Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Jason Silva

Episode Date: March 1, 2018

Jason Silva (Brain Games, Shots Of Awe) joins the DTFH and we talk about mainlining the universe and the problem of death. JASON'S TOUR

A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids.

Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in-store, and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up, everywhere to go. JCPenney. It's a little hot today. You can't burn it. Nine, two, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Bye, bye. Greetings to you, oh beautiful mothership traveler. It is I, Dee Trussell, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. If this is your first time listening, I'd like to tell you a little bit about you. You were destroyed in the great plague of 2024, and your skull was collected by one of the wandering ones,

a fallen alien angel that took control of the planet after the majority of human life had been wiped out. Your skull was taken to a massive alien ossuary where it was processed through a grinding mechanism. A fine white powder was created from your skull, and this powder was sold as a form of psychoactive drug. These beings love nothing more than snorting human skull powder,

because when they do, it allows them to temporarily hallucinate the life of the skull. They snorted. At this moment, you are being hallucinated by a glowing, mucus-covered, goblin-like creature. In a few moments, this creature is going to come down, and that life that you're experiencing right now will fade into a kind of murky darkness followed

by infinite oblivion, but that doesn't really matter. Just forget all that, and enjoy the wonderful podcast that we have for you today with futurist, visionary, and awe-inspirer, Jason Silva. I'm so sorry, don't thank me. Did you hear this, mama? He said our skull got snorted. Just because your skull got snorted by an alien

doesn't mean you can't enjoy this beautiful life, my friend. Meaning it is everywhere, even though you're dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Much thanks to Squarespace.com for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. It's time for you to transform that brain juice in your synaptic clefs into a beautiful website,

and Squarespace has everything you need to do that. You can promote your business, you can announce an upcoming event, you can blog or publish your content, showcase your work, sell products and services of all kinds I've said it before, but it must be mentioned that I have a friend who sells her smelly socks online. Think about that.

There's a market for stinky socks. If there's a market for stinky socks, then surely there's a market for your time machine replicas, your coin collection, your beautiful bean bags shaped like human organs or whatever it is that you wanna transform into money out there into the world. All you gotta do is head to Squarespace.com

for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain name. Squarespace allows you to create a beautiful website because they have amazing templates created by world-class designers, powerful e-commerce functionality, which lets you sell anything online, the ability to customize, look and feel, settings,

products and more with just a few clicks and everything is optimized for mobile right out of the box. Most importantly, Squarespace is the website I use for DuncanTrussell.com. Every time I upload an episode of this podcast, I go to Squarespace and I put it up on my website, which is a Squarespace website. So if you want an example of what a Squarespace website

looks like, check out DuncanTrussell.com. Also, why do you have to have a website for some reason, some business, some announcement? You can have a website just to wreak havoc and chaos on the world. Did you know that right now, the domain name Skullsnorder.com is available? Can you believe that?

That sweet, precious, trembling domain name, that powerful moat of energy. That thing, that is a death metal band. That could be anything. You could use that to terrify your grandmother. You could use that to terrify your little brother or even better, you can use it as a website about your dog that you're gonna adopt from a rescue shelter

and named Skullsnorder. How about that? Go rescue a dog from a nearby kill shelter, name it Skullsnorder, and then get the domain named Skullsnorder.com and put a picture of your dog on that website and I will tweet about it. Squarespace.com, check them out. They are a wonderful way for you to make a website

without getting hoodwinked by a pseudo web designer who's been snorting a combination of Adderall and Advil and who is more than likely gonna have some kind of horrible, violent seizure in your house and use a chainsaw to slash your body into thin slivers of flesh that he's gonna dry in his basement and eat over the course of the next few years.

Squarespace.com, remember use offer code Duncan and you will get 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain named Skullsnorder.com is currently available, but it won't be for law. Friends, are you interested in diving deeper into the DTFH? Well, there is a way for you to do that. All you have to do is go to patreon.com forward slash DTFH. If you do this, you will have early access

to commercial free episodes. Also, I upload at least one hour long, rambling, embarrassing thing on there a month and there's lots of other extra stuff that makes its way over there. So if you wanna be my patron, if you wanna own me, if you wanna have the financial fish hook of your power firmly embedded into my digital spine,

then all you gotta do is head over to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and sign up. I hope you'll do it. Also, we have a shop located at dunkintrustle.com with t-shirts, posters and stickers. Okay, without further ado, let's dive in to this episode. Today's guest is an Emmy nominated and world renowned TV personality,

storyteller, filmmaker and keynote speaker and futurist. You've probably seen some of his YouTube videos, shots of awe and you can see him in person coming up March 29th in Los Angeles at Barnum Hall, April 3rd in Miami and April 6th in New York City. So if you like this conversation, then I highly recommend going to see Jason live. All those links will be located at dunkintrustle.com.

Now, everyone please open your mind, open your hearts, expand your fontanels and allow the great sacred flower of your crown chakra to intertwine with the net of Indra that connects all of us to the beautiful mind of today's wonderful guest, Jason Silva. Pfft. Pfft. Welcome, welcome on you,

that you are with us, shake hand, don't need to be blue. Welcome to you. It's the dunkintrustle. Don't you cancel, don't you cancel, don't you cancel, don't you cancel. Jason. Welcome to the DTFH man, thanks for coming over to my house. This badass that you're sitting across from me right now is so cool.

It's great to be here in person dude, like I was telling you earlier, it's just, it's not the same having these conversations remotely. No it isn't. You just can't feel the other person's presence and so the feedback loops of conversation just aren't the same. Do you think that you can, like when you're recording audio, like, okay, let me start in, I'll start at a place

and then you can help me answer the, okay, so the Hare Krishna's say that you have to be very careful when you're going out to eat because a person's energy gets into the food they're making. So when you're eating, you're not just getting like food, you're getting like however the person's feeling. The chef's energy. Yeah, you're getting the chef's energy

in the same way like you see a painting. Like you go and see a great painting and it's trippy because it feels like it's a battery that's stored this creative energy inside of it. Do you think that could happen with audio just like this where like more than what we think the sound, more than this, or within the sound wave, some other form of energy is getting recorded

that we haven't figured out a way to quantify it? I don't know. I mean, look, I think that when it comes to encoding energy in food, I'm not, I like to think that if a chef is putting a lot of love into the presentation, then the context of that presentation, the set and setting, so to speak, of that presentation can be appreciated

when it's served to you. But if he's having a bad day, I don't want to think that his anxiety is getting encoded in my food. I'd rather dismiss that because that's just something else to worry about. I mean, but there is like, you know, this is like, it's so woo woo-y that it's beyond,

but it's deep woo, but there is a feeling sometimes you walk into someone's house who's sick. You know what I mean? Like who's depressed, he's been doing weird shit. There's a vibe, there's a vibe. I mean, I think with art, it definitely makes sense. I've been listening a lot to Jordan Peterson's take on art. What is that?

What's his take? So you know Jordan Peterson, right? Of course, yeah. How do I have him on the show? Oh, okay, right. So one of his favorite clips, one of my favorite clips of his on the internet is why you need art in your life.

And he has this example where he's talking about like people in a modern art museum, you know, or just an art museum staring at like paintings that are worth like a billion dollars. And the guy's like, you know, why are these people like staring at this painting? Why is this painting worth a billion dollars? You know?

And then he says like, why people are like dumbstruck by awe when they're staring at these images. And then what he says is, well, what the reason they're staring at these paintings is because the transcendent shines through the masses in partially articulated form. So to that end, the painting is an encoding

of the artist's attempt or an experience of the artist's encounter with the sublime. Is it a window? It's a window. It's a portal. It's an encoding. And I suppose that, you know, to an extent, we know that the transcendent can be encoded in music.

For sure. Like music is a painting that unfolds in time, you could say. And when you listen, I mean, even the first records, right, the LPs, like those are grooves that are etched into the LP that when the needle hits them, like rubbing the magic wand,

or the genie lamp, the thing like is reborn, the transcendent emerges. And to an extent, you know, an image, a painting is a still frame of that very same experience. It's an encounter with the ineffable in our attempt to capture that. And some people say, well, a painting or a song is a poor representation

of the transcendent. And I would argue the otherwise. I would argue the other extreme, which is actually, no, I think it's exactly a glimpse of the transcendent. It's not a poor representation. It is the transcendent. Can you define, what do you think the transcendent is? The bridge between the finite and the infinite, right?

I think it was one of these guys, I don't know if it was Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, who said that man cannot live if he doesn't find a way to bridge the finite with the infinite, right? Because we are mortal and we are bounded and we are finite. And that causes all kinds of existential distress. I mean, that's like an impossible pill to swallow.

How do you escape from the infinite? Like how can you not be instantly bound with the infinite? What is, and I know, there clearly is in humans, a kind of tourniquet wrapped around whatever it is that is connecting us to the truth of our never ending permeation throughout infinity. But what is that block? Well, I think the block is that self-awareness,

as we know it, rises from a meat machine, right? Yeah. The brain, which is the most powerful computer in the universe so far, but the brain is housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gassing, decaying body. So, you know, the pattern of information that makes up consciousness,

that this thing that we are, that can think about its own thinking, this miracle of self-reference that is the human being, is still bound in entropic processes. We age and we die, and you know, Ernest Becker in his book, The Denial of Death, which was a distillation of the human condition, says that the source of our neurosis,

our existential distress, our anxiety and our depression is rooted in the fact that we're uniquely aware that we are mortal beings. Other animals are free to live in the present, you know? They only react to like an actual predator hunting them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If the predator is not around, they live in the Garden of Eden.

Right. We, even when everything is fine and we feel safe, we might lose sleep over the fact that one day in the future, we might not exist anymore. For sure. And that haunts the human animal like nothing else. And so, what Tolstoy said is that we actually cannot live if we don't find a technique or a means to bridge

our abject finitude with the infinite and with the transcendent, which is the same thing that Jordan Peterson was saying and why you need art in your life. He was talking about like a beautiful Gothic cathedral or the beautiful medieval buildings in Europe and how magnificent they were. And it's like, you can't stand how beautiful they are.

Because they provide a bridge to the transcendent and without the transcendent, all we're left with is fleeting, trivial pleasures and those things don't give us the strength to prevail. Which is very true. Do you feel like you're a window to the transcendent? I think that there are certain situations and contexts when I drop into a state of consciousness

where the sense of self falls away and I feel tapped into something larger than myself. What is that thing? What is that experience? No, that you're tapped into. What's the thing? Are you still Jason there? Look, I'm a skeptic even of my own experiences of the

quote unquote divine. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's a little bit like, to sort of paraphrase Khalil Gibran when he's talking about children. He says, your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life longing for itself. They come through you, but not from you.

And though they are with you. Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on, Jason. I apologize. When you spray out something that beautiful. Yeah, say slowly. You gotta do it slow around old detrust. Cause I takes a little while for my brain's ears to grind that one up.

Let's do it slow. So my mother is an English teacher. She taught high school English literature. She used to have beautiful quotes on the wall in her classroom. And one of the quotes by Khalil Gibran was about your children when we have kids. And he said, your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of life longing for itself. They come through you, but not from you. And though they are with you, they belong not to you. Which is magnificent, right? Now, I think that of course that applies to the idea of your children and the sort of, the magical force of the universe, the self-organizing properties of the universe

flowing through you to your, from your sperm to the egg that makes this thing called life. But I think also that the word children can be a stand in for anything that flows through you. I think that my videos are my children. I think your podcast is a child of yours. I think anything that we make is a form of, is our children.

Do you have children? I mean, I have a lot of videos that I think of as my children. But do you ever think about making, bringing one of these beautiful things into the universe? Potentially, but I'm not ready yet. I'm still sorting myself out. But to go back to your question about whether,

when I tap into something, whether I feel like I'm a channel, whether we connect with the divine, certainly the art is a portal to the transcendent, but are we portals to the transcendent? There's a guy called Tim Doody that was writing about psychedelic experiences. And he was saying that during these moments that you're talking about,

when we feel like we are channels to the divine, we ourselves are the bridge, right? But we ourselves are the instrument and something is strumming us. He says during these moments, we recontextualize the self, the notion of self, and we see it instead as a marvelous conduit in a timeless whole from which molecules and meanings

flow from neurons to nebula and back again. That's a nice feeling, right? From the iris to the universe. And I think that we're capable of actually engineering scaffoldings of mind, technological extensions of our minds that extend this metaphor of us being conduits between the finite and the infinite.

So a guy called Ross Anderson, and I'm getting very excited because this is one of my favorite essays ever. Guy called Ross Anderson wrote a piece about the Hubble Space Telescope. And it was about the Hubble Space Telescope and the new James Webb Telescope, which is gonna be like 10 times more powerful.

And he was saying that the Hubble Space Telescope, okay, so literally it's like an extension of the human eye that hangs in orbit, but it's pretty much the human mind turned inside out because it's a part of us. And he says that the Hubble allows us to mainline space and time through the optic nerve. Oh, shit, that's crazy.

But that's what it is. It's not even a fucking metaphor, right? That the Hubble Space Telescope allows us to mainline space and time through the optic nerve, right? That we're capable of creating something that allows us to take in space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite. Something that is beyond our nervous system's capacity

to perceive the world. And nonetheless, we create it. And then he goes on and he says through the sheer... Wait, hold on. He's saying like we're shooting up space through the Hubble Telescope. Yeah, that's so rad. Yeah, they're like people smoke DMT to see the infinite,

but it's kind of cool that we have this fucking hovering lens that allows us to shoot up space and time through the optic nerve. What do we have to use the heroin? Couldn't we say it's like a straw that we're sucking up the milkshake of the cosmos through? Yeah, yeah. You remember when those images...

Space cock. Space cock. You could say it's space coming in your eyes. There you go. Why does this guy, has he ever wrote this essay? Ross Anderson. He likes heroin. That's what we know about Ross Anderson.

Ross Anderson blasts heroin from time to time. Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, we can use the experiences like getting drunk on awe or crack for the thinking mind. That's another one that I've heard about beautiful content. Dude, come here. I want to fucking shoot up space with you, man. I'm tired, I know. I would, you know, I'd share a needle with you, Jason.

Shoot up space. I swear to God, I would. Just like, well, yeah. Here's another word for when we're cracked open by divine experiences. It was a New York Times article about this, and they referred to it as opiated adjacency. Again, opiated adjacency.

So it's kind of like you're ripped apart. Yes. And then the light can get in, right? Yes. And it cracks as to where the light gets in. Yes, that's right. But in this same piece, so he was saying that, remember when the Deep Field photographs

of the Universe were published? They took a picture of a dark piece of the sky, and then they did all this post-processing on it. And then the dark piece of the sky revealed a cosmos within a cosmos, right? And he said that gazing upon the Deep Field photograph was nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning with what is.

Wow. OK, now that sounds to me like a psychedelic experience. For sure. That sounds to me like psilocybing and seeing the light. Yes. Or what's that guy, American psychologist William James, when he talked about the mystical experience and all the boxes it has to tick.

But here you are, just this is a scientific instrument, hovering in orbit, taking a picture of the cosmos, and looking upon those images, and contemplating those images, is an ontological awakening, right? Yeah, and kind of like what you're doing, I guess, is like you're kind of like a Hubble telescope for inner space. Or you seem to be some kind of Hubble telescope for a field that you seem to be particularly attuned to,

which seems to be something to do with the sense of awe or wonder. Or there's a specific feeling that we get when we come into contact with certain types of technology, certain types of art. And this feeling is disastrous for some people. And in fact, that was the first question I had for you actually. So I'm sorry to start now with the first question, but I think we're in a perfect place for me to ask it.

So OK, so I did this show with Rogan. And we ended up going to that GF 2045 summit that Dimitri Itchkopf was throwing in New York with. He's that billionaire who wants to live forever. And so he was mixing up all these technologists. And there were a lot of really smart. It was a couple of years ago, right? Yes.

I was there. Oh, OK, I figured you. Yeah, I think. And Rogan came. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, this is what I wanted to talk to you about, because I thought it was really beautiful and it was really interesting, because he didn't just

have technologists. He had Buddhists. He had Coptics. He had all these religious people there, too. But I wondered if you could address the feeling of malevolence that some people get when they come into contact with the incoming technology that's about to radically transform everything, the part of ourselves

that isn't the way you are. And I think the way I am most of the time is like, yes, amazing, beautiful. But some people, they meet this energy and they say, no. This is fucked, man. This is Satan. This is malevolence, technologizing itself, pushing itself into time.

We're looking at the hand of the Antichrist. It's not Rosemary's baby. It's Rosemary's fucking computer. How do you address, what do you say to those people to comfort them? I think that rapid change and too much information can be overwhelming. And for what's happening with disruptive technology,

it is kind of like, instead of mainlining space and time through the optic nerve, it's kind of like mainlining infinite computational capacity through very finite brains. So the implications of these technologies are that we're going to essentially render ourselves gods in a very real way. You go to these places like Singularity University. These guys travel around the world teaching companies, CEOs,

about exponential technologies. But the whole notion of exponential technologies can be explored or explained in a simple example. The supercomputer that 40 years ago cost $60 million was half a building in size has now shrunk to a device in your pocket. Device in your pocket is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, and 1,000 times more powerful.

So that's exponential change. And the brain is wired to think about change in a linear fashion. So what happens is every time that you have an experiential or visceral encounter with exponential speed and exponential change, it's going to create cognitive dissonance. Because your intuition about the world

and your intuition about change remains linear. We're future blind. And so it's a constant sense of cognitive dissonance. No matter what people tell us, yeah, technology's changed fast. Your intuition continues to be linear. So even though we've seen that change thus far, and then you make extrapolations from that,

those very same rates of change, and you pull them out 25 years from now, and you say, in 25 years, the supercomputer will be the size of a blood cell. It'll be in your bodies and brains. It'll reverse engineers from inside out. And people are like, no way, not in 25 years. Maybe in the next lifetime. Yeah, no way.

That's not going to happen. No way. So people resist it. No, some people will go, I'm not talking about that. They'll say, I'm not talking about it. We can't talk about that. Now, this is really interesting to me, because it's like, the example I've used is, if we were to get a signal

from deep space saying, we're coming in 25 years, then the whole planet would prepare for this arrival. There would be a massive shift. All the militaries of the world would probably start meeting together to talk about and deal with it if it's potentially aggressive. As a contact is one of my favorite movies ever, for that reason.

For the way it portrays the way society starts to deal with this. But yeah, people like you, and when I say people like you, futurists, it's safe to call you a futurist, is that OK? People like you who are transmitting an analysis of what's coming in a really profoundly articulate way are essentially our signal coming from deep space saying, hey, this is fucking coming.

And we hear you, and people love your YouTube. How many millions of people have seen this shit now? A lot. Like, I think we've had like 100 million. 100 million people have seen this stuff. And yet, people are still like, well, that's just cool. It's cool. That's cool.

But you're like, no, listen, we're about to go through one of the most radical things that has ever happened. I mean, it's comparable, I guess, to like meteor impact, extinction events, some kind of something on that level. And yet, we still, when we hear you, we're like, OK, OK. But I've got to go to work. Yeah, well, of course.

And I think we carry around these mental models of reality. It's a simple, energy-saving aspect of our brain. Our brain is thrust into a new environment. It makes assessments and makes inferences about that environment. Because, and Jordan Peterson talks about this, too, it's like the world is infinitely complex. There's no possible way we can fully understand

the world and all of its complexity. And so we're reduced, or we're left with the possibility of making only simple inferences about the world. Our brain does this all the time. Our brain takes shortcuts. It connects the dots. And it makes predictions constantly about the world. And as long as those predictions allow us to orient ourselves

and function in the world in a way where we can survive, and we sort of feel kind of safe, that's functionally useful. We do the same thing with our character. We don't fully know ourselves. Ernest Becker says, character is a vital lie. Our house of cards that constructs the self is built on stilts.

But it's necessary, right? That's why some people actually are not meant to take psychedelics. The involuntary killing of the ego can cause trauma. People say psychedelics can cure PTSD. Yeah, because that's the voluntary killing of the ego. That's somebody training and preparing and working with a shaman and sort of knowing

what they're getting into versus an involuntary killing of the ego, like what you get when somebody betrays you, for example. Because the same way you make inferences about the world, you make inferences about the people you trust. And you assume that these assumptions that you make are true. But then when those assumptions are called into question, somebody betrays you.

Something happens that you really didn't expect. Then it calls all your assumptions about the world into question. And so you're hurled all of a sudden into a place of anxiety and or depression, which is really just chaos. You're lost at sea. Well, you're lost.

No, I think it's like, are you OK? I was talking to Krishnadas about trusting people and how like, inevitably, you'll encounter a person who is most certainly just a liar. I mean, we've all come into contact. And there's pathological liars out there. They just think, yeah, the program they're running is a program that's just innately, fundamentally deceptive.

Like on the deepest level, for whatever reason, they can't say what's actually happening, probably because they're afraid or whatever. So I was asking him about this. Like, how do we deal with these kinds of people? And he was saying, oh, well, you can trust them to be what they're like. And so in other words, you can trust them to be liars.

Interesting. So the trust is not so. So it's like, our expectation is that you will tell me the truth. Now, that's different. Fuck our expectation. The truth is that you're a liar, not you, but I'm saying, you know what I mean?

You get around people, and they're just fucking. That's just the way they are. Sure. So you accept people on their own terms, and maybe you lower your expectations as a way of protecting yourself from experiencing the disorienting anxiety of realizing your assumptions about a person are wrong.

Or you enjoy being lied to because you realize, oh, cool. This is a liar. I want to get fucking hypnotized by your beautiful lies. There's this burning man. Do you ever go to Burning Man? I've been debating going there for years. The reason I haven't gone, you'll laugh at.

But it's a result of my neurosis. About what? Well, I'm really, really sensitive to sleep and not sleeping. And my concern is that I won't find a place of quiet. Oh, no, there's quiet places to camp out there. Or I won't hear the throbbing bass beat. You can go way out.

There's way, oh my god, dude. There's places it's the fucking. You can go to their quiet camps. Because they bring kids there and stuff. So you can't keep them by that. Where our camp is is next to the blah, blah, blah, blah. That's my worst nightmare. Oh, I know.

But see, that's the kind of thing that helps you grow. Because you start realizing that, at least for a week, that part of you that is resisting, that needs that metered sleep, you say goodbye to it. And then you enter into this liminal sort of inn. Oh, I love liminality. Liminality is everything, bro. It's like when you're captivated by a movie or a play, man.

Bass is beautiful. I remember seeing this immersive theater experience. It's kind of built on Alice in Wonderland in New York. And there was this whole speech about liminality at the beginning of this immersive play. And then I ended up googling the word because I was obsessed with that sensation, like the sensation of being captivated and losing

yourself in a mediated liminality. Liminality is a threshold state. It's a threshold state between waking and dreaming, between dreams and reality. It's an imaginal realm. It's where creativity is born. It's where humans exist, between non-existence and non-existence.

Deep presence is associated with it. You're free of time. You're in deep flow. You're free of the inner chatter as well. And what also happens in these liminal states is that you have a meta-awareness that you're in it. So at least for me, when I'm in a liminal state, I'm usually thinking to myself,

I'm having so much fucking fun. This is so fucking awesome. I wish I felt like this more often. Note to self, what were the triggers for this? This is where my friendship with Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheale comes from. Because I'm like, tell me how to fucking go liminal and get into flow on a day-to-day basis.

David Lenson calls it stewardship of internal life, the desire to control the contents and the mood of one's consciousness. Yeah, well, I want to dive back into that because that's really interesting. How to do that. So one of the things that Burning Man, to get back to the concept of trust,

is there's one of the camps there is called the Bureau of Misinformation. And this is one of my favorite camps there because everyone there, they have like a bar and they just lie. So you go there and all they do is they just don't tell the truth and they're really good at it.

And when you talk to them, all of them will say things like, I honestly, I'm the worst liar ever. They're doing that stuff, but I'm just at this camp for a different reason. And it's beautiful because what it does is it forces you to surrender to a paradigm. Everything.

And then you begin to realize, so now we're starting to play around with the concept of truth through symbols, which is that, I interviewed this beautiful musician, Will Oldham, and he was talking about how when they were on tour, there's a tendency people have right now where somebody will say, whatever it is.

Someone will ask them question, like how deep, this is on Rogan's podcast, you can do that. Like how deep is the sand in Egypt, right? And Jamie, pull that up. So Jamie will like Google how deep is the sand in Egypt and we have an answer, right? And that's great.

And then now we both have a feeling of having a question answer. I'm like, oh, now we know how deep the sand is. Well, this guy Oldham was saying when they're on tour, they had like a banana called the Google banana. And whenever anyone had a question like that, they'd be like, oh, Google it. And they pick up the banana and make up a fucking live dance.

Yeah. Well, you know what's brilliant about that? It kind of alludes a little bit to what Diane Ackerman refers to as deep play. Yeah. Or kind of like, have you heard of LARPing? Like those people that get into like those deep gaming stuff and they all come in costumes and meet in the forest

and take on alter egos. And by the way, that's like really fun because that's what children do. I have a friend of mine, I grew up in South America. I have a good friend of mine from Venezuela. And we'll sometimes call each other on the phone and we'll speak in alter ego for the first 15 minutes of conversation

before we actually talk about whatever we call him about. I'll call him like in character. And I'll have a whole conversation where I'm making shit up completely in Spanish. Like ridiculous backstory. And it's awesome. Sometimes we do it with the stupid Snapchat masks, where you change their face filter.

So it's even easier to go into that lying, creating, pure, it's pure creation. It's creating and perceiving your world at the same time. The problem with doing that in baseline reality is that we need consensus to create order in the world and to collaborate and to work together. But eventually I think if the AIs take over, if we no longer need normal jobs

because everything can be done by machine. So you know, Yuval Harari who wrote Sapiens and Homo Deus wrote an article in The Guardian called How to Find Meaning in a World Where Nobody Needs to Work Anymore at the Rise of the Useless Class when AIs will take over. He says we'll find meaning in VR.

He says we'll find meaning in VR. Everybody will move into a universe of their own construction. Maybe multiple people will tune into shared universes, but these universes won't be bounded by rationality or by any kind of the rules or grids of this matrix. So it'll be deep play. You'll be a man, you'll be a woman, you'll be a dragon,

you'll make it up as you go along. But it's love. It's like that, you know, and when people, and I know he doesn't mean it in this way, but when people say useless, as in the sense that work makes us useful, it seems to be an indication of... Fucked up priorities, of course.

Yeah, because it's like... Economically useless. And also when you were talking about larping, you know, of course, really, if we look at what's happened to us here, is we've been shot out of pussies into one of the longest larping events in the universe, which is called human existence itself.

Well, of course. And we're playing these characters, right? They're all virtual realities. So larping is a sort of boutique version, but like you could argue that every religion, and you have all Harari says this, every religion is a virtual reality. You follow the rules, you score points,

and then you win when you get to the afterlife. And you're Jason Silva-ing right now. For sure. And I'm Duncan Trussell-ing right now, but if we really think about it, this isn't who we are. It's a monkey suit. Put it on. Yeah, and we have these ways of expressing ourselves,

because underneath it, you know what's underneath, you're, what's coming out of you is love. I hope so. And the way that you're doing it is like, by you're getting these beautiful globs of love, and then you're painting them with these sweet quotes, and these, basically like you're blowing these love bubbles that are surrounded by Khalil Gabron quotes,

and inside it though, it's just love. It's like, ah. I think it's love. I mean, I think wonder and awe are the experiences of the sublime in general, aesthetically relevant experience. Like to be moved to tears, like Albert Camus said, life should be lived to the point of tears. Yes.

The reason I seek out these experiences, aside from the fact that they're completely trans-supporting and they feel really good to hold in mind, to contemplate them as you're having them, but also they offer a refuge and a relief from despair, from nihilism, from nothingness, you know? I mean, you say, you know, Ernest Becker, when he says that character is a vital lie,

that this version of larping, that even the consensus baseline version of larping, which is to say, I'm an American citizen, and I'm Jason Silva, and I'm an artist, that to a certain extent we need to, we need to summon coherence in our identity, because without it, then we're also lost at sea. Like we need certain constraints.

Jordan Peterson talks about this. You need the constraints of avoiding pain, right? That's important. You don't want pain, and you need to protect yourself from pain in the present, but also in the future, and you need to take other people into account, not just now, but in the future. All these things and these constraints are necessary

to form a coherent narrative and a sense of personhood that allows you to move towards a noble goal. Because by the way, without that, it is chaotic. I mean, when you read about people who suffer from like depersonalization, for example, or derealization, where they think that their own, that they feel like everything is fake, or like their own identity is not real anymore,

that sounds like a pathology to me. Those people suffer a lot. They start going, maybe they take too many psychedelics and it triggers some weird psychosis where they have derealization experiences that persist past the psychedelic, where they walk around the world and they feel like they're not a part of it anymore.

Have you ever heard the story of Hanuman and Rom, you know, the monkey god? You'll like this. So this is good to go into the concept of depersonalization as a pathology versus, which it certainly can be. Or depersonalization as a form of realization and awakening. And I think they're both are very possible. So the help.

Interpretation is the only thing that makes a difference. Well, yeah, the framing. You'll know this quote. I always fuck it up. What is it? The mystic swims in the same water. The mystic and the madmen are in the same waters,

but the mystic is swimming. The madmen is drowning. Yes, okay. So this is Hanuman, you know, is the representation of the great servant, you know, which is the idea of like, we're here to serve each other, we're here. That's our usefulness is to serve each other.

And I would add to that to serve each other by articulating love through action and movement and everything we do if we can. So Hanuman is with Ram, who is like the God, essentially. And Ram is like kind of blown away by this monkey being because it's so filled with love and his surgeon. So Ram says, who are you, monkey? And the monkey says to him,

when I forget who I am, I serve you. When I remember who I am, I become you. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, it's beautiful. So and this is the, you know, this is the, this is what, what, when you were earlier, when you're talking about those moments where it's almost as though you're being strummed

by some invisible finger. And then these beautiful sounds are coming out of you that make people feel like there is some reason to be here who in those moments, you're not Jason Silving. You're some thing else. And that thing is a one word for it that they use as a term of convenience really is Ram, Ram, oh, oh, mom, mom. You know, it's that sound of like ah, ah, you know,

even your thing shots of ah, because it's that sound. Ah, that's what we become, you know, for a second. But here's the thing, becoming that, one thing is undergoing that experience and just going, like just having it, right? Another thing is thinking about it afterwards and deciding in contemplating, wow, I wasn't there. Whether that's exhilarating or harrowing.

You know, Abraham Maslow, he talked about, we get a thrill from the God like possibilities we see in ourselves, yet we simultaneously shiver at these very same possibilities. It feels good to shiver though. You know, I mean, look, if I was to talk about the experiences that I've had in theogenic experiences, because again, framing matters, right?

Psychedelics were first called psychotomimetics, right? Which is a psychosis inducing, then they were called psychedelics, which means mind manifesting. Now they're called in theogenics, which means God facilitating. And the whole point is in setting heuristics, the what you mentally bring to the psychedelic experience,

as well as the place that you're in will bleed into the psychedelic dream. But also the words you use to describe the experience beforehand are not just descriptive, they're generative. They actually become the experience. And so I've had in theogenic experiences with cannabis, where I've experienced the acronym and the flow states, they call it STR.

So selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness. So your sense of self, i.e. the monkey mind disappears, your connection to the tyranny of time passing is gone. You're unstuck in time. There's a sense of effortlessness, effortless fluidity in whatever activity you're doing, increased pattern recognition, increased lateral thinking, increased associational thinking.

But then there's also this richness of information that comes in. It's the reason I'm able to do my videos without a script. And I get, I lose myself in these soliloquies. I happen to be a guy that loves words, but for some people it's snowboarding down the mountain, for some people it's surfing, whatever your thing is. But I definitely know what it's like to experience

that no mind of like heightened lucidity with paradoxically a loss of self. But sometimes you have to toe that line, because you're basically flirting, you're towing the line between chaos and order. And Jordan Peterson talks about this too. So chaos and order is like, okay, there's the wave, and you're surfing the wave,

but if the wave is too big and you wipe out, then you're overwhelmed by chaos. You could even drown. And if the wave is too small and you get bored, well, then you're bored, you're stuck. That's its own version of oppression as well. So it's like, what's beyond boredom and anxiety? Check, send me high's book, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety,

is flow. Towing the line between chaos and order is flow. This no mind flow state, again, is where the magic is at. But don't forget that you're flirting with two forces, both of which can be fucked up. Do you ever worry that you're going crazy? I've had panic attacks in my life. You have?

How often, when was the last panic attack you had? Like three years ago. I briefly fainted after having some kind of indigestion at a restaurant. Like it was very, like a few seconds, but of course, being a hypochondriac, when I came to and I realized that I had just fainted, I went straight to, oh, I'm dying.

Yes. I went to the emergency room. Yeah, sure. And that was a harrowing experience, because of course, they all look at you like you're crazy, which makes it worse. Cause you're like, I want an EKG. I just fainted.

I want a CAT scan, like look into my body. Yeah, dude. Yeah. It was a horrible experience. I had micro PTSD for months afterwards with like micro anxiety attacks and like shortness of breath type shit. But then I did a MDMA therapy session that helped with that.

What do you, when you're dying, what's your plan? Well, I'm banking everything I can in the singularity happening before I die. Oh, really? But let's say that it doesn't. And you find yourself dying. What's your plan? I don't have a plan.

My plan is deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, as long as I can deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, deny. Really? Yeah, absolutely. You don't want to die. Any philosophy that accepts death must itself be considered dead. It's questions meaningless.

It's consolations worn out. Who the fuck said that? Get him out of here. Alan Harrington, in the immortalist. He needs to do catamine. He's done a lot of the psychedelics. He says that we lose our sense of self and temples of fragmentation

in the form of electronic Buddhism, but we still come back to ourselves and we still got to work on the human project, which is we have to be the enemies of entropy. He said we must never forget. We must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not Stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everyone.

Dear God, he's a fucking bummer, dude. He's like at war with the universe. Revolutionaries, Stooges, work. This guy's a son. Interesting, so you have a noble death already. I'm just saying this guy is assigning us to, if he's like a fucking existential general, making us all do some weird marching order,

according to his terror of being annihilated by the universe. I love, lately I've been thinking a lot about it. But the thing is, dude, I can sort of join in the ecstasy of making art, of getting out of our own way, of being channels for the divine, but I also think that we have this unique capacity to imagine near tools that allow us to overcome our own limitations and our own boundaries.

Why should sentience itself not use every resource at its disposals to stabilize identity beyond the forces of entropy? Okay, okay, okay, I got you. I mean, there just can be no possible interpretation under which you could get me to think that the death of the people that I love is beautiful. I want you to live forever.

Don't get me wrong. Thanks, bro, I want you to live forever, too. Thank you, but I think that doesn't have anything to do with the body. Now, you know about- I wish I believed you. We'll never be able to prove it in this podcast, but you know, so DMT, we smoke DMT,

the body processes, it's 10 minutes, it's gone, right? And so we use what's it called, an MAO inhibitor, right? So the DMT will last a little bit longer. That's ayahuasca, right? So it's essentially the thing that allows the DMT to get processed out of the brain. We put a little stopper in the drain so we can experience it longer.

Now, what I think many futurists want when they want life extension is to do essentially the same thing for the human body, which is we want an MAO inhibitor for existence itself so we can experience the beautiful epiphanous, human experience, which is actually the universe getting high as a fucking kite on this really advanced neurology.

And so we want that high to last much longer. You're like somebody who knows you're gonna come down, man. You're gonna come down. The trips, the silver trip, the beautiful, fucking brilliant, Jason Silva, pure, fresh off the crystal silver that you took at some point as a universe. You entered into this like hopefully 600 year,

maybe longer trip. Wouldn't it be nice if advances in biotechnology at the very least gave us like multiples of three lifespan extensions? So like, you know, lifespan average used to be 30. Now it's pushing 80. That was before these interventions kicked in. I mean, it'd be nice if we could go in

and do like rejuvenation therapy for ourselves. And just off the bat, just be like, bro, you live 500 years before you even start to decay. Let me tell you something. And then we'll talk. Let's talk in 400 years. We'll have this debate in 400 years. In the meantime, we'll have a front row seat

to the greatest fucking show of all time. I honestly think in 400 years, there is a possibility that you and I will be doing this kind of podcast, but it maybe won't be us. It'll be in the Mars and the moon base. We'll know someone might have like duplicated our personalities and thrown it in a simulator. And they're like, all right, let's see how they fucking

feel about death in 400 years. But the, I think that the essence of it is and what I think is really beautiful about being a human and we need it is this concept that the consciousness is anchored in biology. And I think that once that starts going away, what was the drill sergeant you were talking about? What's his name?

Alan Harrington. Harrington, the drill sergeant of existence. People like that are like the moment that starts going away. What are we gonna become? Fucking blobs. What are we gonna do? Walk in front of cars, get run over. We need this.

We've got to cling desperately to these 60 or 70 years. Even though the truth of the matter is, man, it's done. We're dead. Like, you know that vacation phenomenon where like you've been looking for, like I go to these Ram Dass retreats. I'm going to one coming up in May. I'm so excited about it right now.

I'm already like, oh fuck here, it's coming, man. In May, I'm gonna be in fucking Maui. I can't wait. The energy is gonna be so beautiful. But dude, you know, suddenly like you're on the plane, you're going to the fucking vacation, and then suddenly you're on the plane coming back from the vacation, like wait,

the vacation didn't really even happen. That's what death is like, except it's with your life. Cause you're just laying in your death bed and you're like, oh shit, that was nothing. In fact, that didn't even happen. That was just a nothing. And now here I am being- It's such a depressing thought.

Ah, for you it is, but that is the, that for you it's depressing. And on one level, it certainly is. Oh, it's beyond depressing. It's beyond the beyond the beyond. We're talking about the great annihilation of self, which is why I'm really interested in Shiva. Because one of the terms for Shiva

is the destroyer of elements. That means that the fundamental, basic components of the universe are going to be annihilated. We're talking about, you know, whatever you want to call it, the heat, go ahead. Respectfully. Please.

I, my intuition continues to be that the prospect of death, not just of our own, but of the people we love is so traumatic to even contemplate. That I think it can cause a schism in our psyche and that from it can emerge this, pardon me for saying this, but a kind of perpetuating delusion that somehow,

this is how it's supposed to be and it's beautiful. When actually, it's not just that it's not beautiful, it's that we've committed no crime and we've afflicted with it, we're afflicted with a death sentence. It's actually like the most horrifying thing that you can possibly do is to have a sentient being and tell it it's gonna die.

You know what Jack Heroac said about birth? No. To have a child is to sentence a being to death. Correct. Correct. I know, I know. You know, Ernest Becker, there was a documentary made about his work called The Denial of,

The Quest for Immortality, but it was saying to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feeling and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, yet with all of this, yet to die. What else is wrong with the universe to you? But besides entropy, well there's two opposing forces,

right, so entropy is breaking everything down, but like Bucky Fuller said, that life was sort of gloriously anti-entropic. It was extropic, you know, so whereas entropy wants to simplify things, life wants to make things more complicated and sublime, greater complexity in organization and then you can have like emergent phenomenon.

So when you have sufficient complexity, something new can be born. Right. You can have just a novelty engendering engine, you know, and that's better. What I mean is like outside of conquering death, if there were other aspects of the universe that you could get rid of, for example, black holes.

Right. If you could eliminate black holes from the universe, would you do that? I don't know, I mean, there are very interesting computational substrates, right? Yeah. I don't know if you're familiar with the transcendent hypothesis. No, tell me.

So there's a guy called John Smart, you should get him here sometime, he's a brilliant dude and he came up with a theory to account for Fermi's paradox. So Fermi's paradox is, of course, the universe with its vast scales of time and space and all the preconditions for life potentially present, so many different galaxies and et cetera, then how come we don't see any evidence

of advanced alien civilizations? Yeah, where are they? And so that's Fermi's paradox and the transcendent hypothesis basically says if you look at the human story, we're sort of in our technological adolescence and we've been like exploring outwards, colonizing other continents

and colonizing going to the moon and maybe going to Mars, like there's this outward expansion that's happening concurrently with the inward expansion, whether it's creating denser and denser computational substrates, more computational capacity in denser and denser spaces, okay? Until eventually we reach femtoscale computing, which is already like the computational density of a black hole.

And that when you have femtoscale computing and you have virtual universes in those femtoscale, like you mentioned, the running a simulation of the universe in a femtoscale density computer and then you have digital minds, artificial intelligent algorithms that are living in this world,

fully minds with agency living in virtual reality universes and femtoscale density computers, that's a black hole like dimension that gets sucked out of space and time. So he basically says that all the other advanced civilizations did that already and disappeared into interspace rather than to outer space and exist outside of space and time. Now, maybe that's heaven, bro.

Maybe that's where we're going. But at least that explanation is less wooing and more like something I can imagine based on pre-existing techno trends. Less woo than what? Than to just say that we're like a spiritual thing and we're one with everything. Like this is something where I can imagine the steps

that get us here. How are we not one with everything? Well, if we're not there, you know, the panpsychics say there is no consciousness, there is no reality, but at least from a subjective perspective, if there is no consciousness, which is housed in a brain, which is housed in a body,

there is no nothing. If there is no awareness, there is no anything. Oh wait, I mean, right now are we one with everything? I think we're differentiated, but still connected, simultaneously. You know that term, asyncasinkabeta-tattva, you ever heard that term? No, teach me.

That means simultaneous oneness and difference. So that's a term used to describe the Godhead, which is, or the, what was the name you called the thing inside a black hole? Transcension Hypothesis. The Transcension Hypothesis, simultaneous oneness and difference, which is that you would have on the outside, I guess,

you would see this thing, or you wouldn't see the fucking thing because it would be a big fucking black nothing. So there would be a witness of a void. And so on one level, you would see it, whatever was within that, all energetic forms, assuming there isn't like that spiral of shit that gets sprayed out of it, what's that called?

The, you know, they say around a black hole, the energy gets dispersed. I can't remember what it's called. And God forgive me, all you great scientists and quantum physicists out there. But what I'm saying is, if the idea is that within these black holes, there is some kind of super compacted, extraterrestrial,

whatever you wanna call it, billions and infinite, billions of simulations, then we're kind of witnessing, I guess, little scales on God's body or something, which is so right. So death, to get back to death, and the only reason I keep going back to it with you is because I can see that for you, there's some anxiety surrounding the concept of annihilation

that every single being on this planet, up until this point, has gone through. I mean, we're literally like, we're- Just, I find it so horrific, the horror is directly proportionate to how much I adore the nuances of subjectivity. So for example, when I watch movies, right, I think cinema is a transcendent technology.

You know, when you watch a movie, so many things are happening, right? You're not just looking at the screen, you're looking into the screen, you're not just looking at the characters, you're looking into the characters. Our unique capacity for mirroring other minds, to conceive of other minds,

we do that when we communicate with one another, right? We talk, and then we make inferences, and I make a model of your consciousness and my consciousness in order to relate to what I think is you, right? But the amazing thing is that happens when we watch movies too. So they can create these theaters, these stories, they can pattern these journeys of transformation,

these fantastical voyages for these characters, and I can sit in the theater, and I can experience what's known as the diectic shift. The diectic shift is the moment where I actually assume the viewpoint of the character. I, my soul, maybe my consciousness, leaves the theater, goes into the screen, goes into that character's mind, and is now looking out from that character's eyes.

And when you lose yourself in a movie, that's what's happening. That, to me, is, I don't know, quantum fucking mumbo fuck. The point is, space and time have fallen out of deep space, like I am, I have transcended myself, and I'm experiencing that character's journey. However, if the projector breaks, if the sound quality and the speaker's busts,

if the electricity goes away, if the machinery that runs that techno miracle shuts down, there is no movie, and I don't have the transporting experience. And I think it's the same thing with consciousness. Consciousness has the capacity to transcend space and time. We do it when we're in flow, when we have divine experiences,

when we listen to music that makes us cry, like that's ineffable, that's Godhead. But if somebody gets a fucking aneurysm, or a fucking disease, then the shit doesn't happen anymore. So that's my issue with mortality. The machinery matters. I got you, but let's agree on one thing, though.

We have to agree on this one thing. Okay. I've given you the impression that I have some deep belief that there is some sentient part of myself that will continue after the annihilation of my physical body. Could be a delusion, maybe not. But for me, it's a could be, maybe not.

In other words, it's a big, fat question mark. And it must be the same for you as well. It is, I just, I'm so, I find myself so sensitive and open to the emotional highs and lows of great art. I'm so affected by not just the art, but also awestruck by our capacity to encode the transcendent in machinery

that gives us the capacity to house ineffability in a container, hit play on that song again, record this conversation so that it's not fleeting and ephemeral anymore. And so control is a big part of it. The divine and letting go and connecting to the infinite, but I wanna put a container around it. I wanna record it.

You're doing it too with this podcast. My whole reason for being is to battle ephemerality, is to actually grab the goddamn poetry of the ineffable and put a goddamn container about it. And maybe that's like, I'm the little guy fighting a cosmos that is much bigger than me and that's screaming ephemerality. And I'm saying, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Beauty is worth housing. Beauty is worth putting a container around. And so that's my like cosmic battle. You wanna make beauty zoos. Yes. You wanna take fucking beauty and put it in a closure for us to look at and we love the enclosures that you've built.

The problem is, we're dealing with pure impermanence. And what I'm getting at is just that the thing that I like to play around with, and I've learned this from Roshi Joan Halifax. You know who that is? No. Ooh, she's amazing. She was actually married to Stancila of Groff.

And she- LSD psychotherapy. Yes, and she works with dying people. She's worked with dying people. And so that's one of her- So sad. Well, it's one of her, one of the first things that they teach you

when you're working with a dying person is that if you can, even though you may feel sad, to go and sit with a dying person with this idea of like, God, this is so sad, is in a way for this dying person, you're adding to the weight of what's happening by putting that possibility that this is sad. So it's like a training.

You have to train to do this. Of course it's sad because we're attached to this form, that this, the container, that this thing is like swirling around it. So anyway, she talks a lot about Zen and the concept of radical insecurity being the fundamental human condition,

which is that sense of, I don't know what's gonna happen or the pre-cat scan results state where you're like, what's gonna happen? And we don't know. The reality is we don't know, we can't know this fucking black hole, this concept of what is the beautiful thing you said about-

Transension. Should not just transcend, no, you're talking about exponential, we're time blind or something, what did you do? Oh yeah, we're blind to exponential change. We're future blind. We're future blind. And that produces within us,

if we become aware of it. I think probably what Ernest Becker is talking about, a sense of just pure and our pawns are rippled by this. Our pawns are like, it's creating waves in the ocean of ourself because we know that no matter what we, whatever, what was the thing that you're so smart, what was the thing the guy said,

we have to create personality because it's a- Necessary illusion. Yes, the necessary illusion of personality is in fact a delusion itself. And that delusion, that delusion, that fundamental delusion, is keeping us from experiencing fully the reality of the human condition,

which is to be completely insecure and completely unaware of what's to come. And what if, like McLuhan said, what if the medium is the message? What if putting the container is not just a container over the thing, but the container makes the thing? In other words, when you watch a movie,

the story only works because of what you're shown, but also what you're not shown. It's what's edited in and also what's edited out. The container that makes Jason Silva is necessary for the pattern of information and articulation and interpretation of reality that is filtered through the container of me and the container of my brain.

And so maybe my obsession with containers comes from an intuition or a realization that even putting language to things is imposing order on chaos. Jordan Peterson says, the artist contends with the unknown and makes it known. He has a foot in the unknown and he makes it known through the act of articulation.

Sure. Terrence McKenna said, you take the mushrooms of language and what do you experience? Ecstatic articulation, empowered vocalization. Through language, we create a container, but we also create the thing itself because without that container, it's infinity,

which is chaos, which is formless, which is nothing. But this is fascinating because you are a conduit for the infinite. You're the bridge. And yet this thing that you're bringing here into the world, you seem to be resistant to and it's beautiful, man. I'm telling you.

It's beautiful battle. Yeah, no, no, no, that's exactly right. It's what we're talking about, the collision of these two things. I mean, this is what's so beautiful is that. Maybe we create reality through language. Like maybe we're all reality authoring engines. I mean, we certainly are in terms of our own subjectivity,

but maybe most of the time we let it happen passively or unconsciously and making a conscious effort authoring your reality, stage designing your reality, being the choreographer of your reality, knowing that you have the capacity to then suspend disbelief, right? Because you know, when you go to a theater, it's like an example of that.

It's like, okay, I know the stage is fake. I know they've dressed that up. I know those actors are in costumes. As soon as the shit starts, I not only suspend disbelief, but as Janet Murray says, you actively metabolize belief. So when you're a reality author, when you're trying to steward the contents

of your consciousness, you're doing that. You're like, okay, what are the words that I'm gonna use that are not just gonna describe, but are gonna generate reality? What is the set and setting that I'm gonna create for my life, not just when I take psychedelics? Who are the people that I'm gonna hang out with that I'm gonna become a sum of the people

that I hang out with? McKenna said, you become what you behold. So you take an active control, an active stewardship of your creative and linguistic choices to author your own reality, not because you want to, but because you have to, right? You either create reality or it will be created for you, and it might not be to your liking if so.

So it's like, I don't have a choice, you know? And I don't think anybody who puts a microphone up and speaks loudly is doing anything less than bringing reality into being with the power of language, absolutely. I think McKenna did it. I think Jordan Peterson is doing it with an enormous mic, and you can tell when he's contending with the unknown

and trying to put it into language, and getting teared, teary-eyed as he does it, you can feel the agony of trying to impose coherence on an ineffable universe. I think we're all doing the same thing. One of the things McKenna talked about, which I love, and I think that you're articulating it, is this concept of ecstasy, right?

So the concept of ecstasy, and people hear the term ecstasy, and they think, oh, that must only relate to the positive state, so ecstatic love, ecstatic joy, ecstatic comfort, ecstatic sex. But McKenna was saying, no, there's ecstatic terror, there's ecstatic horror, and there's ecstatic, and so I guess the- I have an example of ecstatic horror for you.

Give it to me. The trailer to this new movie called Hereditary. I don't know if you ever played trailers on this podcast, but maybe- What is it, just to- The trailer is clearly a taste of ecstatic terror. It's the reason that you would even go see a horror movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She's like, how would you do that? Well, there's a kind of thrill at a safe container in which you can see the darkness. That's right, and that is what I think the universe is doing through us. The universe is creating a safe container to experience the pretty much one of the most horrifying things you could do to yourself as a universe

would be to create a complete limitation and an obvious annihilatory moment in this thing where you're gonna lose everything and everyone, and if you really look into that horror, the thing that right now, you're like, no, this is terrible, this is awful, but if you spend a moment, or I have, really looking into it, and I have really thought

long and hard about, just let's make sure this isn't some, you're not just being like, you're not like, let's make sure you're not being a death cuck. Let's make sure you're not someone who's just pretending this thing is good even though there's no way around it. No, let's actually look into it and see, and what I have noticed is that if I really am lucky enough,

and I mean this, to experience a momentary fear of death, if I'm lucky enough to get my pond rippled by the terror of death, and I have that moment in my laboratory of self to analyze that experience fully, then what I have found in there is a sweetness, a beauty, a joy, something that is so profoundly lovely that we begin to realize that we're not really

trying to escape death, we're trying to escape the inescapable bliss that is inside of everything and is so overwhelming that it makes us want to retreat into fear, that's what I think because whether we're, you and I are like fireworks shot into the sky by some random cannon, having this conversation as we fade into nothingness, or whether we're technologically advancing fireworks that are like,

wait, hold on a second, let's turn ourselves into stars, and then once we turn ourselves into infinite stars, let's turn ourselves into fucking black holes, man, and create a billion universes inside of it, either way, if you ask me, it's so beautiful that we wanna turn away from the beauty because it's too much to bear, the beauty crushes us, it's heartbreaking, man, it's heartbreaking,

you know, your mom's gonna die, your mom's gonna die, you're gonna have to bury your parents, this heartbreak, if you look into that, it's so sweet, it's so sweet. I am not won over by that because I actually find it, even the thought experiment, you know, which people who do psilocybin and experience their own death symbolically and say that it's so sweet

and so beautiful, like, but listen to that, they said it was so sweet and so beautiful because they didn't actually die, they experienced something that they think is like what death is, but obviously they didn't die because their brain function never went limp, so they were always there, awareness persisted, and they watched maybe the shutting down

of the ego structure and then experienced what happens when you're not separated from the world in a safe environment, and I'm sure that from this, objectively, that can be aesthetically profound, but they didn't die. I'm not talking about that, I'm not talking about post-death, I'm talking about the experience of the contemplation

of the impermanence of love, and that if we really look at that. So you think it's beautiful, well, it's like the end of La La Land, do you like La La Land? I didn't see it yet. Yeah, you should watch it, it's beautiful film, and my favorite part of that film was the very end sequence, there's a dream ballet, dream ballet that basically

replays the entire story of the film, the two hour film, into a four minute sequence with all the key moments in the film that happen again in this dream ballet, except that the characters all make a slightly different decision. What could have been, what might have been, what should have been, so it's full of that wistful longing and realization of like,

if only this could have been like this, and yeah, it's the most beautiful thing ever. It's beautiful because it's so pungent with sadness, because we see ourselves in that, and because it's like we're all holding hands and crying together. Yes! You know what I mean? And so there's some beauty, but the beauty,

I think, comes from the cathartic release of how sad it is, but not because it's not sad, not because it's not tragic. Well, sadness and tragedy are beautiful. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying, if we are to accept the universe, if we're gonna mainline the universe, man, and we're gonna look up into that motherfucker

and see, these are black holes. Now, maybe they're alien civilizations, but they could just as easily be things that are just sucking in matter, infinitely into a big fucking nothing. And if we look at that and think, oh my God, I look at the cosmic dust that seems to be forming, it seems anthropomorphic, some of those things,

and you're like, what the fuck is that? That's beautiful. But then we look at the black holes and we're like, no, that fuck, it sucks. I say no. I say we accept the entire universe, which means embracing and falling in love with death itself, accepting that.

If this thing we're in is so beautiful, then the annihilatory moment must also be beautiful. Otherwise, it's malfunctioning. It's a nice thought. It's a nice thought. Yet, if we would have listened to gravity, we wouldn't have made the Hubble Space Telescope, we wouldn't have put it into orbit,

we wouldn't have been able to look at the cosmos. Like, our agency and our imagination, it's like where McKenna calls us an extruder of technological material. Yeah, I love it when he's, I love that. The coral reef-like animal that takes in matter of low organization and then through the filters of the mind

extrudes space shuttles. So why can't we do that with our own biology? Oh, I think we should try. I'm not saying don't go for it, but I'm just saying in the meantime. Sure. In the meantime. Let's not practice misery.

In the meantime, because we have this inevitable, not inevitable, but for now we must deal with the fact that should death have, like if we could go back and get rid of death, then I guess like this planet, assuming like maybe, I guess maybe would have developed interstellar travel, but if we didn't, we'd be standing on a lot of fucking dudes right now. Like, there'd just be a big trembling mass

of sentient flesh on the planet vibrating into space. Kill us, please, this sucks, I'm fucking a highway. We'd be driving bodies on bodies. We'd just be like walking across, like would be feel pretty good. Probably a lot of fucking cocks and pussies in there, but still it's maybe preferable to have dirt instead. I hear you, I just, you know,

you hear so many people just encouraging us to just live the mystery, and I suppose for every mystery you solve, there's another mystery that opens, so rather than just live the mystery, I'm like, no, no, no, be constantly in battle against the mystery, learning or demystifying, solving mysteries, and then if new mysteries open, let that be the inspiration to solve the next one.

Absolutely. Like it's just, you know, it's still in Thomas. It's do not go quietly into that good night. It's rage against the light. Have you read the Bhagavad Gita? Ah, no. Do you know about? The closest thing to that is Siddhartha's sort of

related to it. Well that's Buddhism. So in the Bhagavad Gita, what we have here, and you would love this, Jason, because it goes along with what you're saying. So in the Bhagavad Gita, what we have here is a situation of Krishna and Arjuna. Krishna, the symbol for the universe. Arjuna, the warrior, has pulled the chariot

in between these two opposing armies and is looking out and he says to Krishna, he says, I don't see enemies here. I see fathers and teachers and I don't wanna kill them. And he drops his bow, Gandava, and he says, I will not fight. That's the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita. It's called Arjuna's dejection,

saying I'm not gonna fucking do this shit. And the entire Bhagavad Gita is Krishna telling Arjuna, here's why you fucking fight. Here's why you do it. Here's why you do the battle. Jason, the battle is beautiful because it's who you are. It's what you are. You're here to fight this fucking thing, man.

Fight death for us. Conquer death for us if you can. I'm just saying, the Bhagavad Gita teaches us, that as we conquer our enemy, we can simultaneously love it. And when you realize those two things can join together, it's gonna make a more fun battle. Yeah, well, of course.

And you also realize that in fighting that enemy, you figured out who you were. Yeah, so the enemy becomes your teacher and your lover. And weirdly, your mother and father, death is your mother too, you know. Well, you see, we finally landed in a place where we're not disagreeing. I like that.

But we can disagree. That's what's beautiful. That's the matter and anti-matter. It's so fun because it's like... It dances together. Yeah, and it's beautiful, man. I'm so grateful to you for spending time with me here and letting us go into this place.

Yeah, man, I'm grateful to you, dude. It's funny how something as ancient as the art of human conversation has become now one of the fastest growing media forms. I know. Isn't that interesting? It's beautiful. Like the podcast, like what is the podcast?

It's just interesting people talking. Yeah. Interesting people talking. You know, try to pitch that to a TV network. I have this show. It's just like interesting people talking. Yeah, I don't think so, man. What's the plot?

But you know what else it is? I think it's like nodes of the universe trying to work out some problems. We're like, can we fucking smooth this shit out? Is there a way? You and I are both struggling with a thing in different ways and it's like, let's fucking, what do you got, man?

What do I got? What do we have? And then of course, back to the container, the tools to record this, the tools to make this not ephemeral, not just those that might listen live, but that somebody tomorrow or the next day or next month wakes up in the morning,

looks up at the clouds, is feeling melancholic or sad or curious or restless. They put on these headphones and guess what? They're inside two people's minds. They're inside two people's minds. Well, I've got bad news for you. I didn't record this. Oh, shit.

Well, oh well, it's great to see you anyway. Jason, thank you so much. How can people find you? Well, they can always follow my YouTube channel, Shots of Awe, A-W-E, as well as my Facebook page is at Jason L. Silva, or Instagram at Jason L. Silva. Can we get your home address? Caraca, Calle Paso Real, Quinta Maya in Venezuela,

my childhood home. Howdy, Krisha, thank you, Jason. This has been a delight. Much thanks to Squarespace.com for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. Much thanks to those of you who have subscribed over at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. And of course, thank you, Jason Silva,

for coming on this episode. The links for Jason's upcoming tour will be in the comments section of this episode over at dunkintrustle.com. Thanks, you guys. I love you, and I'll see you real soon. Hare Krishna. Eh, eh, give a little love.

It's Macy's friends and family. Get an extra 30% off great gifts for her just in time for Mother's Day when you use your coupon or Macy's card. And take 15% off Beauty Essentials or shop specials she'll love while supplies last. Plus, Star Rewards members earn on every purchase except gift card services and fees at Macy's.

Sign up today at Macy's.com slash Star Rewards. Savings off regular sale and clearance prices, and exclusions apply.