The Importance of Urgency & Leveraging "Death Ground" | Robert Greene & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | I have a chapter in my new book called Awaken to the Strangeness of Being Alive.
00:00:08.400 | And it's about the fact that if you think about it, and how unlikely it is that we humans
00:00:15.300 | evolved at all, even that we even exist, all the bottlenecks in evolution that we had to
00:00:20.800 | pass through, including the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the emergence of mammals,
00:00:25.600 | but there are 20 other huge bottlenecks throughout the history of evolution.
00:00:29.720 | We had to pass through all of those.
00:00:31.640 | We nearly went extinct 80,000 years ago from some virus that in fact, there were only 8,000
00:00:37.000 | people, humans on the planet, all these different things.
00:00:41.080 | And here we are with Zoom meetings, etc, etc.
00:00:44.560 | It's like the strangest story you can ever, it's beyond science fiction, but nobody thinks
00:00:49.560 | about it.
00:00:50.840 | Nobody sits down and goes, God, I'm alive.
00:00:54.280 | If you went back to the chain of people that had to connect and have children leading up
00:01:00.340 | to your parents, the unlikeliness of you ever being born is astronomical.
00:01:05.320 | I mean, unless my science is all wrong, 70,000 generations of people meeting, etc, etc, finally
00:01:13.440 | ending at your DNA, I mean, unless I'm missing something, it's pretty unlikely, but nobody
00:01:20.340 | thinks about it.
00:01:21.340 | Well, I certainly think about it now because I almost died, I had nothing else to think
00:01:26.560 | about.
00:01:27.560 | I have to entertain my brain the way Milton Erickson had to entertain himself by observing
00:01:31.640 | people.
00:01:33.200 | So it's taken a lot away from me.
00:01:34.800 | I can't swim.
00:01:36.360 | I'm riding my recumbent bike, which I love, and 80-year-old grandmothers are zipping by
00:01:42.800 | me.
00:01:43.800 | God damn it, how awful, I'm so envious, I'm so, my insecurity is all well up.
00:01:49.400 | But then I realize, hey, I'm on a boat, I'm sailing, it's wonderful, I'm outside.
00:01:55.600 | I have to go through these processes.
00:01:57.720 | But I think it's developed me in some way that's, in the end, very positive.
00:02:01.560 | It sounds like you've had to adjust to a new frame rate on life.
00:02:06.400 | The old movie had a certain frame rate, this movie has a certain frame rate, but that within
00:02:10.680 | that frame rate, there are gifts to be had that you certainly missed in your prior version
00:02:16.760 | of self.
00:02:17.760 | Is that about right?
00:02:18.760 | But also, like, I tell people this, I totally took my life for granted.
00:02:25.040 | I was swimming all this time, I was fantastic, I was bicycling, I was traveling, but I never
00:02:31.920 | sat back and thought, wow, this is wonderful how grateful it is, it could be taken away
00:02:35.640 | from me.
00:02:36.640 | I tell people, don't do that to yourself.
00:02:39.040 | I try and teach them.
00:02:40.320 | It can be taken away from you tomorrow.
00:02:42.440 | When you're out walking the dog, think of me, think of me that can't walk the dog and
00:02:47.020 | appreciate those things, which I didn't appreciate.
00:02:50.400 | So I try and help people in that way when I can.
00:02:54.720 | I think a critical message is also to inspire a sense of urgency in people.
00:03:01.520 | I think people hear a sense of urgency and they go, oh, I'm already under so much pressure,
00:03:05.680 | life's so hard.
00:03:06.680 | But we're not talking about a sense of urgency to take on more of what life has to offer.
00:03:11.580 | I think we're talking about a sense of urgency to find one's purpose, which takes work and
00:03:18.540 | is an ongoing process, but to really get out of modes of apathy, laziness, languishing,
00:03:27.400 | and to start, as you've described it, paying deeper attention.
00:03:31.540 | I mean, this is a concept that was super important for me to hear about and I learned about it
00:03:38.940 | from you was, how do you get yourself out of a rut?
00:03:41.600 | You start paying deeper attention to the things around you and inside you.
00:03:46.180 | And perhaps not coincidentally, you referred to that as, quote, death ground.
00:03:52.640 | - Yeah.
00:03:53.860 | So it's a strategy from my book, I wrote a book on strategy, my version of the art of
00:04:01.160 | war.
00:04:02.160 | It's called 33 Strategies of War, but it's really about strategy, the strategic thinking.
00:04:07.440 | It's inspired from Sun Tzu, the great Chinese strategist, but it has vast philosophical
00:04:13.720 | implications.
00:04:16.400 | The idea is, you can almost think of it like barometric pressure.
00:04:22.460 | When necessity is pressing in on you, like your back is against the wall, like you have
00:04:27.720 | to get something done, and there's like this pressure around you, you find energy in there
00:04:33.240 | that you never believed before.
00:04:35.400 | William James talks about this when he talks about getting a second wind, he explains it
00:04:39.640 | very eloquently.
00:04:41.220 | When you feel like your life's in danger, suddenly you can leap over things that you
00:04:46.360 | never could leap over before.
00:04:48.640 | So Sun Tzu says, put an army on death ground and it will fight until it wins, meaning put
00:04:56.140 | an army with its back to the ocean or back to the mountain, and it's either win or die,
00:05:02.960 | they're gonna fight 10 times harder.
00:05:04.940 | You're gonna find the energy in you that you normally lack when death is facing you in
00:05:09.480 | the face or urgency or deadlines or people pressing in on you.
00:05:14.480 | When that barometric pressure loosens up and there's none of it, you think you have all
00:05:18.920 | the time in the world, you get nothing done.
00:05:21.560 | Wow, man, I'm 23, I got all these years ahead of me, I'm gonna figure it out, right?
00:05:28.320 | I'm not gonna die, I got 50, 70, 80 years ahead of me.
00:05:32.520 | No, you don't.
00:05:33.960 | That pressure now is gone and you're wasting time, you're doing all sorts of things that
00:05:39.060 | aren't leading to any kind of skill, you're not learning or anything.
00:05:42.460 | You need to put yourself on death ground, you need to feel that barometric pressure,
00:05:47.080 | which is the actual reality.
00:05:49.160 | The actual reality is you could die tomorrow, you could have a stroke tomorrow, you could
00:05:54.200 | be fired tomorrow, everything could fall apart.
00:05:57.080 | You need to have that sense of urgency now because that's the reality.
00:06:01.540 | You're fooling yourself by thinking you have all of this time.
00:06:04.940 | And so when you feel that pressure, suddenly you can move mountains, you have energy, your
00:06:12.120 | life, you just have focus, et cetera.
00:06:16.240 | Neurologically, everything clicks in.
00:06:19.760 | And people who've had that experience where they've felt like the ship was going under
00:06:26.120 | and they better get their act together and survive, they talk about all these physical
00:06:30.460 | processes.
00:06:31.620 | I have a story in my new book, I hope I'm not boring you with all this.
00:06:36.480 | No, quite the opposite.
00:06:38.240 | About a mountain climber who, he was climbing this mountain by himself and he was having
00:06:47.040 | a great time but there was a storm coming and he had to get down and he suddenly fell
00:06:52.360 | and he cut his leg open massively and there was like a branch sticking in it and he broke
00:06:58.880 | all these bones and he was going to die, he was on a ledge.
00:07:02.880 | He could see that it was getting dark and storm clouds were amassing, this was in the
00:07:08.240 | Rocky Mountains.
00:07:10.200 | He was alone and suddenly he managed to get up on his two feet and he can't explain how
00:07:17.720 | but all of this energy, all this adrenaline started flowing in him and he said he was
00:07:21.880 | like a mountain goat.
00:07:22.880 | He was like going down the ledge, he jumped, he was able to kind of get down to another
00:07:27.720 | ledge.
00:07:28.720 | He got out of it and for the next 20 years, he was haunted by how did that happen?
00:07:35.760 | I want that feeling again because it was actually the most ecstatic feeling.
00:07:40.240 | I had energy that I never suspected in myself and so he tries everything to get that feeling
00:07:46.360 | back.
00:07:47.360 | He tries climbing other mountains, he tries going to Mount Everest and it doesn't come
00:07:51.720 | back and finally he kind of figures out the formula for it and why it happened.
00:07:58.060 | He studies a lot of neuroscience.
00:08:00.020 | It's a great book.
00:08:01.020 | I'm using it in my new book.
00:08:02.020 | It's called Bone Games, it's a very interesting book, a lot of science in it and he got the
00:08:09.480 | feeling back in a smaller sense but it was the feeling of your life is in danger, I better
00:08:18.640 | get my act together or it's the end and suddenly adrenaline, dopamine, all the other things
00:08:25.120 | were occurring in him and he found that energy.
00:08:30.920 | That's the ultimate kind of death ground right there.
00:08:34.640 | The human will to live is truly incredible and Sunai, I have to say, as I said before,
00:08:42.160 | I'm so grateful that your stroke didn't take you out because clearly there's still so much
00:08:49.560 | in there and you're continuing to share what is really exquisitely useful knowledge.
00:08:58.040 | [Music]