And I was curious, what is false sublime, maybe in America right now? And what do you think some of the most dangerous false sublimes are that we tell ourselves?

Well, to understand the false sublime, you have to understand a little bit about the true sublime.

So the true sublime is going back to deep in our history.

We are this creature that became aware of our mortality, of our death.

Now, other animals have an instinct for death, but they don't think about it, which makes them die with great ease.

Have you ever had a pet? They don't die like a human dies.

They just relax into it.

Like, should you go out and try to apply pressure upon yourself as a human?

have for young men that are feeling a little lost in the modern world?

Well, you have to be comfortable with who you are and with your masculinity.

So the word masculine has now got like this negative connotation around it, which is terrible because you're a young man.

It's not every young man.

Some men don't feel this way.

But a lot of young men, I remember myself, you've got this testosterone that's roaring through you.

You're competitive.

Yeah.

Never let others define it for

you.

When I wrote The 48 Laws of Power, I tried to I have somebody through my whole life loves playing games.

I don't mean that in the abstract sense.

I mean literally, like chess, backgammon, sports, poker, whatever.

And I like the cleanness of a game.

It's like you do this and you can win, et cetera.

light-hearted.

Well,

I initially got interested in the subject of the sublime, I think around the year 2000.

I read a book, kind of an academic book about the literature of the sublime.

But the idea seems so weird and interesting to me because I'm always looking for ideas that are not in the ordinary, that you don't normally come across, things that are kind of exotic or strange.

So I wanted to write a book on the subject because it intrigued me.

It's also a challenge because the sublime is essentially experiences that go beyond words that are hard to verbalize.

So how you write a book about something you can't verbalize.

So, What were the Eleusinian mysteries? And walk us through a bit of that real human need we have.

What is your suggestion for people who want to think about what that seed event might have been if they don't know? Like how do we know what that thing was for us if we're like 12 years or older?

I was always clear for myself about what that was because I was obsessed from a very early age with words.

I just thought words themselves are very strange and very weird that we have these words that mean things.

And I remember, I think it was in the third grade, my teacher put up the word carpenter and she said, now try and see how many words you can form out of those letters.

And for some reason, that just excited me so much that with these little individual letters, you could create all these different words, right? I don't know why, I can't explain it.

There's no logic behind it.

But it seemed like letters and words were magical and that always attracted me.

Is there any way to access the sublime through human-human interaction? Yes,

What do you do to start uncovering it and not just keep avoiding it?

The key is, and so again, I go into this in mastery, but also in the new book, is you want to have to have it.

You have to desire something in order to get what you desire, right? You have to know that this is something missing in my life.

So most of the time, you're not aware of that.

You think you're just sort of floating by.

You're doing what other people are doing.

You're going to your job.

So I'm just thinking, how do you expose yourself to that without being reckless or careless?

What is it about childhood that allows for awe and wonder that we as adults tend to forget how to tap into?

Well, it's hard because we can't remember our first months and first years of life, right? And it's kind of a strange thought.

We can remember everything else.

Probably the reason is we didn't have language then, so we'd have nothing to stick our memories onto.

But I did a lot of research, and if you think, and if you've had children, you look at the baby when it's first born, and it's just this bundle of nerves and impulse.

It's just crying all the time.

It's got all these things you've got to attend to.

Yeah,

If you could expand on that a bit.

The problem with that is everybody's got a different weird path in life and circumstances.

It's hard to give a general...

although I try to do it in my books, but it's more on the level of your attitude than on exactly a strategy.

So take, for instance, just looking at 50 himself, um, He was 15, 16 years old, and he decides he's got to get out of dealing drugs.

Maybe you're working at McDonald's, and you've got to get out of flipping burgers.

And so he said, all right, what do I want to become? I want to become a rapper.

It's like, no, learn all the necessary skills, and then once you get to the next level, learn the new skills that are made available to you, so on

You know, like, what triggers them? It goes, like, that layer deeper of, like, what is also running them? Not just the surface, but, like, really piercing through and understanding who they are, even linking it back to their childhood, so on and so forth.

So I'm trying to say that people have a character and what I mean by that is it's their core, it's who they are, it's something very deep.

It comes from their DNA, there's a genetic component.

It comes from their early childhood and the kind of attachment they had to their parents.

it comes from their early experiences with friends and teachers and at school and it makes them who they are and their character tends to be revealed in certain things that you must pay attention to and the reason it's so important is You want to be able to judge people by their character.

You want to know what runs them from deep, deep within because if you don't, if you make a mistake, you will hire them as a business partner or you'll get involved in a relationship and it will be a disaster because you didn't see that actually they have very negative patterns and they only come out later.

So I want you to be able to look at the people you're dealing with and literally see their character.

So just reflecting on that just brings a lot more authentic data and gets you much more aligned with what is authentic to you in my experience.

drama

or being difficult.

Yeah.

So your job is to save them time.

And if you save them time, they're going to become dependent on you.

Also, the person that you're working for tends to lack certain skills.

They lack time, which I certainly did, but they also lack skills.

That wasn't a specific lesson that you told me, but you're in the room and you're able to observe them and you see how the person you want to be like is doing what they do.

Never let others define it for

you.

When I wrote The 48 Laws of Power, I tried to I have somebody through my whole life loves playing games.

I don't mean that in the abstract sense.

I mean literally, like chess, backgammon, sports, poker, whatever.

And I like the cleanness of a game.

It's like you do this and you can win, et cetera.

Yeah.

have for young men that are feeling a little lost in the modern world?

Well, you have to be comfortable with who you are and with your masculinity.

So the word masculine has now got like this negative connotation around it, which is terrible because you're a young man.

It's not every young man.

Some men don't feel this way.

But a lot of young men, I remember myself, you've got this testosterone that's roaring through you.

You're competitive.

Yeah.

Never let others define it for

you.

When I wrote The 48 Laws of Power, I tried to I have somebody through my whole life loves playing games.

I don't mean that in the abstract sense.

I mean literally, like chess, backgammon, sports, poker, whatever.

And I like the cleanness of a game.

It's like you do this and you can win, et cetera.

light-hearted.

What are three things you'd recommend to get going?

Well, um, it's something I describe in my book, Mastery, and it really depends, first of all, on how old you are when you get stuck.

So if you're 21 and stuck, it's a little different than when you're 51 and stuck, right? It's a different set of problems.

But I'll go on the assumption that we're talking about the younger people who are stuck.

And essentially, it's not something that's magical.

It's not like I can give you a, a formula that'll change you.

You have to be willing to put time into a process, okay? And the process, just like working out, is the following.

Let's talk, let's talk about your latest book so that we could tease folks to, to get excited about it.

Hmm.

And so, so the sexual desire is actually you are being possessed by something greater than yourself.

It could be Aphrodite.

That might be the name you put to it 3,000 years ago.

I still might even think that it could be Aphrodite.

But the gods weren't like these funny creatures, kind of laughable, silly things.

They were these forces that in, that in, that c- possessed you.

How much do you think of what humans call supernatural abilities are actually just natural to humans, but we've lost touch with our subconscious so much that we don't have access to them anymore?

When it comes to people that are feeling lost and kind of more, getting at more of the cause of it, do you think it's because they lack connection to themselves or, and/or is it because they're kind of addicted to what the algorithm wants for them or what they think, uh, other people want them to become?

Well, um, a lot of the problem is, is, um, you...

W- we're so s- we've become so social that everything is, is a reflection of what other people are doing, other people are thinking.

We're immersed.

When we're in social media, we're seeing what other people are doing and all the entertaining things that are going on, and so, um, it's be- that becomes our reality.

But our reality is actually quite different.

We're an individual.

Now back to the show.

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 wanna 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, maybe you, I don't know about you, but I can't really understand.

My wife understands it, and when she tries to explain it to me, I go, "What the hell?" That's not like anything we know.

That's right.

These, these patterns, it's almost mathemat- it's all mathematics, you 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.

Is implied in this your, uh, admonition to writers is just do not use AI at all?

Never let others define it for you.

You know, so when I wrote the 48 laws of power, I tried to I have somebody through my whole life loves playing games.

I don't mean that in the abstract sense.

I mean literally, like chess, backgammon, sports, poker, whatever.

And I like the cleanness of a game.

It's like you do this and you can win, et cetera.

But there's also a psychological element in it.

light-hearted.

What advice would you have for young men that are feeling a little lost in the modern world?

Well, you have to be comfortable with who you are and with your masculinity.

So the word masculine has now got like this negative connotation around it, which is terrible because you're a young man.

It's not every young man.

Some men don't feel this way.

But a lot of young men, I remember myself, you've got this testosterone that's roaring through you.

You're competitive.

hopefully making the world a better place along there's no reason that your desire to pursue and conquer and and and become masterful anything has to leave the world worse it's not some weird zero some thing where in order for you to become better you need to take from the world i think it it's additive

Never let others define it for you.

You know, so when I wrote the 48 laws of power, I tried to I have somebody through my whole life loves playing games.

I don't mean that in the abstract sense.

I mean literally, like chess, backgammon, sports, poker, whatever.

And I like the cleanness of a game.

It's like you do this and you can win, et cetera.

But there's also a psychological element in it.

light-hearted.

As we're talking about, I guess, mastering social intelligence, a lot of what's, you know, what's shared in the laws of human nature, I think if the reader is a politician or a public figure and they're reading about the importance of mastering social intelligence, they say, "Okay, I understand the utility of this right out of the gate." But what about everybody else, right? Business leaders, parents, and so on.

I have a hard time understanding why anybody would think that.

We're a social animal.

If you understand anything about evolution and about where we came from, we are the premier social animal on the planet, although some people consider ants to be the premier social animal, but we're high among them.

Everything we do is social.

You're not really an individual.

You, Michael Mogill, are not really Michael Mogill.

And, and I want to elaborate on this, on what you mentioned, because I've heard you share this in an interview before where, you know, while many of us may feel like we have an idea of our identities and how we define ourselves, I, I've heard you argue that, you know, we actually have no idea who we are.

What advice would you have for young men that are feeling a little lost in the modern world?

Well, you have to, um, you have to be comfortable w-with, with who you are and with your masculinity.

So the word masculine has now got like this negative connotation around it, which is terrible because you're a young man.

It's not every young man.

Some men don't feel this way, but a lot of young men, I remember myself, you've got this testosterone that's roaring through you.

You're competitive, you're ambitious, you have goals, you have this energy, and you want to assert yourself.

But it's bad, it's bad, it's bad.

I think it, it's additive.

Never let others define it for you.

You know, so when I wrote The 48 Laws of Power, I tried to...

I've somebody through my whole life loves playing games.

I don't mean that in the abstract sense.

I mean literally, like chess, backgammon, sports, poker, whatever.

And, um, I like the cleanness of a game.

It's like you do this and you can win, et cetera.

I'm a Ranger- I'm a Texas Rangers fan, I'll have you know.

[laughs] It will be.

Anyway, it's going very slowly.

It's not an easy concept to describe, not like The 48 Laws of Power or something.

But I've been meaning to write the book for 16 years.

And the last chapter of The 50th Law, the book I did with 50 Cent, I talk about it where I discussed, wow, you've got it all, confronting your mortality, and I talk about the sublime there.

And then the 18th chapter of The Laws of Human Nature.

But I meant to write it in 2006, and I got sidetracked by the 50 Cent project.

so that probably wouldn't be a barrier, but.

And people can sometimes almost be offensive more than it is like intriguing.

Well, seduction involves by nature an element of transgressive and taboo.

So the word itself has this kind of edge to it where we're sort of attracted to it, but we're also a little bit afraid of it.

It's like something...

It could be very exciting, but there's also something a little bit evil about it, a little bit naughty.

And if it didn't have those two elements, it wouldn't be this very powerful word that attracts us so much.

So people who pretend that they want everything to be so comfortable and easy and perfect in their life, they want everything to be good, everything to be sweet and angelic, But people are complicated.

So let's talk about number one, the siren.