Jason Silva - Transform Your Consciousness

Full transcript: Jason Silva on London Real

4:28 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest Yesterday is Jason Silva, the media artist, futurist, keynote speaker, and TV personality. You hosted five seasons of the Emmy-nominated global TV hit series, Brain Games, on the National Geographic Channel, and your inspirational YouTube videos, Shots of Awe, our weekly micro documentaries on futurism, technology, innovation, existentialism, and the human condition. They are hugely popular with over 100 million views.

5:06 Jason, welcome back to London Real. It’s been five years. Yes, thank you. Great to see you again, man. What’s going on?

5:13 What’s going on? It’s so good to reconnect. Dude, agreed. Congratulations, this is awesome. Thank you, man.

5:18 Yes, the set just looks amazing. We’re seven years in, and I think when you would come on the show, Brain Games hadn’t yet happened yet. It was just on the cusp. We were doing the international press conference for it. Something like that, yeah.

5:32 Yeah, and your YouTube videos on Shots of All was, you were thinking of, it was starting out. Just starting out. Just starting. You caught me right in the beginning. You had seen a few of them.

5:42 And you had, of course, before that made your own videos. And I’d seen you on Rogan and that kind of thing. So you were doing bits of that, but then all of that stuff ramped up. And so. Kind of all blew up at the same time.

5:52 It was kind of crazy. So Brain Games came out around 2013 was the premiere and it was the highest new series launch ratings in the history of the channel. So it just like blew up, unexpectedly so. And you know, they launched in 171 countries, that National Geographic can be seen at, and so it just became a global hit, which was insane. At the same time, I partnered with Discovery Digital Networks, which ironically is a competitor of Nat Geo, but I partnered with them just for digital to be my partners for Shots of Oz, to officially launch the YouTube channel.

6:24 And so, Shots of Oz became like my philosophical soapbox where I could continue to do my short form content about any and all things that I was passionate about or my noble obsessions, so to speak, but meanwhile I had this mainstream platform with Brain Games, which was a show on National Geographic that parents loved, kids loved it. We were nominated for an Emmy. I was nominated for an Emmy. So everything converged in 2013 and things just kind of blew up before I knew it.

6:51 The speaking stuff went crazy and I was like traveling the world talking about tech and singularity and biotech, nanotech, artificial intelligence, boom. And it was just like all three things came together and this was right around the time where you and I connected. So it’s been a bit of a ride. What was it like wearing those two hats where on one sense you’re like known by, you know, everyone in all of America. On the other hand, being this guy that puts together these really edgy, you know, at times esoteric, but then mainstream thoughts at the same time.

7:23 And did you ever think about one or the other? Well, the thing about Brain Games is that it kind of legitimized me as a science communicator, right? So National Geographic is a highly respected brand and Brain Games was all about our perceptions and misperceptions of reality, you know? It was a show about neuroscience. We had neuroscientists on the show explaining key ideas about the brain and how often reality is coupled to perception and how often perception is skewed.

7:48 So you don’t see the world as it is, you see the world as you are. This was a philosophical takeaway from a scientific show. So getting to promote the show and getting to promote these highly philosophical implications of reality being warped by our skewed perception, but having that backed up by neuroscience and having all these cool little games I could play when I went to promote the show on the Today Show kind of made me a sort of an accessible person who was like making people trip out a little bit and then whoever was engaging with that and was interested in what I was talking about could then dig deeper and find my videos where I took these philosophical implications such as reality is coupled to perception so then they’re like wax philosophical about what that means and then that’s what Shotsava was for, to dig deeper.

8:35 What does it mean if reality is coupled to perception? So then what is perception? Well, we have these lenses of perception, and we see with our lenses, and we see through our lenses, but we don’t often see the lenses themselves. And when we do see the lenses themselves, we realize, hey, we have some kind of agency over our perception in the world, right? We can mediate our perception.

8:52 We can hack our perception. So this has let me down a whole rabbit hole of consciousness hacking, and stewardship of internal life, and wanting to engender my own reality and create my own movie. If we don’t really get a direct experience of reality anyway, if reality is being mediated by the processes in our brain, perhaps we can exercise creative agency over those processes and give ourselves the experience of reality that we wish. So this is where science becomes about us taking control, a creative control over our experience.

9:25 And you’ve always been talking about that creative control, or is that something more you’ve been playing with the last few years? Well, to be honest, in the beginning, My videos were a celebration of the human capacity to transcend our limitations. My videos were all about technology. You could almost call it techno porn because I was an unapologetic techno optimist and I drank the Kool-Aid of singularity and this idea that we could engender our own godhood that our tools were scaffoldings of our minds and we could use our tools to transcend our limitations.

9:57 We didn’t stay in the caves. We didn’t stay on the planet. Soon we won’t even stay within the limitations of biology. This was something I could drink in because it provided an antidote to existential despair. Because we are mortal beings who long for immortality.

10:12 We are constrained and we are finite and this causes an unbearable amount of angst because we can ponder the infinite but we’re housed in heart pumping, breath gasping, decaying body. So I fell for the Ray Kurzweil singularity narrative because it provided an antidote to this feeling of being constrained by our mortality and finitude. This was the beginning of shots of awe, a rallying cry to overcome our limitations. It was very much inspired by a book by Alan Harrington called The Immortalist when he said, we must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everyone.

10:51 So I’m like, give me that. But in the meantime, in addition to my advocacy for the human machine enterprise and us building tools to overcome our limits. In the meantime, we have to also find a way to manage our day-to-day reality. How do we mitigate against depression? How do we mitigate against anxiety?

11:11 How do we mitigate against boredom? How do we mitigate against existential despair in case our technology project fails us? And so then it became this idea of like, okay, well, we need to learn to hack our day-to-day perceptions. And so from that was born my interest in mediating consciousness, in flow, in alter states of consciousness, in psychedelics, psychoactive compounds, in cannabis, any and all ecstatic technologies that I could find. And so this has become the material, the fodder for a lot of my videos now.

11:48 Was there any blowback ever from a mainstream show like Brain Games on Nat Geo when you You start talking about psychedelics and cannabis and these types of things. Is that a tough line to walk? I suppose it could be. I was on the cover earlier this year of Dope Magazine, which is one of the largest cannabis lifestyle magazine. We’ve seen the mainstreamification of cannabis in America with legalization in California and Nevada and all these places and the majority of Americans now supporting legalization, so all of a sudden a psychoactive herb that’s been highly controversial for years is now socially acceptable.

12:24 And here I was on the cover, and the title was Brain Games with the Wonder Junkie. So they totally used the connection to Nat Geo and to Brain Games for this article where I was talking about playing games with our brain using cannabis, and citing people like Michael Pollan, who’s written extensively about cannabis, or his new book, How to Change Your Mind, is all about deploying psychedelics as tools to help us mitigate against depression and anxiety by knocking offline the autobiographical mind and the default mode network the rigid thoughts and the over-ordered, overly ordered ego that has become oppressive and using tools and technologies to knock that offline and to, in the interview with Dope Magazine, they were like, oh yeah, well this all sounds like playing games with our brains, and essentially that’s what we’re doing.

13:07 We’re deploying all these ecstatic technologies and we’ve all become what Eric Davis calls ecstatic technicians of the sacred, you know? Where we’re just tinkering and messing around with our neurochemistry and trying to see if we can make ourselves better. It’s not just curing ourselves of our ills, but it’s about making well people better. Which is very much the Rick Doblin argument as well. His work with MAPS, you know, using MDMA to help people suffering from PTSD.

13:34 Who in one or two sessions, apparently 80% of patients who undergo the MDMA therapy no longer meet the criteria for PTSD, talk about playing games with our brains. And so I felt like I had an opportunity to be an advocate for the responsible deployment of ecstatic technologies to essentially play games with our brains and make ourselves better. And if I could be an eloquent advocate for these tools and technologies and have the data to back it up that I could cite or the organizations that I could point to that were doing this responsible research, then I essentially could be, or could opt to be one of the advocates or the mouthpieces for these ideas and these movements that are happening that could help alleviate the suffering of people and I could do it in a way that wasn’t really that controversial, right?

14:27 It’s like the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan used to say. When he went to visit Timothy Leary in jail, he said, you’re a performance philosopher. You’ve gotta go on talk shows, you’ve gotta smile. You are the product that you’re selling. If you’re talking about deploying psychedelics to make this a better world, then you’ve gotta be the embodiment of that.

14:46 You’ve gotta look like somebody that people wanna be. You’ve gotta talk like somebody that people aspire to be like. And so that resonated with me a lot. The medium is the message. You are the message, so.

14:57 Right, and the medium is you and me, right, yeah. Absolutely, man, I mean, it’s what you’ve done with this podcast. It’s making these kinds of conversations, it’s bringing these kinds of minds and dressing them up, having them sit here like they’re movie stars, talking about the biggest ideas in the history of the world. I mean, bravo, you know. Well, you’re a bit like Michael Pollan in that sense because you’re kind of very much accepted by the mainstream.

15:20 And then when they pump over shots of awe, they’re like, wait a second, mommy, this is the guy that just taught me to alphabetize the days of the week and I couldn’t figure it out. And now he’s talking about awe, which is fascinating. And technology and singularity and flow, and then every now and then altered states. And that’s kind of what we need. Well, I think it’s very important to know your audience, right?

15:40 And so if I’m at a cocktail party where the vibe is a bit more conservative, or if I’m meeting my girlfriend’s parents and the vibe is whatever it is in that situation. It’s like, how can I infer the mental states of others? How can I meet them where they’re at? And how can I introduce certain ideas into the conversation without offending them or shutting them down? Because if you introduce a controversial subject matter undelicately, the first thing that people will do is shut down and immediately judge you and no longer are open to any kind of discourse.

16:14 And so you lose, you know, you lose. But if you can find a way of inviting them to a comfortable place, a comfortable meeting point, if you can meet them halfway, if you can know where they’re coming from and address their concerns before you make your case for your own advocacy, you know, I think you can reach people. And that’s worth doing, right? Yeah, you know, you talk about awe a lot. I do, that’s a big theme for me.

16:40 Yeah, and it’s a word, maybe because the 80s got overused a lot, you know? But it’s funny, that’s what a lot of us are looking for, oftentimes in our life, and we’re looking about hacking it. And I told you a few months ago, I went down to Costa Rica with Dennis McKenna, and I had three ayahuasca ceremonies, and I’m doing that, I’m tinkering with my brain, and I’m trying to engineer something that I know I need to see, and I actually, I know the actions I need to take, but I’m missing the awe.

17:09 So I went down there, and with these medicines, and with the ceremony, and I actually engineered one of the most profound experiences in my life. And I had it, and then I came back, and I tried to integrate. And it’s very, very difficult. And I see you, as similar to a psychedelic, you’re out there putting these shots of awe around the world, trying to, I think change human consciousness. And I’m always curious, like when someone watches one of your videos, maybe they’ve gotten to this awe state, and then they come back to the rest of the reality, and they have to integrate that.

17:42 Have you thought about that sometimes? Well, the integration is definitely a key theme. It’s very important to integrate experiences that take you out of yourself. The whole notion that once a mind is stretched by a new idea, it never returns to its original position. But it definitely somewhat returns to somewhat, I mean, original position.

18:04 You’re never the same again, but you’ve gotta be able to go back. After the ecstasy, the laundry, you’ve got to be able to chop wood and fetch water. So there’s got to be an integration, otherwise the experience can be too destabilizing. And if there’s not some take away, some output from that that you can integrate into baseline, because we live in baseline, right? Like we live in a world in which we have to collaborate with other people, we have to have consensus.

18:27 The red light, when the light is red, you don’t cross the street. Like we need rules and consensus and compliance to a certain degree in order to collaborate and cooperate. So you can’t just spiral out into your own ecstasy and not be able to integrate that back into a world in which you have to live with other people, you know? And so that’s very important. The subject of awe, of course, this is a favorite of mine because an experience of awe is highly destabilizing.

18:52 You know, awe used to be not just about encounters with the sublime, but it used to be encounters of what auto-rank, I believe, called the Mysterium Tremendum e Fasinosum, which is the sort of unfiltered totality of existence. You know, here you are naked and trembling before the cosmos, sitting on a mode of dust, Suspended in a sunbeam in an infinite black void of space with a little beating heart being the only thing that keeps you alive in an infinite cosmic ash of nothing like it’s Like the awe can be terrifying, you know something so much bigger than yourself can can shrink you into nothingness, you know but I think that This is where whether The kind of the interpretive frameworks matter So there were some recent studies in Stanford and Berkeley on the subject of awe and the description they used I think was very apt So they describe awe as an experience of such perceptual vastness right such perceptual Expansion that your mental models of the world that you’ve created as a kid and adolescence You know you create these algorithms and these maps of the world right that you use to Engage with and manage the world and for the most part as Michael Pollan says these algorithms serve us They allow us to kind of run on mostly autopilot most of the time.

20:07 But when an experience shows up that supersedes or exceeds your models, you can’t automatically be like, oh, I know what this is, the been, there’s, and done that’s of the adult mind. Occasionally, something shows up, whether it’s the birth of a child or a psychedelic experience or seeing through the Hubble Space Telescope images of the deep field, and it’s an experience that is so much more vast. It’s beyond your perceptual models that now, all of a sudden, you have to accommodate.

20:32 You have to make room for accommodation for this new experience. It’s no more been there than seeing that. Now it’s like, okay, holy shit, never seen this before. How do I accommodate my maps to account for this? I’ve learned the lesson, again, that the map is not the territory, that there is more to the world than I thought there was.

20:52 So my nodding resignation, the adult resignation, the jadedness that seeps into our pores, you know, the way that habit deadens is agitated by this. And it can be exhilarating or it can be scary, but the point is it demands a response, right? And in this act of accommodation to this new experience, you might describe it as at its best an exhilarating neurostorm of intense intellectual pleasure, an experience of cognitive ecstasy, Certainly for people like Carl Sagan, he used to say understanding is a kind of ecstasy.

21:27 Isaiah Berlin said to understand is to perceive patterns. A new Gestalt is revealed. You have an experience of connecting the dots. You have an aha, you have a cathartic revelation. Joseph Campbell calls it the apotheosis, right?

21:40 The moment of resurrection, realization, the moment of the cosmic download. I think something, this guy who, his last name is Moore, I can’t remember his first name. He says this is a version of dying into your old self so that something new can be born, right? You have to surrender. If you cannot submit, you cannot die.

21:58 If you cannot die, you cannot be reborn. And this is what happens during an experience of awe, and that’s why it can be terrifying until you learn to surrender, until you learn to let go. And when you do, well, according to Tim Doody, this is what happens. The self, you recontextualize the self as a marvelous conduit in a timeless whole from which molecules and meanings flow from neurons to nebula and back again. So in other words, you become one with the universe, right?

22:31 You are part of the universe, but guess what, the universe is a part of you. You have Carl Sagan’s notion that I am a way for the cosmos to know itself. And this recontextualization of the self blasts new tunnels between the mind and the other. It ticks the box of Tolstoy in the sense that you find a way of bridging the finite with the infinite. And that is what a mystical experience is, right?

22:55 William James, the American psychologist says that if an experience of awe and rapture or poetic rhapsody ticks all these boxes, feelings of interconnection, feelings of communion with the infinite, feelings that you are part of love something larger than yourself, feelings of ecstatic well-being, feelings of a noetic truth that’s deeper than the literal grid of the everyday, if an experience ticks all those boxes, that is considered a mystical experience. And we know that that is healing. All the studies being done at Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College of London, with people suffering from treatment-resistant depression and treatment-resistant anxiety, are given a single dose of psilocybin psychedelic mushrooms in a controlled environment with two therapists in the room.

23:38 If they have a mystical experience, which a large majority of them do, they are healed of their existential distress. they no longer meet the criteria of depression and or anxiety. Why? Because the whole story of who and what they are has been transformed. They say the beginning of a personal crisis is when the story you tell yourself about yourself is no longer convincing, right?

23:59 But you have an experience of awe. You have an experience of opiated adjacency. You have an experience that blasts new tunnels between yourself and the other. You have an experience of radical cosmic recontextualization when you connect with something larger than yourself. You have Campbell’s apotheosis, right?

24:14 And you are born anew. Of course you come out of that experience with a bigger fucking story, a mythological story, a cosmological story, and you are a part of that story. That will fucking heal your fractures, man. That will let the light get in, whereas once I was blind, now I can see. That is the aesthetic orgasm.

24:36 That is what the French call frisson. That’s when you get the goosebumps and the hairs in the back of your neck stand up. F. Scott Fitzgerald notion of a transitory enchanted moment in which man must have held his breath, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face-to-face for the last time in history with something commensurate to our capacity for wonder. And I’m like, gimme some of that fucking shit, right?

25:04 That’s why we’re here on this earth, right? For that, dude. For that. For that. For just a moment of that.

25:10 Yes, dude, a dose of that. It’s Flaubert’s idea that human speech but a crapped kettle on which we tap crude rhythms while we long to make music that will melt the stars. Like, you know, that’s what we need, right? And of course, the guy that wrote Infinite Jest, you know his name? So he says that the alternative to this, to say no to that, to shy away from that, the alternative is a bummer.

25:41 The alternative is unconsciousness. The alternative is the default setting. The alternative is the rat race. The constant gnawing sense to have had and lost some infinite thing. Which most of us are in.

25:57 Yes. Yes. And that is what you battle every day. Every day. Because your shots of awe are on YouTube.

26:05 And most of the people on YouTube might argue they haven’t had one of these experiences or they long for that. And when you look at the rest of the world on the news, Jason. It’s the opposite sometimes of what you’re talking about. How do you put those two things together? Ah, well it’s so interesting.

26:20 I was watching an interview with Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens and Homo Deus. Have you had him on the show? Not yet, we will. You must get him on the show. And some of the things he was saying is that we tend to focus so much on the negative.

26:33 And by the way, it’s good because we can address the negative and that’s good. But the problem with overly being focused on the negative and taking the progress we’ve made for granted is to fail to realize, for example, that today, more people die from accidents than from violence. More people die from eating too much than from eating too little. More people die from old age than from infectious diseases. I mean, there is so much astonishing progress that we have done.

27:00 Like, human beings live in a better time now than they’ve ever lived in all of human history by a factor of, I don’t know how much, you know? And yet, if it bleeds, it leads on the news, right? The media is incentivized to hack our attention. Our attention responds to fear because of the amygdala that we have inherited from the most nervous humans in the past that were the quickest ones to run away from the predators. And so we have a predisposition towards anxiety and hypervigilance, you know.

27:31 And again, the problem with that is that then the incentive of attention hacking of a media enterprise that works because of advertisements, advertising business model, is that it’s, there’s mechanisms that, again, have incentive to feed us negative news, which warps our perception of reality, which makes us feel a kind of existential bummer on a day-to-day basis that the world is going to shit, that we can’t do anything about it, and so we might as well either hide and take refuge or live in what Jamie Wheal calls 21st century normal, which is this fibrillating nervous system that’s constantly oscillating between anxiety and depression. You know, what we need is more fucking flow. Chick Senmihai, who wrote the book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, was the guy that first popularized the notion of flow.

28:19 The state of consciousness in which you feel your best and you perform your best. A state of consciousness in which you lose your sense of self, you lose your sense of time, you lose all sense of effort, and you are essentially in the cloud nine, right? Selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and information richness, right? Performance levels go through the roof, the inner chatter goes quiet, you experience this as liberation, you step into the eternal now, right?

28:44 The forever box, and you’re the surfer in the wave, you’re the jazz musician in the zone, you’re the writer who’s like, fucking having the flow go through him, you know? And no matter what your particular flow trigger is, you respond to the world better. You feel more present, and you feel like you have more agency to make a dent in the universe. So what we really need is to figure out ways of organizing people’s lives so that they have more regular access to flow, right?

29:12 On a kind of daily basis, I would hope. More regular access to experiences of awe. Maybe on a once a week or once a month basis. More regular access to cosmic humility. All of which, by the way, leave an afterglow.

29:28 So even if flow is temporary, or even if awe is a transitory enchanted moment, it does leave you with increased feelings of well-being, increased feelings of compassion, and increased feelings of creativity, not to mention that neurophysiologically, the experience of awe is an anti-inflammatory experience too. So having regular access to this primes our nervous system to be better citizens. More compassionate, more creative beings. So what we’re talking about here is improving the human condition fundamentally.

29:56 Jamie Weil and Steven Kotler in their book, Stealing Fire, talk about the four forces of ecstasy. Psychology, technology, neurobiology, and pharmacology. and we’re making exponential advances in all of them. We’re making exponential advances in psychology and our insights into the human condition. We’re making exponential advances in technology, in neurobiology, and in pharmacology.

30:16 We’re making better drugs. We’re understanding the mechanisms that underlie, where it’s neuroponephrine, dopamine, enandamide, all the chemical cocktail that goes into making flow. And the more we understand all this shit, the more we can start to DJ our own experience. And they’re not the first to talk about this. The British philosopher David Peirce, you should also get on this show.

30:35 He wrote the Hedonistic Imperative back when I was in college. So we’re talking like 1997. I used to go to his website, the Hedonistic Imperative, where he used to talk about literally deploying biotechnologies to reverse engineer the human state, to hack ourselves and become better, to engineer ourselves to create gradients of bliss and versions of subjectivity that are way beyond what Darwinian evolution has given us. He talks about the MDMA state as a glimpse of the perfect human state.

31:04 And of course, right now it has certain side effects that we can’t sort of take MDMA on a day-to-day basis, but he says that the MDMA subjective state is a glimpse of what the future of human subjectivity could look like. Right, and that’ll be 4.0, 5.0, MDMA. Yes, yes. Without the- Without the toxic side of it. And drops and that kind of thing.

31:21 Correct, correct, correct, correct. And so we don’t need to live these quiet lives of desperation. We could be deejaying ourselves into the flow, into the awe, put on the track, And it doesn’t have to turn into, also, this constant hedonistic state. This could be something that we’ve just engineered to get the best out of our lives. Thousand percent, dude.

31:39 In fact, Jamie Weil, co-founder of Flow Genome Project, dear friend, brilliant visionary, also needs to be on this show. He had a TED Talk, TEDx Talk, that he did at Burning Man. It was called From Altered States to Altered Traits. Listen to that, Altered States to Altered Traits. And the key idea here is that, yeah, for sure, we love to have some drinks or smoke a joint to pop a pill on the weekend and have a glimpse of what we can be and then on Monday morning we back at work not integrated and feeling like shit and it’s like fuck that.

32:07 The problem he says of that is that we become bliss junkies, essentially addicts. We get hooked on the state instead of raising the stage. I get beautifully put, right? We get hooked on the state instead of raising the stage. So then he asks the question, what if we could transform our self systems which he describes as leaky buckets, or colanders full of holes.

32:30 No matter how much flow or awe we put in, it only gets full while the flow or the awe is being poured. But essentially we’re leaking, we’re bleeding from our holes. So what if we can turn our self systems, literally engineer our self systems and transform them from leaky buckets, from colanders into chalices? How might we render ourselves whole? How might we render ourselves holy?

32:55 How might we turn our passing illuminations into a biting light? And I hear that, and that gives me a kind of cognitive, cognitive orgasm or an aesthetic orgasm, just hearing those words, you know. And that can be done through technology and through psychology and pharm- Psychology and technology and neurobiology and pharmacology, the four forces of ecstasy, which are all advancing exponentially, can be deployed, can be thrown into the pot to figure this out, right?

33:22 Right, so we get off the hedonic treadmill of this back to this steady state, back to all of our adult dissonance with the world. Absolutely, for more resources, I would point people to the Flow Genome Project website. I would also point people to neurohacker.com or the Neurohacker Collective if they Google it and check out the work of Daniel Schmachtenberger and some of the work he’s doing with qualia and with kind of like re-engineering our hedonic state, re-engineering subjectivity, creating designer minds, so to speak.

33:51 Consciousness has become now the ultimate engineering project. And I love that notion, right? Again, turning our passing illuminations into abiding light, engendering our own divinity. What do we have the power of gods now? We really do, man.

34:04 The new space is inner space. It’s trying to convince people that they have that power. Most people wouldn’t know they have that power. For people that are hearing about flow for the first time, how would they try to get themselves more in a flow state? How do you try to get yourself in a flow state?

34:19 Can you always get yourself in a flow state? Steve Kotler’s gonna be here in a couple weeks. I’m super excited to talk to him. And I’ve heard his story, you know, about, you know, dealing with, you know, was it Lyme, and surfing, and, you know, but for people that don’t know too much, basics of flow and how you use it. Absolutely, so a flow state is a state of consciousness in which you feel your best and you perform your best.

34:41 It’s as simple as that. Everything’s amazing and performance levels go through the roof. It’s characterized by the acronym STIR, the features of flow. It stands for selflessness in that your sense of self completely vanishes. And that means that the inner chatter, what they call the inner Woody Allen, it’s the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, it’s responsible for self-editing, it’s the inner critic, that actually gets knocked offline.

35:05 So you experience that as a sense of selflessness, of losing yourself and finding yourself. And that’s experienced as liberation. Because you’re here and you’re now and there’s no inner chatter. So that’s the S from stir. Then T, timelessness.

35:19 The way that time is ordered in the brain gets knocked offline too. So time passes by kind of strangely. It can speed up, it can slow down, it can get warped. Time becomes relative in an Einsteinian sense, you know? So selflessness, timelessness, there’s a sense of effortlessness.

35:34 You don’t feel the labor when you’re in flow. Whether you’re playing jazz or whether you’re cycling down a mountain, it doesn’t feel like you’re putting a lot of work into it. It’s just like, it’s like you’re watching yourself do it. And it’s just, every move follows the next move perfectly well. And finally, richness, the sense that there’s more information access.

35:54 You’re accessing more information, you’re seeing more data, lateral thinking increases, pattern recognition increases, risk taking increases, and performance levels increase when you’re in flow. So all this stuff is happening at the same time. So essentially, it’s the ideal human state. People who have regular access to flow, like professional surfers or people who organize their lives around flow, report the highest levels of life satisfaction that exist.

36:19 So this is not about, oh, how do we find happiness? It’s really like, how do you build flow into your life? Because we’re talking about states north of happy, beyond happiness, you know? And so for me, there are universal flow triggers and there are specific flow triggers for specific personalities and temperaments and certain predispositions. I suppose a musician finds flow when he plays music.

36:42 A golfer finds flow when he plays golf, a mountain biker. So I would say experiment. Try different hobbies, learn a different language. Universal flow triggers tend to include novelty and a little bit of risk. Not so much risk that you shut down and not too little risk that you’re bored or disengaged.

36:57 Flow follows focus is what Stephen Collar likes to say. So you gotta make sure that it’s certain activities that hurl you into the moment, that force you to focus by circumstance or by contextual reasons. Flow follows focus. And again, novelty. So travel, exposure to new experiences, stimuli you’re not used to.

37:16 All these things facilitate flow by increasing engagement in the moment and boosting focus. And again, flow follows focus. It’s also good to understand flow cycles. You can’t have flow all the time because it’s cognitively expensive. And there’s a lot of neurochemistry happening.

37:30 It’s again, it’s anandamide, it’s norepinephrine, it’s dopamine, it’s all these different, this cocktail of chemicals. And these have to, you know, these get depleted and they have to, you have to like have good sleep is crucial for flow. If you’re not getting good sleep, you’re not gonna get any flow. Sleep is incredibly restorative. I treat my sleep like a religion.

37:49 Getting to bed, getting my eight hours is crucial. I can’t get on stage. I can’t do a talk. If I’m not sleeping well, I can’t manage the world. I lack the resources to deal with things, so sleep is huge, so.

38:00 When you’re in flow, can you say I’m in flow, or is that against the flow? No, no, no, you definitely get it. I think you have moments in which you forget yourself completely, but even in the greatest of flow, there’s still a little bit of oscillation. I guess it depends on the degree of difficulty of the task. I mean, I think that the snowboarder who’s doing five flips in the air, he’s not saying I’m in flow during those five flips.

38:24 But as soon as he lands, he’s like, whoa man, I’m in so flow, let’s do it again. You know? So is there awe in flow? There can be awe in the immediate aftermath of a flow task. If the flow task was all absorbing, you’re surfing the barrel, you might not be thinking anything.

38:41 But as soon as you finish it, you’re like, wow, that’s the greatest feeling in the world, you know? And then certain flow activities that are not so physically intensive, you know, that can be like, maybe you’re just like with your lover, you know, looking into her eyes during sunset and you’re having flow with her, but then you’re oscillating between like losing yourself in her and then like coming back into yourself and going, wow, this feels really good and going back into it and popping out of it and going back into it. The metacognitive drive with humans is always, for me at least, is always wanting to come back.

39:16 So it’s like when the inner monologue goes quiet, I find relief, but then as soon as I feel that relief, the inner monologue kicks back in to acknowledge how cool the relief is. It’s like, oh my god, this feels so good, this is so awesome, how I just felt so awesome just there when I wasn’t there. Is that a silver thing, or most humans, you think, come back to the dialogue? I think that because I am, I think I have the neurochemistry of a writer. I just happen to write when I speak.

39:43 So the writer always wants to transcribe. The writer always got the voice recorder. So even when he is having a Cloud9 experience, he puts on, he’s like, okay, I’m having a Cloud9 experience, this is amazing. I don’t know if, okay, Gordon Wasson, for example, Gordon Wasson was the first westerner who took psilocybin mushrooms with Maria Sabina in Mexico. And he had a cover story in Life Magazine, I think it was in the 60s, in search of the magic mushroom or something like that.

40:09 And he was a banker, a banker who was an amateur mycologist into mushroom. And he went there, and again, was the first westerner to take psilocybin. So again, you would think that you were in a psychedelic, adult state of ego death, that there’s no inner chatter at all, because you become what you behold during these experiences. And yet, he wrote about the experience while he was having it. And one of the words that he wrote is, He said he spent the evening uttering ejaculations of amazement.

40:41 That’s how he described his description of the process. And I love that. Ejaculations, uttering ejaculations of amazement. Like out of his mouth, he was literally having cognitive orgasms that were flowing out of his tongue. But that’s because, again, that’s the compulsion to write.

41:00 The ecstatic dancer experiences no mind, but his body is expressing it in the dance. The jazz musician in Flo might have ecstatic no mind, but he’s still expressing his language with jazz. It just happens to me that my language is verbal, so I don’t think language ever really gets knocked offline for me because that’s the expression itself. If I was a ballet dancer, the inner chatter going quiet would make sense, you know? And you’re in Flo when you’re doing shots of Oz sometimes?

41:27 Oh, for sure, dude, yeah, definitely. I used to experiment. I think we can feel it. Well, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this relationship between cannabis and improvisation? No.

41:41 So cannabis is marvelous for improvisation and it’s had a relationship with improvisational creativity for years. Jazz musicians have always deployed cannabis as their tool because it’s divine for associations and improvisations. Freestyle rappers will often smoke a blunt before they go freestyle. First hand knowledge, my roommate’s in New York City in the 90s, Fire up the blunt, pass it around, and freestyle. Freestyle?

42:05 Yeah, because it changes the chemistry of the brain. Well, they’ve done FMRI scans on freestyle rappers and jazz musicians, and they compared the freestyle rapper versus when he was reciting memorized lyrics, and when he was freestyling, the inner critic was quiet. The self-editor was quiet, so his risk-taking went up, his pattern recognition went up, his associational thinking, right? The hyper-priming, the making the connections between more unexpected ideas was going up.

42:30 So the associational network went wider. So it’s like- It’s usually in a group of people doing the same thing. So then there’s more- It gets triggered and this leads to the next and it’s a butterfly effect in thought. Or as Rich Doyle says, you summon coherence in the bardos between one statement and another. So you make these divine associations and whether the jazz musician is doing it with the melodies or whether the freestyle rapper is doing it with words, there’s definitely flow.

42:52 And cannabis, the cannabinoids play a huge role in facilitating that increased pattern recognition. So I’ve definitely experimented with cannabis for shots of awe, right? And typically you wanna maybe, you try a little bit and you go have the experience of increased pattern recognition and increased sensory appreciation and increased access to the present. One of the things that Michael Pollan says is that the brain is essentially like an artificial intelligence program.

43:21 It takes in data from the present, compares it with data from the past and uses it to make predictions about the future and it does this automatically all the time. And so we kind of live in a perpetual future tense with a low level amount of anxiety all the time. And in his words, the good news is I’m seldom surprised, the bad news is I’m seldom surprised. Because your brain is always making predictions and doesn’t ever really stop and smell the roses. But one of the things that commends travel, he says, intense experiences, art, and certain drugs, including cannabis, is that these substances block all signals forwards and backwards.

43:55 So the ability to immediately predict the future and the ability to constantly compare with the past. And by blocking all signals forwards and backwards, you are thrown into the flow, flow of the present that is literally wonder full, full of wonder. Wonder being precisely that sense of unencumbered first sight or virginal noticing to which the adult mind has closed itself. So when you’re in that present and that unencumbered sense of first sight, Everything is new again, including the ideas that are emerging in your brain or the perceptions that you’re having.

44:31 You become what you behold. You notice where you are. You stop and smell the roses. You see the world in a grain of sand. You see heaven in a wild flower.

44:38 You hold infinity in the palm of your hand. You hold eternity in an hour. And so whether it’s playing jazz, whether it’s freestyle rap, whether it’s writing, whether it’s dancing, you’re so present. You’re so free from the tyranny of later and before that what happens now becomes infinite, man. And there’s such grace to be found in that space.

45:02 There’s such creativity to be found in that space. Shots of awe emerges in that space. Those who were seen dancing were called insane by those who could not hear the music. But when you’re in that space, you can hear the music, man. It’s like that lion says the only people for me are the mad ones, right?

45:19 When you’re in that stage, You’re mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved. You’re desirous of everything at the same time. You never yawn or say a commonplace thing. You burn, burn, burn like yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky. And in the book Stealing Fire, Wheel and Kotler talk about what they call the altered state’s economy.

45:37 The trillions of dollars a year that people spend to see other people in altered states, to see other people in the present and in the forever box, you know? Whether it’s going to a concert to see jazz musicians lose themselves and that ecstatic magic that they create with their music, whether it’s theater, whether it’s watching a gymnast do a bajillion flips in the air or going to watch sports events. Fight. We pay money, yeah, fight. We pay money to see people in the forever box because we have theory of mind.

46:05 We can infer mental states. We can read other minds. We can reflect other minds. And so sometimes watching is enough to get a taste of it. Experience it vicariously.

46:16 And because many of us don’t have access So that amount of flow on a regular basis, we pay money to watch the elite athletes or artists who have built their lives around it do it. And in beholding it, we become it for a moment. And we spend a trillion dollars plus a year to get access to those states, even just to witness them. Wow, it’s not entertainment. We’re actually trying to hack flow into ourselves.

46:39 100%. And sometimes successfully. Yes. Right, and you remember that moment, where that human was in the moment, the knockout, the trade, or the loss. Even the lost, they were present, weren’t they?

46:50 Dude, I mean, why do we enjoy movies like Rocky so much, dude? The end of Rocky when he wins. Because we’re Rocky in that moment, dude. We have the capacity to lose, too, and we still remember. Yeah, we can infer the mental states.

47:02 We can experience the glory. We can mirror the glory. We walk out of that movie theater high as fuck. So we should be aware of what we’re doing as humans. And then understand the science.

47:14 So then maybe tap into it on our own. Go get your own flow moment, your own present moment, and understand what’s happening. Yes, because these experiences used to be elusive. These experiences used to be experiences that you had to just humbly appreciate when they showed up and not expect them to when they didn’t. It’s that whole Protestant ethic of like, no pain, no gain, like life is suffering and occasionally you get a drip of ecstasy.

47:41 But what these guys are saying is actually, We could reverse engineer our self-systems. We could transform who we are. We have the expertise, the insight, the creative capacity to make ourselves fucking better. And with YouTube, we can tap into all these people doing this stuff, talking about them, so we can watch you in the flow. I wanna ask you about YouTube soon, and what even is that thing?

48:08 Because I don’t think we even know what it is yet. But first, I want you to tell me a little bit about love. Because you mentioned getting into the flow staring into your partner’s eyes and most people would be like Oh, I wouldn’t understand that to be flow and wow, you know This concept of love is yeah crazy one and one that’s hard to understand in some in some languages There’s six different words for love. Yeah, right. So for me, I would I would Fall in line with the ideas of Ernest Becker So Ernest Becker wrote the denial of death. It’s a psychoanalytic distillation of the human condition I have a copy of it next to my bed I’ve read one chapter, but I know some of the tenets.

48:45 You can go into any of the chapters, you don’t have to read it in order. The key idea is that the worm at the core, the faint disquiet that invades you some time at night when you don’t have all your defenses and when you don’t trivialize yourself with trivialities and with busyness, is the source of our existential malaise or our neurotic distress. And it used to be psychologists in the Freudian school of thought would say, well, the neurosis is because we’re sexually repressed.

49:17 All of us were walking around like sexually repressed, we’re like neutered, and that’s the source of our, that manifests itself in our pathologies, right? Becker says it goes deeper than that. There might be some sexual repression, but the real issue is that we have death anxiety. It’s this unique awareness that we are mortal beings. And not like other animals who like see a predator and run, They’re scared when there’s reason to be scared.

49:39 When the predator’s not around, the animals live in the garden of Eden. They’re in the forever box. But we, we lose sleep over the idea that in 60, 70 years we’re gonna grow old. Like that bothers us now, even though it’s so far away we can’t even truly experience it at all, but cognitively we know that that’s coming and it just haunts our dreams, right? Even the greatest ecstasies are tinged by a bit of sadness, right?

50:03 This is the existential conundrum. We have to respond to this right we need to find a way of bridging the finite with the infinite otherwise we can’t contend with life and He cites three solutions to the death problem one is the religious impulse and the religious impulse While healthy the desire to connect with something larger than yourself has been corrupted by the institutions of religion Which have like hijacked this idea of access to the sacred and used it as a means to control people So that’s fucked which was a predictable outcome. Yeah, no doubt I corrupted it Also, as we become more secular, spiritual experience has been robbed of its magic because it can be explained by neurochemistry.

50:40 Even though I think that just because neurochemistry can explain mystical or sacred experiences, I think that adds to their magic. It doesn’t take away, for me, but for others it does, because they can dismiss the experience as not spiritual, as material, and therefore not worthy. The point is the romantic solution to the problem of death for many doesn’t work anymore, the religious one. Then there’s the romantic solution to the problem of death. And that has to do with, of course, the Western construct of romantic love as we know it today.

51:09 She’s like the wind. She’s my salvation. She is the sun. It’s the lyrics of all our favorite pop songs. It’s the movies we love.

51:19 It’s the pop stars we adore. So it’s this deification of the sexual partner. It’s rendered the sexual partner, the romantic partner, into a holy entity. by raising a person into the divine space or by seeing the divine inside of a person, then by the ecstatic communion with that person, you are raised to the divine as well. So love makes you both gods.

51:43 And in the words of Alan Harrington, when you’re in love, you step off that people mover that’s carrying everyone else towards death. So everybody’s in one of these airport people movers and you’re carrying your suitcases and you’re sitting on the people mover and you’re having your problems and your work and your games and your sex and you’re drinking and you’re smoking and you’re hanging, you’re going to work, but the people mover keeps moving. And at the end of the fucking people mover, it drops you to the fucking, to the grave.

52:06 When you’re in love, you jump off the rails. You’re not in the people mover anymore. You’re now God’s outside of time. This is love. And it’s intoxicating.

52:15 It’s like awe, it’s like flow. It’s an experience that puts you into the timeless realm, puts you into the sacred realm. It puts you into the mythopoetic trance. It puts you into the story realm. It puts you into the narrative realm.

52:28 It puts you into the mythological realm, like love lifts you up and that’s a beautiful fucking thing. It’s also a lot of pressure, right? Becker says the burden of godhood is a very real thing. You’ve gotta work on love, you’ve gotta cultivate love, you’ve gotta be willing to hack the backdrop that sustains that love, you know? If you have the same fucking routine, if you’re taking your partner for granted, love will die.

52:52 So you’ve gotta do all the things you do to get flow in your life to keep love going. So if novelty increases flow, novelty will boost love. If challenges and a little bit of fear boosts flow, the same thing will boost love. So go on adventures with your lover. Do unusual things with your lover.

53:10 Cultivate, enter into altered states with your lover. Realizing that the fetching water and the chopping wood, maintenance procedure applies to maintaining the divine mental state of love. You know, and I think if you do that, I think you can sustain it in the long haul. I think people who have, who are forever in love, maybe whether they’re conscious of it or not, have figured out a way to sustain it. They’ve turned their self systems from leaky buckets into calendars some way, somehow.

53:40 That hasn’t like scaled, not everybody gets that. Most people end in divorce, but I like to believe that that’s possible. And so yeah, you know, I’m an artist, so I love love, what can I say? and you experimenting with love a little bit? Yeah, you know, I’ve had a couple false starts in my life.

54:00 I think we’re all casting for a co-creator. You know, it takes two to tango. And so even the greatest romantic and ontological DJs amongst us who believe we can concoct the cinema that is love, the magical realism that is a romantic relationship raised to the highest order, sometimes struggle with finding co-authors. We can’t build it ourselves. We need someone else who can build it with us.

54:24 And if we find that, that’s a cool thing, man. And there’s a biological component. You know, a dream you dream alone is just a dream. A dream you dream together is reality. You know, and love is a cosmology of two, at the very least, you know.

54:36 Shaped like a heart. A universe shaped like a heart, you know. And so now you can recognize it and you can see, okay, I’m playing with this really potentially dangerous, fiery bit, but I’m gonna play with it. And I’m gonna see what we can do here and go timeless and not. And so.

54:51 You have to. We have to, it’s your duty as a human. Yeah, and to realize that that’s what you’re doing. You’re playing, the playing is being. Playing is actualizing imagination.

55:05 We play, that’s what we do. We imagine things in our head, and then combination with our modest looking thumbs, we create tools and technologies that allow the play things in our minds to become real. And we build the tools and the tools build us. I mean, we have this capacity of play as a means to making real. We’re not just human beings, we’re human becomings, and we become what we behold, and we become what we play with, and we become what we practice, as I recite, therefore I become.

55:34 Diane Ackerman wrote a whole book about deep play, the importance of deep play. So if you’re like self-aware enough and mindful enough to deploy the tools at your disposal, to concoct reality authoring games for yourself, well fuck man, and they should be infinite games. James Purse wrote about infinite games. Finite games are played to win or lose. That fucking sucks.

55:55 The game is over, you’re dead. Infinite games are played to keep the game going. So it’s like, all right, how can we play to keep this game going? Well, that’s the fucking holy grail. Why do you go to Burning Man?

56:06 What do you learn from Burning Man? What is the state? We’ve all heard the Burning Man stories. I know there’s some great things that happen there. I know, you know, Dublin and Maps people are there and I know there’s great talks and we see the statues and I still have yet to go.

56:20 Yeah, why do you go and what do you see there and what kind of ideas and? Wow, dude, this was my first time. No way. This August was my first time and I think I’ve been invited for almost a decade. And you never said yes.

56:37 And I think I just wasn’t ready. I think I knew the art would be outrageous, the magical encounters would be enchanting. I think I was afraid of all the variables I wouldn’t be able to control. I definitely have a relationship with control that is something I’ve been working on. I believe that flow is at the intersection of discipline and surrender.

57:01 And I think that I’m somebody who is more on the discipline side and less on the surrender side. Most people would be surprised to hear that. Yeah, well, because shots of awe is a container in which I practice surrender. But the discipline part is in all the reading I do beforehand and bringing the camera along and following through with the edits. Michael Pollan says the ego is what gets the book written.

57:25 He took all the psychedelics to have ego death, but the ego in the end is what wrote the book. So there’s this beautiful Venn diagram and here is discipline and here is surrender and they overlap in flow, which is very similar to Jordan Peterson’s notion Toning the line between chaos and order right you know too much order We know leads to the diseases of depression and anxiety an overly ordered brain with too much rumination You know that’s that’s not good too much order is not good It’s oppressive, but too much chaos too much surrender these are the personality disorders You know this is a manic episode. This is the losing control. This is the going crazy or hurling into chaos the personal crisis And so you actually need to tow the line you need to surf the wave You know a flow discipline and surrender, but both are necessary both are necessary I got a lot of people watch my videos and talk to me They’re like yeah, man. You need to learn to let go to surrender surrender I’m like yes, but like the discipline part is what has made me make 200 plus shots of all episodes the discipline part It made me show up to this meeting on time the discipline part gives me an exercise routine Like I love that I have this discipline You know in college when I was assigned an essay that was due at the end of the semester I did it the first night because I couldn’t bear to have it in the back of my mind Like, discipline, I got it down.

58:40 Surrender, I’m working on, because surrender carries with it the fears of like, losing track of all my shit, fucking up, like my life falling into chaos. Oh, I’m forgetting to pay the bills and not making this appointment on time and getting fired and stopping the gig stop coming and chaos scares me. Too much surrender scares me. But if you balance those two things, man, you’re good to go. And so Burning Man, you thought maybe there was gonna be too much input.

59:07 Well, I think I felt that Burning Man would be too much chaos. It would hurl me into chaos and I wouldn’t be able to sleep because of the noise and the dust storms would screw me up and maybe somebody would like dose me with some drug that I didn’t know what it was and I’d have like a panic attack and a meltdown. Like I just envisioned the worst case scenario. So what I did is I mitigated against that by doing all the planning to the highest order, bringing people around me that made me feel safe, bringing a little bit of that home and security and predictability with me.

59:33 And once I had all those boxes ticked, then I was able to surrender fully. And of course, once I did, holy shit, man, did the light get through, like. How was it? What happened? What do you?

59:44 I had, one of the things that’s really amazing, Eric Davis, who was written about Burning Man, he wrote Technosis. You should also have Eric Davis on this show. He says that Burning Man is essentially a metaphysical flea market. A metaphysical flea market and a demolition derby of reality constructs colliding in a parched void. So what it does is the flat, the sort of empty lake bed is like this blank canvas.

1:00:15 It’s a very strange landscape that kind of takes you, completely puts you in a state of like, like you don’t know where you’re standing, so to speak. You’re removed from all reference points. It’s kind of feels like invisibility in every direction. so your sense of up and down is completely inverted. So it’s this blank canvas, it’s very much a liminal zone, a place between dreams and reality.

1:00:40 It’s a surreal landscape. And then they populate that landscape with the highest installations and expressions of human creativity on the planet. Within all these different pocket universes, as he calls them, are all juxtaposed next to one another. So here you have a giant statue of a beautiful goddess dancing ecstatic woman, and here you have like a weird 1920s movie theater, And here you have this like giant lobster with a penis sticking out of it. Like completely unrelated reality constructs.

1:01:10 But they’re side by side. So it creates this intense juxtaposition or like this feeling of like an assemblage or like a collage. And assemblages is the art of surrealism. Like Dali built assemblages. His paintings are all like assemblages of different things.

1:01:26 It creates a surreal feeling to bring things together that are seemingly unrelated. And so what Eric Davis says happens is a lot of synchronicity and serendipity. Because what happens is, he says, synchronicity, or juxtaposition, rather, juxtaposition, again, all these different unrelated fucking creative constructs juxtapose against this desolate landscape, this parts void. Juxtaposition is the formal operating space of synchronicity. And what happens is the experience for you is you’ll be walking around and you see this installation and that installation and you’re bike riding You’re just, what am I looking at?

1:02:00 Where are my reference points? And before you know it, you have what he calls an evanescent lightening bolt of meaning in the perceiver’s mind. So you have this moment where all of a sudden, this finds a connection to this, which finds a connection to that, which tells you something about yourself and your past, and you have this moment of apotheotic catharsis. And that playa moment, that becomes the breakdown to break through. And it’s funny how people who really surrender and submit at Burning Man have a very similar experience.

1:02:29 They face their demons, they have a big cry, they get lost, and then they get found. They see hell, but then they find heaven, and it’s a compressed container for a highly transformative experience. And if you treat it as such. Okay, if you surrender, and, okay, and that happens to you. Intention is key.

1:02:48 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And I fell in love. And I had like magical, magical moments there. Like, I had outrageous encounters with the art.

1:02:57 I had a deep cry at the temple, which is a non-denominational temple where people come to grieve for lost ones. The pictures and candles and little written notes of people that have died. So you go there and you experience this collective grieving. I had a moment of grieving there. I grieved for everybody I’ve ever lost, everybody I’ve ever loved.

1:03:16 It was very powerful. And then I met somebody, really dropped in with her, in with her and probably because you were in this course well I was we all want to connect with somebody but we’re usually in the wrong context for it and we’re contextual beings this is a place built to crack you open so then you have an open heart and then you say what you’ve always wanted to say but you can’t you know it’s like instead of the usual club passwords that Leary talks about like how you doing good how you doing how’s your day good how’s the weather good when you really want to say is what makes you cry what makes your heart light What makes you smile so beautifully with your eyes? Do you want to dance with me?

1:03:55 Do you want to be my lover? Like the things we want to say when we feel butterflies in our stomach with somebody, we have permission to say at Burning Man. So in that sense, it’s a fucking healing place to commune, you know? And so I came together with somebody there, and she kind of rocked my world over the course of an entire day. Then the next day, of course, I lost her.

1:04:12 Oh, my gosh. I mean, I couldn’t find her anywhere. There’s 70,000 people there. Biked around all day looking for her, got caught in the seeking mentality, mentality and then was told very quickly you have to let go, you have to surrender. So the following day I was getting ready to leave and I was like okay fine I’m done I’ll send her a Facebook message when I get back to the default world and then my buddy a dear friend of mine was like let’s do one more bike and see what the Playa wants. The Playa is what you call the the open canvas of Burning Man. So we biked out and 70,000 people again and that way we’re gonna bike in the direction of like where her camp was maybe we’d see Maybe we do it. I leave my camp. I turn right onto the main road the Esplanade Two minutes into pedaling somebody bikes past me and says hey Jason It was her I turn around I have like a reverse dolly shot moment where I’m like I thought it was like a shots of off-fan I hear a girl’s voice and they you know like when you zoom in and pull out the camera the same time Like that reverse dolly and as my eyes come into focus. It was her So here I was like, okay. Will I see her again? Will I find her again?

1:05:15 And their cell phones don’t work, and then I’m like, I trust, I trust, I trust, I trust. First person that I see when I start to peddle in the 70,000 person event, she finds me. And of course, then we spent the whole day together, and I was like, okay, it’s a sign. Synchronicity’s abound, and exactly the kind of synchronicity’s that you read about, that you expect, but that some part of you doubts. Some part of you’s like, yeah, sure, yeah, synchronicity, yeah, that’s all that can be explained.

1:05:38 I get it, people are open, they’re more likely to see patterns where there are none, and so on and so forth, but like, come on. 70,000 people, one person I wanted to find, and it’s the first person I see when I bike out on the day that I was gonna leave, okay. You’re a believer. Well, it makes you believe. But you don’t know if you’re a believer yet.

1:05:56 All right, and you’re writing it. I am a believer. It’s just that I think that the conditions for the miraculous require preconditions. So like, fire emerges when the conditions are right. You have whatever, the dry thing and the spark, and then the flame emerges.

1:06:17 Tornadoes only happen when certain environmental conditions fall perfectly into place, and then you have this self-organizing thing out of nowhere, you know? Life exists only in the Goldilocks zone, not too hot, not too cold, perfectly placed, panicked, perfect distance from the sun, like all these, you know, perfect conditions that then engender transcendent effects. Transcendent effects are when the sum of the parts add up to more than the parts, you know?

1:06:44 And so I think serendipity and synchronicity and these subjective experiences of the miraculous, or what Eric Davis calls poetic facts, still require preconditions. And I am a believer that when the preconditions are there, absolutely, but when the preconditions are not there, well then, then I don’t know, you know? And so I am somebody that pays attention to the preconditions, tries to cultivate Environments to engender the miraculous I’m always in search of the miraculous the miraculous lifts me up above my animal condition, man The miraculous knocks me on the shoulder and gives me the chills in the back of my neck and says worry not You know and so you’re in the middle of this kind of love experiment now. Oh, yeah I’m like all in at two feet in I like to say I’m like all in and my choice You’re like, let’s go all in and let’s yeah Let’s see what this is like and learning to say yes and to be intentional and to have the discipline and to have commitment and to choose every day to choose, but also like to trust.

1:07:43 Yeah, because it’s scary too, right? Yeah, to trust, you know, to trust the parts that I can’t control, you know. Yeah. You mentioned religion earlier, and I wanted to know where, how you feel about it. We talked about Jordan Peterson earlier, and he’s really well known now for talking about religion.

1:07:59 And when I first heard about him, I actually didn’t see the religious component in there, but if you read his 12 Rules for Life and the more you listen to him talk, he’s a very big fan of religious archetypes of these stories being in our DNA. And look, that’s a lot of what you talk about on shots of all of us being these beings that are always trying to put everything into a story, right? I mean, I think he’s a genius, man. I think he’s a genius, but I think above all, he’s a poet and a psychologist.

1:08:28 I was watching his video when he was talking with Sam Harris and Sam Harris was starting out saying you know like religion is just like astrology you know and so when you’re professing the importance of religion you’re no different than somebody who’s talking about astrology is something that somehow is legitimate you know and of course he’s expecting the audience to be like we’re scientific rationalists we don’t believe in astrology but then Jordan Peterson’s response was very different he says look astrology was astronomy in its earlier form and what we did when we looked at the stars as early humans was we draped the stars with our imaginations and our stories and our hopes and our dreams. You know, astrology and draping the stars with meaning was no different than what we do with cinema now. Gene Youngblood says that cinema reflects mankind’s historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind in front of his eyes. So we do it with cinema, we do it with our stories, we exteriorize our consciousness, and that’s what we were doing with us with astrology. We were draping the cosmos with our narratives and our stories and in our archetypes, taking our insides outside so that we could look at ourselves.

1:09:33 So we looked at the cosmos, we were really looking at ourselves. And I thought that was a fucking brilliant answer. And I was like, oh yeah, I get it. Now he’s a poet, you know, he’s a poet. He is a poet.

1:09:43 I saw a piece that he did about why you need art in your life, and he’s talking about the importance of beauty. He’s talking about like gothic cathedrals and how they’re like trees and how like the stained glass is like the light going through the trees and like how exquisite they’re humans to spend hundreds of years to make something so beautiful, so beautiful, you can barely stand it, you know? He’s talking about the aesthetic orgasm and he’s talking about how overwhelming it is or like music, of how music speaks meaning to people.

1:10:08 Music is the one thing that cynical people can’t be cynical about and I’m like, exactly, you know? Like when you hear some of these musical scores, you know, some of this Hans Zimmer or Jerry Goldsmith or William, you know, these composers of these movies that you hear the songs and you get welled up, you get uplifted, you get raised to the highest order, And those, I feel, I mean, the closest thing for me to a religious experience, the moments in which I feel like maybe I am divine and maybe death will never touch me is when I’m carried away by song, is when I’m lifted by a melody and my eyes well up and I start to cry and I’m like, oh, thank fucking God, there is more to us than nature allows, you know? And he says the same thing about music.

1:10:48 Or he says people looking at art. He’s like, why are these people looking at these beautiful Renaissance paintings? I’m like, what are they doing staring at these paintings for hours? They don’t know what this means. They don’t know the history.

1:10:57 Like, what are they doing? And then he says, well, what they’re doing is they’re looking at the transcendent because the transcendent shines through the maddest in partially articulated form. And whether we’re fully aware of it or not consciously or unconsciously, we respond to it. We respond to the light of the transcendent of that which is divine that shines through the maddest of art or music in partially articulated form. So music, art, aesthetics, they are platonic ideals.

1:11:25 They are reflections from a divine realm. And whether that’s literally true, I don’t know. But is it poetically true? Yes. These are poetic facts and they lay their claims on us because they are experiential.

1:11:37 And Terrence McKenna, the Psychonauts, said, trust your experience. So is it time not to throw the Bible out the back door and to be in touch with some of these? Well, I don’t know about the Bible, man. There’s some dark passages there. The other day I was watching the movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and some of these horrible scenes where they’re tracking down the serial killer and the serial killer had like Bible passages to justify all his heinous acts, so I’m not sure about that particular book, but respect to whoever gets joy from it.

1:12:03 Look, if where you get your spiritual nourishment is from a source that fills you with light, fills you with love, makes you more compassionate and kind to others and gives you a reason to get up in the morning and not judge others, then more power to you, right? Talk to me about technology, but first let’s talk about YouTube because it’s changed your life It’s changed my life, and it’s it’s now the tool that’s changing us right and I had Jordan Peterson in here And and I watched him you know debate Sam Harris. I had heard him talk about that same question It’s very hard by the way It’s very frustrating debating Sam Harris when he goes back to the astrology bottle every time I think you should debate Sam Harris on on stage, but you know me and Sam Harris are friends Okay, we actually have dinner occasionally in the US and we’re pals and friends with his wife as well. They’re they’re super cool I’ve never been on his podcast and I’m kind of like I’m like his friends So I don’t want to ask I’m also kind of intimidated because I’m not an academic So if I ever go up, it’s like it has to be on something where we establish the facts It’s like okay. Look, I’m an artist if you’re interested. Great, you know, I think would be a great conversation Well, you just talked likewise. Yeah, I love what Sam does Yeah but also I watched Jordan and Sam and debate and sometimes it’s not a debate anymore because it’s like well

1:13:17 This is this is devoid of this well because because because Sam Sam is asking Jordan He’s like so what talk about God like does God exist or not and then Jordan Peterson is just so good I don’t know if you call that a dodge or just asking a better question Which it will depends what you mean by God and like well, does he really exist and what depends what you mean by exist? And is he real? Well, it depends what you mean by real So it’s like okay That’s like splitting this distance into two and then splitting this distance into two and then splitting this distance into two and you can and keep splitting that forever and never make the two ends meet.

1:13:49 Yeah, we probably need to be you moderating that debate, because then there could be some more mixing it up. That would be interesting. Sometimes they’re very polar opposite, and it’s hard to find some coming around there. For sure. But it was fascinating, and then Jordan told me, he said, Brian, without long form podcasts and audio and visual form, I wouldn’t be up here on stage in front of 7,000 people, which then changes those humans’ experiences.

1:14:11 And so, we’ve seen, when I had you on the show, original on YouTube, I think I was just recently allowed to put videos that were an hour long on there. And again, it looked like just a video platform, but it’s more than that. So what is YouTube? A repository for consciousness. It’s the library of Alexandria for consciousness in visual form, in video form.

1:14:35 And don’t get me wrong, it includes all our junk too. It includes all our junk. But hopefully this is a library of Alexandria that can’t get burned down. You know, but I think the long form high brow conversations that can be now stored there forever bring me so much pleasure because they can find their audience. You know, it’s this notion of Leary, find the others.

1:15:01 I think if I really sort of reverse engineer and look back on what I’ve done, my videos have all been a way of finding the others. Or actually allowing the others to find me. They’re my beacon in the night. Doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo. We’re all in the dark ocean, man, sailing with no navigation.

1:15:20 But what we have is our eyes, and occasionally we see a light. And then we find the light. And we find the light that lights us up. And dude, I owe my entire career to Shots of Awe. And Shots of Awe began from ideas that I got while in an altered state mediated by cannabis.

1:15:36 So this is no different than a religious pilgrim who might or might not have accidentally eaten some psychoactive fungi, had a vision, told his friends about the vision, and then become some kind of a movement because of it. All art and all great visions that turn into things in the world, I believe, began in a highly altered state in which you weren’t all there anyway. So it comes through you, but not from you, and though it is with you, it belongs not to you, and then look at the consequences, look at the ripple effects and look at the way this can be amplified now with these platforms.

1:16:13 It won’t take 10,000 years for an idea to scale to reach the world. You know, now it can happen in a few months. Look what happened with Jordan Peterson’s ideas. Yeah, and look at the world 25 years ago without YouTube or 100 years ago. I mean, someone maybe in their entire lifetime might be fortunate enough to spend five minutes with you and get an idea that maybe they would remember, maybe they wouldn’t, maybe they could buy a printed book and read these funny words.

1:16:38 But now you can see it and feel it. Yeah, and I mean that’s extraordinary Yeah, and now they can get 200 of those from you And go deeper on this flow state and like work and then we’re constantly I mean it’s it actually You could argue that well our brains were designed for this because we’re doing it But some people say you know the brain we evolved in a world in which we only knew like 50 people in the little village So we’re not used to receiving the scrutiny or the attention of thousands much less millions of people the idea that you know And we infer the mental states of others we can do mind reading right? But imagine the millions of people that are inferring my mental state when they watch one of my shots of ah When the shots of ah gets a million views, that’s a million people that watched it and had a moment of intersubjective Communion with me and they inferred my mental states. They listened to what I said. They responded emotionally to it they might have chosen to share it, that means it’s like I’ve planted a seed, I’ve taken up real estate in the minds of millions, even though I’m only one person and I could never know those millions of people, but those millions could all know me, which is insane to think, you know, to think that my consciousness through mimetic distribution, I’ve turned my mind inside out.

1:17:54 My consciousness is like, and your consciousness is like a tapestry in this collective consciousness now, you know, And Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, certainly, and every comedian or every person, whoever had a mouthpiece that can now compete in the marketplace of ideas. And you know, ideas have sex. Ideas leap from brain to brain. Ideas have infectivity and spreading power. And even though ideas are not made of nucleic acid, they have achieved more evolutionary change and at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.

1:18:26 So you know, like whoa, like whoa. I can’t even begin to imagine the consequences of that wave. And what is the future of this? Because right now, we get your words on a two-dimensional screen with some incredible images. But that’s still kind of caveman tools.

1:18:43 Sure. Potentially. Well, you know, I’m wondering, I don’t want it to go dark here, but like on your obituary, what will we be thanking Jason Silva for? Well, first and foremost, my friend, you and I, I hope, will benefit from radical life extension technologies. So I hope that we can drink the wine centuries unborn and have hundreds of years to have these kinds of discourses.

1:19:02 I’m looking forward to the next visit in 150 years and chatting with you. Let’s book it in. I do not accept mortality. But no, I think that the future, even the short-term future, will be that we’ll get to experience the minds of others more intimately and on a fidelity that we cannot even begin to imagine. I mean, Terrence McKenna, who began as a psychedelic philosopher, ended up as a proponent of cybernetics and virtual reality.

1:19:26 And he says, if you think we can attain intimacy today through art, like we can know the mental states of an artist or poet through reading the poetry or experiencing their paintings or seeing their cinema, that’s amazing. I mean, I can get in Chris Nolan’s mind by seeing Inception, no doubt. But he says, in the future, we’ll be able to visit each other’s minds in virtual reality. So I’ll actually get to go inside your mind. If I want to show you my room now, I invite you physically over to check out my room and watch the movies I like and listen to my albums.

1:19:54 In the future, I’ll be able to invite you into my mind, and I’ll be able to visit yours. So we’ll get to know each other in a level of fidelity that we cannot even begin to fathom right now. And that’s kind of amazing, right? Because the forms of intimacy that will emerge, right? When you’re in love right now, what do you want more than anything else?

1:20:10 You want to know the person you’re in love with. You want to know them, right? You really want to know them. You want to commune. You want to visit their cosmos, you know?

1:20:20 And I think that will be more readily available as we deploy ecstatic technologies, both of virtual reality and psychedelics and meditation and yoga, and the combination therein of all of these things. Will you be designing these future iterations of shots of awe? Why not? Okay, yeah. And London Real, man.

1:20:37 That will be intense, right? I mean, Terrence McKenna always talked about the limitations of language. And we know in the psychedelic state that, I mean, I used to come back to my ayahuasca ceremonies and my wife would say, tell me what happened. And I’d be like, honey, I can’t even begin because you’re getting all of this information and it’s not limited to this primitive form of language. Do you ever feel limited by language?

1:21:01 So the take away, one of the hallmarks of psychedelic experience or mystical experience is that they are ineffable. Ineffable means they can’t be languaged. I think that it’s fair to say they can’t be languaged with conventional, empirical, journalistic, literal grid language. But poetry has an elasticity that can, I think, encapsulate ineffability. Allan de Boton talks about truth that is beyond the literal grid, right?

1:21:42 A deeper truth that is maybe not as accurate as a journalist in describing an event, but nevertheless reveals truths about it that are beyond the literal grid. So I’m interested in poetic facts. I’m interested in poetic truth. Werner Herzog, the filmmaker, says facts are interesting, but they do not illuminate. If you want facts, buy the phone book.

1:22:06 It’s full of facts. It’s a whole list of phones and names, but it doesn’t illuminate. What he wants is ecstatic truth. And you know, I know that we’re living in an age where people are maybe confusing their opinions for facts. I’m not dismissing the importance of facts and geography and science and physics, okay?

1:22:24 Like, I am pro-facts. But what I’m saying is in the realm of human subjectivity, in the realm of human meaning, we need poetry, and we need poetic language to describe certain experiences that are beyond the literal grid. And so that’s why I tell people with shots of awe, This is not journalism. I am not an academic. I’m not trying to be an academic.

1:22:43 Shotsava is poetry. Shotsava is a reflection of my interiority. It’s a transcription of my ecstatic states. It uses metaphors, it bends language. It borrows and takes poetic license to convey ineffable experiences, much like cinema does.

1:23:03 They’re not documentaries, they’re films, you know? Well, if anyone can do it, I think you can. Oh, thanks, bro. So this latest project, we’re calling Dissolution, which is kind of this idea of dissolving the ego, beyond the ego. It started off with these ayahuasca experiences, but we’re going to continue and try to look at different ways we can come to this final conclusion that you talked about in the beginning, which is we are all one.

1:23:25 And I’m telling you, Jason, that the guests that I have on here that truly feel connected and have this deep life experience, at the end of the episode, they all tell me whether Whether it’s a championship fighter or a bodybuilder or a writer, they basically say, we’re all one. And so we’re trying to find different ways of understanding that, whether it’s to endurance races or flow or shots of awe. And it seems like you’re trying to edge the global consciousness kind of towards that, right?

1:23:55 Yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting. Yeah. We are all one and we are also individuals. And so, you know, for me it’s not so much about the blurring of identity.

1:24:07 I love how individuated we are. For me it’s more like we’re all in it together. So we’re all one family, but we’re individual beings at the same time. We recognize the ways in which we are the same, but me recognizing you and you recognizing me is a dual act of recognition. So I still celebrate, revere, and recognize the individual.

1:24:35 That’s why I can love some people and not love other people, even though I wish them well. I also have these experiences with people who resonate with my work. Total strangers who will stop me all over the world and say, hey, I really love your videos, and it’s like, I have an intuition immediately where I sense a kindred spirit. A kindred spirit, but a self-sustaining entity nonetheless. We pat each other on the back, We give each other a wink of recognition and then we each go forth and make our own dent in the universe.

1:25:04 Because sometimes the metaphor of we are all one, it dilutes the exquisiteness of you as an individual which I also want to celebrate. Okay, that makes sense. And what’s next for you? Without the Brain Games? Five years is a long time.

1:25:22 I know, we did Brain Games for five seasons and then last year I did a show called Origins, The Journey of Humankind, which was an eight-episode series that tracked the key transformative moments that changed humanity. Origin of money, the origin of religion, the origin of transportation, massive show on Nat Geo that came out last year. I also started doing for the first time Jason Silva live events around the world. We did three in Canada, two in Australia, three in the US, we just did London.

1:25:49 And this was a new thing for me because it allowed the sort of million plus fans on the internet and Facebook to come see me live, people resonate with my content, and it gave me the freedom also to explore all these other topics, because I’ve spent so much time doing just corporate talks on tech and innovation and creativity, which I love. I’ve been to Dubai and Australia and everywhere in between, talking about innovation and singularity and using our tools to make this a better world. It’s a big part of my message, I hope to continue to spread that gospel.

1:26:19 But these events that are open to the public just opened up a whole new space for me. So it’s not just corporate audiences, but it’s anybody who’s ever resonated with a piece of video can now come hang out with me live. And that’s been amazing. So we’re planning on doing some more of those. And then just continuing to really develop the craft of Shots of All as the equipment becomes better.

1:26:39 Even shooting stuff with my iPhone can take on the professional quality of a DSLR camera. It just frees me to really travel and explore. And when some transmission wants to come in, boom, bring it on. And so I wanna keep pushing the envelope with the people I collaborate with, with the composers, with the editors that helped me bring my vision to life, just deep in that. And I’m hoping to get into some virtual reality collaborations.

1:27:04 My friend has a VR production company called Tomorrow Never Knows. My friend Tom Lofthaus, who was my partner on Shots of Awe for years. So we’re hoping to do some collaborations in VR as well. And then I’m psyched to explore love, man. I’m excited to hear about that.

1:27:23 You mentioned the singularity. We need to talk about it briefly. Elon Musk was on The Rokin’ Show recently and had a great time there. Really interesting conversation, but he talked a lot about that concept. Has your thinking changed on it?

1:27:37 And for most people that don’t understand singularity, how do you explain it to them? Yeah, sure. The first thing I should say is I continue to be completely optimistic. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t risks. Technology has always been a double-edged sword.

1:27:49 You can use fire to burn or to cook. So it’s really up to us how we deploy these tools, No doubt. Singularity is a metaphor. It’s a metaphor borrowed from physics to describe what happens when you go through a black hole. The laws of physics, as you know, they no longer apply, so this is a singularity.

1:28:05 There have been singularities in human history. Kevin Kelly says that the emergence of language was a singularity. If you draw a line in the sand of hominids pre-language and hominids post-language, the rich symbolic abstractions made possible by language would be unimaginable to early hominids on the other side of that line. I mean, try explaining Shakespeare and how beautiful a particular passage from Hamlet is to a chimp. I mean, yeah, chimps are amazing.

1:28:28 They’re superhuman-like, they’re super smart, but like, tell them about a Pablo Neruda poem and why it’s so exquisite, can’t. And so, there’s a prediction that we’re on our way to a technological singularity akin to a Cambrian explosion of mind. And this is due in part with the fact that technology trends are advancing exponentially versus the way that we think about change, which is linear. So we have this linear intuition, but technology changes exponentially.

1:28:56 And what’s the difference is that linear change, if you take 30 steps in a linear fashion, one, two, three, four, five, what do you get to? You get to 30. But if you take 30 steps that are exponential, where do you get? To a billion. And technology is exponential.

1:29:11 So yeah, people are like, okay, flying cars, brain machine interfaces, downloading our consciousness to the machine, maybe in a thousand years. But they’re thinking linearly, not exponentially. Exponentially, the supercomputer in your pocket today, your smartphone is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, and a thousand times more powerful than what used to be a $60 million supercomputer that was half a building in size 40 years ago. So in 40 years, half a building shrank down to a device in your pocket.

1:29:38 That is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, and a thousand times more powerful, okay? So extrapolate from that exponential trends continuing. In the next 25 years, your smartphone will shrink down is a device that fits in your pocket. And you go in your bodies and brains. Reverse engineering is from inside out.

1:29:56 So that’s happening with AI, artificial intelligence, the creation of non-biological minds, billions of times more powerful than us. Us merging with those tools, because we’re gonna put our tools inside of ourselves. We already are merged with our mobile phones. 100%. It’s just that we have a skin bag bias.

1:30:12 It’s what Andy Clark and David Chalmers call these cognitive philosophers. The skin bag bias is that we think that we end at the edge of our skin tissue, but we don’t. We live inside the condensation of human imagination. We think with our tools. When you write something down, part of your mind is now on the page and then it’s engaging in a feedback loop with the contents of your own mind and allowing you to think different thoughts.

1:30:31 We think through our tools. Same with our smartphones. These are extended appendages. These are extended minds already. We are already cyborgs.

1:30:38 You put on a pair of glasses to help you read. You are a cyborg. But the idea is that this hybridization, this merger with our tools will deepen. And as the tools give us new capacities, It will evoke or birth new forms of human creativity. Kevin Kelly says, how impoverished the world would have been without the technology of the oil painting or the, sorry, without the technology, imagine if we didn’t have Van Gogh in time for oil painting or imagine if we didn’t have Beethoven, if we didn’t have musical instrument in time for Beethoven.

1:31:11 It’s this idea that the tool creates new capabilities that we couldn’t even imagine. So if we didn’t have the technology of oil painting in time for Van Gogh, or the technology of the musical instrument in time for Beethoven, we wouldn’t have had the gifts they brought to the world. So as we move in this exponential direction towards artificial intelligence, towards genetic reprogramming biotechnology, mastering the information processes of biology, transforming the language of life itself and making it an engineering project in nanotechnology, which will allow us to pattern program atoms in the world, I mean, essentially reality will become programmable.

1:31:46 We’ll reprogram our biology. We’ll reprogram the physical matter that surrounds us, and we’ll have AI that’s a billion times more powerful than the human brain to deploy to do these things. The three things coming together, biotech, nanotech, and AI, these overlapping exponential revolutions, if you map out where they’re heading, it’s like staring at the sun. It’s like an event horizon, we can’t see beyond it. And so what do we do?

1:32:11 We use art and poetry to imagine what that might look like. It’s always been the artist who realizes the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it, so. How come they don’t get any credit? Yeah. How come they don’t get any air time?

1:32:24 You know, I mean, it’s like the science fiction author. They’re a writer and they paint a picture of what’s coming. We need storytellers and we need mythologists to help us articulate the mythologies of our time. But these are mythologies backed by data-driven extrapolations. So where we’re heading is a realm in which we will essentially acquire the power of gods, the power to create life, the power to destroy life.

1:32:52 Homo Deus, the book by Yaval Harari, is all about this. Death will become optional, immortality is coming, all these things. And the arts will be even more important, there’ll be levels we don’t understand. Well, I’m just excited about the new aesthetic possibilities that open up when we have new tools, new instruments to make beautiful things with. And you’re optimistic.

1:33:17 I remain always optimistic. That’s my choice, man. What’s Jason doing in 20 years? What do you think your life looks like? You must have been offered positions at big companies to come in and be their head of futurism.

1:33:29 Chief philosophy officer. I’m sure it happened. I know that’s happened. That’s not your gig. You know, when I’m a big fan of Ted, Ted conference, and when Chris Anderson, I’m attributing this quote to him.

1:33:42 I hope I’m not butchering it. He was asked about the future of TED. And he said, the world is changing so fast and we’re changing every day. So it’s silly to have a 20-year plan, to have a 20-year map. He said, so we don’t use maps, we use a compass.

1:34:03 And I was like, oh, fuck yeah, that’s me. So I don’t have a map for 20 years from now. I have a compass. I use my compass every day. What does the compass tell you?

1:34:14 The compass tells me to keep leaning in, keep leaning in, working on my craft, making my art, making my videos, seeding the world with my content, and then seeing what sprouts from my seeding. I don’t know exactly what’s gonna sprout, but I’ve been six years waking up to interesting invitations and invocations every time I look in my email box, so continuing to trust that process. What’s your biggest challenge right now? Managing my own fears, it’s always been.

1:34:50 I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. So I’m like, if I have a little ache, I’m like, oh my God, everything’s okay, everything’s okay, because I kind of love my life. I don’t want anything to derail it. So that’s definitely an anxiety. I have a little bit of hypervigilance.

1:35:03 Another one is, I think I harbor a fear of abandonment, especially when I feel vulnerable and exposed, there is just, there remains occasionally sort of a shadow side that it just feels like, you know, what if the person I want the most doesn’t want to be with me? Is that from divorce? My parents divorced when I was young. How old were you? I was like 11, 12.

1:35:32 I was seven. Yeah, I was shattered, shattered. Shattered, not because my dad didn’t see us, He still came over every day. But shattered by the sense of home and the sense of safety, being fractured. So it’s like Jordan Peterson says, you’re hurled into chaos because the one thing you’re sure of when you’re a kid is the omnipotence of your parents.

1:35:55 Like the one thing you’re sure of is you’re safe with them. And as soon as they, they’re not safe because they’re clashing and my mom is crying and my dad is angry. If my mom is not safe, then how can I be safe? If all my assumptions about them were called into question, then all my assumptions about the world are called into question, and I’m hurled into chaos, in the words of Jordan Peterson. It’s the involuntary killing of the ego that he says can, it’s very different from voluntary.

1:36:22 It’s not like taking a psychedelic with intention. An involuntary killing of the ego is what happens when you’re betrayed by someone you love. And it’s not that that betrayal was necessarily on purpose, right? My parents didn’t betray me on purpose, but I was betrayed. My sense of safety was betrayed by their inability to hold space for me in that sense.

1:36:43 And that means that I then realized that I needed to make sure that I was safe all the time. Also, growing up in Venezuela, a very dangerous country, there’s always fear of home invasions and kidnappings and stuff like that. We were well off, but in a country where there’s a lot of have-nots, there’s a lot of crime and kidnappings and organized crime, and so you always felt like a target. scary growing up there, and I was getting out of bed and triple-locking the doors every day, like, you know, that kind of stuff.

1:37:08 So those things get stored in your body memory. Do you go back to those in psychedelic experiences and process that stuff? Definitely, I’ve had experiences on cannabis where I’ve had panic reactions, for sure, when I felt like I lost track of my own borders too much. So there’s towing that line between chaos and order, but I definitely have altered states of consciousness experiences where I lost track of myself so much that I felt confused and like I was in a disordered state, disorienting state.

1:37:39 So there’s a big difference, you know, baseline is flat water, flow or an altered state that’s great is you’re surfing the wave. You introduce disorder, you bring waves into the pool but then you’re surfing those waves. But when you have a wipeout and you’re underwater for too long and you can’t breathe, then that’s panic. That’s like, oh, this is not fun, I changed my mind, I don’t wanna surf anymore, I’m drowning, you know? That’s why panic attacks are always connected to, I can’t breathe.

1:38:06 Like, that’s like one of the hallmark preconditions of a panic attack. The first thing that goes is, I can’t breathe, you know? And I definitely have had a handful of those in my life, one in particular in which I thought I was dying. Everything was fine, by the way. But those leave like little echoes.

1:38:22 And sometimes like late at night, if you’re stressed out about something or you didn’t sleep well, or you feel alone, you know, you might like have like a brief moment where you gasp for air and you feel like you didn’t get enough air. And it’s like that little reminder of like, ah, I can’t breathe, ah. It’s like, gah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Ernest Becker says that’s just a faint disquiet.

1:38:41 He says that’s just a moment in which you’re like, all of a sudden reminded that you’re like, oh shit, mortal. Right, of death, yeah. Yeah, my parents divorced when I was seven and I know you talked about it a bit of at yours. And it’s weird because they had no, they didn’t intend to do this to you and my brother was nine and my sister was three and we all had different experiences. But I read the same thing as in, I can’t trust anything in the world to be the way I thought it was gonna be.

1:39:05 And that means I’m on my own, and I can’t trust anyone with my feelings because they might ruin them again. So I just became real barricades everywhere. And so only honestly through an ayahuasca experience was able to see that child, and then now I have to constantly remind myself to allow yourself to be hurt. Well, that’s what I’m doing now with love. Love, right.

1:39:28 I did two sessions of MDMA with a therapist. I followed the protocols that they’re doing in all the studies where it was intentional, it was with a nurse, the whole thing. Two sessions with MDMA. And the reason I chose MDMA versus psilocybin or others is because I think it’s psychologically safer. You can’t have a bad trip on MDMA.

1:39:51 Right. That’s why it’s better for PTSD than any others. Right. PTSD have panic disorder, you don’t wanna give them psilocybin and risk them having a fucking panic attack on a classic psychedelic. MDMA, however, is an empathogenic.

1:40:04 It’s heart opening. It boosts frontal cortex, so you’re more engaged. It lowers activity in the amygdala, so you’re less afraid. It’s a little bit stimulating, because it’s an amphetamine, but it makes you simultaneously feel relaxed. They call that the optimal arousal zone, perfect for psychotherapy.

1:40:19 And again, David Pierce calls MDMA the perfect human state. So I was like, okay, I wanna do one of these sessions and revisit my demons, revisit my fears, talk to my panic, talk to my anxieties and all of that. I feel it was very helpful. You have a lot of breakthroughs that day, but then you wonder what’s it gonna be like next week, next month, next year? And sometimes the integration is slow, but then you notice that things are just better.

1:40:41 And then you notice that you also make certain decisions that you leaned into and you’re like, wow, I never thought it took me 10 years before I was able to go to Burning Man. And then I went. It’s been six years since I like really found a relationship that wasn’t just like a short fling. Like is the MDMA attributable to this? Like slowly but surely giving me the courage or the permission to lean into discomfort, maybe.

1:41:06 Yeah, maybe I’m just growing up, but who knows? I definitely am happy I had the experience. Yeah, the integration is something I’m trying to get my head around because three months ago, I mean, Jason, I literally got the 10 commandments on my second ceremony. It was like, number one, number two, number three, make your wife the queen, you know, be the king, do this, do that, do that. It was like, and then at the very end of the ceremony, it was like, let’s review the 10 commandments.

1:41:30 And you know, you come out of it and my crew was there and I got to say all this to cameras. I recorded everything I saw and you know, you’re three months later and you’re like, what was that commandment again? And just, what does that make me a jerk? But then am I integrating subconsciously? And then I shouldn’t be angry at myself for not implementing those things and it’s this process that I guess we all are integrating something, right?

1:41:52 Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, I think what I’m looking for the most, truly, is faith. Never thought I’d say that but like, you know, ah, you know, because I read about the singularity and I read about all this progress and I’m like, I’m banking on that, man. Like, I’m banking that like, everything’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna have radical life extension.

1:42:17 We’re gonna address the grand challenges of humanity, like we’re gonna solve all the problems and afflictions of our age, and I see progress everywhere. There is so much progress, you know? But it’s, but at the same time, it’s like, I tell myself, I’m like, okay, yeah, there’s evidence that things could go well, but could they go wrong? Yeah, so then I need more faith, so I can sleep better at night on a regular basis. I wanna believe, but I don’t just wanna believe.

1:42:40 I wanna know. I wanna know. And you’ll never know maybe you will maybe you will What um, what’s it like to live in the states these days? And is it is it is it a divisive place? Does it make you more motivated to put out these ideas and shots of all people to kind of take a step back?

1:43:01 Yeah, yeah, I mean, it’s it could be yeah. I mean look I think it’s time I’m very privileged in that I I have spent a lot of time with people that are doing amazing things in the world, like inspired lit up souls. So the feedback loops that I often encounter are very positively reinforcing. I’m like, I see progress everywhere. I see people working hard.

1:43:23 I see people agitated to make things right. I know that when you watch mainstream news, the divisiveness and the ugliness is also there. You know, we can only do what we can do, right? We can make our own contribution and let the chips fall where they may. I feel good when I wake up in the morning, but I’m making, I’m doing my part, you know?

1:43:44 Yeah, I agree, we can only do what’s in front of us. Even Jordan talks about that, you know, what can you do with your life and your daily practices and connect to this divine and this flow, you know? Jason, I always ask people a few questions at the end, I’m gonna ask you, if you could make a phone call to that 20-year-old Jason Silva, maybe you’re still in school. What do you mean, I’m 20, right? Of course, and I’m, by the way, We are gonna book in the next, well not the next episode, but the episode for 2159, for 150 years from now.

1:44:14 Done. Let’s do it. And let’s just make it happen. Let’s do it. But, you know, that advice to that 20 year old kid who was gonna be a director, right, but loved philosophy, that had done these crazy salons as a high school kid, things that you hear about people doing in France and things like that.

1:44:32 What advice do you get to him? Everything you know now, what would you tell him? Mmm be more confident. I

1:44:47 I had glimpses of confidence I had enough confidence in the right moments to push me into the direction of that I needed to go to But I often was kicking and screaming in between doubt boredom Insecurity fear Just would have just been like just be more confidence Just dance like no one’s watching. Because one confident slip, you might have missed some of these hurling pieces, right? You might have missed the brain games and the shots all and the, yeah, but you got there, but.

1:45:25 So it’s kind of like, yeah, trust. Trust, yeah. Lean into what feels good, trust. Yeah, this is good for people listening. Yeah.

1:45:34 Best advice you’ve ever received? I know you, my mom has her favorite like bumper sticker quote. It’s kind of like the one rule in our house. Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. These success secrets are only available on the London Real Academy.

1:45:57 Become a member and get access to live shows, exclusive courses, my webinars, bonus content, meetups, live events, an amazing community, and much, much more. Now back to the rest of the show. You know, it’s like, do not compare yourself to others for you will become vain and bitter. And I’m, you know, I’m no saint. You know, I can’t, I haven’t transcended that, but I know I’m self-aware enough to know that, well, if I don’t put myself in that situation, it won’t happen.

1:46:33 I don’t try to be an actor or try to be a film director because then I’m going to be so insecure comparing myself to the others. For me, I had to figure out a way of making something that there was no comparison over, so that I wouldn’t have to labor over the suffering of judging myself against those that had come before. So I often tell people, take the road less traveled by, that will make all the difference, you know? However, if what you decide to do is a path that’s been carved, like if you do wanna be a filmmaker, then go fucking do it, but borrow from your influences, but don’t compare yourself to them.

1:47:05 And be okay with creating something new. Yes, absolutely. Because if you hadn’t had some of those insecurities, you wouldn’t have created this thing that you do. Which, you know, for everyone that’s watching, now it all seems obvious. But you were doing this back in the day, before I even think YouTube existed.

1:47:20 And so, and now a lot of people do it. You were the OG of doing this stuff. Thank you for saying that. I was filming myself doing these philosophical reflections in 1999, man. I have the videos.

1:47:33 I have them all. In my high school salons, like literally this. Whew, that’s like pre-Google. Yeah, and so, well, Jason, thank you for doing that stuff. Thanks, man.

1:47:46 Thank you for having me. You’re a beautiful soul, man. So are you, man. And, you know, you’re becoming more beautiful with age, kind of like a wine. So in another 200 years.

1:47:53 Another 200 years, we’ll chat. Yeah, we’ll chat. But thank you for giving me these ideas, you know. I don’t get stuff like this all the time and it really helps me think about these things, You know, because I think I’m doing a lot of the things you’re talking about, and I’m like, okay, we need to do this, but sometimes I don’t know why, or what, or how it’s inspiring me, or my own flow, and so you’ve taught me a lot about me today, and it just helps me wanna go in more and do more of this stuff.

1:48:25 Again, thanks so much, dude. I wanna show you a video of mine when we finish. It’s called Ego Death, The Art of Ritualized Surrender. I think I watched that a couple days ago. It’s like six minutes, right?

1:48:36 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m wearing sunglasses. Yeah, sunglasses. That one was so good. That one was, yeah.

1:48:40 We had a lot of those themes today. That was super powerful, you know? Thanks, bro. And again, like, we’re doing this whole project. It’s probably gonna be a video series and then a movie coming out next year, Dissolution, and I’m sure I’m gonna be talking to you more about these ideas because we were looking about different ways of people are doing these things and you’re doing something super unique and I love it.

1:49:00 So, much love to you. Much love to you, man. And, you know, you going all in on the love thing is very inspiring for me, because I feel, I feel that Demian is, you know, and for me, you know, I became a father a couple years ago and that was the ultimate test. Like, are you ready to allow another human being to like slice and dice your emotions? You know, and so, but it’s been a great, it’s a great thing to push through.

1:49:21 So, thank you, thank you, brother, much love. Thank you, man, awesome.