Why Adults Lose Childhood Wonder, and How to Get It Back

Some of the best conversations on The School of Greatness begin in a car. Lewis Howes has said that the podcast itself was born in Los Angeles traffic, sitting in a jam beside a highway full of drivers leaning on their horns, when he looked around and thought the people around him seemed stuck, and that he was stuck too. That was the start of a show he has since carried for years. So when Howes sat down with Robert Greene for the sixth time, it was fitting that the conversation opened with the question of how to get unstuck. Greene, the bestselling author of The Law of the Sublime, had been the very first guest on that show, back when, as Howes put it, no one knew what a podcast was. Eight years earlier, a stroke had nearly ended Greene's life, and his book was the product of seven years spent trying to describe what it felt like to come back to a world that seemed to sparkle. What follows is a walk through the central ideas of that November 2026 conversation: why a child's attention is so wide open, what adults trade away to function, and why almost-dying may be the most direct lesson on awe most people will ever get.

How did a traffic jam in Los Angeles start a podcast?

The origin story matters because it contains the first lesson of the whole conversation. Howes recounted that he had moved to Los Angeles about six months before the show's first recording, following a relationship that did not work out. He was running an online marketing company with a partner, and the two were constantly arguing. Relationships in his life were breaking down, and he came to a realization: he was at the center of the breakdowns. Instead of blaming everyone else, he asked what within him was attracting those dynamics.

That question is the same one Greene's book asks at a much larger scale. The awareness that arrives when you stop projecting onto other people is the first move out of a closed loop. Howes was describing a personal version of what Greene calls waking up to the self, and it's a useful frame for everything that comes after. Wonder, in this telling, is not something that happens to you from outside. It becomes available when the constant narration of your own grievances goes quiet enough to let the world in.

Why does a baby see everything, and a grown-up see almost nothing?

Howes brought up his twin daughters, who had just turned one, and asked Greene what it is about childhood that allows for awe that adults seem to lose. Greene's answer began with a confession that we cannot remember our first years of life. He suggested the likely reason is that we had no language yet, so there was nothing to attach memories to.

What he described next is the part worth slowing down for. A newborn, in his account, is a bundle of nerves and impulses, almost animal, attending to needs. Somewhere around nine months, things begin to settle, and the infant starts looking up. It watches a mobile turn above the crib, watches its parents move around the room, and begins to observe. Greene asked listeners to imagine seeing the world for the first time, with colors that fascinate not because of what they belong to but simply because they are colors. Pets and the sky, in his telling, are objects of pure enchantment for a young child, while adults, tall and strange, move about performing activities that make no sense yet.

"The childhood brain is so much more plastic than the adult brain. It's constantly forming these new neural pathways in the brain and making all sorts of connections which is why child's imaginations are so powerful."

Robert Greene, on Lewis Howes's The School of Greatness, November 2026

The plasticity point is more than a nice image. It explains why the child's world is so porous. Everything is new, and the brain is still wiring itself to make sense of it. The adult brain has a different job.

What is inhibition, and why does it dim the world?

This is the central mechanism of the conversation. Greene put it plainly: "The adult brain operates through what we call inhibition." To get through the day, an adult brain filters incoming information so that it does not overwhelm us. If we had to take in every color and movement around us, we could not handle the ordinary business of living. Filtering is a survival skill, and no one should imagine that adulthood is simply a failure.

The child's brain, by contrast, has very little inhibition operating. It pays attention to everything, including the silliest and most trivial thing, and wonders what it is. Then language arrives. Greene said that somewhere after a year or a year and a half, a child learns the word "I," and that moment is powerful because until then there is little sense of the self as separate from mom and dad and the surrounding environment. The sense of being a separate self is, in his account, the beginning of a new kind of filter. Once there is an "I," there is also something to protect, defend, and manage. Attention that once poured outward begins to fold back inward.

The video's own summary takes this to a sharp number. In the description, the claim is that a small child gives about 90 percent of their attention to the world, while most adults give about 98 percent to themselves. Greene's argument in the conversation is consistent with that shift. The point is not that self-attention is evil. It is that when the self absorbs almost all of our attention, there is little left to receive the sky, a face, or a song. The description also links this shift to anxiety and addiction, a connection that Greene's broader framing of the lost perception helps explain: a mind that is always attending to itself has a hard time settling into the present.

What did a near-death experience teach Robert Greene about seeing?

The emotional center of the episode is the stroke. Greene described its first symptoms with a directness that is hard to forget: "When I had my near-death experience, I was slurring my words incredibly and my face was falling." His wife saw the signs, made him pull over, and called 911 about thirty seconds before, as the video's description puts it, he would have been brain dead. He came back, he said, to a world that seemed to sparkle.

Greene framed the sparkle not as a pleasant side effect but as the whole point of the seven years he spent writing. The line he gave in the opening of the conversation is worth reading in full context: "It's kind of an ecstatic experience since I wanted people to have that in their life without having to die." He told Howes he wanted readers to get back to the sensation of being alive in the moment, to feel the brevity of life directly rather than as an abstraction that only the dying discover.

Howes asked the natural follow-up about pain and suffering, wondering whether so much of it comes from focusing too much on ourselves. The question sits right at the seam between the childhood argument and the near-death one. If awe requires a loosened grip on the self, then the crisis of a stroke is one way the grip is loosened abruptly, and the book is an attempt to show how to loosen it without a catastrophe.

Can consciousness be felt outside the head?

The video's description raises a question that the book takes seriously: what if consciousness was never locked inside your head in the first place? Greene talks through near-death experience research and what the description calls the old idea that awareness might run through everything. Those are large claims, and the conversation treats them as open questions rather than settled results.

The most striking piece is a story from the description itself: a woman in surgery, with no measurable brain activity and her ears plugged, later described the drill and the Hotel California song playing in the room. The conversation returns to this kind of case to ask how consciousness could be present under those conditions. Whatever one concludes, the story pushes against the easy assumption that awareness is simply a product of a working brain, and it fits the book's broader interest in perception beyond convention.

What does love have to do with the sublime?

Greene's marriage enters the conversation as the place where ego becomes hardest to manage and most worth managing. The description says his marriage taught him what it means to let the ego go quiet. On the show he described how saving a life changes the way you look at the person who did it: "I have to look at her through new eyes. I have to see that I am here because of her." He also said, "Love between two humans is the highest form of the sublime," and linked it to experiencing life on a higher level.

This is the most practical part of the argument. The childhood "I" and the adult ego are the same filter, and the most intimate relationship is where it gets tested. Looking at a partner as if for the first time is an exercise in the same attention a child gives to a mobile turning above a crib.

Where to go from here

The conversation is an invitation rather than a manual, and it is best taken in small doses. Three things follow from it.

• Notice where your attention lives. Greene's contrast between a child's wide attention and an adult's self-focus is a usable test. For one day, notice how often your mind returns to its own story and how often it lands on something outside you.
• Look at the sky. The description ends with the suggestion to step outside and look up. The childhood image Greene gives, of colors and animals fascinating for their own sake, is a reminder that this can still happen as an adult.
• Look a little longer at the person you love. The marriage thread in the conversation is an argument that the sublime is found in ordinary intimacy, and that the ego's quiet is what makes it visible.

For the full argument, Greene's The Law of the Sublime is the place to go, and the conversation itself, from Howes's sixth visit, is worth hearing in full. Both return the reader to the same question Howes started with, eight years after a stroke and fourteen years after a traffic jam: what is it within us that keeps the world from sparkling, and how do we let it back in?