The Jordan Harbinger Show - 451: Jason Silva | Origins of a Performance Philosopher

Episode Date: December 24, 2020

Jason Silva (@JasonSilva) would have been called a “performance philosopher” by counterculture icon Timothy Leary. Among many things, he’s a futurist, filmmaker, creator of short video series Shots of Awe, and host of the National Geographic Channel’s Brain Games and Origins: The Journey of Humankind. What We Discuss with Jason Silva: How our concepts of self are formed — often through the eyes of others — and how they affect our behavior. How top performers excel by shutting down the editorial parts of the human brain coined by Buddhists as the monkey mind. Why “unscripted” isn’t the same as “unprepared,” and how videos can be edited to elicit altered states of consciousness. How good directors help performers get out of their heads — while bad directors do just the opposite. How is day-to-day reality edited by context, similar to the Kuleshov effect demonstrated by Alfred Hitchcock? And much more! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/451 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. Our brains are media. Think of them as media. That store patterns, like a hard drive. 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.

He calls an inevitable vortex of self-mirroring. That eventually a real causal mind emerges. It is like when you plug it. a video camera to the TV screen and then face the camera at the TV, it creates an engulfing infinity. Right. That's consciousness. Welcome to the show.

I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. If you're new to the show, we have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Spies and psychologists, astronauts and entrepreneurs, even the occasional mafia, enforcer, cult member, rocket scientist. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better

critical thinker. Today, we're talking with my friend Jason Silva. He's kind of a performance philosopher, I guess you could say. Host of the Emmy-nominated show Brain Games on National Geographic and the show Origins, which you might already be watching. That's also on National Geographic, super passionate guy on his YouTube videos, authentic, interesting. One of those guys that just seems like he's on another level, I'll let you fill in the blanks on that one. Today we'll discuss how our concepts of ourselves are formed and how that affects our behavior in the world.

We'll also discuss his addiction to cognitive ecstasy and connecting the dots on ideas and why this is both important for us and for him. It's a little abstract, but if you liked our episodes with Stephen Kotler and stealing fire and you like these a little bit more abstract, philosophical, potentially, Call it episodes. You'll dig this episode here with Jason Silva.

And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these authors, thinkers, and celebrities every single week, it is because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. Now, here's Jason Silva.

We have mutual front, Stephen Kotler, Sam Harris. Yeah, Stephen Kotler introduced us, right? That's right. Yeah, that's right. Stephen Collar introduced us. He was raving about you. Oh, good. Peter Diamandis, I know from XPRIZ and through Ray Kurzweil.

I'm big fan of his and friendly with him. I love his passion. So Peter, Stephen, Max, from Current. Who else? And John Levy. I have been to some of those events. So good. Small world.

Well, a lot of people have been emailing, why don't you have Jason Silva on your show? Why don't you have Jason Silva on your show? And you were like, who's that douche? I was like, is that the guy from Brain Games? Because I don't have a TV, so I'll pass now. It's funny because I saw that show once and I thought, this is. is the coolest show ever. It was like in an airport lounge, but I didn't have TV for 15 years because I was a cord cutter in the 90s, basically. I don't watch a lot of TV either.

Yeah, it was on Netflix for a while, though. That was nice. I did see it on there. A lot of people rediscovered it on Netflix. Is it gone now, though? I think it's back on Netflix, actually. Because you can always steal it, like most people, my age, get their media, just steal it. Got it. I won't do that with your new show, though, because that would be, that would be bad news. We did get cable for certain educational reasons. Great. By the way, do you ever watch your own stuff? Like, do you watch the fly, production of your Nat Geo? Are you kind of like, okay, I'm so done with this. I don't want to deal. 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. I know, yeah. The shots of odd 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, whatever. And that kind of goes along with what you're mentioning with watching the video and looking at the final product. 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 peopling. 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, for our inferences, our modeling of what other people's interior worlds are like if we want to

communicate and or commune with those people. Any 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? And it's all. Well, I definitely think that the more empathic you are, the more rich your modeling of other people's minds are. You know, people talk about

having, being an empath or whatever. Right. 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. That has no idea of your inner world. You must get that a lot because the passion and all the things you talk about and the philosophy, there's got to 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 much 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 word 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 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 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 Godell 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've 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 coolie'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-miroring, 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. or at the TV, it creates an engulfing infinity.

Right. That's consciousness. It feels like the movie Inception, you know, that scene mirror reflects the mirror reflects the mirror. And to your point, when you do that, you still get the screen of the TV in the shot again and again and again. So the observer is always going to be in there. Always, right. 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 these 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 there's been a decade and a half thinking about why these problems happened and how they can be solved. But you are a super passionate guy in your videos. Your performance philosopher, I think some people have said, which I think is really a cool descriptor. It's an interesting title. So that comes from a quote by Timothy Leary. And Timothy Leary, of course, was a counterculture, sort of hippie rock star in the 60s, Harvard performance. took a bunch of LSD, realized, oh my God, we can hack our consciousnesses. Let's create a social revolution. Maybe he took a little too far at the time and society responded. At the time, right now, you'd be like, yeah, buddy, tune in drop out. Big deal. Yeah, 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 very interesting, like Silicon Valley means counterculture merger. Which led directly to probably Steve Jobs and all these other guys drop in acid. Precisely. What we have the internet and acid, why not just combine the two? Yeah, there's a book called What the Dormouse said, which is all about how the counterculture on Silicon Valley merge. And so much of the techno-utopian dream, 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 at these big mainframe things for social control and instead become tools for personal liberation and personal self-expression. Right. And I assume that 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 in 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, 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 current 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. If you're not 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 gopros 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 stated 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, 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 Kotler 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 book stealing fire and all about like some that 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 my self-esteem is what I'm worried about. Right. Right 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 rappers versus people who are citing memories. The freestyle rappers shut down the new. cortical hardware, the dorsolateral 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 you use more of your brain. It's actually you shut down parts of the brain that don't serve you in that moment, and the self-experiences that is 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 love incorporating cannabis into their jam sessions because you get a flood of dopamine, it increases

pattern recognition, it 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 to capture when this is happening. And it reminded me of a line from Black Swan where, you know that Natalie Portman? Yeah, 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 you know 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 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 around people that I trust so that I can be really vulnerable and fully surrender 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 Stephen 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, but the intensity of words that comes at you, combine 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 alter 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 $4 trillion 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 I'm 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 rap 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 and 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 and the show notes.

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 in 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'd have to do

these host wraps and he's like, put your hand in your pocket, like, you know, be a little more calm, 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. I'm concentrating on keeping your handling now and now himself 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 two 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, like, 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 all that junk. The cul-de-saxon error messages as Jamie Wheel calls them, you know. I love those guys. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Jason Silva. We'll be right back.

And now back to Jason Silva on the Jordan Harbinger Show. 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, he's 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. Yeah, it's nice. That's a good one. If you're going to steal a slogan, that's a good one to steal. Yeah, but that's the dream.

Like my relationship, my friendship with people like the Flow Geno Project founder is Stephen Kotler and Jamie Wheel 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, Stephen Kotler brings. the neuroscience, like breaks it down, hardened to materialist. And then you have Jamie Wheel waxing rhaps, rhapsodic sotic a la Joseph Campbell in 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 Stephen Cotler and Jamie Will 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 Stephen Kotler, 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 used 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 existence. context for why this matters, it just made it all make sense. 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, know, I host a couple series of National Geographic there are about science because I'm a good

synthesizer and I explain 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 regime. What's going on there? Yeah, so Chavez is like a terminal cancer that shows up to cripple its host. He was cancer and he died of cancer. Yes. I don't think that's a coincidence. There's a little poetic justice. Yeah, in 1998, he took over and he really made things far worse.

Venezuela for a while, you know, on 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, taught 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 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. 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's got to be aware of it.

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 what you the world is reality. You know, 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. Sure. With very, very little context, you know, 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've 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 the film Arrival. He's brilliant.

That guy is an X-level thinker, like yourself, actually. Well, he's one of my heroes, and I've become very good friends with him as well. I adore his work, Evan Pushach, the Nerd Rider. He did an analysis of the film Arrival, which is really an analysis of consciousness and 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 with a blazer on

than when we're not, you know? David Lenson, who wrote a 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 guard, 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 to learn in Spanish, I veo 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? and 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, 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. 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, the context switches pretty much immediately, and it can be almost like a knife, cutting open a fabric that you think you're looking at 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, that's what I'm really am. Paying attention, deconstructing how conscious experience is informed by context, place, even music can be very empowering to use the metaphor that Stephen Collar and Jamie Wheel 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. 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 in making the movie play out and give a certain mood and a certain vibe and a certain flavor. You know who's good at this is 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 everywhere. Yeah. Some people can fly, you know, first class to Paris, staying 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 practically half 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? 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. Like, buzz kill. Somebody else ruin it. 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 appropriate. And they're appropriate. 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, Oh, for God, 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? 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 mental apparatus that you're incorporating into that is a pivotal part of that feedback loop. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Jason Silva. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers, That's what keeps us going. If you want to get all the discounts and the deals in one place,

definitely check it out at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you have any problems with any of those, please do contact me directly. We'll make it good. Please do consider supporting those who support us. And don't forget, we've got a worksheet for today's episode, just like always, if you want some of the drills, exercises, thought exercises, et cetera, talked about during the show in one easy place. That's where you get them in the worksheets.

That link is in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our conversation with Jason Silva. How do you get yourself into and out of feedback loops that are negative and positive when you do your videos? For example, 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 along. 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, 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 environment. 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 or 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 Disneyland 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's of 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 one. wonder and curiosity, no worries or constraints, zero anxiety. And you can incorporate the mental landscape very easily because even the other people that are there, they're operating a different

channel than you. That totally makes sense. So you're changing your environment. You're changing the people you surround yourself with, 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 eye and be like, all right, we're both in here. Okay, we're hitting this together. Right. It's 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, 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. 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. Does that make sense? Yeah. So my videos are called Shots of Aw, and you can see them in the YouTube page, Shots of A, or follow my Facebook page, Jason Silva.

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 NatGeo execs 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 Nat Geo 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 Nat Geo, it's about the origins of humankind. It's really about the McLuhan 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. Feedback loops.

And the show is structured in a way that every act has a shot of awe-esque opening in every single act of the show. that we call them symphonies that I did with John Boswell from Melody Sheep. And they basically look like shots of HBO level. They're beautiful. And then we have these amazing historical recreations shot in Africa that look like mini movies that chronicle these 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 awe is I don't just want to tell you about an idea. I want to get you into an altered state and 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. And in fact, I think it's probably really great. Yeah. We've been adapting our tools since the freaking stone age. of we're still here. But how do you think AI is going to change us? Instead of a robotic arm or a hand, I might have an 800X brain. Of course.

That's doing the computing. 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, 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 my favorite thinkers are David Chomers 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 scaffoldings 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 and 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 brain's tools and environments. And so environment is informing thoughts and ideas, the way you interface with your tools is informing thoughts and ideas. So 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 quarter. 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, Dawkins 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 the planet is cloaked in data. And there's more information produced per second now, I think, than 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 sexually crude, but if 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 Genghis Khan of iTunes. There you go. I think that's a great way to think about it. And you're right in a lot of ways when I think about this. We

curate our input. We curate those around us. We shape our future selves. 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 important? Ah, is it necessary or does it feel necessary to me? The reason for getting up in the morning, the reason to be compelled to 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, 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. Ernest Becker in 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 has naked, rotting, conscious flesh. So everything I do is a response against meaninglessness. It's a desperate attempt to carve my body. 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 get something once and go, oh, cool, that'll sound great on the podcast. If you hang out with me a lot, you'll realize

that all the stuff I quote is all related and Nicole 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. 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, bro. 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 with our new subjective reality that we've created here. Beautiful, bro. Thank you for having me on your podcast. Congratulations on your success.

And thank you to all your listeners. Thank you so much. Thanks, brother. Cheers. We've got a preview trailer of our interview with poker star Annie Duke on how we can learn to make better decisions by thinking in bets instead of trying so hard to be certain all the time. Check out episode 40 here on the Jordan Harbinger show. The quality of your life is determined by the sum of two things, the quality of your decisions and luck.

when something bad happens to us, we act as a skill wasn't involved at all. We just sort of pawned off to the luck elements. But when good things happen, we sort of ignore the luck element and we say that it was because of our great skill. A self-driving Uber just hit and kill the pedestrians. But what I thought was really interesting was that the reaction was to suspend the testing and just to take the cars off the road, not just the Uber cars, but other self-driving vehicles. And what I didn't see were any comparisons to how self-driving vehicles did per thousand miles traveled versus the technology that we already have on the road, which is cars that are driven by humans.

We know that 6,000 pedestrians die per year by regular driven cars. Let's say that you're on the side of the road and you've got a flat tire. And of course, what everybody's thinking in that moment is I have the worst life ever. Like, why do these things always happen to me? I'm so unlucky. I'm so miserable. What's really interesting to me about it is, like, you could have gotten a promotion, like the biggest promotion of your life three days before.

And you're not standing on the side of the road going, my life's great because I just got the biggest promotion I could ever imagine. So imagine that you had this flat tire a year ago. And now I'm asking you today, a year later, how much do you think that that flat tire would have affected your overall happiness over the year. For more with any Duke, including some common mistakes we make when evaluating decisions, check out episode 40 here on the Jordan Harbinger show. I always enjoy talking to Jason. He's one of these guys that makes you think differently. Sometimes I just kind of go,

okay, I don't know if I get it and, you know, maybe I need to be on some kind of other substance or something in order to be on that plane of existence. But anything that challenges my thinking makes me think about things in a different way. I'm always down for that. And this is a guy who, by his very presence can make you, can put you in that mood. And I really appreciate that about him. He's also really kind and generous and you don't necessarily expect that from somebody who's kind of a big deal TV hero, you know? So big thank you to Jason Silva. Check out his work. We will link it in the show notes. And please do use our website links if you buy books or use resources from any of the guests that you end up having to purchase or wanting to purchase. That stuff adds up. It helps

support the show as well. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes. Transcripts for this episode are in the show notes. There should be a video going up on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or hit me there on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course that is always free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig the well before you get thirsty, right? Build those relationships before you need something from your network. You got to strengthen that network itself. Strengthen the web. Most of the guests you hear on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter.

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