 World well a lot of people have been emailing. Why don't you have Jason still on your show? Why don't you have Jason still on your show? And you were like I was like is that the guy from brain games? I don't have a TV So I'll pass it's funny because I saw that show once and I thought this is the coolest show ever I get an airport lounge. Yeah, but I didn't have TV for 15 years because I was a cord cutter in the 90s Basically, I don't want to watch a lot of TV either yet. It was a Netflix for a while though. That was nice Yeah, I did see it. I discovered it on Netflix. Is it gone now though? I think it's back on Netflix. Okay, you know, I can always steal it like most people my age get there of media. Yes, feel it. Get it. I won't do that with your new show though because that would be bad news. Yeah, we did get cable for certain educational reasons. Great. By the way, do you ever watch your own stuff? Like do you watch the final production of your Nat Geo? Or are you kind of like, okay, I'm so done with this. I did watch the entire finished premiere episode on television for the first time. Okay, that's fair for the premiere of Origins and I had like a little party going on in my hotel room and it was surreal because we worked really hard on it and I think the final product was lovely. Yeah, for me, it's hard for me to listen to finished products but it's also kind of required to get the full view. You want to sort of view it through the eyes of the viewer and not just the way that you think it went. That's true. That's true. I also do a lot of short form content with the shots of our videos and those because I'm simultaneously sort of the narrator but also the director and the creative and overseeing the music and all the editing. With those, I really love to watch the final product because I have such a sense of control and authorship over it. It's like my baby from frame to frame. You mentioned also that there's this concept that we're not who we think we are, we're not who other people think we are, we are who other people think we are, whatever. And that kind of goes along with what you're mentioning with watching the video and looking at the final product. Totally. Can you break that down for us a little bit because that's complex yet fascinating. Yeah, so I remember reading this article on this concept called Peepling and it's inspired by a book called Others in Mind and it has to do with our awareness that other people have interior worlds. And therefore our inferences, our modeling of what other people's interior worlds are like if we want to communicate and or commune with those people and it kind of interpersonal exchange requires a rendering within my consciousness of the contents of your consciousness. And when I communicate with you when I encode my thoughts verbally and transmit them through time and space and I read your responses and cues, I can assess whether my modeling of your mind is accurate enough and whether I'm actually communicating accurately with your mind based on the cues that I'm getting back. Does everyone do that though? I feel like my dad doesn't even do that. He just communicates unidirectionally and then goes right. Well, I definitely think that the more empathetic you are, the more rich your modeling of other people's minds are, you know, people talk about having being an empath or whatever, you can really feel other people. We all do it to an extent. I mean, I guess some people don't and that's when you feel like you're talking to a robot that's like looking right through you has no idea of your inner world. You must get that a lot because the passion and all the things you talk about in the philosophy, there's gotta be people who go, wow, that's so fascinating. And then they just kind of go, I'm going to dip out of here before I show them how dumb I am or you know, how I'm not following on because I watched a lot of your stuff and I went, I'm not sure that I understood that. Let me watch it again. And then I went, nope, nope, I still don't understand it. Let me watch it again. And then I went, maybe this one's just not for me. And there was a few words like that. I think it depends on the topic. I think some people respond to the passion and to the fact that I seem genuinely excited or curious about what I'm talking about. I'm definitely out of my head in those videos. But to just to finish the thought about I am not who I think I am. So the idea was that when I talk to you, I am running a simulation of your mind and interacting with that. And then I'm also running a simulation of your simulation of me. So within my simulation of you, there's a simulation of how you see me. And that's who I then try to be. I want to be who I think you think I am, unless I'm not interested in connecting with you. Right. We're making those little micro assessments all the time. And then there's a sociologist called Cooley, who calls this the looking glass self. And that that's how interpersonal relationships work. And so his famous line is, I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am. And human beings are social creatures. Sure. So this is happening subconsciously all the time. But anyway, I thought it was an interesting thing to make a video about because it feels like when you have two mirrors that look at each other and it creates an engulfing infinity or recursive loop, that's kind of how consciousness works. I don't know if you never read Godel Escherbach. A long time ago, when I was trying to be like, if I talk this way, people will think I'm really smart. Okay. It didn't work out for me. It worked for you. Whatever you're doing is working. I think I'm just genuinely curious to try to deconstruct things I don't understand. And he had a theory in that book about consciousness that feels a lot like Cooley's looking glass self. And basically what he says is, our brains are media. Think of them as media that store patterns like a hard drive. Sure. And that pattern mirrors the world. It models the external world. Now, if you make a model of the external world, eventually, you have to realize that that model of the world includes the observer within that world, making the observation of that world. Sure. Sure. And what he calls an inevitable vortex of self mirroring, that eventually a real causal mind emerges. It is like when you plug a video camera to the TV screen and then face the camera at the TV, it creates an engulfing infinity. Right. That's consciousness. It feels like the movie Inception. That's the mirror reflects the mirror. And to your point, when you do that, you still get the screen of the TV in the shot. Yeah. Again and again and again and again. So the observer is always going to be always right. Okay. I mean, you can trip out with this stuff. It starts to get like really weird and odd, but I've always thought that getting a handle on a weird and odd idea gives me a semblance of control. And I think the reason for my interest in making this particularly short form videos is that the headier the idea, the more the creative challenge to kind of hone it in, to clothe it in language. And if I can do that effectively, it makes me feel like I'm in control because I can like articulate this. I've rendered this into like a solid thing. It fits in a drawer. Okay. Been there done that move on. Right. Right. Go on to understanding something else. And I can completely identify with that point. I mean, the show seeks to do that with human behavior in a lot of ways, figuring out, okay, what's happening here. And I heard in one episode of a show, you were like, well, how come this love thing worked out that way? Or how come this texting thing didn't work out this way? And I thought, well, I can definitely explain that to you because I spent a decade and a half thinking about why these problems happen and how they can be solved. But you are a super passionate guy in your videos, you're a performance philosopher. I think some people have said, which I think is really a cool descriptor. Interesting title. So that comes from a quote by Timothy Leary. And Timothy Leary, of course, was a counterculture, sort of heavy rock star in the 60s. Harvard professor took a bunch of LSD realized, oh my God, we're going to hack our consciousnesses. Let's create a social revolution. And maybe he took a little too far at the time and society responds in return. Right now you'd be like, yeah, buddy, tune and drop out. Big deal. Yeah, exactly. But after his psychedelic thing, his peak, he came out in the 80s as a cyberneticist. Like his whole thing was the internet is the new LSD. Computers will literalize the psychedelic dream of mind expansion. It was a very interesting, like Silicon Valley means counterculture merger, which led directly to probably Steve Jobs and all these other guys dropping acid. Yeah, precisely. We have the internet and acid. Why not just combine the two? Yeah, there's a book called What the Door Mouse Said, which is all about how the counterculture on Silicon Valley merged and so much of the techno utopian dreams, singularity, Kevin Kelly, like we will become as gods and extend our intelligence, came from inspiration that came out of the sort of psychedelic vision. That we reconceived of computers as these big mainframe things for social control and instead become tools for personal liberation, personal self expression. Right. And I assume that when, when you're talking about personal liberation and self expression, you're referring in many ways to the things that you started creating. And you did this before there were vloggers, right? You were kind of just like, I'm going to make these little films. Yeah, I started doing my little videos in like, well, I've been doing videos since 1994 is the truth in Venezuela. Yeah, I was doing videos and short films. I've been obsessed with the camera. And I think it was mostly because it was a way of capturing reality. You know, I was always like acutely aware of how ephemeral life is, how ephemeral moments are. Everything is impermanent. Everything is temporary. And this was again, back to the control thing. Yeah. If I can capture it, I can own it. Eternalized temporary moments. And I went to film school, double majored in film philosophy, and then I got to college and ended up getting a gig at Currents with Max. And then we worked there for four years. And when I left the network, I just wanted to go back to doing these philosophical short films and put them on the internet. And that was like 2010. People still roll their eyes at you when you're doing online video in like 2010, 2011. Yeah. Now it's like, you know, not a big deal. Right. Now everybody's doing it. Like I don't do a lot of online video and people go, what are you doing? You're wasting this opportunity. So here we have these go-pros in our face and I'm trying to pretend like they're not there. Yeah. Because just like you mentioned earlier, when something is observing you, you get a little bit of that. So I'm like, trying not to let it modify my behavior. Yeah. It's hard. You know, one way of doing that is to get into a flow state and to get out of your head. And, you know, the Timothy Leary quote was in the information age, you don't teach philosophy, you perform it. Now, and it's not so much that I read that and I'm like, well, I want to go perform philosophy, but rather that philosophizing is a verb, is an act lived out loud. It's pondering and contemplating. It's not something prescripted or even thought out beforehand as much as like discovered in real time as you probe the idea. But that requires getting out of your head, that requires silencing what Stephen Collar calls the inner critic, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or whatever, right? And so that's when I kind of fell in love with some of the ideas of the flow genome project and their new books dealing fire and all about like some silencing the monkey mind. The key idea is this part of the brain that is doing the self editing, the inner critic, the self doubt, the overthinking of everything. We've inherited, you know, because it was the planning for the future. It was worrying about the predator. I mean, we are the descendants of the most neurotic humans. It served us very well. It allows us to think about the future and plan accordingly, fair enough. But it also betrays us because it prevents us from ever truly being in the present because we're always five steps ahead. And when there's not things to worry about, we're still finding things to worry about. Like now, well, I'm now my self esteem is what I'm worried about. I'm worried about how I'm coming across, not the fact that a lion is going to eat me. But it turns out, and this comes from those fmri scans they did on freestyle wrappers versus people who are setting memorize lyrics, the freestyle wrappers shut down the neocortical hardware, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex in the zone, the jazz musician in the pocket, the elite athlete when he surrenders and submits to the amazing feat of athleticism. In these moments, as Jamie wheel says, the aperture focuses, it's not so much use more of your brain is actually shut down parts of the brain that don't serve you in that moment. And the self experiences that as liberation. So with my videos, I quickly realized that's the function they served for me. That was my jazz. That's why they're fully improvised. They allow me to dive into the moment. One of the key insights for me happened in high school when I used to experiment. I was experimenting with cannabis. And cannabis has a history of being used in improvisational contexts. That's why jazz musicians jazz musicians love incorporating cannabis into their jam sessions, because you get a flood of dopamine increases pattern recognition increases lateral thinking increases associational thinking, and it thrusts you or hurls you into the now or into the forever box. And I think for me it was very interesting that anything that could be a catalyst to get me out of my head to hurl me into the present. That's the surrender part. But then the control part was make sure I have a camera around sure to capture when this is happening. And it reminded me of a line from Black Swan, where you know that Natalie Portman, of course, so the dance choreographer is talking to Natalie Portman and she wants to be, you know, the Black Swan. And he's like, look, you're a perfect white Swan. You're all about control and deliberate moves and practice and meditation and judiciousness and control control control. You're a great white Swan. But the Black Swan has to let go, has to surrender, has to surprise ourselves, be dangerous, transcend. And so he finally says to her, look, perfection, any kind of perfection or exceptionality and anything is not just about control. It's also about letting go. So it's actually both being able to do both the ping pong between one and the other. And I think with those videos, the control could be all the reading that I do, all the thinking that I do about these ideas, all the planning that goes into bringing the camera, getting the right people together, creating the vibe, authoring the environment to get myself there. And then it's about submit. You don't script the videos. And that's great. You still have to prepare for the videos. And I think a lot of people go, wow, this guy doesn't even prepare for his videos. And that's just not true. They're unscripted, but there's a lot of prep. The control element still has to be there to create the product. Yeah, I would say that the control is to put myself in an environment where I feel safe. I'm in around people that I trust so that I can be really vulnerable and fully surrender to, so then I can surprise myself to go beyond myself, right? And see what I find. You can see yourself surprising yourself in the video if you look closely. Of course, I don't know you that well, but that's exactly what I think that subconsciously people process from the video. And Steven Kotler wrote about this in stealing fire. He's profiled so many athletes and surfers and big wave surfers, you know, that get in the zone. He's never really talked to an artist, you know what I mean? And I think what was interesting is that he said that in my videos, both the verbal diarrhea, the intensity of words that comes at you combined with the jarring editing and cuts shuts down conscious processing in the viewer because it's overwhelming. You can only hold like three or four items in mind at once through conscious processing, but then you switch to unconscious processing. So you move into an altered state and then you receive the intensity of the video. So when I'm talking about creativity and altered states of consciousness in these videos, I'm also inducing an altered state of consciousness in the viewer, which is different than just telling them about an altered state of consciousness. The reason that they respond that is because that's what's actually happening to me as a performer when they watch those videos. Because of the way that we mirror things that we see and all that subconscious communication. They call it the four trillion dollar altered states economy, the money that people spend to get out of their heads, whether it's watching a musician in a concert or going and watching an MMA fighter, you know, or going and watching a horror film, like we want to watch other people in an altered state because it gets us into an altered state vicariously. And you know, when you were mentioning that in my videos, you see me surprising myself because what's happening there is I'm coming to realize where I've ended up with this like verbal tirade and finding myself delighted that I landed in some interesting spot, which is very similar to when these rappers freestyle. It's just that that's one particular context that we're used to seeing, you know, what are you going to wrap on 30 seconds, give me go, you know, and that's fine. They're just in my context, it's a little different because it's a different context than it's maybe a different set of things that I'm talking about. But I'm convinced it's the same mental process. Yeah, you can even see it happening in your nonverbal communication. We'll link to some of your videos in the show notes. Yeah, AOC family, if you agree with me, Jason starts moving more when the idea starts to blend together, you start to move your body more and then you look up and you're like, and then boo, and it's like your hands even go up and it's like an eruption of the idea comes out of your head. And I've actually read that when we use our limbs to speak, they are part of our thinking is happening through the limbs like this aids me in my expressiveness. And there's feedback happening between my arms and my brain and my brain and my arms. You know, I remember when I started working at current TV for the first time and one of the producers who was not my best friend, you know, I have to do these host wraps and he's like, put your hand in your pocket, like, you know, be a little more calm, maybe a little more chill. And you know, he's realized what he's doing is he's like silencing my soul in that moment. He's making me self conscious, right? He's actually taking away what could possibly make me good at what I do. And he's putting me back in my head instead of letting me take me out, right, concentrating on like keeping you handy now and now I'm self conscious. Now you've completely crippled my creativity. Well, we've got the mind following the body and the body following the mind. So if you shut one of those things down deliberately to look better in some sort of dumb frame that you could probably fix with a wider lens or by backing up your feet, you're going to ruin the final product 100% in anything even like this with the cameras. The thing I have to get used to is don't knock this thing out of whack because when I'm in my home studio, I'm flinging things around. And if I don't hit my desk hard by accident, at least twice, it's just probably not a good show. Yeah, I think any performer, but like, I love movies. So I always watch interviews with actors that I love talking about their craft. And, you know, they talk about the search for truth to be fully present and committed to the reality of an imaginary circumstance. That's a powerful thing, right? To hypnotize yourself to get into an altered state, a frenzy, a trance of such significance that a crew of 25 crew members and cameras all around you can nonetheless not thwart your capacity to induce an alternate reality that for all purposes is real, right? The camera doesn't lie. When we see transcendence on screen, that's because that actor is having a real experience under imaginary circumstances. And that's beautiful to watch. And so in my own small way, when I try to be creative, when I try to make creative work, and I'm sure that you get into that space in your podcast, the reason it's so successful is no doubt, because you're able to induce that altered state, that truth with your guests, is that you go to that place, man, and you're not there. It's the going beyond yourself. You know, you finally stop worrying about, you know, how you're coming across and how you're going to be perceived. And, you know, all that junk, the coldest acts and error messages is Jamie Wheale calls them, you know, I love those guys. They're so brilliant. When I read that book, I thought, wow, there's so much good stuff in here. And so of course, when I read books, one of my sort of tricks is to read the acknowledgement section and make sure that I highlight the names they talk about. Because you have to get your inspiration from somewhere. If you can find those people, you can sort of pull up the roots and look under the hood of what's even deeper into the book. It's the way to do it. 100%. I don't know if you're familiar with the Edge Foundation. I've heard of it, but I'm not that familiar. John Brockman is a famous literary agent. He represents a lot of the science writers, people like Sam Harris and others. And he's got this organization called Edge and their tagline is something that I've borrowed as a kind of a life philosophy back to what you were saying about looking in the cliff notes of the book and digging deeper into everything. He says, to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, to gather the world's most interesting minds, to put them together in a room and to have them ask each other the questions they've been asking themselves. That's beautiful. That's nice. That's a good one. If you're going to steal a slogan, that's a good one. Yeah, but that's the dream. Like my relationship, my friendship with people like the Flow Genome Project founder is Steven Collar and Jamie Weal comes from wanting to find people who could verify and legitimize interior experiences that I had had in a language that is both poetic and archetypical as well as scientific. And that's what those guys do. So you have, you know, you know, Steven Collar brings the neuroscience, like breaks it down, hardened materialist. And then you have Jamie Weal waxing, rapsotic, a la Joseph Campbell and like archetypes and bliss fuck crucifixions and dying into the moment and all this stuff. And I'm like, holy fuck, these two know how to tango, you know. And so I became best friends with them. They're like my gurus. Did you ever deal with, say some kind of imposter syndrome? Because I feel like a lot of folks would say, well, you know, what qualifies you to do this type of thing and finding guys like Steven Cartler and Jamie Weal who legitimize it in science is you can kind of take the mask off and go, look, this is real. So screw everybody who doubted me. Yeah. So Steven Collar in the process of interviewing me for that chapter, revealed me to myself. He really anchored my meandering journey because I never had a plan, right? There's no directions that I followed. I never had a map, but Chris Anderson from Ted once said in an interview, we don't use maps, we use a compass. And that's always what I've had. But then sometimes looking backwards, you see that you did kind of follow a trail and it was the trail of finding these flow states and building your life around them. And, you know, your instrument happened to be film and video, you know, you use the storytelling technologies of media that you had to find and articulate your voice that got you into that altered state and so on and so forth. But then explaining the neuroscience behind the experience I was having, and then having people like Jamie articulate these sort of existential context for why this matters. It just made it all make sense, you know. And as far as imposter syndrome is concerned, I never would call myself an expert in anything. I don't want to be an academic because I think that the people that are academics have a different kind of training. And I think they're very important. And I don't want to confuse people between what I do and what they do. I am an artist, which means I want the poetic license and the freedom to interpret and to take poetic license and to get inspired. And I call my videos art. And, you know, I host a couple series of National Geographic there about science because I'm a good synthesizer. And I explained some of these ideas maybe in a poetic way, but I'm not a scientist. I'm an artist. I'm an artist. And Marshall McLuhan used to say, it's always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it. So it's like, the artist matters too. And I'm just trying to like legitimize the artist as a voice that can communicate important ideas related to science and technology and the implications of science and technology in a rapidly changing world. Being such an artistic free thinker was a little bit surprising for me. You grew up in a repressive regime. I mean, there's no getting around it. Chavez, Venezuela, not exactly this bastion of, Hey, let's let the kids experiment with all the stuff and videotape it and talk about whatever they want. I mean, it's literally the opposite of what people think about communist socialist regimes. What's going on there? Yeah. So Chavez is like a terminal cancer that shows up to cripple its host. He was a cancer and he died of cancer. So I don't think that's a coincidence. There's a little poetic justice. But yeah, in 1998, he took over and he really made things far worse. Venezuela for a while, you know, in the back of oil income was one of the wealthiest nations in South America had a really strong middle class, very high standard of living. We were like the Switzerland of the South America for a while. And my grandparents who were immigrants came there and did very well for themselves. So I grew up in a very cosmopolitan bubble in Caracas. The country was much better off back then, but it still had that Latin American signature social division where a small percentage of the population is extremely cosmopolitan. And the rest are very rural, you know, people who live in the countryside, farmers, etc. You're an 80s and 90s kid? Yeah, I grew up in the 80s. Yeah, exactly. I was in this cosmopolitan bubble and I went to an international school. My mom, who was a teacher at the International School of Taha High School English Literature, is an intellectual and a poet and an artist. And so the environment of my home was extremely bohemian. Surprise. The most bohemian of sculptures and art and paintings and psychedelia. And my friends would come over to my mom's house and they'd be like stoned and they'd be like looking at her art and they just couldn't believe that this was real. Like, I was lucky in that sense. A lot of the videos that you create are based on how some elements of our brain and perception and things like that can combine to kind of trick us, right? Brain games is, in fact, many of the episodes I've seen are about that. What are some of your favorite cognitive distortions that you just can't talk about enough? This is so important. How does not everybody know this? Everybody in my family has got to be aware of this. Yeah, well, one of my mom's bumper sticker quotes in her classroom was, we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. So our interpretive frameworks matter. The set of codes and symbols and moralistic philosophy, like our cultural reality tunnel to quote Robert Anton Wilson, matters. So again, what that does is it informs what we decide about what happens to us, like how we feel about what happens to us. And so when we feel disempowered, sometimes it can serve us to try to take ourselves out of context and realize, am I really disempowered? Is the whole world really conspiring against me? Or do I have an interpretive framework that is fatalistic, that is defeatist, that is not serving me? And how can I change it? The notion that reality is coupled to perception is very important to me. I've had enough experiences in altered states of consciousness to realize that perspective is reality. The angle with which you see the world is reality. You can talk about some of these film theorists that talk about how when you edit a film, depending on the order of how you show certain frames and certain shots, you can get the audience to have a certain opinion about what they're seeing on screen with very, very little context. There's that famous shot of Hitchcock showing that if a shot was shown in a certain way in a certain order, he looked like a pervert. And if it was shown in another way in a certain order, he looked like a really nice old man. Interesting. We got to find that and throw it in the show notes. I'm sure it's on YouTube somewhere. Yeah, the nerd writer did a video essay about film arrival. He's brilliant. That guy is an excellent little thinker, like yourself, actually. Oh, well, he's one of my heroes. And I've become very good friends with him as well. I adore his work, Evan Puschach, the nerd writer. He did an analysis of the film Arrival, which is really an analysis of consciousness in cinema and how it plays with time and context. And this is where he used the example of Hitchcock. But again, that applies also to our day to day reality outside of movies. Our day to day reality has been edited to a certain degree by context, by the culture, by language. Can even sculpt our worldview by the clothing we wear. We're a different person. We're a laser on them when we're not, you know. David Lenson, who wrote the wonderful book called On Drugs, said that consciousness is a collaboration between subjective and objective. So it's person multiplied by place, multiplied by time, revealing a garden of forking paths of possible consciousnesses, right? I mean, that's what we are. I mean, you know, they say if you're a sum of the five people you spend the most amount of time with, yeah, but you're also your language, the context, where you are, who you're with, people who are multilingual tend to be more tolerant and creative because they see the world through two different lenses. When I start speaking in Spanish, I see the world completely different. And that sensibility, it just allows you to more easily see the world through the eyes of others because you know what it's like to see the world through two different eyes. Are there certain concepts that you think about more in Spanish than you do in English, in vice versa? It's a hard question to answer because I don't know what language I think in. Really? I guess maybe I think in both. I don't think that I'm thinking in any particular language unless I'm trying to say something. Right. The voice in your head, I guess, is the only one. Because, right, if I think about what language I think in, I don't. I just have feelings. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But what's interesting about me is that I literally grew up with both. So my parents are both native Spanish speakers and my mother is also a native English speaker. So even though I grew up in Venezuela, I was completely bilingual. And what that does, again, it's two worlds. It's like, if I'm talking to the nanny or some of my Venezuelan relatives, it's like, this is Venezuelan culture. This is where they're coming from. This is their world. But then I would switch to English with my mom and it allowed me to just join that two worlds. It's just right away. It allows you to ping-pong between different monkey suits. When I switch languages and I'm not fully bilingual, but if I switch to German or something like that, it's the context which is pretty much immediately. And it can be almost like a knife cutting open a fabric that you think you're looking at in reality. And then the knife goes through and then behind it is, oh, that's what I'm really, that's what I'm really paying attention to deconstructing how conscious experience is informed by context, place, even music can be very empowering to use the metaphor that Stephen Coller and Jamie Weill use the knobs and levers approach to perception. Now they're using it very much in the context of psychedelics. But I think the knobs and levers approach can be as simple as if I go to Amsterdam with my buddy Ben and my buddy Jason Goodman, and we take this stereo system with us when we're riding bikes and we're listening to this particular cinematic score. I'll be able to frame a particular reality. It's like being a stage designer, the people who choreograph the stage. Like, you know, when you go to the theater, you sit in the chair, if the stage is made to look like an 18th century British home, you're like already contextually ready to receive that. If the actress addressed a particular costume, you're ready to meet them at that reality. David Lenson calls that stewardship of internal life. When you realize the creative capacity that you have through your creative and linguistic choices to inform consciousness, that's like the best kept secret to any kind of happiness. It's not when I buy that car, but it's when I get in that car, that is a particular monkey suit. That's a particular reality that I want to render. I want to feel like James Bond or you can get really creative like it's a jukebox style selection of like the kind of reality authorings you want to create for yourself. And I don't want to sound like a new age thinker, but I'm talking literally about it's no different than like if you have a girlfriend that's really into hosting dinner parties and she's like an expert like having the candles and the lighting in a certain way and she plays the perfect jazz music in the band. She creates little movies. Just think of yourself as you're an editor and an actor. You're living the reality, but you're also in the editing room tweaking the scene and making the movie play out and give a certain mood and a certain vibe and a certain flavor. You know as good at this as kids. At some point around eight or ten we just kind of switched to instead of creating that all internally we go well no actually now I need this external thing to do it and it just gets worse as we get older. Yeah because the price of what you need to get there changes and sometimes you get so jaded that nothing will make a difference. Well we're in Hollywood you can find examples of that every day. Yeah some people can fly you know first class to Paris, day in a five-star hotel and complain of being bored. I think it's a dance. I think you know the little kid can build a fort made of sheets. I mean the little kids have maximum imagination and minimum. Even the little kid some environments are better for thriving than others. You know like I had an enormous yard in Venezuela. Like we had to practically have a mountain within our property. So that mountain was a freaking world. It was a safe contained environment that I could make a part of my mental landscape. It's like when you go on nature walks right like really beautiful nature walks they say that those are so good for a contemplative introspection. Why is that? Well if you're in a nature walk in the middle of nowhere and there's nobody else around except you or maybe your friend the landscape becomes your mental landscape. You appropriate the mystical surroundings and that mystical surrounding becomes the mystical mood that you're in. But the minute that somebody else pops in some like annoying tourists what does that do? Now you have to model their mental world and now your dreamscape has to be shared with them and that's oh shit buzzkill somebody else ruining my sacred holy moment. So I always say you have to be able to design the context that you can then appropriate to become your mental reality and nowhere is that more clear. You know now that pot is getting legal in all these places in Colorado why do some people smoke pot and get paranoid and wig out? They're like oh I got so awkward in that room and then some people smoke pot and they're like they go into archetypal realm of ideals. Context bro they're appropriating a different landscape that surrounds them into their mental experience. Cannabis and many other techniques of ecstasy one of the key things they do is they're non-specific amplifiers of consciousness. What that means is they make you aware of how your creative and linguistic choices are making you feel. Some people can listen to music so much that they're so satiated they don't even notice the music that's playing in the background they don't stop and smell the roses. One of the first thing that happens when somebody gets high you play them a song they've heard a thousand times and they're like wow forgot how much I love that song. What's different? The only thing that's different is that you're noticing how the song is making you feel. Normally the song is doing that you're just not aware of it you're not paying attention right? You're thinking about your grocery list whatever it may be yeah and so people say learn to be in the present learn to be mindful they're all saying the same thing. They're saying your creative and linguistic choices are constantly informing your interior experience. If you learn to tune in to how those signals are authoring your interior experience you've won because then you can start cultivating those signals like a freaking DJ and that's really empowering. I mean if you're interested in human flourishing and you're frustrated by the fact that the things you buy don't satiate your soul is because the the mental apparatus that you're incorporating into that is a pivotal part of that feedback loop. How do you get yourself into and out of feedback loops that are negative and positive when you do your videos? For example if oftentimes you're out in nature you're in like a weird barn or something with the roof caving in and I think okay this isn't just cool scenery there's something going on here because I would imagine it would even be hard for you to function in society if you were like you are in those videos everywhere you go all day of course and the reason that I wouldn't want to be in a place where I have to manage consensus reality right? I can't appropriate New York City right as part of my mental landscape unless I'm ready to include all of those people as part of my mental landscape so what I do is I just don't do it I'm like I'm in borrowed space I'm in borrowed land this is not my mental landscape this is a shared space this is like being on a plane you want to behave you want to follow protocol you want to be compliant and that's fine society requires that thankfully there's a lot of outlets where each of us can move into our own personal universe so if I you know I'm in Lake Mead outside Las Vegas and I rent a boat with my friend and we go to the middle of the water and we turn the boat on and play our favorite song all of a sudden we're authoring our own little operatic moment you know what I mean and so I've learned that and I've cultivated I think the art of artfully curating particular environments that catalyze certain states of consciousness and I use different tools at my disposal got it but with a huge respect for all of these variables so my favorite place to make videos is Amsterdam there was a recent article in New York magazine called the psychological impact of boring buildings and it was actually saying that like city design again this is happening all the time whether we're paying attention to or not that boring buildings that uniform buildings that don't have enough diversity like the city landscapes can trigger depression can cause anxiety you know architecture when it's too functional and not aesthetic enough you know can have all these negative repercussions and it makes sense that the ideal design of a cityscape should be first of all for walking speed not for cars because that's what we're designed for and that every five seconds we should look at something different so as we walk it should change enough that every five seconds there's a new structure a new building a different storefront that constant novelty so you have a city like Amsterdam it's like New York's west village turned into a city sure low buildings gorgeous like old European style city with beautiful canals and then what do you have severely restricted automobile transportation in the city and a huge bicycle infrastructure so everybody's moving around in bicycles like kids grandmas and everything in between people put their kids on the baskets of their bicycle so it almost looks like a disney land for adults so you already have that surrealist environment that sense of agency and volition that being on a bicycle and being able to go everywhere it gives you you also have the element of being in an alternate reality because it's a different culture so it's kind of like you're watching this VR simulation that's like oh this is like another reality but i'm like slightly outside of it but looking in so interesting then cannabis is legal there right so what that means is that you can have an espresso you can have a beer you can also have a joint which is david lenson says creates a dialectical pattern of reconcilable estrangement with everyday perception so what does that mean it means the ordinary becomes slightly new and different right you see it as if for the first time and you reconnect with ordinary perceptions as if they were new right the sense of first sight unencumbered by knowing this rather than the been there's and done that so the adult mind so you see the world through the eyes of a child so you bring all those elements together then you bring maybe your closest friends and that's a really nice space to induce childlike state of wonder and curiosity no worries or constraints zero anxiety and an easy you can incorporate the mental landscape very easily because even the other people that are there they're operating in a different channel than you that totally makes sense so you're changing your environment you're changing the people you surround yourself with yes maybe adding or subtracting something from your consciousness by taking something or whatever yes you're bringing trusted friends with you so that in that other realm when things get a little weird you can always look at them in the imb like all right we're both in here okay we're hitting this together right safety element yeah it's paying attention to everything you need to travel to another realm dude it's the same thing that you would want to pack for an epic journey treat your life like a journey you know that pack accordingly the right friends the right vibe the right people the right equipment everything the videos are excellent for people who haven't seen them it's you do the videos maybe to share a little bit of your thoughts give people a head trip it's kind of like you're crawling into someone's head and then starting to paint on the walls yeah that makes sense yeah so my videos are called shots of awe and you can see them in the youtube page shots of our follow my facebook page jason silva and they're they're kind of like trailers for big ideas they're kind of like an entry point to dig deeper into something related to technology or creativity or the human condition and what's interesting is those videos that were very much a passion project and continue to be a passion project have led to everything else so brain games came because nagio exacts had seen some of these videos and dug my passion and were like let's do this brain show together origins came because brain games did really well my videos were continuing to explode and nagio gave me a chance to do a project that would bring some of the sensibility of my videos to tv so if you watch origins my new tv series on nagio it's about the origins of humankind it's really about the mcluen quote first we build the tools and then the tools build us looking at human cultural evolution through that lens so we domesticated fire but fire also domesticated us true yeah groups feedback loops and the show is structured in a way that every act has a shot of all esk opening in every single act of the show that we call them symphonies that i did with john boswell for melody sheep and they basically look like shots of hbo level like yeah they're beautiful and then we have these amazing historical recreations shot in africa that look like mini movies that chronicles key moments in history so the visuals are we stepped it up and so it really does feel like my passion and curiosity to create these like media brain bombs in the short form and now getting to unpack them in the larger form for origins has been finally like literalized and the goal with origins is the same as with shots of all is i don't just want to tell you about an idea i want to get you into an altered state sure i feed you the inception yes which you do very well thanks bro you mentioned the tools which is a great segue because ai is coming right we're talking people are afraid of it people are excited about it technology is and has always probably been a cognitive appendage it's becoming a part of our brain and a lot of people complain about that i don't necessarily think it's bad in fact i think it's probably really great yeah we've been adapting our tools since the friggin sure age we're still here so but how do you think ai is going to change us instead of a robotic arm or a hand yeah i might have an 800x brain of course that's doing the computing yeah and what's that going to do to the world and further if my ai is talking to your ai do we still have a relationship i mean if my ai is doing 800x what my brain is doing yeah which part is more real things could get weird but as you said very eloquently we've had these cognitive appendages already for a long time so two of my favorite thinkers are david chalmers and andy clark they're cognitive philosophers so they wrote this essay online called the extended mind thesis and andy clark wrote a book called natural born cyborgs and the key idea is that we've always incorporated non-biological props and scaffolding into our mental architecture so they talk about an example of like an airplane so an airplane is a symbiotic organism of biological and non-biological intelligence so the airplane is controlled because the pilot watches the autopilot and the autopilot watches the pilot and it is in that feedback loop that infinity loop that figure eight that you have something that is as reliable as it is because it's distributed between biological and non-biological intelligence when you interface with your phone which allows you to express yourself on video or send your thoughts and ideas to people across the planet in real time or broadcast tweets and all the media that you can do that is essentially versions of your mind turned inside out is made possible through a feedback loop mediated experience between you and your phone part of your thinking is happening on your phone when you write something down part of your thoughts right are being transmitted through that phone that you can then watch back later and reflect on so there's constantly feedback loop what these guys say is that the mind as we know it right is not limited to the brain the brain is a crucial component but that what we call mind emerges in the feedback loop between brains tools and environments and so environment is informing thoughts and ideas the way you interface with your tools is informing thoughts and ideas so that it is just feedback loops is a better metaphor for life than the dna logo so if we're looking at these feedback loops and we're looking at your art your videos as influencing your mind and the minds of other people through your videos is it safe to say that transitively you're looking at people almost as art projects i mean i'm not trying to pin you into a corner it just seems like that makes sense to look at it that way i mean i think that it would be appropriate to i think it was uh docans who said if you want to understand life do not think of throbbing gels and oozing liquids think about information technology words instructions so dna is code we are made of language we are linguistic all the way down dna replication was an information technology the dominant form of information technology on earth until consciousness and language then we went from trading in genes to trading in memes right and memes are the new replicator right born from the primordial soup of human culture the vector of transmission is language and electronic communication so this information transfer right is happening now in this space of memetics so you could argue that i interface with my phone my phone interfaces with me i interface with the books that inspire me those books interface with me that changes the ideas that come out of my mouth regurgitated and synthesized in the form of media that other people watch and then maybe they send comments or ideas back to me that informs my future video and so those billions of signals and infrared the planet is cloaked in data and there's more information produced per second now i think then like in all of human history combined and so i think you know i'm just a grain of sand but within my world i take in i put out i take in and put out those feedback loops continue you know i'm just trying to create self replicating memetic structures in the form of these videos that can then live on their own i can be sleeping at night and somebody can be having an ontological awakening watching one of my videos that is a trip it's the same thing that you're doing i mean with the enormous success that you have had with this podcast like i don't want to get like sexually crude but we are designed to disseminate our seed our gene right you could have sex with a thousand women okay and that will not disseminate your memes as effectively as the two million downloads you get per day with your podcast so this is your way of fulfilling your wiring to disseminate you widely i'm the gang is kind of itunes there you go i think that's a great way to think about it and you're you're writing a lot of ways when i think about this we curate our input we curate those around us we shape our future selves and the art of charm the show and what we teach is essentially the study of how we do this for ourselves why is it that important for you i mean why is it important that while you're sleeping your ideas your thought process your subjective reality is infecting other people why is that even why is that even necessary why is it ah is it necessary or does it feel necessary right the reason for getting up in the morning the reason to be compelled to the labor at creating something of value in the world initially a value to me but then secondarily a value in the world is from a fire in the belly it's from existential dread it's from a terror of meaninglessness it's from a fear that the joy and ecstasy of yesterday means fucking nothing the next day um unless i've turned it into something magnificent that can still mean something days from now there is a i think it was Tolstoy who said that man needs to find a bridge between the finite and the infinite in order to live ernaz becker and the denial of death says man cannot live without a continuous belief in something indestructible within himself he was paraphrasing kafka but what the hell do we do as mortal beings who dream of immortality with our minds we can ponder the infinite right yet we're housed in heart pumping breath gasping decaying bodies so we have to respond in some creative way to rage against the darkness because otherwise the reality of our condition as naked rotting conscious flesh so everything i do is a response against meaninglessness it's a desperate attempt to carve my name on a tree in fact even more than that to turn myself inside out in a very real way you know you obviously read a lot how do you remember all of the things that you're i mean you're quoting all of this complex thought it's not the thing that happens when you do something once and go oh cool that'll sound great if you hang out with me a lot you'll realize that all the stuff i quote is all related and it call comes back to one thing it's how do we deal with our existential condition and every quote and every other quote is some mystic or some sage or some thoughtful person who came up with an interesting set of words that gave me the chills because of the way they said it you know i think i remember something because i feel like nobody has said it better than that and that speaks so deeply to how i feel and it makes so much sense to me that it now becomes a part of me very much the way that especially artists who really personalize their homes it's themselves written all over the walls it's every book they've ever loved it's every poster that ever moved them i mean we're all affirming our insides outside of ourselves in our private property because i live on the road and i live out of my suitcase a lot of the time i've had to do that within the contents of my mind sure who i am is what i remember and all the references and anchor points that ground me in my ontological reality so again it comes back to the control thing it does always yeah you're an ontological dj for a lot of people jason thank you for helping me infect slash impregnate my audience the aoc family with our new subjective reality that we've created here beautiful bro thank you for having me on your podcast and congratulations on your success and thank you to all your listeners new show origins out now or really yes yes yes monday nights and nine p.m eastern on the national geographic channel origins blow your mind please do not follow my facebook page facebook.com slash jason l silva thank you so much thanks brother cheers