The Age of The Sublime

A conversation with Robert Greene

Dear reader,

Today we’re publishing a beautiful conversation with Robert Greene.

Robert Greene is the bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Laws of Human Nature, and several other classics read by millions of people around the world.

After suffering a stroke that made typing difficult, he spent the last seven years writing a book about the sublime by hand.

In our conversation we talk about why our minds are shrinking to the size of phones despite the sublimity around us, the mystery of consciousness, his views on AI, how to reclaim a sense of awe in modern life, and lots more.

You can read the conversation below, listen on Spotify, or watch on YouTube.

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P.S.

It took two years to make this conversation happen.

I first tried reaching out to Robert through the contact form on his website back in 2024. And then again the following year.

I literally filled this form two years in a row

Eventually, through a bit of persistence and some help from Billy Oppenheimer, we got connected.

What I want most is to be a vessel for the sublime that’s screaming to be revealed in the world. In talking with Robert I felt in flow with something larger than myself. I hope that reading this conversation makes you feel something, because HOLY SHITTTTT WE’RE ALIVE!

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*Best enjoyed with a cup of tea and this playlist ;)

The Age of The Sublime

A conversation with Robert Greene

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Sari Azout: I’m very excited for this conversation. We both share a love for the word “sublime,” and I’ve followed everything you’ve put out about this book since you announced it. From the outside, it seems like this book is a shift from your earlier work, which is about power, control, domination, and influence. Did something change in you?

Robert Greene: Not really. I did a book with the rapper 50 Cent, The Laws of Human Nature, and the last chapter in that book was about confronting your mortality and was called “The Law of the Sublime.” So, I’ve written about it before. I understand the power book and the seduction book don’t seem very similar to this, but people are complex. I’m complex. I have several sides to me.

I remember reading about the sublime in the late 90s, there was a very famous book by a man named Thomas Weiskel that really shook me up. I thought, “This is an insanely interesting concept.” I’ve been fascinated by it ever since. I had meant to write this book in 2006, but other projects took me off that course.

Then I had a stroke in 2018 and came very, very close to dying. My wife saved my life while we were driving here in Los Angeles. The sublime and death are very much interconnected. I didn’t have a near-death experience, but I had something similar to it. I remember in the ambulance coming home from the hospital, and the experience was so jarring, so weird, and kind of marvelous in a way that I thought, “All right, the fates or the gods are telling me that now’s the time to write this book.” But it’s always been in my system. My books reflect the different aspects of my personality.

SA: How much of your calling to write it is personal versus a broader cultural observation of the spiritual hunger people have now?

RG: It’s a mix of both. Everything a writer writes is personal in some way, unless you’re writing a technical manual. But the book has a definite sense of purpose and mission. I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality. Life is so weird and awesome, and there’s so much depth to it, but people, particularly young people, but really everybody with technology and a phone, are sleepwalking through life. It disturbs me and upsets me. I’m not judging it, because I have some of the same problems as well, but the book is filled with a sense of mission. I’m pushing myself against the trends of this culture and the times we’re living in.

On one hand, science is revealing an insane sublimity in this world. We now understand the first few minutes of the universe and the Big Bang; they’ve been able to photograph a black hole; we understand that life originated from the explosion of stars. All of these thoughts are mind-boggling, and science is revealing them. So, the paradox is that we live in a world where the sublime is exploding all around us in these discoveries, but people’s minds are getting smaller and smaller, constricting to the size of their phones. It’s personal, but I’m on a mission because I want to wake people up. I’m very disturbed by the way things are headed.

SA: If you had to name the things unique to modernity that erode our capacity to tap into the sublime, what do you think those are?

RG: There’s a kind of cynicism and disenchantment where people think the world is just the “brute facts” of life. They think anything having to do with spirituality, religion, or ancient cultures is just superstitious or irrational, which is absurd, because we’re not just here out of context. The religious aspect of life and the spirituality developed thousands of years ago is still within us. The thought patterns and the need for some kind of transcendent experience that takes you out of the banality of daily life—what used to be called the “sacred versus the profane”—is still there. We’re not suddenly “modern.” It’s still inside of us, and yet we’re denying it because we’re afraid of those animalistic, superstitious, irrational aspects embedded in our nature. We want to feel sophisticated, like we’ve come way beyond all of that. To be cynical and see the world through that disenchanted lens is now projected as being “intelligent,” which I don’t think it is at all.

…the paradox is that we live in a world where the sublime is exploding all around us, but people’s minds are getting smaller and smaller, constricting to the size of their phones.

SA: You said that when you had your stroke, you experienced pain but also a strange kind of happiness. I had something similar when my lung collapsed a few years ago while I was pregnant with my third child. I was in physical pain, but I felt an unexpected sense of connection to the world and to other people. It was like the physical pain made me more alive, whereas emotional pain tends to make me feel disembodied and stuck in my head. Do you think part of the “dopamine age” of living through our phones is that we’ve shifted from physical experiences of life to more cognitive ones?

RG: Yes. The last chapter of the book—which I just finished about three weeks ago after almost seven years of work—is about death. I looked into near-death experiences very deeply. It’s very common in the literature for people to say they’ve never felt so alive as in the moments they were facing death. It’s a very strange thing to say, but it struck me: it means when you’re “alive,” you’re not really living. Suffering and knowing you have only a week or two to live suddenly makes you feel more alive. The reason is that we live with this social mask that’s not very real. We’re always pretending, smiling, and saying things to please people. We’re always worried about our survival and how we’re going to make money. When that drops out, when you know it doesn’t mean anything anymore because you only have a few months to live, you suddenly feel a liberation. You’re free; you’re flying in the air. It’s wonderful. You’re rid of all that crap.

Social media is just a cesspool of those very petty things. I’m not saying it’s all that way—I have a meditation app on my phone that I love, but social media is mostly a cesspool of banality as opposed to these cosmic things. We’re conscious creatures, and we’re conscious for a reason. It’s a freak occurrence. I don’t even know if there’s anything else like it in the universe. It’s a thing you don’t want to waste. You’re only alive for several decades. You could die at any moment. That consciousness needs to be used for something beyond just what people are eating, or sex, or shopping.

SA: I have tasted transcendence through psychedelics and they’ve been very transformative experiences. But then the next day, there are still crying babies, payroll, and spreadsheets. We live inside a system. Can we simultaneously inhabit the mysticism and the spreadsheet? Is that the goal? I guess what I’m asking is: why is it so hard to integrate these ideas that we experience when we’re near death into everyday life?

RG: Well, most people who go through a near-death experience and come back say that it stays with them for the rest of their lives. They’re never the same after that, which is striking because I can’t think of any other human experience you could say that about. I’ve taken many drugs myself when I was younger, and they were amazing experiences, but they didn’t completely transform me. I don’t think therapy does, and I don’t think pharmaceuticals are going to do that. But death has that effect.

I’ve been doing Zen meditation for about 16 years—every morning, about 40 minutes of it. In Zen, there’s this idea that you reach a kind of ultimate enlightenment, and when you reach that stage, it’s complete integration with daily life. You can actually function in daily life on a higher level than when you’re so infused with the self and always insecure, thinking, “Are people thinking about me?”

When you get out of that, you actually function at a higher level. So if your baby is screaming and you have to feed it and you have all these banal chores, actually, the banal chores are part of enlightenment. You’re in the moment, you’re happy, you’re dealing with it, as opposed to worrying and being anxious and having all these recurring thoughts. This book shouldn’t be about a sharp delineation between everyday life and the sublime; it should suffuse your everyday experience and actually make you integrated on a higher level.

SA: It seems to me you don’t see exercising agency, having insane mastery over something—and dissolving the ego as contradictory things.

RG: Very much so. My fourth book was on mastery. The sixth chapter covers people who have mastered something on such a high level—usually music, the arts, or science—that it’s inside of them. It’s a mixing of the intuitive and the rational. When you reach that level where you’ve mastered the piano, for instance, the self kind of falls away and you become the keyboard; the piano is inside of you. You don’t have to think anymore.

Reaching that high level of performance in sports, culture, technology, or science means you’re not thinking anymore—you’re living. It’s inside of you and it comes out that way. It’s like you’ve spent the proverbial 10,000 or 20,000 hours working on something and it’s internalized. Your whole mental landscape has been transformed by all of this practice until you become the work itself. It’s an odd feeling, but when I’m writing, I feel like I am the words. I am the writing itself. It’s not me anymore. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

SA: It makes complete sense. And it also feels like that kind of immersion is much harder for creative people today. There’s this expectation of constant motion—optimizing for the algorithm, moving quickly, producing something all the time. You took seven years to write this book. Long-term thinking feels like a luxury now.

RG: I’m in a unique position because most writers are under extreme pressure to make a living. It’s very hard as a writer because you depend on royalties. I’ve reached a position for which I’m very blessed and grateful. I could choose this subject, spend almost seven years working on it, and not have to worry about living from paycheck to paycheck. Because of that, I was able to focus so deeply on one subject for so long that something unusual happens.

When you study great artists—and I’m not putting myself in their company by any means—but when you study a John Coltrane, a Bach, or a Picasso, their level of focus is so deep. People don’t have that luxury anymore. It’s so difficult. The levels of distraction are through the roof. You have to worry about paychecks, pleasing an audience, and making money; the pressures are extreme. I sympathize very deeply with that. I’m able to resist it because, quite frankly, I don’t care if anybody reads this book. I don’t care if it’s unpopular because I don’t need to worry about that anymore. But other people do. I think that’s a tremendous barrier that artists used to not have. I lived in New York in the early 80s when I was very young. It was a very strange time—the city was crime-infested and very dangerous—but there were artists all around. I lived in the East Village and SoHo, and people were living cheaply. They could live like that and make interesting art. You don’t have that luxury anymore. It’s very sad.

SA: There’s always a temptation to romanticize the past, but is there a moment in history that feels analogous to this? Where technology expanded so fast that it created a spiritual vacuum?

RG: It’s always a trade-off. There were things in the past that were very brutal and cruel, it’s not all rosy. If you read history, you understand that. Things move in waves in cultural history. It’s not a straight line where things just get worse and more banal; it goes up and down.

In the 18th century there was a reaction against religion and superstition. It was the birth of modern rationality—the Enlightenment. Writers, particularly in France like Voltaire and Diderot, were reacting against the irrationality of the Catholic Church. But then things descended into something superficial and banal, which led to an incredible reaction against the Enlightenment and this worship of human rationality.

That reaction came with Romanticism, a period when the sublime exploded. It’s the most important historical period for my book, because that’s when the sublime really became a modern concept. People discovered nature—the idea that nature itself is sublime, not just God or religion, but animals and the earth. It was a reaction against creeping banality and the worship of science. You had all this Gothic literature emerge because people wanted the mysterious and the superstitious.

My hope is that we’re coming out of something similar now. The Enlightenment wasn’t all bad—amazing things came out of it—but I hope we’re entering a moment where, in the next ten or twenty years, there will be a reaction like Romanticism or even the 1960s. Back then, people were fed up with the crushing banality of 1950s culture—Eisenhower, the “man in the gray flannel suit,” Madison Avenue. And then it exploded: hippies, flower power, psychedelics. These things move in waves. Maybe we’ll see a similar explosion again.

SA: We forget that this social media era is really just a twenty-year experiment, and the pendulums always swings. Right now, a handful of people: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, have enormous influence over how we experience the world. If they read your book and were genuinely moved by it, how do you think it might change the kinds of products and experiences they enable?

RG: I remember in the early years of the internet, in the early 2000s, there was a kind of excitement. It was new. Something very interesting was happening where, for example, I might be interested in a particular jazz artist and suddenly see a whole community of people interested in the same thing. You could connect and make friends. In the beginning, the internet wasn’t about making money or constantly manipulating people; it was about connecting and opening up the world. Billions of people were on the same level. It was fascinating.

Technology had the potential to be absolutely sublime. If you think about the internet itself, it is a completely sublime object. Look at Wikipedia—it’s sometimes inaccurate, but thousands of people are working on the same thing and discovering it together. It’s mind-blowing. The sublime, in the original concept, includes what Immanuel Kant called the “mathematical sublime”—the sense of infinity and timelessness, the idea that our consciousness can become aware of the universe. It’s a concept you can’t really put into words or analyze because it doesn’t fit into any category.

The internet is infinite. It’s an infinite space. It could be a realm for exploring and opening the mind. Instead, it has become a tool for closing the mind.

There’s an interesting mystical writer I’ve always loved named Gurdjieff, whom I use in the new book. He had this idea that when anything is created—a religion, a political idea—it has a sparkle to it. It’s fresh and connected to life. But as time passes, it loses that spark and often turns into its opposite. Christianity, for example—a religion of love with Christ as this incredible figure—turns into its opposite over time. The internet was one of those things.

SA: I’ve read a lot of the work by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, and one of the things he talks about is the the disappearance of rituals, and how transformative experiences often have boundaries, while the Internet is boundless. Right after this call, I’m hosting a fifteen-person Shabbat dinner at my home. I do it every Friday—it’s a ritual that gives my life meaning.

It makes me wonder: can technology be designed to create that kind of meaningful structure? Or is this the inevitable end state of American Capitalism and products shaped by the logic of markets and attention?

RG: Well, the thing is, I try to avoid turning the sublime into an abstract intellectual concept in the book. The sublime is an experience. It’s an experience of the world, not an idea. Because we live in all these abstractions, we’re so left-brain oriented—it’s all words and language. The sublime takes you out of that; it’s emotional.

The neuroscience of the sublime is very interesting. They’ve been able to map the sensation of awe and look at the brain as it happens. The sensation originates from the most primitive parts of the brain—emotional things you can’t really control. Then the cognitive side, the neocortex, sees that and starts analyzing it. In the combination of those two things, you have a sublime moment.

If I were to design technology like that, I’d want people to not be so passive. I’d want an app that makes you have an experience—hopefully a social one where you’re meeting people, like the internet used to do. I hope I’m not sounding too egotistical here, but if you took some of the things in my book and tried to make something where people could actually experience them, it would be powerful.

At the end of each of the twelve chapters, I have a section called “The Sublime Experience” where I give you exercises to bring this into your life. You walk around and look at the world a certain way, or you sit in a room and imagine certain things. I think I have about fifty of these exercises in the whole book. You could turn those into some kind of application. Instead of people passively consuming, I want them to have an active experience. If you could do that with technology, it would be wonderful. It’s very possible.

SA: We’ll get to some of the examples in your book, but before that I want to get into your views on AI.

RG: Everything is a tool. The internet is a tool; a hammer is a tool. A hammer can be used to build a beautiful home, or it can be used to kill somebody by clobbering them on the head. AI is a tool. I’ve used it myself—if there’s a quote I vaguely remember by some philosopher that I’d never find in the chaos of my office, I type in a few words and it comes up. It’s like magic. It’s insane.

SA: It’s sublime. I think the human-AI encounter itself—if you remove the fear of job loss and the existential anxiety around it—is sublime. It’s a miracle that we’ve made this.

RG: Yeah, but of course, like everything else, it reaches into the dark side of human psychology. And that, unfortunately, can be very frightening. I’m about to give a talk in a few days about how AI is going to completely disrupt the world economically. The people running it don’t have a great deal of responsibility; they’re under immense pressure to make money. It’s a capitalistic culture, and they’ve invested incredible sums of energy—literally energy, environmentally—so they’re under pressure to see a return. Because of that, they’re going to do things I don’t think are socially or humanly responsible. It could be dangerous.

On the other hand, the human brain is the most sublime organ of all. It’s more sublime than AI or the internet. Those things are simply reflections of the human brain. Our complexity is through the roof. Some neuroscientists have said nothing in the universe comes close to the complexity of the brain—the neurons, the connectivity, the infinite connections that can be made. Look at what we’ve done in a very short period of time, evolutionarily speaking. In 80,000 years, we’ve transformed ourselves into this.

It is the human brain that is so immense. When I talk about that intuitive mastery level, it concerns me that if young people aren’t learning to think or use their brains—if they become lazy because of AI—that is very dangerous. I don’t want to make out as if the past was always rosy, but I think of this example: My major in college was Classics, probably the least practical major you can have. I remember a crash course in Ancient Greek where we had to translate a paragraph by Thucydides. It took me a day and a half to translate that one paragraph. It was so frustrating; it drove me crazy. But it made me think. It made me develop patience. It made me realize that if I focus deeply, I’ll get there. It was a wonderful feeling. If you’re translating everything through AI and not learning a language, the brain will rot. Maybe it will develop in some other area, but I’m worried about the laziness it will infuse into our cognitive powers.

SA: Yeah, technology is neither good nor bad; it depends on what you do with it. I’ve used AI to think better, but I’ve also used it to outsource my thinking. In your view, how much of reclaiming the sublime is an individual responsibility versus requiring a collective shift?

RG: It’s up to you. No government or company is going to give you a sublime experience. It’s up to you to do that. If you take a bit of information from AI that is remarkable or miraculous and it makes you think—it makes your mind active—that’s fine. The mind can either be still or active; you can either consume “crap” passively or your mind can be tingling and moving. If you use that information to think, that is sublime. But I’m afraid that because humans are naturally lazy and tend to take the path of least resistance, it will have the opposite effect. I hope I’m wrong, but knowing human nature, the opposite could very well happen.

SA: I can imagine two possible futures. In one, we become more machine-like, and this “god” we’ve created simply raises expectations—making us busier and more disconnected from the sublime. In another, if people have the kind of intellectual freedom you have, AI could actually help them think more deeply and access that part of themselves. It feels like it could go either way.

RG: Very much so. People think too much about the technology; it’s really about the consciousness that interacts with it. If human consciousness blossoms and expands in the next few decades, it will use AI for those purposes.

As someone who reads a lot of history, I can’t say this is just a downward slide. There are moments where it goes down and then bounces back up. My hope is that young people—who drive change in this world, not dinosaurs like myself—are going to feel so bereft of experience and so bored with the culture the Boomers have fed them that they’re going to rebel. Youthful rebellion is a beautiful thing. We need it desperately right now. If that happens, there could be a new level of consciousness where people realize we need more experience and open minds.

Science is providing the tools for this. Neuroscience is fascinating; we’re delving into our own brains and uncovering things that are scary but also amazing. If we take what science is giving us, it could lead to an explosion of the sublime. I remember reading about the evolution of life—understanding that three billion years ago, there was just bacteria in the ocean. You follow the evolution, the extinctions, the moments where new creatures evolved, and you can’t believe we’re here.

If an asteroid hadn’t struck Earth at the exact angle it did 60 million years ago, dinosaurs would still be here. Because of that cataclysm, mammals could evolve and become dominant. If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be talking to you; there would be pterodactyls in the sky. We live in a world suffused with this knowledge, yet it’s not affecting people. In one chapter, I mention that if we actually thought about how unlikely it is that you, Sari, exist—with all the things that happened in evolution and your parents meeting—we would be building temples and synagogues just to worship the fact that we’re here. Science might be destroying the planet on one hand, but on the other, it could be expanding our consciousness.

SA: You said something that resonated with me: technology doesn’t change the world—people do, depending on the consciousness they bring to it. It often feels that everything is available today, yet nothing feels profound.

I grew up in a small city in Colombia called Barranquilla, and I remember discovering TED talks and the internet when I was about twelve. If you had told me then that one day I’d carry a device in my pocket that could answer any question and connect me with anyone, I wouldn’t have believed you. And yet here we are, and it feels like our consciousness hasn’t caught up to the technology.

Your book feels like a spiritual wake-up call, and I appreciate that you are trying to make it practical. What are some practices people can bring into their daily lives?

RG: Some of it is as simple as taking a walk and changing how you look at the world, because the sublime is a perceptual thing. It’s how you look at the world—it’s not that the things themselves are sublime, but our brain and our consciousness are aware of them. A lot of it involves walking around and looking at things as they are, divorced from the words we associate with them.

If you look at a tree and don’t think of the word “tree,” you see this giant thing springing up out of the ground from nothing with all these leaves on top. What is this weird thing? It’s very strange. Or you look at the sky and see clouds—and you don’t think of the word “clouds,” but you just see the thing itself: these fleecy white things against a blue sky. They’re weird, they’re insane, they’re strange. There’s probably no other planet in the universe where people see clouds quite like this.

Most people don’t truly “see” the things around them. So many of the exercises are about changing perception. I’m also trying to get you to move away from these values where some things are worth looking at and others aren’t. I’m trying to get you to think that everything is equal. That’s one of the exercises: ants are as interesting as people; dog excrement on the ground is as interesting as a beautiful building. It’s all the same level. If you get rid of all your judgments and gradations of what’s “great” and just see the whole thing on the same plane, that changes everything.

SA: The first one you described is exactly how my four-year-old experiences the world. When we walk into a room, he finds everything fascinating. Meanwhile, I’m in an efficiency mindset, just trying to get from point A to point B as fast as possible.

RG: Well, one of the twelve chapters is about the “Childhood Sublime.” One reason we’re aware of the sublime—and why we’re so miserable sometimes—is that we remember when we were two or three years old and our minds were different. Everything was new and exciting. We weren’t experiencing the world through words; we were seeing things as they are for the first time. In the back of our minds, we know we had that and lost it, which makes us very depressed.

In that chapter, I explain how you can reclaim it. You can re-experience your childhood—not through some magic, but by recreating how children see the world. It’s a capacity you have; great artists are capable of it. I talk about Vladimir Nabokov, who was obsessed with his childhood because he was separated from Russia and couldn’t return. He went so deep into the experience that he saw the world through the eyes of a child. Childhood is our first real experience of the sublime. Because you were pre-verbal, you experienced the world directly and immediately.

In the last chapter on death, I have an exercise that’s a little frightening where I try to make you experience your own dying. Because I’ve researched it and lived it, I know what happens to the brain and body as things start dissolving. I try to take you through that process as you lie on the floor and feel yourself dying. Then, at the point where it’s “gone,” I ask you to walk outside as if you’re a ghost—as if you’ve been granted one last walk. This is the last time I’m going to see the sky; this is the last time I’m going to see a bird. Suddenly, things look very different. I’m trying to move death away from being an abstract, boring philosophical discussion and show that it is a physical and spiritual experience. You’re conscious as you’re dying—at least some people are—and it is an awesome, amazing experience.

I talk about Carl Jung, who had a near-death experience in the 40s. He describes it in such beautiful detail. He says he experienced death from the inside, and it’s not the same as death from the outside. From the outside, it looks like you’re just dying, but from the inside, you’re being reborn. I’m trying to give you that sensation. I don’t know if I succeeded, but that was my goal with that exercise.

SA: You’ve been writing this book for seven years. How did writing it change you? More specifically, how did it change your ability to experience the sublime?

RG: It was an insanely arduous process. I can’t begin to describe it to you because I could not type—and I’ve been a fast typist since I was nine years old. How do you write a book without typing? I had to hand-write everything. It was really difficult. I’d have to dictate it into the computer, print it out, edit it by hand, and then dictate it again. I was trying to be inspired while dealing with all these physical limitations.

When I first thought of writing the book twenty years ago, I was going to go to the Gobi Desert, the Amazon, and swim with dolphins. I was going to have all these experiences and write about them. But now I’m writing the book and I can’t do any of that. I can’t even take a hike to clear my mind. I’m trapped in this room.

That was a blessing in disguise because it made me realize the reader also has limitations. How can you experience the sublime when you can’t travel? When you’re in Brooklyn and it’s snowing and ugly and dark? I had to experience that sitting in my office. I had to experience it watching my cat and looking into his eyes. I had to go into my backyard and just sit in a chair, looking at the nature I had right there, not up in the mountains. It changed me because to make the book exciting, I had to transform myself so I could feel the sublime in everyday things.

SA: That is very very inspiring. I can’t tell you how excited I am to read this book. It feels to me like we are re-entering the age of the sublime.

RG: Well, maybe when it comes out, we’ll revisit this. Thank you, Sari. I really enjoyed it.

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