Jason Silva - Shots of Awe

Full transcript: Jason Silva on London Real

7:48 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, and how lucky am I? I have two awesome guys here today. I’m spending a bank holiday afternoon about to jump into a very cool conversation with some intelligent, promising and very positive dude. So I just wanted to thank you guys both firsthand.

8:04 It’s one of the perks of doing London Real. I get to kind of hang out with cool people. When I was your age, 25, I think, 31, I was out doing things, but I was doing them for me, you know? I was trying to make more money. I was trying to be a better martial artist, and I wasn’t giving, it was all this way and none of this way, you know?

8:21 So when I meet guys like you, it’s just awesome, and it just keeps me optimistic about the future. So just wanted to say thanks. Oh, dude, thank you so much. Awesome. Let me introduce you guys.

8:31 My co-host today is Mr. Timothy Shieff, who is currently the most successful freerunner in the world. You hate it when I say that, right? Yeah, sorry. So good though. You’ve probably seen him on MTV.

8:42 He has his own YouTube channel called Flow, where they pay him to make videos with different people, like the famous nman Damen Walters. I see him on these O2 commercials, which is like a phone network here, promoting touch rugby. I’ve actually stopped watching television because I don’t want to see Timothy come up on the screen. He has a whole series of videos called Life in a Handstand, which are kind of actually dark, and he walks around and lives his life, literally, in a handstand.

9:06 He’s one, he’s homeless, and a handstand on one. Anyways, definitely check him out. But he’s most famous for his relatively few but amazing appearances on London Real. So thanks, thanks for being here. I hope you come back.

9:21 And our guest today is Mr. Jason Silva, who is a futurist, a television personality, a filmmaker and a performance philosopher. I think, I think the Atlantic described you as, a Timothy Leary of the viral video age. I think that’s probably pretty accurate. I love that description, actually. It makes me giggle because I freaking love the Timothy Leary, and I just think that they just, they caught it with that, they caught at least my aspiration with that description.

9:47 So right, no, it’s good too that you’re, that you’re comfortable with that too, because people get compared to these people, and they’re like, ah, but that’s good. You got to roll with it. You were, a presenter on Current TV for a long time, 2005 to 2011, so you know how to do this job better than I do. you have a new series on Nat Geo called Brain Games. I want to talk about that definitely.

10:05 You’re best known, I think, though, for your viral videos like Radical Openness, The Biological Advantage of Being Struck, both of which I watched earlier. I’m pumped up because of them. Jason Silva, welcome to London. Oh, thank you so much, guys. Thank you for having me.

10:20 I’m excited to be here in London. I’m excited to meet you guys, and I have to say I love this whole studio setup you got going on. The vibe is, is, is perfect, man. Positivity all the way. Like, it’s cool.

10:31 I couldn’t imagine you coming through and not being on the show, so for me it was like obvious, no-brainer. I think we had spoken like a long time ago, but you, you were in New York. Are you based in New York or LA? I’m based in New York these days. I lived in LA for 5 years, but ever since I started the N Geo project, I kind of relocated to New York, and that’s been kind of like the base.

10:46 I keep coming back there to sort of anchor myself, but I’ve really kind of been traveling the world, really, for the past year and a half. Actually, those videos acted kind of as springboards, because when the videos went viral, my philosophical espresso shots just took a life of their own. They just started making like these ripples, and people were like paying it forward and sharing the videos with their friends, and their friends with their friends, and before I knew it I’m getting all these inquiries, for like, come speak to us, come talk to us about imagination, come talk to us about creativity.

11:10 I mean, it’s just like been insane. So I kind of feel like my home is the airplane these days. Wow. I mean, that’s what, and you, these viral videos, you call them like shots of philosophical espresso, which I think is pretty accurate, but how did that start, and did you start shooting them on your own, and then they get bigger and bigger, and did I’m guessing you did have this means to an end in mind? Yeah, no, well, it’s funny, because, you know how Joseph Campbell always used to say, follow your bliss and doors will open for you, where there were no doors open before.

11:38 You know, where there were no doors, actually, it’s like, it’s almost like that scene in Beetlejuice where they like draw a door and then they knock three times and a door opens in the concrete. But it really does feel that way. Like, I feel like when you find your calling, when you find your voice, when you find your bliss, you know, it’s almost like the role of consciousness in the construction of reality. Like, exacerbates, you know what I mean? Like people always talk about how in, you know, quantum mechanics, people say, you know, the observer changes the world in the act of observation, and I feel like that stuff plays out.

12:08 That stuff is felt in a very visceral way when you find your bliss. You know, it’s all of a sudden the world becomes a sort of canvas that’s full of clues, and you can read your way through it, as Stephen Johnson used to say. It really does feel that way, and and so for me it was like, I had been working at Current TV, I got my feet wet with the whole citizen journalism, do-it-yourself media. I kind of felt that coming, and when I left Current, it was like, you know, starting Current was like winning the lottery, working for Al Gore, being on TV, but the problem with it is nobody watched it.

12:38 It was a little bit ahead of its time, and it was when I really left the network after four years, mind you, of like building my networks in LA and growing my sort of extended creative family there, and feeling like I was ready to cut cords with the mothership, which is what Current was. I felt that online video had finally come of age, and so I felt like now the time was prime to do your own content. People weren’t going to roll their eyes at you if you said, I’m leaving TV to go do web stuff, you know what I mean?

13:03 But like by the time I did it, people were like, oh cool, what are you going to do? And then I was like, what am I going to do? You know? And it was just the kind of decision to go back to my philosophical sort of roots and my philosophical sensibilities, which is like, you know, I went to school for philosophy and film, so I wanted to go back to that. I want to make content that informs and inspires.

13:20 I want to make content that, the format itself of the content, I want to do, is built around the way I communicate. So the philosophical espresso shop just, it made sense, because I, when I get excited about an idea or about a topic, you know, I go on these rants. I always have since I was a little kid. I mean, since, you know, this middle school. Like, if I’m excited, I want to explain to you what excites me, and it usually takes me one and a half minutes to do so.

13:44 It’s just like a thing. Just like you got skill there, definitely. For whatever reason, there’s a mixture of just passion, I’ve always been a voracious reader. My mom was an English teacher, so I’m relatively articulate, but, so it was just like, okay, I want to start filming these riffs that I always have, and I’ll start seeing if I can then later kind of visually animate them, so I can put people in my head. You know, see sort of if they can visually see the stream of consciousness in imagery.

14:07 It could really create a kind of synesthetic effect in the viewer. It’s so important to do that. Absolutely, absolutely. You want to capture people’s attention, capture and manage their attention for 2 minutes, and it just so happened that people’s attention spans on YouTube happens to be, you know, like 2 minutes or less. And so I was like, this could work for me, and I worked with some really talented editors as collaborators in the beginning, but it was very important to me to be very specific and hands-on, and kind of micromanage the editing process, because I was like, I’m very specific about the kind of imagery I wanted to see, the kind of juxtaposition of extremes, the molecular scale imagery, the galactic-scale imagery, put the micro next to the macro, and just create this kind of synesthetic, almost psychedelic digital experience.

14:43 You know, it’s like taking the blue pill in The Matrix and seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes. It just became an exercise in that, a kind of indulgence in that, and so when I saw the reception that people had, I felt, my God, I was successful at getting people to feel what I was feeling when I shot those videos, and I was shooting them in the park. You know, I was doing them myself, but the fact that people were responding that way, I was like, oh, I’ve hit a nerve here.

15:07 It’s working. You know, language is an attempt to put you in my head. It’s your attempt to put me in your head, you know. like that’s what language is. It’s an attempt to smash the sense of separateness that separates people.

15:17 It’s an attempt at merger. You know, language is like, it’s kind of like sex in a way, you know, but you know, outside of the context of physical bodies coming together, but when people communicate, they’re trying to merge, and it’s like read it’s like telecommunication, kind of, but we do it through making completely, but many times language has these limitations, you know. Terence McKenna and Rich Doyle talk about ecodelics, or psychedelics, and how these chemicals, they basically encourage the innovation of language.

15:48 They push language to its boundaries, because they force people to try to describe the ineffable when people are ecstatic or inspired. They’re more inventive in their use of language to describe set experience, and I think using these visuals and the music in my mashup videos was a sort of further attempt to convey the ineffable experience of subjectivity. So do you think I go on a rant? You just did that, that was great. You know, language, Terence McKenna talks about language a lot, and we, we have, we talk about ayahuasca on the show, and a lot of times with, with psyched Alex, which are very similar to what you do, is presenting.

16:25 He, he says that language limits us because we can’t describe what’s going on in our brain. And since you use language to communicate, do you find it as a medium to be does it hold you back sometimes? Well, I think language is a tool, you know. Just like writing is a tool, just like photography is a tool. It’s an instrument, it’s a piece of technology, you know.

16:45 Like, I think most people don’t think of technology that way, but that’s one of my messages. I think of technology the way Kevin Kelly does. He says, you know, if we didn’t have the technology of the oil painting, we wouldn’t have Van Gogh. That was the channel through which Van Gogh expressed his subjective experience, his perspective on the world. That’s the way we saw the world through his eyes was thanks to the technology of the oil painting.

17:04 If we didn’t have the technology of the musical instrument of musical annotation, Beethoven’s genius wouldn’t have been able to unfurl upon the world. Language and the alphabet just is one of those tools, one of those instruments that we use to merge with one another, to share subjectivity. Film perhaps is the greatest because it combines everything, right? It combines the alphabet and oration, and then it combines, like, visuals, and then it combines, like music.

17:28 I mean, it, I mean, really, to me, watching a film like Inception in an IMAX theater, you know, with a particularly receptive consciousness, is one of the greatest kinds of psychedelic meditations that is possible for a human being to contemplate the nature of reality, like by watching a false reality genre film like Inception, like The Matrix, like The Truman Show, like the game, and experiencing those ideas through the prism of cinema, is to me one of the greatest kinds of psych explorations that human beings can do. So I guess these are just tools, tools to explore our own consciousness, tools to explore other people’s consciousness, tools for self-referentiality as well. You know, as Kevin Kelly says, language turns the mind a fural mind into a tool that can now think with purpose and deliberation.

18:16 Language allows the mind also to perceive itself, right? Through these kinds of hierarchies, you know, it’s okay. So I know that I am a mind. My mind is, I, you know, this whole idea of like recursion and self-perception, I think also has a connection to language. Wait, you’re, you’re talking about cinema.

18:33 Is there going to be that next level of medium that we’re going to create as humans that’s going to be better than cinema, you know, where you really are in that movie? Yeah, dude, I absolutely think so. I mean, there’s, there’s a book by Gene Youngblood called Expanded Cinema, and he says that cinema reflects mankind’s historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes. So it’s this idea of putting ourselves in front of ourselves to reflect upon ourselves, infinite recursion, again, self-mirroring.

19:01 Douglas Hofstadter says that our ability to perceive ourselves comes from the fact that our brains create virtual models, internal models of the external world, but that external world includes the brain that’s making the observation, and it is that self-mirroring, that inevitable vortex of self-mirroring, in which a sort of causal eye is kind of birthed into existence. I made a whole video about it. So I think we push the envelopes of our art in order to do that you know, to explore the self.

19:28 And I’m particularly interested in trans-media technologies, or technologies that basically create situations in which your sort of intent or participation can sort of change the narrative in which you’re losing yourself, whether it’s in the analog world or in the digital world. One experience of that was Sleep No More in New York City. It’s an interactive theater experience based on Macbeth and like a Kubrick film, and it’s this like interactive space that is nonlinear and has like 25 rooms that are like thematically constructed, intimately, with like amazing music that follows you around, and then there’s, you walk in and out of scenes where actors are acting out scenes of Macbeth, but they’re out of sequence, and you can follow the actors along from room to room, or you can go your own way and choose your own adventure, but everything has been constructed to somewhat connect itself to the larger story.

20:16 So it’s like you can open a drawer and find a picture with like blood on it, and then think, was this connected to that scene that I caught in that other room? And it’s like, it’s like you’re inside of the movie in this like dreamlike environment, but you are like the main protagonist, and everybody wears a mask when they’re in it. Also, in Sleep No More, so you’re kind of like a ghost, right? Cuz nobody can see you, and the actors will not acknowledge you either, so you can go up really close during a scene and, like, stand next to them and stare in a voyeurism.

20:40 So imagine how safe it is. It’s like being a ghost swimming inside of a narrative. So it’s like if you were watching a movie theater and you could sort of dive into the frame and then be swimming around and exploring the space that’s kind of what Sleep No More is like. So it’s a glimpse of, I think, at the very least, the kind of consciousness, the adventures and consciousness that will be available for us with these new kinds of nonlinear immersive interactive narratives.

21:04 Now, when we can do that in virtual reality, that’ll be cool. Yeah, so it’s sort of like Sleep No More is like the analog version of virtual reality. I think, what if, like, a movie was shot, mind-blowing, makes your mind just move over. You got to, yeah, like if there was a movie shot and you could pan around with, like, a mouse around the whole movie, but it would take you to the scene, and it would just be in one location, but you could watch it from any angle, cuz they’ve got like 3D or 360 video, haven’t they?

21:28 I’ve seen a few. Music that you can move around and see like different whole video. You can look at things. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if new kinds of technologies of rhetoric, narrative technologies, emerge when the technology allows for it. So you know, when the printing press came out, then the sort of the paperback, or the format of the novel.

21:46 You know, television, oh, the sitcom, you know, this, movies, oh, the screenplay, 120 pages, one minute per page, you know, tells the average story with beginning, middle and end. So I wouldn’t be surprised if as new technology has emerged, new creative ways of telling stories will sort of be born as well. It must be that way. You know, one of the things that I first heard about when I first heard the concept of the singularity, I think, was coming from you a couple years ago after I saw you on Rogan.

22:12 I saw your videos, and I was just wondering, for people that don’t know, which are a lot of people out there, if you could define the singularity, and then define, you’re kind of a rare guy is it, is that then you are just shipping in the singularity? You’re like, let’s do this, let’s do this now, and this is going to make us better. Where there are a lot of fearmongers out there, and a lot of critics are like, yeah, Jason doesn’t talk about the risks. So yeah, well, look, man, I think that anything we do with technology ultimately acts like a sort of scaffolding or second skin.

22:43 So technology is this extended phenotype like the termite colony is to the termite, and it extends our thoughts, it extends our reach, it extends our vision. You know, there’s cognitive philosophers that actually make the case that technology is actually a part of the species, like literally it’s organic. It’s like the spider’s web is a part of the spider. Nobody would say that the spider’s web is this like weird technology that the spider is doing, tinkering with nature.

23:10 No, it’s birthed from the spider, just like our creativity and our instruments are birthed from us, and then it’s like we create these tools to then extend the boundaries of how we express ourselves, like we were talking about oil painting and instruments and alphabets, before people talk about Singularity as being the sort of the ultimate convergence of biotechnology and nanotechnology, in the same way that we saw kind of singularity when language was born, and a singularity of information technology with sort of the internet, connecting human beings together and transcending time, space and distance. But like with biotech, we’re literally having, you know, gene sequencing is going three times faster than Moore’s law, and with biotech we’re learning to master the information processes of biology, and biology is basically software that writes its own hardware, something that computers could never do.

23:55 So when our genes become sort of blank canvas for the artist, when our genes become this thing that we can kind of, that can birth a new generation of artists that can write genomes the way Blake and Byron wrote verses. As Freeman Dyson used to say, what does that even mean? You know, when I can take like the raw material that constitutes what each of you are, and that becomes the literally like the blank piece of paper for us to sort of author. Like, we become gods.

24:21 You know, Kevin Kelly says we are aspiring gods. We are amateur gods, and I think he totally gets it. You know, it’s not about being heretical by using these terms, but it’s saying this is what’s actually going on. Carl Sagan says we are the frontal lobes of the universe. So we are the universe being aware of the universe, just like the brain can perceive itself.

24:38 Well, on a sort of macro level, we are the universe perceiving itself, and these moments of, of sort of mental expansion, and then seeing the fact that, you know, with our biotechnology we’re manipulating biology, with nanotechnology we manipulate matter at the level of the atom. The whole freaking thing becomes a creative universe that wakes up, a creative universe that comes alive. And so this, the singularity is just ultimately a kind of metaphor used to describe the ineffable and indescribable nature of a universe, a creative universe accelerating in its capacities to be creative.

25:08 Terence McKenna said the universe is an, is an engender, is a novelty-engendering universe. It’s a universe that sprouts complexity, sprouts new possibility. Kelly says technology is the seventh kingdom of life, subject to the same evolutionary forces. You know, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest, talks about the Omega Point, this complexity leading us towards this kind of rapturous transcendence of all previous limits. Eric Davis, who wrote TechGnosis, she said that eventually the human design process will achieve a kind of infinite velocity where everything becomes linked with everything else, and matter becomes mind, because that’s really what’s going on.

25:46 We take in matter of low organization, we put it through our mental filters, and we extrude it as space shuttles and iPhones. So when you look at the stuff, you see the rhymes of McKenna and Timothy Leary saying that computers are the new LSD, that technology is how we actually expand the boundaries of the mind. So you see, you’re like, wow, like KW singulari is the same as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest who was tripping out talking about the Omega Point, which is the same as Timothy Leary talking about us going from, you know, from worms into butterflies and transforming ourselves, and it’s the same as McKenna talking about a universe that engenders more and more novelty, and is the same as Kevin Kelly’s technium.

26:26 So you see the academics and the writers and the scientists and the sort of Psychonauts all saying ultimately the same thing, you know, and, and, and as Isaiah Berlin said, to understand is to perceive patterns. So you start to see the patterns, and it’s just again, it’s just, it’s humanity. It’s certain mind is just noticing the same thread, the same common denominator, which is kind of this move towards that something. You know, it’s like staring into the sun.

26:52 It’s, it’s hard to describe, but I think we’re, we’re going in that direction. Yeah, that’s, that’s very exciting, and for the future technology every time something new is announced, like, seen, you mention the, the plane as well. That’s exciting, but, yeah, it moves forward. We’re gonna go into that in a minute. Talk about the Boeing 787.

27:08 Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I just, I can briefly mention that, you know, most people, there’s a great line actually. I should probably read it to you. There’s a philosopher actually, he’s here in London. His name is Alain de Botton. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Alain de Botton, so he’s one of my favorite guys, and he is a pop philosopher.

27:24 He wrote a book called Religion for Atheists, where he says is that museums have a responsibility to create spaces for contemplation, where people that are non-believers can still have religious experiences or encounters with the sacred, or encounters with the epic, which is a thing I totally agree with. He also wrote an amazing book on love called On Love, that’s spectacular. And he, he has a book called The Art of Travel, and in it he meditates on, I guess he’s really meditating on hedonic adaptation, which is our inability to sort of perceive or to become viscerally affected by those things that we become accustomed to.

27:57 When we habituate to something, we stop being affected by it. And it’s really tragic, because the same way with people eating meat, killing animals. Yeah, it’s reversed. It’s habitually the other way, where, right, we’re completely insensitive to the fact that these animals are suffering. I, I couldn’t agree more, and that’s why I support in vitro meat.

28:14 We can talk about that, but you can be that way about anything. I mean, they, they interviewed people that have won the lottery and guys that had their legs blown off in Afghanistan, and they found after a year, completely, they were back to kind of the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and that is, that is a bit of hedonic. Yeah, yeah, but so, so the thing about airplanes, I, I love to travel, mostly because it radically deconditions my thinking. It thrusts me in a place that I’ve never been before, and I see a different cultural operating system, and I’m reminded of the consensus trance of the world that I normally live in.

28:42 I’m excited that I’m reminded of the sort of frameworks of reality and the limitations, and the, our, our sort of inability to see new possibilities for ourselves. It’s many ways the consequences of the spaces we find ourselves in. We change our space, we change the outerverse, we change the interverse. So he’s talking about just airplanes. Airplanes have the capacity to help us transcend time, space and distance.

28:59 When you’re on an airplane, you get to cross oceans of sky, and so one of his meditations is this wonderful thing that he says, he’s talking about being in flight, right? He says there is not much talk about the clouds visible up here. No one thinks it remarkable that somewhere above an ocean we flew past a vast white candy floss island, which would have made a perfect seat for an angel, or even God himself, in a painting by Piero della Francesca. In the cabin, no one stands up to announce with requisite emphasis that out of the window we are flying over a cloud, a matter that would have detained Leonardo.

29:36 Yeah, so true. I was just like, holy moly. So I, when I go to airports, I try to listen to beautiful music and stare at those machines and marvel at them. You, you’re flying through the air at nearly Mach one, right? And, and breathing.

29:51 And travel is such an important part of expanding your mind. When you travel, you learn about yourself. That’s what I was telling you. Go places, you think about your question, why you do things the way you do. Of course.

30:02 Well, you know, and the thing is, here’s where I, again, finding the analogies and finding the patterns between all these attempts to the search for sort of psychological spaces for us to go to, whether it’s illumination, ecstatic illumination, taking the journey, taking the trip, taking the physical trip, the psychological trip, the psychedelic trip, with technology. It’s going so fast and so far. Is it taken us any closer to that? Though, that is, well, I don’t know.

30:23 I mean, we’re going to have to tweak the neurochemistry of our brain in order to expand our consciousness in some way. Well, I hope that we can. You would, you think that you’d support that? That I would support what, tweaking our neurochemistry, if you could genetically make people happy? Yeah, I mean, there’s a guy called David Pearce.

30:39 He wrote a book called an online book or journal called The Hedonistic Imperative, where he advocates using biotech and nanotech to basically engineer Darwinian suffering out of existence. Oh man, using nanotech to literally create outrageous states of consciousness for ourselves. You have to find enlightenment yourself. Like, that’s a journey you’re on. Like, to genetically modify that, you’d lose the whole.

31:00 When you change, I mean, sometimes just thinking a different thought changes your neurochemistry. So is that cheating? I think so. Cuz you have to find it. You change your thought yourself, if chemistry is changing your thought.

31:10 But if we’re, if our technology is us, and there is no separation, and what is without is within, and the atoms of this are the same as the atoms of me, and the atoms and the chemicals we make are the same. So I don’t think we’re any happier than people that didn’t have any technology that lived in fields years ago. I don’t think, I think we have radical new possibilities for self-expression. Yeah, I agree with that, and that’s so exciting, but yes, look, I agree.

31:28 Hedonic adaptation is still a problem. You know, we may have amazing airplanes and jet engines and skyscrapers, and a lot of people still go to work bored most of the time. So that’s true. Is that the principle of your videos, to snap people out of their hedonic? What do you call, yes?

31:42 Well, the principle of my video is what I say, they’re like digital trips, you know, or as my friend Maria used to say, they’re video pills. You know, you take the pill and it does something to you. You have to watch it a few times. Yeah, one of the lines that I always use in my speeches, which I, because it applies so well. It’s a line by Tom Robbins, and Tom Robbins wrote an essay about the plant genies.

32:03 So what he was talking about was psychedelic experiences, right? He was an explorer and seeking altered states of consciousness, and one of the things that he used to say was the plant genies cannot manufacture imagination or wonderment. They don’t create it, but what they can do is pull you so radically out of context that you are then forced, because of the change in context, to gawk in amazement at those ubiquitous everyday wonders you’re culturally disposed to ignore.

32:28 Now, even though he was talking about plant genies, that quote you take away plant genies, and you say taking an airplane to an African safari does the very same thing. It doesn’t manufacture imagination or wonderment, but taking that trip to the African safari will pull you so radically out of context that it will force you to gawk in amazement at the ubiquitous everyday wonders you’re supposed to ignore. You’ll stare at the elephants. You’ll stare at the jungle, and you’ll gawk at something that’s normal there.

32:55 They’re playing, you know. The elephant is normal. It’s a normal thing. If you live there all the time, you would ignore it, but a radical change in perspective, a sort of different context of observation, will force you to be perpetually and continually astonished. Doesn’t sleep do that every night?

33:10 But we’re so habitually used to sleep that dreams are just, oh, that was weird, but I’ll wake up and get away with my day. Forget about it. Go such a trip. Well, dreams are real when you’re in them. I mean, the movie Inception said that, right?

33:21 When you’re in the dream, it’s real. You create and perceive your world at the same time. That’s what’s going on every night. Then we, like, pulled out, but we’re so habitual. Yeah, we quickly get busy.

33:30 I read this essay in Aeon magazine recently about attention, about, like, controlling and, and managing attention as, like, the answer to everything, you know, even though it was, I think it was, not too good of a topic, but I think it was Henry Miller. Henry Miller said even a blade of grass, when given proper and complete attention, becomes a magnificent world in itself. You know, it’s all about what we’re paying attention to. You know, Darwin’s: that attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise, and this into astonishment, and this into stupefied amazement.

34:01 So if we were open to all that there is to sort of ravish us at any given moment, we would be inspired all the time, but we’d probably get run over by the car because we failed to see that the don’t walk sign is on there. So the world forces us to modulate what we pay attention to, to get by, but the consequence of that is that we don’t often get to be in states of awe and marvel, trained out biological advantage, which is one of your videos. Yes, yes, which is, I think that, that, that, that the argument of that video is that regular encounters with the sacred, which with experiences of such perceptual expansion, they smash our mental models of the world.

34:44 In other words, they smash the autopilot that we’re relying on, and force us to take in radically new stimuli that stretches the boundaries of what we have ever seen before. That those experiences leave us with a residual gratitude, with a residual thankfulness and altruism towards others, and all these benefits, you know, and with a sense of purpose, because we come out of those all-like experiences feeling like we’re here for a reason, and we matter, and there’s more to us than conventional thinking allows, and there’s a hidden door, and there’s a rabbit hole to fall through. Wow, there’s more and a community too.

35:23 Yeah, yeah, there are feelings of poetry and grace. You know, it’s, it’s like a feel-good movie, except it’s happening to you, you know. But it’s such a gradual thing. You still get pulled. You have experiences and you’re like, that’s changed my life forever, and in a few weeks you’re kind of back to your old ways.

35:37 A few weeks, you’re in the supermarket, I need to buy some tomatoes. You know, this is my, this is my perpetual battle in life, to figure out how to handle the necessary trivialities and banalities of existence. But it builds up over time. You gradually become more and more like, after each experience, you chip away a piece of your ego or whatever. You try, right?

35:54 You stop tuning into the broadcast of, and you start tuning into the broadcast of the whole, but that’s very hard, because part of the reason we create these wonderful tools in a lot of ways is to sort of outsource banal things. Like, thanks to my iPhone, I don’t have to remember phone numbers ever again. It frees up my brain to go, right, poetry like Hyde Park. But the irony is that it stores all my phone numbers. Yeah, but instead of me using that free time for, like, contemplative rumination, it just makes me free to get busy doing something else.

36:26 Often now, you know, this is the challenge. You know, are we going to use these tools to free our creativity, or are we going to use these tools to just get more efficient at being really busy? Do you think, because of these, like, airplanes and the technology and the internet, that’s say us as people, as again, compared to say 500 years ago, Middle Ages in England, where you might have one moment in your life where you had this epiphany, when I don’t know what happened, you were the king and you were crowned, or you saved your daughter from this?

36:53 And then these days we have all this stuff around us, we can have, we could have a hundred of those a year. Yeah, or not. No, no, I agree with you. I think the potential is there. We’ve never had such possibilities to sort of have religious ecstasy.

37:10 You know, I mean, for the most part there’s not like religious persecution. You know, people are not getting murdered in masses. You know, I mean, it’s like we’re not experiencing genocide to the degree that has been experienced in the past. I mean, Stephen Pinker often talks about the fact that most people don’t know this, because, you know, our media, if it bleeds, it leads, but the world has actually never been less dangerous. It’s actually never been more safe.

37:37 You know, the chances of a man dying at the hands of another man for the average citizen is the lowest than it’s ever been for it’s like 150. He was here three months ago. So yeah, so, so I think that what that, what that proves is that, you know, we shouldn’t spend so much of our time worrying, and we should spend more of our time actively seeking, in safety, illumination. Right? Do you think you were born too late to witness a singularity?

38:02 Do you ever think that, damn it, I’ve only got 60, 70 years, depending on biotechnology, and I’m going to miss what’s really going to happen in 150 years? Dude, I have, I have quite a bit. I’ve, I’ve had quite a bit of anxiety about not having enough time. I think we, anybody who’s sort of sensitive to those things, probably thinks of that, but like, you know, there there’s this anxiety and this fear that there is, so, so much unlived life inside of me that I’m terrified of having that being limited in any capacity.

38:33 There’s a great documentary called Flight from Death that I recommend to everybody to download. It’s based on the work of Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death, which basically says that the human condition is defined by our anxiety about being mortal beings. This is another one of those things I often talk about, because it’s so true. We know we, we, we emerged from nothing, right? We have a name.

38:55 We have self-consciousness. You know, I’m conscious of the fact that I exist, you know, consciousness of self, deep inner feeling. There’s this excruciating yearning for life for self-expression, and yet with all this, cut to the cemetery, you know, the most horrible thing that could possibly happen is going to happen. You know, there’s something profoundly ironic and horrific, frankly, about that idea that’s a condition feeding the, I think, well, I think it’s a consequence of our sort of intense self-awareness.

39:31 I think most animals don’t lose sleep over the fact that they’re mortal beings. I mean, they get scared when under attack, but they don’t lose sleep over it philosophically. I mean, I’ve been in situations where, as Roland Barthes would say, all of my desires have been abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction. So I’ve been in a situation where I’m in love, where I have found the one and she’s in my arms and I feel complete and everything is perfect.

39:56 It’s rapturous, it’s beatific, and even in the throngs of that moment I feel sad. I want to weep, and she’ll say, why, why are you sad? I’m like, because this moment is temporary, fleeting. Because this moment is fleeting. So, but, Roland is afraid of change and what we don’t know, and every time it comes about, it always turns out it was all right in the end.

40:16 And I think death is just another one of those things we’re so afraid of, but it’s another thing we don’t know. That’s poetic. I respect that. I think that you’re spot on, because I mean, I do tell people all the time, don’t be afraid of change. You, you have to embrace change, but I think in this instance is different.

40:30 It’s not the change that I’m scared of. It’s if I’m in a moment that I want to hold on to. I want to decide when the moment ends. So I guess it’s about, maybe it’s not about immortality, but maybe it’s about a yearning for an indefinite lifespan. Maybe it’s about a desire to, you know, I decide when I’m hungry.

40:48 I decide when I’m full. I decide when I cease to exist. Yeah, that would be, that would be the goal. So what are you trying to do before you die? Then, I mean, what is what is the ultimate, ad Jason Silva accomplishment?

40:59 I know that’s such a general question, but like, you have these things in your mind that, like, I do. I need to get this done. I need to get my book done. I need to get this next film done. I don’t know.

41:09 Well, I, I see, I see my life as a series of scenes that I, that I want to inhabit. You know what I mean? So it’s like, as a little kid, I think the reason I worship films is because when I watch movies, I had religious experiences, right? I had what I never had in the synagogue. I had when I watched movies.

41:26 Those were my temples, sitting there in the dark. I was able to sample ecstatic illumination. I was able to sample subjective spaces that were overflowing with just everything, right? Grace, poetry, gratitude, ecstasy. Really such a powerful medium.

41:44 People don’t give it the credit. They don’t, they don’t give it the respect they do. It’s the same thing with many other aspects of life. People ignore rituals and they just overconsume, and they’re gluttonous. But anyway, so my thing with cinema is I would see a movie and I was like, I want to live that scene.

42:01 I want to have that moment. It could be a moment in a movie. It could be a line, a dialogue between two characters. It could be a smile between two characters, set to music, and it’ll stay with me for 15 years, and I’ll go and, like, live that. I remember when I first watched Vanilla Sky.

42:14 I love Cameron Crowe, by the way. He’s one of my favorite directors. Cameron Crowe, Danny Boyle. These guys, you know, they’re brilliant. You obviously, obviously, the director of Inception, Christopher Nolan, is brilliant as well.

42:24 But when I first watched Vanilla Sky, here was a movie about love, about the longing for love, about the longing to transcend our loneliness. It was also a science fiction movie about the desire to transcend our mortality. I mean, the guy gets cryogenically frozen and thrust into a virtual reality environment that is like a lucid dream that’s sculpted moment to moment, but ultimately that movie was about him wanting to hold on to these perfect moments with Sophia, which is this beautiful play by this beautiful Spanish actor called Penelope Cruz, set to, you know, Cameron Crowe’s gorgeous transcendent soundtrack, you know, whether it’s Cigar Rock or Peter Gabriel.

42:58 Every frame between these two characters was just enhanced by this music. I wanted to live inside that lucid dream with her. I wanted to literally be him with her. I wanted to be around her voice, her accent, that smile. I don’t think it’s a surprise that, you know, a few years later my first real love of my life, girlfriend when I was graduating college, was this beautiful Brazilian girl that looked exactly, well, she actually looked like a composite of Penelope Cruz and Vanilla Sky and Virginie Ledoyen from The Beach, from the Danny Boyle movie, The Beach.

43:30 And this girl, this girl, she was Brazilian. She was an exact composite of those two characters, brunette, with beautiful smile like that, and she had the accent of, of, of Penelope Cruz and Vanilla Sky, and I would have her, I would have her feed me lines from the movie. Oh, absolutely. We had little, we lie down in bed like lying down in the pillow, having, like, pillow talk, and I always have my camera. You know, back then, the, it wasn’t as high res as now, but it almost gave it, like, a vintage quality.

43:53 It was, you know, it was like Instagram before there was Instagram. Video, with like the blurry footage, and I would film her and I’d be like, oh, tell me. I would feed her lines from the movie, you know, and it was so haunting to watch. Now I don’t think it’s twisted. You feel like you manifested that, like you brought.

44:06 Yeah, look, yeah, it completely felt like some kind of like cosmic manifestation. It was like I wanted to have those moments so bad, and here’s the thing, I believe that it was possible. You have to believe, you have to believe, you have to believe, and I think that ultimately, you know, George Carlin, actually. There’s a great interview with the comedian George Carlin talking about how he achieved what he achieved in life, how he was able to, like, actually live out his dreams, and he talks about a book he read called Psycho-Cybernetics, and that book was saying that the brain is essentially a machine, a goal-achieving machine, a reality-creating machine, and Psycho-Cybernetics talks about the power of creating impressions that put patterns in your brain that orient the direction that it goes in.

44:47 So he was saying, for example, like when he sees something cool, when he thinks of something cool, he writes it down or he takes a picture. So that’s like the first impression. Is I thought of something cool, or I see something beautiful, inspiring. That’s the first impression. The second impression is take a picture of it or write it down.

45:01 That’s like mark the moment. Second impression, take a picture, smart it down. The third impression is later on that day, look at the picture you took, look at what you wrote down. That’s the third impression. So that’s three impressions, right?

45:10 You had the epiphany, you wrote it down, you took a picture of it, number two. Three, you reflect upon it later. After that third impression, you’ve literally primed your brain with, like, a kind of archetype for that, that it will then unconsciously be on the lookout for, and think serendipity is just filling patterns unconsciously, and then having moments in which it seeps into consciousness, because what will happen is you have the idea, one impression, you write it down, take a picture, second impression, third impression, you think about it later.

45:39 Let’s say it was the girl in the movie. I watched the movie. I thought about the movie. I wrote down of the movie. Later I reflected upon the movie.

45:46 Three months later I meet a girl at the bar. She looks just like the girl from the movie, and she talks just like the girl from the movie, and oh my God, how did this happen? Well, you know, your brain was, you, you might have met her and not noticed her if you hadn’t primed yourself with the whole Psycho-Cybernetics technique, with the kind of multiple impressions. So I think there’s something to that. There’s something about believing that you can create your reality, and at least priming your brain to do that, and then your brain will just, like, it’ll put the pieces together because the raw material is there.

46:14 So you know, if reality is like a soup of the alphabet, and just like a screenwriter, right, the letters are there, the alphabet is there. All the screenwriter has to do is pick the right letters and put the right words, and he can tell any story. The screenwriter is God. He can author any story he wants. The alphabet will allow for anything.

46:34 There are no limits to what he can conjure up and bring into being. So if the raw material of reality is like that alphabet, and we are the authors of our life, and that metaphor is more than a metaphor, because we can script it. You have done it. Yeah, I mean, why do you think I was getting such a kick of hearing your story? You know what I mean?

46:55 Like, like, just what you were telling me. You were saying, oh yeah, you know, I came here, I moved here, and I was in finance, and then I got inspired from this podcast, and I thing I wanted to start my own, and I did it, and all of a sudden, like, you’re doing it, and here we are talking about it, and like this thing that you thought would be cool to do, this thing that you aspired to create, is like a living thing. Like this table, if I hit it, it hurts.

47:17 It’s solid. There is a tangibility evidenced here that was sort of uttered into existence by you as the sort of author of your life, life. And so we can manifest our destiny. Is what you’re saying? Yeah, those bumper stickers have depth to them.

47:31 It’s just that most people are just, they think of those ideas in throwaway ways. Oh, it’s just a bumper sticker. You know, my mom had one. Your minds are like parachutes. They only function when open.

47:40 I’m like, dude, if you read that sentence and pay attention to it, there’s some profound truth in those sentences. Most people don’t know how to apply that, unfortunately. Do you believe in synchronicities then, or do you think it’s just because you’ll know to sing things that are in your reality? Well, I think it’s either or. I, for me, I think it is.

47:54 And Einstein even summed up, he said, yeah, coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. So when you notice these coincidences and synchronicities, that’s a sign. And I’ve read in a lot of things that’s, you know, you’re on the right path. When you notice these synchronicities, you’re like, oh, I must be doing something right, and generally you’re in a good mood and whatever. Anyway, yes, absolutely, and I think there’s something really beatific to that, because again, quantum physics says that the observer is required for reality to exist.

48:16 So, and Joseph Campbell says God is that which exceeds all our intellectual capacity. So it’s not this bearded guy, but it’s just a great metaphor for that which we don’t yet understand. What if we are able to understand it? What if we are able to say, oh, synchronicity is just a glimpse or a brief moment of awareness of the subconscious processes of Psycho-Cybernetics, of you creating these impressions for yourself that will guide us, orienting signposts through life that will be telling you where your path is?

48:44 And that ultimately the hero’s journey is, is like Quest Physics, you know. Not, is that movie Eat Pray Love? You know, which is based on that great book that resonated with so many people. It’s a very deep film. You, you know, it’s a great deep film, and at the end when she says, you know, Quest Physics: if you’re willing to believe that, if you’re willing to leave everything you know behind, if you’re willing to step out of your comfort zone and push yourself outside the constraints of your life and just go on a, a crazy adventure, and if you’re willing to treat everybody you meet as a teacher, and if you’re willing to believe that everybody has something wise to teach you, then the answers will be given to you.

49:18 This is her whole thing about Quest Physics. Believe that, but think about it. Like, are they really there to teach you something, or if you’re willing to believe that they’re going to teach you something, then they end up teaching you something? So the consciousness, the intent, changes the truth of the circumstance. But I witnessed that with friends, though.

49:35 You witnessed them getting into the same situations and meeting people, but I don’t know, if then again, that’s your consciousness, your awareness of the situation. You’re going to perceive it your way, but for me, I think even when they’re not aware and they don’t believe people are teachers, I can still observe it from outside, and think, that could, he’s trying to teach you a lesson. But you can’t tell your friend. But if he, if he didn’t notice the lesson, then the lesson was not taught, and then the person didn’t teach them the lesson.

49:55 Mind needs to be open. If we were taught that from childhood, and that was a school subject, and you, it would be common knowledge, and everyone would look out for situations like that. But because it’s not as common, yes, not everybody’s born, you know, having parents that encourage them to think that way, not many people at all. But if it was a school subject and it became an ordinary thing, then everyone would go through life, and everyone they’d meet, they’d be observing.

50:13 Great stories, though, have those lessons in them. Yeah, Harry Potter has those lessons in them, you know. The Hardy Boys, The Berenstain Bears. I mean, when I was in fourth, fifth grade. I mean, those, that’s what storytelling is all about, right?

50:26 It’s about profound lessons that you should sort of internalize, you know, sugarcoated in an entertaining kind of ride that’s not too challenging, but that is embedded with deep truth. Like dreams, right? Yeah. People say dreams are lessons, but it’s the hardest one to learn. Yes, and most people, most people, unfortunately, you know, they lose their childlike sense of wonder, and so the normal storytelling devices embedded with deep truths that worked when you were a kid don’t work when you’re a grownup, you know, unless maybe you’re high on cannabis, because we do know that people will get stoned, and all of a sudden they’re, oh my God, this story is so profound.

51:01 You know, the air of profundity that that that that is, that cannabis bathes people in, I think ultimately is, it’s, it’s, it’s it’s smashing their preconceptions, and it’s smashing their set of expectations and their mental models, and allowing them to perceive the world a certain way. You know, Carl Sagan used to write a lot about his love of cannabis, but you know, that’s one way I think maybe for some people to get there. Another way is to create media that does the same.

51:25 I think that my videos, I try for my videos to be mind-expanding. I think that this podcast, for example, is an exercise in a mind-expanding session. I think you can’t listen to this for three hours and not be stretched outside your comfort zone, you know what I mean? So I think we’re all trading in the same currency, you know, the currency of mind expansion, the currency of expanding consciousness, expanding awareness, the currency of the addiction. Right now, is yeah, yeah, yeah.

51:48 I think that we’re all playing that game, and it’s the reason why, you know, it’s like we just met and we feel like we already know each other. Oh yeah, yeah. So what is that Silva project that I was asking you about? I know you know. Or is it, well, I’ll tell you what’s going on.

52:01 So here’s the latest update. So what started as these non-commercial mashups, you know, the first couple videos, the Ostaru video, The Beginning of Infinity, and all of these that Joe Rogan was gracious enough to spread out into the world. And I guess it’s how you discovered them, right? Yeah, it is. It is.

52:16 So those videos were great, because they kind of put me on a map within a new community, and all of a sudden I was invited to do a lot of talks. I visited all these places all over the world, and it was great. I was in the International School of Dubai, where the high school girls have a club of like imagination and wonder, dedicated to the Imaginary Foundation, which makes the t-shirts that I wear, and all like Jason Silva video clips, and they’re all like, become wonder junkies.

52:37 Jason Silva Club in Dubai. Dubai. You know, they’re like 16, 17, and they know all my videos. It’s just absolutely insane. You know, and I’ve spoken to corporate executives for IBM and Intel, you know, who are the people that are creating amazing technology that allows all these incredible things, and the ideas to be shared across cyberspace, and I’m talking to them about what they’re doing, and I’m telling them what they’re doing, and hopefully making them inspired in Austr.

53:02 So my life changed. You know, I travel the world and give all these talks, and that’s been fantastic, right? Then National Geographic. Oh, then TED Global, the TED conference asked me to create an original video. Radical Openness was created for TED Global, so I got to show that they opened the conference with that.

53:18 That was last June. Wow, that’s big. Are you a TED fellow? Did they ever invite you to be one? Or, I’m not a fellow, but kind of a regular.

53:24 I used to go do write articles about TED for Big Think or Huffington Post. I used to get a press pass, and then finally I got to be on the stage and show my video open to TED Global, Global, and then did a Q&A on stage. It was amazing, and that led to invites to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I spoke at the Sydney Opera House. Again, like holy moly, right?

53:42 And then National Geographic, they caught wind of my videos, and they were doing this brain series called Brain Games, and it was a spin-off from a three-part special they did two years ago, and they were like, come host this series about the brain. We love your energy. Now, granted, this is a mainstream TV project, so it’s not necessarily as sort of insane as my short videos. You know, Brain Games is something that everybody can play along and follow along.

54:05 It’s meant to be really digestible, but also really smart and challenging at the same time, if that’s possible, right? We worked on it for eight months. The show premiered in the states and it blew up. It was like the highest-rated new series premiere in the history of National Geographic Channel, so of course they want to do another season. It’s English.

54:21 National Geographic, say again, is it on the English one? It’s launching in the UK June 3rd. That’s why I’m here, so I’m here promoting that show. So now, aside from, you know, my talks, like this show is like, it’s a much more accessible brain, Jason Silva basic neuroscience experience, and hopefully people see it, and people like it, and then even more than that, hopefully they go look up my videos afterwards as well. Did you think about not doing TV?

54:43 I mean, you used to be in TV. Okay, this is a different kind of TV, cuz you were, well, you were creating shows, but you’re creating this show, but did part of you say, I don’t want to be the TV guy, or were you like, yes, let’s do this? Well, I wanted to do it, you know, but I was aware that there’s a lot of moving parts in a TV show. There’s a lot of people that are involved. A lot of people have to sign up on stuff.

55:02 You, you manage your earlier videos, you said, and so, complete, my, my earlier videos I’m the writer, director, producer and co-editor. I hire an editor, but I direct. You know what I mean? Every frame has to be right. Yes, here you know, there’s producers, there’s other writers, there’s other editors, so everybody’s got something to say, which is fine.

55:19 It’s a collaboration, but I, I, the artist in me likes to control everything, so I’ll do a collaboration as long as I can have my own side project that makes it fun. I can enjoy Brain Games, and it’s a blast as long as I see power and be cool with that. Right, right. And then, but then the St, which is fine. That’s the essence of collaboration.

55:39 My videos are still the place where there’s absolutely, it’s just Jason Silva way or the highway, and that’s fine. It’s a place where I want to say something very specific, and I want to edit it very specifically, and that’s cool. So Brain Games has taken off. It’s premiering now in the UK June 3rd. It’s premiering in Australia, and then globally actually in NAOI, in like September.

56:01 That’s awesome. And then I also am working with a company called Revision3, okay, which are awesome, because they do, they’re like a digital video production house in San Francisco, and they just launched a new, like, premium YouTube channel called Testtube, and it’s basically going to be like for inspiration junkies, science stuff, short-form segments, and the guy that runs it, who’s also British, actually, Tom Lofthouse, he was like, I want to help you make more of your espresso shots. You know, right now you produce one every 3, 4 months.

56:30 I’m willing to give you the resources, the post-production, the editors, the visual library, to take your videos to the next level. And I was like, I’m in. You know, like, I was, you know, I wasn’t getting paid for this. This was just they were giving me the resources to make the videos. So separate from Brain Games, I started a new YouTube channel actually four days ago.

56:48 It’s called Shots of Awe. So I want everybody listening to go to youtube.com/shots of awe, so yeah, like the philosophical espresso shots. So now they’re Shots of Awe, and, and we had like the video came out three, four days ago, and we’ve had like 88,000 views on it, so it’s pretty good. Let’s see what happens with that. I’m going to be releasing these videos weekly now.

57:10 Wow. So we’re going to have, like, up to 22 Shots of Awe over the next six months, coming out weekly. So again, I implore people to check it out through Revision3. They are doing the producing. Yeah, they’re helping me with all the production.

57:22 I still have full creative control, which is great. Oh, that’s perfect. How many of you shot? We shot for three days in Upstate New York, basically had a download like this, where we shot hours and hours and hours and hours’ worth of footage of you talking, and well, we just had a session, like a shamanic session. Like, you know, we got ourselves into the mental space that we needed to be in.

57:42 We had Canon 5DS, and we just had a list of topics: grief, loss, Singularity, creativity, the nature of creativity, etc. We had made a whole list. We talked about the stoned ape hypothesis of evolution, talked about the power of language. We talked about synesthesia. Basically they were like, write out everything you think is interesting right now, and we’ll en riff on each of these things, and then we work to make those into videos, and actually the new have you seen the newest one?

58:08 No, oh, do you ever play videos on the show? What, I will sometimes, I can splice them in later, so I might do that. Which, if you want to, well, if it’s called, it’s actually just called awe. Okay, and if you go to youtube.com/shotsofawe, it’s like there’s a trailer for the YouTube channel, and then there’s the first video. So if you want to play it during the conversation, it’s, it’s pretty beautiful.

58:30 Cool, we’re going to feature your channel on our YouTube channel, so we’ll put it up there. That’s awesome. So they just you get into a just a crazy, like, Jason mood, and then they just film you, and obviously get the audio, which is probably key. Yeah, and then they, proper labs, proper five, you know, Canon 5D, go into the woods, outdoor, minimal distractions. You want to just get to a place where nothing is going to mess with your flow.

58:52 You were talking before, you have a YouTube channel called Flow. Yeah, okay, so I’m obsessed with flow, like you’re probably familiar with the term flow, like the sort of the idea of creative flow. You talk, you can tell you’re obsessed with flow the way you talk. Jazz musicians when they improv, flow states, painters when they’re painting, writers when they’re writing, martial arts athletes, martial arts, they all talk about this flow space, right? And so recently the science of flow space has become very interesting.

59:18 People want to know, because books about optimum psychology always say that flow states are the greatest type of consciousness humans can be. It’s much better than like money or any, or sex. Being in flow, you feel like God’s flowing. People say that as well, like God’s flowing through you, and you’re just, it comes through you but not from you, and though it is with you, belongs not to you. You know, it’s like channeling.

59:40 It’s like in the zone. In Japan they call it no mind, I think, you know. And that’s the most blissful state to be. Yes, and, and frequently for people that are virtuosos in something, after they’ve spent their 10,000 hours at it, whether it’s martial arts or violin or, or ballet, the 10,000 hours of practice and control are there for that moment in which you let go. As they say in the movie Black Swan, perfection is not just about control.

1:00:04 It’s also about letting go. So you spend your 10,000 hours, and then you get to the point where you shut off the mind and you trust that the knowledge is implicit, and then you can go into a flow state whenever you want. You L the 10,000, then you can access it. Well, that’s that would be the hope, right? Like to be able to be a flow virtuoso in anything.

1:00:21 You still have to have spent the blood, sweat and tears to become. You know, well, you have to be in the right environment as well, to be like, about to be, you have to. Yeah, yeah, to create the right environment. So, but anyway, recently in searching for the science of flow states, there was recently some, some really interesting stuff that was published. So they did fMRI scans on the brains of freestyling rappers.

1:00:41 So they had these rappers just riff on an idea, which is kind of similar to when I’m riffing about something. It’s unscripted, right? You are a spoken word artist, really? I mean, some people have said that, but you know, spoken word artist has sort of this association of a style of performance. I think it’s different from what I do, but still, so and then they compared those fMRI scans with rappers that were reciting memorized lyrics.

1:01:05 Now, I often, I have a very verbatim memory for quotes, you know, so I do a little bit of both. I do freestyling and reciting lyrics and remix the recited lyrics with the freestyling. But what they found in those fMRI scans is that the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for self-editing, actually dims during the flow states. So when the rapper is reciting the non-memorized lyrics, when he’s freestyling, the self-editing part of his consciousness is not firing.

1:01:36 Yeah, so it’s pure flow. Yeah, it’s free association without a filter. So think about that. You need to be able to say, now he needs to still be a creative guy that has a certain lexicon, and the martial artist still has to have the technique, but when you get out of your own way, so to speak, the only thing standing in your way is you, right? Is your own censoring yourself.

1:02:00 Then what happens is that flow, ego and everything, as well. Exactly. So you try constantly exploring flow and optimize your own flow. Do you watch it in other people and try to see how they get in their flow? There’s a school, there’s a place or an entity, an organization, people should Google it.

1:02:16 It’s called Flow State University. Flo State University, and the Flo Dojo is a group of scientists, writers, thinkers and neurologists, neuroscientists, who are exploring the science of flow states and creating this think tank to sort of teach people how to get in their flow and running all these flow dojo workshops, cuz flow is, I mean, all these people that are obsessed with neuroenhancers and neurosupplements, and this idea of enhancing our cognition, these new generation of smart drugs that are surely going to come online. It’s all about this, right?

1:02:45 It’s all about tapping into your maximum potential. Flow states, like how do we get flowing? How limitless, right? Like the movie Limitless, and I’m totally, I’m, I’m on board for that, for sure. Now we, I mean, sitting right here is the man, the ultimate man of flow.

1:02:57 Here, I mean, what Timothy does is, I guess, you’ve probably logged your 10,000 hours, but you get out and you see like an outdoor scene and you flow into it. Yeah, it’s a lot rehearsed, though. It’s, it’s, you still, it’s not just like you run, and, like, I think break dancing has more element of flow sometimes, which was my background, which helps me put that into freerunning. But it’s, you have an environment, and then you have to be creative. You have to think, okay, there’s two walls here.

1:03:20 Most people would just jump, but what can I do that’s different? And that’s what I’m trying to come on with, a flow that, my mind’s more of a planned flow of different moves that you’ve pictured in your head yourself doing. And, like, do you ever find yourself improvising mid? There’s a bit of that, but no one’s, I think that’s where the future of the sport is, cuz you know, it’s such a young sport, not that it’s like still filtering through to people that know about it, but I think that’s exactly where the future of it is, when you get people only just starting to log those 10,000 hours, maybe, and they’re only just starting to, like, begin.

1:03:47 There’s a few guys from Russia that look like they do that, that they just throw the body and they just know they’re always going to end up in a certain way, and they can just go, go with the flow. But that’s that, yeah, that’s the, you can’t be, you can’t be invested with the outcome. If you want to create a beautiful piece of art, you know, you can’t be, you can’t be obsessed with what other people are going to think. You can’t be obsessed too much with the result.

1:04:06 I mean, you ultimately just have to go and be in the moment, enter it. Yeah, ultimately isn’t that how you make beautiful things? Yes, well, they, that’s why people say you have to lose yourself. Yeah, I mean, people say I don’t want to lose myself, I like myself. Like, it’s what they mean by lose yourself.

1:04:21 Is that, like, forget the critic, forget, you know, self-consciousness is not the same as being conscious. You know, self-conscious is when you go up on stage and you get nervous, and you’re all self-conscious, and you think everybody’s looking at you and scrutinizing you, and you know you don’t want to be self-conscious. It’s not fun. It’s also not attractive to other people. People who are really self-conscious just come across as, like, you know, self-obsessed, really and just awkward.

1:04:45 But like, so when people say, yeah, we’re all of us, man, but when people say losing yourself, the whole point of losing yourself, they’re saying, is get rid of the self-consciousness. So remember why you’re there and do what it is you love doing, and it’s not about impressing them. It’s about sharing in your ecstasy, sharing with them your ecstasy, like that’s why you’re supposedly do what you do, and if you’re doing it in a public way, it’s only because you love it so much, you want them to sample why you love what you love, you know, and ultimately that’s what it should be.

1:05:14 It’s also for getting your social conditioning, though, as well, because especially with the freerunning, you’ve seen a lot of YouTube videos, you know what moves people commonly do, and so it’s so quick for people to instantly want to just repeat that. It’s removing everything you’ve seen ever, and then getting into that moment of just actually flowing is also losing the it’s hard, man. That’s how people do meditation. That’s why they do yoga. That’s why, you know, there’s all these ways, TM, take smart drugs.

1:05:38 Smart drugs, you know. I mean, it’s always been about, like, you know, it’s like, okay, I’m going to go warm up and jog in order to warm up. You know, I’m going to get this many hours of sleep to get myself the way I… This is the kind of diet that energizes me. You know, people know their own subjective experience.

1:05:54 You know, Eric Davis wrote an article about experience design, and he says, as we come to understand the neuro, neuro, neurophysiology of lived experience, right, the psychopharmacology of lived experience, how the chemicals that are required to have a certain kind of, like, mood or, or, or, or subjectivity, as we come to understand that, then we can learn to modulate that. You know, the same way we can, like, raise the volume on our music. You know, when we’re in a certain mood in the car, relax, I love this song, raise the volume on it, then you’re immersed in the music.

1:06:24 Moments you’re like, lower it. You know, if you can up the volume and lower the volume of your TV or your car stereo system, you know, why can’t you modulate how open you are to existence? So you’re all for this technology, pharmaceuticals, whatever, for increased modulation in our ability to control and shape our subjective experience, our ability to inform our subjective experience. So like, when I get on the subway in New York, it’s like, turn the volume down, and I don’t want to think about the fact that I’m underground, and I don’t want to think about the fact that I’m scared that one of these guys is maybe going to, you know, mug me.

1:06:54 Like, you lower the volume, put aside the, that the resonance with the set, in the setting. But when I go to the park here in Kensington Park, I’m like, open up, Jason, open up, open the pores, open the pores, let those trees in, let that sun in, let that sky in, let that London-isness in. You know, stop, you’re looking at the specific and instead see the universal. But you know, ping-ponging between the openness and being closed, you know, that modulation is tricky.

1:07:22 Yes, has to figure out how, what works for them. I would be interested in standardizing that and creating some kind of technology. You know, this is the pill that ups the volume on how you perceive reality. This is the one that lowers it. I mean, people say psychedelics are for that exact reason, but you know, who knows, and there’s dangers there, but you’re, you see the positive as so outweighing the negatives that you want to charge forward.

1:07:41 And I mean, I think that that fire can cook our foods or burn us. Yeah, and it’s, I’m not going to, about to say ban fire, because there’s a risk. Like, there’s always a risk. Uh-oh, raw food diet is the best diet, and cook food, if it, there, some, there’s some people that say that it wasn’t until we discovered fire we were able to actually cook the animals that we were hunting that our brains actually grew. I hear, I hear that.

1:08:05 It is a very valid point to get to the stage we’re at, but I think to further consciousness is to stop doing that, cuz you can live perfectly healthy, happy. That’s fair. That’s a good point. If I had a vegan chef that made me amazing meals every day, right, I would have no problem. Every day, I might do that too.

1:08:21 It’s just just kind of complicated to fit it into the life, but when you realize how much a part that plays in spirituality and evolving consciously, that’s true. If you’re looking at yourself, you’re looking at who you are and the things you’ve, I’m not trying to be that preacher guy, cuz you must have everyone’s heard this talk, right, that the diet changes how you see the world. It could be a good way to get you in the flow as well. Yeah, and the, and the way I said this before, when animals are slaughtered, you know, know what energy is going around their body, their consciousness, and then you ingest that.

1:08:47 You don’t know what you’re taking in, and it’s point made. Score one for the vegan. I know everyone said it before. I hate to go there. A valid, it needs to be said.

1:08:55 It needs to be said. Tim, sorry, Jason. A very London Real question is, if you could pick up the phone and make a phone call to the 20-year-old Jason Silva and give him a bit of advice, and it can’t be, keep making those cool videos, what would you tell him? You know what’s really funny, man, is that I actually, when I was 20 years old, I recorded messages to my future self, which is the opposite of that. Why am I not surprised?

1:09:19 Yeah, dude, it’s funny. If you watch videos of, like, I used to have these salons in my house, house in Venezuela. We had a beautiful deck and it looked kind of like Hollywood Hills, if you imagine that geography, just green, and everybody lives in the hills, and I used to have my friends over. We videotaped each other having these conversations. It was like a non-broadcast podcast.

1:09:36 Yeah, it’s like we just literally had the cameras. We’d interview each other. You know, we did what teenagers do in high school parties or get-togethers. And, you know, we would get into this headspace. It was very similar to Charles Baudelaire, the poet, who wrote about Charles Baudelaire’s hashish house in Paris, where the artists and the poets and the scientists would all get together and drink all this wine, and they would smoke all this hash, and then they would transcend their individual selves and go to this other place, right, enter the space of complete beatitude.

1:10:07 I’m not saying we did that, but you know, I, I do like Baudelaire’s accounts of that. But anyway, in my salons we did used to videotape each other and interview each other about all these ideas, and a lot of the times the insights that I would get that would emerge, that would be occasioned by the space we were in, I would often say, oh my God, God, Jason, don’t forget this feeling, don’t forget this moment, this is what it’s about, this is truth, this is illumination, like this is what I want to do with my life. It became the moments of clarity was so intense, and I was obsessed with immortalizing those insights.

1:10:35 Like, that’s always been my thing, this obsession with bottling these moments that are pivot moments, moments that are going to shift the way the rest of my life unfolds, are important to, like, hold on to. You know what I mean? Because if it’s a pivot moment, you don’t want to forget it the next day. You don’t want to say, oh my God, I’ve had a transcendental shift in how I want to live my life, and then you go to sleep and the next day it’s gone. No, no, no, no, no.

1:10:57 And I think that that’s what, that’s why your videos exist. I think it’s cuz you find it so important to make them happen at that moment, and you’re able to summarize them. So, so, so you’re just saying you did give advice to yourself at 20, you were saying to my future self, to your future self, to remember this moment, or remember the important things? Yeah, yeah. The irony is that when I watch them, I’m simultaneously like, oh, that’s so cool, and at the same time I get a little freaked out, because I’m like, wow, time has passed.

1:11:21 I mean, I like that I remembered all those things, that’s cool. What I don’t like is, like, oh man, 10 years older. It shows you how much, well, less time left. I mean, 30 still really young, but, and a slight corollary to that question, before we wrap up, is what, what advice would you give to the 20-year-old that wants to, you know, grow up and be like Jason Silva one day, or wants to just, I don’t know, wants to expand their mind, and I don’t know, all these new things?

1:11:47 Yeah, well, my mom was a teacher, and she taught at the American School in Venezuela. Her name’s Linda. She’s awesome. If she’s listening, I love you. She probably, but she is the kind of teacher that they make movies about, you know, that teacher that, like, 20 years later the student will still write a letter and say, you changed my life, you changed how I see the world, you change.

1:12:07 I mean, this is, she’s a, you know, she’s a holy moment person. She is that’s what she is, and that’s how everybody describes her. So what was that movie about that teacher in South Central Los Angeles? He was that Hispanic guy, played by Edward James Olmos, and he was like chopping up the hamburgers. They’ve made a bunch of those movies.

1:12:22 Yeah, so I think that, you know, I, one of the things she always encouraged, I feel very blessed that she was my mother, because she always used to say, like, that what you’re passionate about, that your bliss, that was, that was like, that was, you know, in her mind, God, or the infinite, or the inexplicable, or the ineffable, guiding the way, like, listen to your heart, listen to your passion, and she had really only one rule. I mean, that was like her rule, was very simple. It was just like, be kind.

1:12:49 You know, if you’re kind, you know, practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty, then like the sky is the limit. You know, the only thing you’re not supposed to do is hurt other people. But like, other than that, bro, like it’s infinite creativity, right? And she never said you can’t. You know, she said whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, either way you’re right.

1:13:09 That’s what she used to say. So I feel very lucky, and that’s the same advice I think I would give to anybody. Right? What if the afterlife is that feeling of bliss that you feel? And it is completely, 100%, feels that way, and there just glimpses of when you live right, you find this position, and, but we’ve forgot that we’ve come from the afterlife, whatever, and so if you live right, then you end up, you go back to that place, and you can live there because you proved yourself on earth.

1:13:31 It’s, it’s a theory. I’m not saying it’s that’s what I believe. Well, look, man, I’m slightly envious of people of faith. You know, I think that religion has really messed things up in so many ways, and you know, religious violence, and religious jihad, and religious bigotry, is so, every, I mean, I find it grotesque. Okay, I find it grotesque, and I think history has shown us that religion has a very bad rap.

1:13:58 However, the religious who are kind and interpret their religion as an act of love and a way of living with kindness and rapture, there are those people, and even though I’m not necessarily one of them, I envy the reassuring way in which they experience the world, because they seem like they’re not afraid of death, and that’s kind of something that I can’t relate to. What if you’re, it must be nice not to be afraid. You know, what if what you believe comes true?

1:14:29 Like, you believe that up to this point, but when it comes to death, you don’t, let, put it this way, when it comes to the idea of consciousness persisting after death, I’m not convinced, but I hope, I hope I’m wrong. I think, I think you’re wrong, brother. I think you might find it as well. I hope I’m wrong too. I think you just want to live forever, and you keep creating.

1:14:47 Yeah, well, look, that’s the thing. I want my, I don’t want to not exist, so you know, my sense of self, looking upon the world, having infinite reflections and reson, is that not ego? You must, I don’t know if it’s ego, because the moments I like the most are egoist moments, but they still require a self to experience them. I think when people talk about ego death, they’re not talking about death. Yeah, I think ego death just means the part of you that is selfish gets out of the way, but it’s still, there’s still an observer.

1:15:16 Yeah, we need a new word for ego, cuz ego is such a polarized term, but it’s necessary within it. And yeah, it’s necessary, it’s necessary to create something, and so yeah, we need a slightly different word that doesn’t have all these, all this baggage with it, cuz if you say I have an ego, then you’re, yeah, you can’t discuss it with some people because it sounds like egoic. This has been rad, man. Dude, thank you for having me. Jason Silva, you know, everything I hoped today would be was that and more.

1:15:43 Oh good, I can’t wait to share this, because I think this has been the most rich and in-depth conversation I’ve had recorded since my appearance on Joe Rogan. Wow, that’s quite. I have to be, I have to be completely honest. This, the nature of where we took the talk, that format, oo, it’s, it’s, it’s what I like, man, and I’ve been meaning to go back on Joe Rogan. I just haven’t been to LA, but I’m glad we did this, because this has that spirit, man.

1:16:09 Dude, it’s all about getting in the flow. So, thank you, Mr. Silva, for being here. No problem. I appreciate. Nice to have a, with a flow guy, a freerunning flow guy.

1:16:17 Yeah, there you go. Definitely check out Brain Games, which is going to be, that, you said June 3rd, here in the UK, in the, yeah, National Geographic Channel. I love that channel, and I just love the fact, I love the fact that people are going to meet you through this, and then they’re going to get to see other things you do. Yeah, you know, that’s cool. Thanks, man.

1:16:33 Yeah, I’m, I’m very excited to connect with your audience, and I would love for them to check out my new YouTube channel, youtube.com/shotsofawe, and also I’m on Twitter. Jason Silva, please tweet at me. I try to read most of them and reply as many people. Silva, awesome. Silva.

1:16:48 Yeah, exactly. Most people think Silver. No, no, Silva. Jason Silva. Awesome, check him out there.

1:16:54 You can subscribe to the Flow channel as well, youtube.com/flow. I’ve got videos on both coming. Okay, Livewire is your handstand videos. Flow, flow is all your stuff that you’re doing for YouTube, and have you, you said you got some comedy stuff coming out. It came out on the weekend, on Friday.

1:17:12 Yeah, yeah, the community love it. Really, it’s one of, and they think we’re real, cuz we were playing like arrogant stunt men, like, off, it was behind the scenes of what we shoot, and so it was like The Office style. Yeah, I like the fact that he’s always like pushing it to a new place. You know, a lot of guys would just keep doing freerunning parkour. I’m trying to, so they’re like doing this behind the scenes ego humor, or you’re doing your life in a handstand stuff.

1:17:33 So I don’t know, that’s all cool. So, please, doing that. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, please subscribe, and if you want to see all of our faces, if you want to see Tim, Timothy dressed in white, come see us on YouTube channel London Real TV. We’re on Twitter. We’re on Facebook.

1:17:46 Join the party. A lot of people want to know about interning. We got about 15 interns worldwide, so if you want to do that, send me an email at [email protected] them up. Yeah, it’s, it’s just, it’s a lot of fun, because they just, to be, get to be part of the show, and they get to learn a lot. Andrea, shout out, Andre.

1:18:02 Yeah, Dre. Dre is our main guy, PR coordinator, and three of them have gone on to the industry to work full-time. So it’s just all good. It’s this whole, like, self-perpetuating awesomeness. products, the Bulletproof Coffee, etc., etc.

1:18:18 All right, you know, thanks so much. If we can be of help in any way, anything in your future, please just ask, because it’s just cool seeing what you’re doing, man. Likewise, man. This has been awesome. Thank you, sweet guys.

1:18:30 All right, until then, it’s about the journey. Yeah, very good. Got it. All right, it’s well done. Peace, guys.

1:18:35 I like that. Cheers. All right, peace. How do you make that funny? It’s got.

1:18:41 It’s got. I’ll make it funny. You show up tonight and I’ll show. Yeah, you make it money. Uh, done.

1:18:49 I, I don’t know. I’d say about 80% of the time I succeed, and then 20% of the time the audience goes, that’s pretty good odds. Yeah, that’s good odds. Do you do like