fights, you have egos, you have you get defensive >> Because you're very hurt.

>> And you get a like a shell around you. And that sensitive porous part of you is no longer there because you want to protect yourself. Right? And that happens to everybody. It happens to me. It'll happen to you as because as you get older, you can't help it. But you got to fight against it, right? Or you're going to become >> Is fight the right word there? Is that what you do? You fight against it or is it something else?

>> Well, it's just the word. I guess I meant you have to struggle against it and not give in to it and return one of the chapters about returning to your childhood. Not as nostalgia, not as oh, it was such a golden wonderful period of time. But experiencing the way the world was when you were a child. I look at someone like Albert Einstein. I mean, it's kind of a cliche Albert Einstein, you know, we all know that. But he he was someone who was very childish. And he retained that childlike spirit. He talks about how he has that same sense of wonder that he had when he was 3 years old when his father gifted him a compass and he was like, "Whoa, what is a compass?

This needle is moving from these invisible forces in the universe. What is that?" That caused him to become a physicist, a scientist pondering invisible forces. He never lost that childlikeness and that's what secretly we venerate. And even a businessman like a Steve Jobs that seems kind of hard and was kind of a manipulative person, he was actually still a child even as he as even in just you know, even in his 50s. He still retained that awe before a beautifully designed object, right? A piece of technology that actually looked beautiful. I don't think you can have too much but you you retain your adult ability to organize and make something which I've had to do to write a book, you know, it's 7 years of intense labor.

I can't just be a child going out and playing baseball in the streets. I have to be disciplined. But I have worked very hard to keep that childhood spirit alive in me because when it's not there, I feel dead. I feel like I've betrayed who I was and I have in the book has these meditations in them at the end of each chapter and I have a meditation where you encounter a child in like a dream-like setting and the child is looking at you curiously as if it's kind of disappointed in you and it's actually yourself looking at you when you were a child and being disappointed who you become and how ugly that is. Right? You've given up your dreams, you've become kind of hard realistic and you don't have a spirit anymore and so I I feel like my my childhood was very magical and I I I'm not alive if I when I get divorced from it. You're smiling.

>> I was smiling because I'm showing you a photo. I saw this hat. It says "Ever since I was little, I've wanted to maximize shareholder value." It is the greatest hat. >> Well, I mean you look at people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and that whole gang and they were all grew up on science fiction >> Yeah. >> and weirdness of outer space travel and The Hobbit and fantasy. >> Futurama. >> Yeah, and it's still part of them unfortunately because they they use it in ways that maybe we don't want.

But they still have a kind of a perverted child that's still going on inside of them. Where they're you know, it it there's yeah, Elon Musk is about becoming a trillionaire and but it's also still those childhood fantasies that he had. He's still living them out with his space exploration and all that stuff.

>> Talk to me about Scriabin and how Scriabin had both sides here. This sort of intuitive side that could almost create mystical music, but then also the analytical side that would want to break down why a piece of music was working. >> Well, music is a strange thing, particularly classical music, because it's a language. It's a very weird abstruse language that you and I and maybe you I don't know about you, but I can't really understand. My wife understands him and when she tries to explain to me, I go, "What the hell?

That's not like anything we know." That's right. These these patterns it's almost mathematics all mathematics who know. It's very complex. And you have to study that about chords, the dominant chord, the major, the minor, blah blah blah, on and on. And it's it's a discipline. It's a very rigid discipline, right? And Scriabin was one of these strange people like the Van Gogh or Nietzsche. He had um he had that childlike spirit that's very powerful inside of him.

And he said he wanted to make the universe sing. He wanted to make the sun make music and the trees make music and the whole universe start to sing and come alive. He said that as a child. But, then he goes to the conservatory in Moscow. We're talking about 1890s, early 1890s. And he has to learn all of that intense discipline, and he's not a disciplined person. He's got a very kind of wild spirit. And he disciplines himself, but and he writes music and the teachers hate his music because there's a wildness in it and they don't like the wildness in it. So, they graduate him in piano and you know, in playing the piano, but not in composing cuz his composing was too strange. And he gets out of that and he has to make a living. He's got a wife now, he's got children.

And he's got this wildness to this wild spirit to him, but he can't make a living doing that. So, he compromises. He starts writing pieces that will please the public, right? And he goes far in it and he has a little bit of success and he's teaching how to play the piano. The conservatory hires him. But he's dissatisfied. It's like that Nietzsche thing. He doesn't feel like he's himself. What is this music I'm creating? It's not me. There's something weird in me. I want to create music that has never been heard before. I want to create sounds that no one has heard before. He hears about Einstein's theory of relativity, right? 1905. What he's traveling around Europe because I want to make music that will have the same weird effect on the brain that Einstein's theory of relativity had shake up our ideas of reality. But it's music. How do you do that in music? He knows he can do it, but he can't figure out how and he's got

to shed himself of all of that stuff that he learned. And so, at one point, he's created he's writing this piano sonata number five. He knows there's there's something insane inside of him he's got to get out like a new kind of sound, but he can't do it. This he's reaching this point of maximum frustration. And I've often written in mastery and other things that that point of maximum frustration is when the cloud is about to burst. Cuz you've reached a point where something about it's going to explode. And suddenly in December of 1905, I think, it just explodes out of him in the course of 6 days. He finishes this sonata.

And the people who heard it goes, "I have never heard music like that." And I I encourage you to to to listen to this fifth piano sonata. And it's one of the weirdest things you'll ever hear. It's beautiful, but it's also very irritating and very strange and not what you want, but it is what you want. It's got a a mix of emotions to it. But he's discovered a new language in music, right? And he created this chord. It's called the mystic chord, and I can't really begin to explain it cuz I'm not I don't know music that deeply.

>> I'll put it right here in the in the audio. >> Oh, you will? >> Yeah. >> Okay, the mystic chord. >> Yeah, exactly. So, people just heard it. >> Okay. Okay. >> People just heard it. >> All right. But the idea is that um music traditional music is a mix of dissonance and consonance, right? So, you hear dissonant sounds that are kind of not right, and then the composer resolves it into something beautiful. And it creates this tension, that's drama. It's like you'll hear a lot of this in Beethoven or even Mozart or any of the classical composers. They create tension by something a little bit ugly and discordant, and then they resolve it.

They bring it to home, is is how they translate it in music. You're constantly creating this dialectic between consonance, something beautiful and pleasant to something ugly, and then creating this drama. Even drama on the stage has that same thing. >> Mhm. >> You know, you're creating tension and struggle and fighting, and it makes you upset, and then the playwright resolves it on the stage. It's a very deep something very deep and satisfying to the human soul.

But Scriabin hates that. He hates that you have to play to that. He wants something else. He wants to He wants to break through to a different kind of music. And so, what he created with the mystic chord is the chord has both dissonance and consonance in one chord. Right? And it's in one chord, so it's one sound. And people who heard it didn't know what to make of it. Is it supposed to be nice and pretty or is it supposed to be so ugly? It's in one sound.

And it's very weird and it's very it has an eeriness to it. And people listen to his music a lot and I do, it feels like something almost from outer space. >> Do you believe that at certain times maybe there's a portal between humanity and outer space or something bigger? Because you're talking about the early 20th century, the late 19th century. Gaudi is the exact same time and almost does exactly what you're saying in architecture.

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> I could have almost taken every single word >> Yeah. >> and applied it to Gaudi >> Yeah. >> of this sort of frustration with what's going on, the novelty of Art Nouveau, >> Yeah. >> this sort of Gaudi is the mystic chord etched in stone. >> Wow. >> Is there something that can happen at a certain moment in time? >> Oh, you mean uh culturally? >> Culturally. >> Well, yeah. Um if you look at it um that period things were very conventional and they'd kind of frozen into these ways of doing things. It was sort of the beginning of entertainment and the beginning of creating for the masses. Right? And so these conventions became kind of hard set in music, in architecture, in literature.

And so >> I'd say we're there right now. >> Yes, but the difference is back then it was new and people were revolting against it. Artists and poets and musicians and architects felt disgusted by it because it was so new and they didn't like it and they didn't like the way the world was going and they rebelled. People aren't rebelling right now against these convict. Some people are. I don't mean to over generalize. But that sense of this isn't how it should be. It should be something else.

And the 19th century is the turning point in culture because people felt it more deeply than they do. You know, they felt more deeply the standardization of experience. They wanted to explore and create imagery in painting or in architecture that broke out of all of this stuff, right? Created a new language. And that's sort of what makes modernity. That's what makes modernism. Was this restless spirit of always finding a new language.

Postmodernism doesn't have that same kind of anger and and rebelliousness in creating a new language. And we're trapped so deeply in conventions of popular culture that people aren't rebelling. It's all they know. Back in the 19th century, they kind of knew something else and they were longing to go back to it. >> So if I'm a creative and I'm frustrated with the state of modern creative culture, whether I live in Hollywood, it's like my Uber driver this morning says, "Ah, we make nothing but sequels now. No one's able to take a risk." You look at architecture, not all these architecture schools they create the same kinds of architects. You look at writing, we're in this kind of age of minimalism. And I'm thinking about what it means to rebel. It's probably not I'm going to go to Hot Topic and dress in the way that you think of a what a rebel should look like with a bunch of tattoos and whatever else. Like what does

rebellion actually look like? >> I had I talked a little bit about it in this book and I also talked about it in Human Nature, which is um you don't realize it, but you're a product of a cultural moment. >> Yeah. >> Right? You live them in a certain generation. Right? And it kind of puts a stamp on you. It stamps how you dress, but also how you think and how your emotions are organized. You look at young people nowadays, I'm sorry because I'm an older guy, and they're all wearing very baggy jeans. They call them puddle pushers. They're like hitting the puddles of the street, you know? And the whole thing in fashion now is to not be body conscious, to just be free and just let everything flow. And the body conscious thing that was you know, 10 years ago seems kind of ugly and and stupid because we're not like that anymore, right?

We're freed of all that. I don't I'm not criticizing at all. You are a cultural product. You are a product of the times, the zeitgeist. It has put its stamp on you. And to the degree that you can step outside your culture and be outside of that, you're almost like somebody from outer space. You're almost somebody like from the future. And Nietzsche was sort of obsessed with this idea of people out of out of time who kind of you can't really peg them at that moment, right?

And so you can't escape the times that you live in, right? I'm as much a product as as those young people with their puddle pushers, you know, in the way I dress and the values I have. But to the degree that you can step outside of it a little bit, you can have some of that rebellious spirit and you can kind of create something new and different. So Scriabin was immersed in late 19th century, early 20th century traditional music. He couldn't escape that. He couldn't escape the values of his time, but he struggled to get out of it.

And in that struggle to get out of it, he created something new and and he created what we what at the time was called music of the future. We have now a modern music that's really interesting and I love a lot of it. There's some really interesting things going on in modern music. But in some way Scriabin was ahead of all of them still to this day. >> What's the modern music that's inspiring you right now? >> I say modern, but these are composers who are probably now in their 80s. But, they're um there's like Tristan Murail, there's Gérard Grisey, they're these French composers, and there's some there's some Americans.

Uh I had somebody I went to I grew up with named David Lang who creates kind of music like this. I'm recording the audio version of my new book, the Spline book, and the sound engineer is really into like strange modern music, and he turned me on to this guy named Harry Partch. >> Hm. >> Who who was like this homeless guy who created new kinds of instruments and new kinds of sounds. And I listened to it and it it was very weird, and I liked it, but it didn't have the impact of Scriabin because Scriabin's music is very emotional.

And if you know the 19th century, you know people romantic the romantic movement was very emotional. Even Wagner's very emotional. >> Of course. >> Right? So, he has that allied with this kind idea of being something new and different. A lot of the modern music has the idea of being new and different, but doesn't have that emotional impact, that desire to overwhelm the ear with something powerful and transcendent. That's the only thing kind of missing.

>> Can you tell me about automatic writing? Can There's a turn of phrase that I like where you say that automatic writing can lead to the surreal associations of a dream. >> Well, automatic writing was something that um was mostly invented by the surrealists. Now, it might have existed before in some other form, but they basically created the concept and and used it. Um I'm talking about the 1920s, people like André Breton and other poets, Philippe Soupault, and a whole series of writers.

And what you would do is because at that time Freud was the hottest thing around, right? And the unconscious. Now, it's hard for us to imagine, but the unconscious was a new concept. And people were exploring it. Well, what is that? And so, automatic writing is you you have a piece of paper. You can't really do it on the computer, I'm afraid. You could, but it's You got your pen and your paper and you're writing the first things that come to your mind, right?

Right? And there's a degree of organization because you're stretching in language. You're going uh I'm sitting with David Perell and my mind is focusing back on some clouds that I'm seeing in the sky and they're green and the cows are moving through there and they're grazing on the on the clouds. All right, there's a little bit of a structure there cuz it's language and it's grammar. But I'm letting it all loose. I'm letting it flow. Like how the brain operates with these weird associations, just the stream of consciousness. You're letting it out on paper without any filters, without any attempt to make it literature or art or coherent.

And they would think that it's your unconscious speaking. Right? It's as if your unconscious is writing for you. You're seeing it on a page. And it must have been very exciting in the beginning to have those kinds of experiences, right? >> Mhm. >> Um and I've practiced it a few times and it does reveal some interesting things if afterwards you analyze it and you see patterns in there of how your brain like my mind will start circle around the same kinds of associations and I can see patterns of thinking that are that are not rational and that are not conscious, but there's something going on and I'm seeing it on the paper, right?

And so, in the book I'm talking as an exercise for you as the reader to do to explore and contact the daemon inside of you, that second self, which is your soul, which is your unconscious. In the conscious mind, we have all of these opposites, black and white, masculine and feminine, uh freedom and and slavery, etc. And our minds are focused on these opposites, how the brain works. The unconscious doesn't have these opposites. Everything is kind of nebulous and floating in this one world.

It's life itself. And when you write like that, you kind of touch upon it, you feel it a little bit. And so, it's something who you are is coming out in the automatic writing. You can touch that daemon, that second self inside of you through this exercise. And it can be very illuminating. That's that's how I

use it in the >> It reminded me of a friend who's a professor Juilliard. And he says that there's two kinds of musicians. And the first archetype is the singer. And the singer, they really sing from their heart, but they're not as good technically. >> Yeah. >> And then there's the organist, where they tend to be really good technically, but they don't have as high of a ceiling because they don't know how to play from the heart in the same way.

And I think that's been a through line through this conversation is that a great artist, they know how to play from the heart, and they also understand that being technically strong really has its benefits. >> Yeah, I mean, um if you're just loose, and you're not disciplined, and you haven't learned the codes of your of of what it means to how to write or music and all the conventions in there, it'll just come out as It won't connect to anything.

Because we are creatures that create through conventions, through codes, through through through a structure, right? So, plays and stories have a structure that go back thousands of years that are very pleasant to us, right? That kind of connect to us and that make us feel something. And you have to learn those conventions and you have to master them. So, you you can't just write them. You have to learn them and you have to practice them and you have to get good at them. But then you get so good at them that the writing loses its spirit and its soul and you have to go back and you kind of infuse that and that in there, that spirit.

But one without the other is kind of meaningless. And I don't know. I think nowadays we have a lot of people who are very technically gifted at things, but don't have that that singing as much as as they used to. And that's what's kind of missing, I find. In a lot of books, in a way. Um so, I do a lot of research. My books, this book was heavily researched. Every paragraph is represents like three books that I had to read.

Right? And old books I can feel like the writer kind of I can feel their spirit. >> It's how I feel when I read John Ruskin. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's just like shock. I I almost want to fall back in my chair. >> Yeah, yeah. >> One paragraph is all it takes. >> I know. I know. I know what you mean. I know exactly what you mean. Flaubert is a good example. He's technically brilliant cuz he's he trained himself so deeply in writing.

But he's he's still so kind of He has a very emotional, almost a feminine spirit. And he he was somebody who had an was very kind of strangely androgynous. That would be not androgynous, but he had a very deep mix of the feminine and the masculine. He admits this. I mean, Wagner was very much like that. And that kind of spirit where you're you you you kind of master your your craft, but you still have that kind of openness and receptiveness and playfulness is to me what creates great art. And the problem nowadays for writers is that you're under pressure to make a living.

So, things have gotten much more expensive. I mean, I can really bring it down to that level of banality. That back in the day, you could be an artist and you didn't have life wasn't so expensive, right? And you could afford to write something a little bit unconventional and you'd still make a little bit of money, but you could still afford your loft in New York or your little apartment in Vienna or wherever. Now, things are so expensive and there's so much pressure to make money. And if you're a writer, how are you going to make money? Well, you you become a professor and that's pretty pretty soul-sucking and doesn't give you a lot of time to write and you have to write things that kind of fit the ethos of the call the university crowd.

Or you know, you can write books. Just try and live off making a living writing books. Do you know how hard that is? It's easy for me. I I'm so lucky, but for most writers you get $20,000 advance. I I have to write the book in a year, otherwise I can't live. It's not going to make me last very long. And how often do you see royalties? So, you have to write the book quickly and you have to make a living. And that's kind of what I think is making writing kind of suffering because it's no longer something that you can just take your time with.

>> I can't think of a time that I've spoken to a writer who said that their publisher made their work more distinctive. >> Yeah. >> Every person has said to me, "My publisher homogenized my work." Yeah, yeah. Maybe they made it better, but they made it better in a certain direction. >> other may made it better, too. >> Which was to have more right angles, to shave off the coarse edges. And I've just seen with so many writers there's just not a lot of there's a lot of risk aversion in the corporate >> Oh my god. creative world.

>> I mean, look, I am so blessed because quite frankly, I've made so much money for my publisher that they leave me alone. So, they let me write for 7 years without without any pressure. My editor occasionally gave comments, but I would push back and she would end up agreeing with me. So, I'm unique so I I recognize that I'm in a privileged position and I understand how my fellow writers don't have these same privileges. And so, I have a friend named Brent Underwood who bought a ghost town in California and he completely recreates a very famous YouTube channel.

Um and he completely recreated this ghost town single-handedly. It's an amazing story what he did. He's an amazing person and he wrote a book. And I kind of helped him a little bit with the book called Ghost Town Living. I highly recommend this book. It's it's great. But, it was one of those things where the publisher was like, "Can you make it more practical? Can you add more self-help lessons in it instead of like this beautiful story?" I I told him to read this book called Desert Solitaire by the writer Edward Abbey.

It's beautiful beautiful book and it's very sublime. It's about his experience when he was like a ranger in in the deserts in I think it's New Mexico or somewhere like that. It's very poetic. It's very wild. It's very weird. People can't don't have the luxury of writing like that something like that anymore and I wanted him to be like that and the publisher was pushing back on him. You know, just kind of writing whatever you want. But, I mean, some people can get away with it, but you have to be immensely successful and have made a lot of money for your publisher in order them to give you that kind of leeway.

But, if you're a young person writing your first book, you're not going to get that kind of leeway and it's going to set in your mind that you have to be conventional in order to get published.

>> So then, should more people be working full-time while writing and not try to make a living as a writer at the beginning? >> I I would hate that because it I mean, that was the story of my life and why I suffered so deeply. I I had to have I wanted to be a writer. I tried journalism and I kind of hated it, although it gave me good discipline. I tried writing novels and I couldn't make a living. You know, I moments I was starving. I mean, my parents would help me out when I needed it, when I was at the worst.

But, I couldn't make a living. I couldn't bridge the two things, creating something that I loved and and making a living. And so, when you're working for a company, like I worked in Hollywood or all of the 80 different jobs that I've had in life, it's hard to write a book because you come home and your thoughts are submerged with all those people and all the pettiness and all the things that are in your brain. You're also tired.

You don't feel excited about life as much. It's hard to come home and carve the time out for yourself if you have a full-time job, a part-time job, maybe, but still it's very, very difficult. If I were to advise writers, and I advise a lot of writers who are starting out, I try and make I try and get them to be more reckless. >> More reckless? >> Yes. >> Huh. >> Especially if you're young. You know, you can live off packs of ramen in a cheap, dingy apartment like I lived in in East Village in New York when I first lived in New York. You can live like that when you're in your 20s, right? I can't live like that now, but you could. You can live cheaply and just write something that that appeals to you that is that is your spirit. Okay, you got to you know, you you you compromise a little bit, right?

You you know something that will sell, but you also are like not listening to a publisher, you're just writing what you want, and you're being excited about it. And don't worry about being so conventional. Don't worry about what the publisher is going to say. And if they reject it, so be it. But, you've Now, you've written one book. Now, you write another book. Eventually, you will find a niche. If you write a really good, interesting book that no one has seen before and that's covering something new and different, it will find its audience. It will find its audience. Don't be so cautious and fearful.

And, you know, especially when you're young, have a sense of adventure, a sense of anger. >> Mhm. >> My first book, The 48 Laws of Power, came out of deep wells of anger. >> Huh. >> I had about Hollywood and about the world. And fortunately, I had a man who uh was my producer of a book, a book packager. And he supported me. And if I didn't have that, I don't think I would have I wouldn't be here talking to you right now. A lot of people don't have that luxury. But, bring your anger into play. Bring what's unconventional about you into play.

Don't try and be like other people because the people who stand out are are are something that's unique. They have something unique to say and contribute. What is it you're trying to say? What is it that's valuable and that you want to contribute to the world? Cuz so many books are unnecessary. I read them and I go, "Why do they exist?" It's just a waste of of paper, of trees, you know? Why does this book have to be written? I often ask young writers that.

What is it that is compelling you? What's so important about this book that you need to write? >> I was telling you before we recorded, I'm working on a TV show, and I feel angry about the state of what we build and >> And that's what's going to make it a great show. >> It pisses me off that the world looks like it does. But, I'll tell you right now, being in it and just getting rejection after rejection after rejection. All of the sudden you become disheartened and you say, "Oh my goodness, you know, maybe I'm going crazy. Maybe there isn't an audience here. Maybe I need to add some right angles to what I'm doing to make it fit inside the corporate puzzle piece that's needed. And >> Yeah. Well, >> I'm in it right now. I'm like, I have something to say, and but then you start doubting yourself.

>> Well, the beauty of the world now, if there is any beauty to be found, is that you can create something and and put it out there with bypassing some of this. Although, you know, you're the money, the budget, the considerations are going to be kind of more perilous. But, that's what's happening. The standardization is being imposed by these conglomerates in in film, in entertainment, in publishing. They own everything, these Right now, there's like three or four publishing companies. And now with the mergers with Paramount and Time Warner and all these things, it's becoming so standardized that in order to get something through the gatekeepers, you have to kind of become a sausage in the sausage factory.

>> Okay. >> So, in your case, I don't know. I I I don't know. I don't have a lot of experience in film, but you have to bring out that anger. You have to be different. You have to have that edge. And and I think if you do it right, you can kind of trick the corporate people. You can kind of make it entertaining. You can kind of have the visuals that will excite the 20-something group. And the message is snuck in there.

I'm a believe big believer in sneaking in messages, you know, and and and so you can have the veneer of the corporate kind of way they like to cut things in certain segments and you know, points that they want you to reach, the right angles you talk about, but you're tricking them with you're sneaking in the fact that our world is ugly. You know, there's the negative and there's the positive. So, the negative is the world is ugly, the world is ugly, how awful. The positive is what was once so beautiful.

Let's look at what was once so beautiful. So, you become aware of the contrast without the preaching, right? So, in the book and I have a chapter on history and what's sublime about history, I try and take you imagine what it was like to take a walk through ancient Babylonia, right? I did a lot of research on this. And I take you on the the the pathway that leads you to the Ishtar Gate. It's this beautiful carved, I don't know, limestone pathway. I don't remember exactly what the tiles were lined with these enormous statues of lions up there looking down and they're growling, etc. You approach it and there's the Ishtar Gate, one of the most seven one of the most beautiful things in the world. The tiles, the sunlight reflecting up, enormous 50-ft high, and the walls of ancient Babylonia, these thick walls that they have like entertainment on and chariot races on.

You see a chariot race going on there. You enter Ishtar Gate. Jesus Christ, what is this? It is so beautiful. Right near there is the ziggurat, the famous ziggurats, right? This kind of step to have stairway to heaven with priests and this kind of weird chapel on the top and these people in these robe figures going up and down. The city everything nowadays in our city is so disparate. Every building is looks different. It's all like cacophony of styles. And some of it's very ugly.

All of these buildings are built up the same materials, right? And so there's a If you see like San Francisco or some cities like Paris that had the uniformity, it's not boring, it's beautiful. Beautiful. Absolutely stunning. All these buildings are made of the same stone. They have the the exteriors, the facades are are carved in a certain way to reflect the sunlight. So each building is creating like a pattern of sunlight that's amazing. And you go, "My god, the engineering back then, the stone bridge wasn't was was amazing how they built this." You see in the river all these strange crafts going up and down, these circular boats. You see the Hanging Gardens of Babylonia.

One of the seven wonders of the world. This giant structure with these gardens hanging down. And then also the weird people at night because once the sun set, the streets are filled with prostitutes, male and female, and everybody's they're having wild sex. It's a very erotic place. The point is, if you went through that city, it would strike you how god damn ugly it is. How we've got mini malls and we've got trash everywhere and we've got derelict parking lots and and you have like a Cape Cod here in LA, a Cape Cod house next to a Spanish style house next to God knows what other Craftsman house.

It's this mishmash. There's no sense of aesthetics going on, no sense of organization or structure. Taking you through ancient Babylonia, instead of me preaching at you how ugly the world is, uh my idea is, Jesus Christ, why is our world not like that? What happened? You know? I just want to say one thing about my theory about architecture. >> Yeah. >> So in Mastery I interviewed um Santiago Calatrava. So I talked with him a lot about why the world is so ugly.

>> Oh, Calatrava did the Oculus, huh? >> Yeah. Which some people hate. >> I like it. The office market stuff is otherworldly. >> It is. >> It almost feels like you could have put it in the movie Arrival or something. >> Yeah, and he's a he's a brilliant, wonderful man. When you had to um design a building, it was this kind of process of working on paper and sketching things out, and it was very laborious. Right? But it was like art in a way.

What you were you were seeing it created through your own hand. Very disciplined and methodical and mathematical, but also had an artistic touch to it as you were sketching out what the building would look like, and then figuring out the dimensions and working out that way. And then at some point it got computerized. And it's all a computer program. AutoCAD? Yeah. And you program it, and out comes your building. And very strange things happen, very irrational, not human, not made by a hand, made by a computer that thinks in formulas and bits and, you know, ones and twos. And sometimes you come upon a bit like you go to a hotel and you in the bathroom and the faucet is in a location that doesn't make any sense. And the sink isn't functional. It's because it was drawn on these AutoCADs. They're not even aware of it, and the whole building is designed that way. It's standard.

It's a formula. And so the human hand is not designing these things. Yes, they're being programmed by humans, but some a step is missing that can't make something a little bit unique and adds to a personalized touch to it. And I think that's because architects, it's like how people are now who don't know how to write because they don't depend on AI, and they become lazy, and the whole art of writing will disintegrate cuz people don't know can't write anymore.

Well, the whole art of architecture is disintegrating cuz people don't know how to design and sketch anymore. And what made Kahlil Traven this other of pianos so interesting is they don't do things by computer. They sketch out. Still, they're incredibly famous, incredibly wealthy. They still sketch out by hand. It's not the whole answer, but it's part of the reason of the brutalization of the ugliness of so much of the architecture that comes out.

>> Do you feel like you're part of the last generation of human writers? >> On the one hand, it's possible, but on the other hand, I don't want to be so grandiose because I feel I sense in this new generation, I would assume or whatever you want to call them. >> [laughter] >> I I I sense some anger and some rebellious >> There's major rebellion. >> And there's some dislike of what the world is like, what the world they've been thrown into. And this kind of helplessness that they feel about a world that's programmed that's not of their making. That the older generation, my generation, is kind of monopolizing all the wealth.

And that anger can be the source of a rebirth of the human spirit as it was kind of in the '60s, which was a rebellion against all the standardization of the Eisenhower years in the '50s. And so I like I was yesterday I went up into that ghost town I was mentioning and filmmaker who was doing the whole film, he's like 23. And you know, he's got that spirit. He's like, "Damn it, I I just want I'm so upset about how things are and I want to express things that kind of get that out."

I encounter that a lot in in the in that generation. And that gives me some degree of hope. I didn't suspect it in millennials as much, but I'm feeling it in this new generation. It gives me little sparkles of hope that that our spirit could be revived and writers writers will will emerge who are sick of how everything is standardized, how publishers operate. You know, you now you can self-publish a book. And maybe you can even, you know, do something interesting when you don't have a publisher breathing down your neck. I might even self-publish books in the future just to be able to control everything cuz publishing is now a a business that's getting very ugly.

I sense that spirit in young people who are being fed spoon-fed all this crap and they're made to absorb it all and if they don't succumb to AI, and they don't succumb to the laziness that their brains want to fall into, something beautiful could emerge. I could There could be some hope. And I want to believe in that cuz I don't want to feel like it's hopeless. >> Is implied in this your admonition to writers is just do not use AI at all?

>> Yeah. I would go that far, but I would be a hypocrite to say that sometimes I do a Google search and it's filtered through AI, whatever their AI is called, and it's pretty damn incredible. You know, like some abstruse piece of I mean, even like you put in Scriabin and some weird thing that you know, it take hours to find, and it would have something kind of interesting. So, it's a tool like a pen that you use to maybe enrich your writing, but it doesn't become your writing. It doesn't dominate you. You don't let it write for you. You don't let it compose paragraphs for you. You still do your own research, but occasionally maybe it can answer a question for you. Not an answer a question about how to write, but a question about some bit of research or about some something you don't understand about the world. Or like, you know, I want to see this painter that you were mentioning or something like

that. But it's a tool and you doesn't let you dominate you. Yeah, if I were to tell someone young a young writer, don't get don't even go near it. Develop your own style. And the future will belong to people who aren't AI, who are still human and unique and create something that appeals to us because we remain emotional animals that want to be moved by something and AI can't do that. AI writing is interesting but it's soulless. It's totally soulless. It seems kind of intriguing.

It kind of mimics our human world but it's dead. It feels dead in the end. And I don't know it'll get very good in 20 years at kind of mimicking life but it'll never be It doesn't have our experience. It doesn't have the riches. It doesn't have all the disappointments, the years of depression, the frustration churning through all of the negative emotions and creating something. It has none of that. It just has large language models. It's just digested information and data. It's not alive. Don't give in Don't be seduced by that and keep bringing in that that hardness that's that hardness of writing, the resistance that the material gives you and work on it and don't be seduced by this monster.

>> I want to talk about first Dostoevsky and how he understood the paradoxes of human nature. >> Dostoevsky is probably my perhaps my favorite novelist. I I almost want to cry. I think so I connect so deeply to Dostoevsky. Um he's he's a writer that has what we're talking about. And I just reread one of my favorite novels of his cuz I'm actually flirting with the idea of writing some fiction. Hmm. Um I was reading The Demons also called The Possessed or The Devils. There's different translations.

It's It's so weird and it's so beautiful and it's so human and yet it's it's uh I don't know. He brings to life these characters. And a lot of uh things written nowadays the characters just seem kind of flat. He's got these characters in that book that you'll never forget. He has in this one book called this guy named Kirillov. Have you read this this book? It's all about the nihilists in Russia who were kind of the starting point for later the Russian Revolution.

And a period where all nihilism was in its ascendant. And I kind of compare it to how it what's going on in America right now. That's what's the source of what I want to try to write. But um Kirillov is one of these nihilists who has decided that when he reaches a certain age, a certain point, he's going to kill himself. And it's like a rational decision. He's just decided, I'm going to kill myself at this point, and he creates this whole philosophy around it. That because we don't decide when we die, we're these weak, helpless creatures, but I'm going to be like a god because I was given life, but I decide exactly when I'm going to kill myself.

Not because I'm depressed, not because somebody left me, but because I rationally decided this was the moment to just to die 15 years in advance, right? And he this character comes to life. You'll never forget him. I've never forgotten Kirillov, and I can't even picture him. Literally, he has this one scene that's very violent with Kirillov. You'll never forget it. And how many pieces of fiction do you read like that?

I don't know, there are some. But Dostoevsky brings the world to life. He brings reality as it is. He loves the marginalized in culture. He loves the the prostitutes, the everyone's forgotten about. He loves criminals. He literally loves them in a like way. >> I was about to say very Christ-like. >> He is a true Christian in the spirit of the Christ of Christianity, and he wanted He thought that's what made Russia such a unique country was that it was more Christian than any other part of of of of Europe or the Western world.

And he feels this deep love of everybody marginalized. And he brings them to life. And even the evil characters, the the the villains, he brings to life with a sort of love, right? And so that universe of not judging or bringing the world people into life actually as they are is an act of grace of It's a spiritual thing. I'm not Christian, but I can get caught up in Christianity just by reading Dostoevsky. He's the most spiritual I don't know. As I said, I can almost not explain it because I read Brothers Karamazov when I was 16. I probably didn't understand a word of it, but I was so entranced by this guy.

You get attracted to certain people when you're young and and and there's a reason for it. I don't know. I'm almost too emotional to explain my love of Dostoevsky.

>> I think it was right around that same time when you were talking about I think we're on a bus and there was a group of I think young black guys who came and you're like, "Wow, they're so alive." What have you taken from black writers, from black musicians? >> Well, I always felt I remember um I was in junior high school here in Los Angeles. Paul Revere Junior High School. And it's it's in West Los Angeles, kind of Brentwood now, very fancy neighborhood.

There were no black people in the school and suddenly bussing. And suddenly one year our school is filled with black students bussed from inner city Los Angeles. And I know it could sound patronizing and I don't mean it to. I was so excited. I was so happy. I loved the culture that they brought. I loved the aliveness. I loved There was even a kind of an edge. And I remember I had this this I had a friend and he was kind of making fun of me about how skinny I was, but I loved I loved like how he was able to do that.

Cuz why do people always so tense? They're so worried. They're so like mouths and all. They don't smile. They don't laugh. They're so worried. This guy was like he was like around. He was making fun of me, you know, saying, "Why are you so skinny, you know?" And I loved it. I loved their culture. I loved how alive it was. I loved how open it was. And then I started getting into like John Coltrane and jazz and Sly and the Family Stone.

I'm just opening myself up to this world that is America. Our culture in a time now where people are trying to define what it is to be American. Well, that We're a melting pot. Black culture is as much a part of who we are as American. Uh it's part of who I am because it had such a big impact on me. And then I started reading writers. I would read Richard Wright. I didn't read the Invisible Man until um maybe 10 years ago, but I it's one of the most beautiful books I've read.

Reading James Baldwin, on X's biography of Malcolm X. I loved Malcolm X. I I I deeply identified with more than at the time than with Martin Luther King. I don't know why. I just loved the spirit of rebellion, of anger, of realness, and the spirituality cuz cuz black culture is very spiritual in a way that we don't really recognize. Like the music of John Coltrane is like the music of Scriabin. He studied classical music on a very So did Miles Davis at a very deep level, right? They were masters of that mathematical component of music, but they created things that were so wild and weird.

You know, later John Coltrane is like some of the strangest things you'll ever hear, but it's deeply, deeply spiritual. Have you seen um Archibald Motley paintings? >> No. >> I don't even know who that is. >> The best. The best. He painted black culture in the '20s and '30s. >> Oh. >> And has this amazing painting, amazing painting. One of my favorite paintings in the world. Archibald Motley. >> Yeah. And it takes place in New Orleans, I think. And it's this church. And what he got really really right was he had sort of the jazz culture of black America at that time.

And so he's got this one painting that takes place in a church. And there's only two words in the painting. It says, "Jesus saves." And all the people are there kind of listening to gospel music, kind of swaying and stuff. You can almost look at that painting and hear the music. >> When I I did that book with 50th cent >> Yeah. >> 50th lot. And like a year later, I was invited to come give a talk at the AME black church in Baltimore, like the biggest, most important black church in Baltimore. I believe that's what it too was. By this particular reverend who was a fan of the books. And it was a whole experience. It was like a real, you know, gospel music and all of these things going on. So alive. And then I got up and talked about things from the book. And everyone was so engaged. And I just, you know, you get a white audience and people are just they're all sort of complaining and whiny. And they're kind of half

listening. They sort of smile. But this was on another level. They were so alive and engaged. >> Yeah. >> It was one of the transcendent experience of my life because I gave a talk, but there's also this music going on and people kind of it just was completely >> I love what you said about John Coltrane. It really maps onto a lot of themes of this conversation. How he was kind of the epitome of an improv musician >> Yeah.

>> but was obsessed with practice. >> Well, he he he's an example of exactly that's why I compared him to Scriabin. Um he for 10 years he was learning everything about music, but he was also a heroin addict. And he felt like it was going to destroy him. And it was kind of leading him down the wrong alley. And so he when he quit heroin is when he became a real musician, right? But he was in prof- supremely disciplined. Music is like chess in that chess is all about patterns of movement.

And a great chess player has memorized so many patterns that he can think in a head and create new patterns. That that's what a Bobby Fischer was a genius at. John Coltrane absorbed all these patterns of music, traditional music going back to medieval music and also black music, classical music, everything, all these patterns. Then he reaches a point, probably like '63, '64 with A Love Supreme and he's able to take off and go in and create new music that no one has ever heard before, wildness.

People Some people hated it. But, it just it was like the late '60s and and and hippies and flower people suddenly discovered John Coltrane cuz he was of that spirit of rebellion, you know? He just let it all loose. Yet, he still had this discipline. Um yeah, I can't speak highly enough of what John Coltrane's music meant to me when I was a kid. Particularly, A Love Supreme was my first album.

>> I want to end with this quote from Sublime. It's from Victor Hugo. >> Yeah. >> The banal world of our habits, the dulled sense of life, the smug calmness of our conscience, our good taste and common sense, our little happy egotism, all this is disturbed and overwhelmed by the monstrosities of the sublime. >> Yeah, yeah. >> That is a crazy crazy quote. >> I know. I love that quote because the sublime, you know, the word seems so kind of almost sentimental, almost sickly. Oh, it's I had I had a sublime meal.

Oh, that you know, that movie was sublime or that you know, we we banalized the word. It also has this kind of sweetness. >> Sounds dainty. >> Dainty, thank you. Fussy, old-fashioned. Quaint. And it's not. It's something kind of It's a mix of terror and exhilaration, of awe and fear. And it creates this kind of trembling in you that makes you really upset, but also opens your eyes. So, that's if you don't have the terror, if you don't have the monstrosity, the grotesqueness, and Scriabin's music has that.

It's kind of monstrous. But in its monstrosity, it's so beautiful and different and human. And so, um that's kind of what I wanted to get at, the Hugo quote that the sublime isn't this pretty little fussy little thing. It's got the our our our our guts in it, our our soul, our our our blood. And it's it's terrifying in a way. So, like when you look up at the night sky and you see how beautiful it is but if you really thought about it, you think about God damn, I am so small. I'm so insignificant.

My life doesn't matter at all compared to a billion years from now, no one will ever know who I am. The vastness. >> The vastness of it. >> When you were a child, it terrified you, but it can still terrify you. And that If you don't have the terror when you look up at the night sky, you're not going to have the sublime feeling of of eternity, of of the infinite nature of space. Well, I think I also have in there, I don't know if you got the quote from Carl Jung that's very similar.

>> Hmm, do you want me to read that, too? >> Yeah. >> Sublime, pregnant with meaning, yet chilling the blood with its strangeness. It arises from timeless depths, glamorous, demonic, and grotesque. It bursts asunder our human standards of value and aesthetic form, a terrifying tangle of eternal chaos. On the other hand, it could be a revelation whose heights and depths are beyond our fathoming or a vision of beauty which we can never put into words.

What do you make of that? Well, as I said, you know what the strange thing about my the book that I just wrote is I spent 7 years trying to write a book about things that you can't express in words. Right? [laughter] Now, imagine what kind of mission that is, you know? So, he's sort of expressing how in the end all of these intensities, all of this the grotesque, the beauty, the monstrosity, the the dark side of human nature, the demonic, the shadow, and all of that, when you boil it all down, it comes to moments that you can't put into words.

And that's what makes it the sublime, you know? It's like pushing you to the limit of what our language creates because as I said, we live in a world of formulas, of symbols. And you don't realize it. You don't realize you're not seeing the world as it is. You're only seeing symbols and abstractions and language. And yet when you get outside and you taste that world out beyond language, it's kind of terrifying. It's a bit grotesque and monstrous. The boys it's strange and that's what religion is all about. That's trying to bring you to that to that point. So, that's what I get out of that you can quote.

>> Robert, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, David. >> was wonderful. >> Okay. >> Somehow even better than the first one. >> Oh, really? >> I think so. That was my second time having Robert Greene on the show. And if you liked it, well, go check out the first episode we recorded together.