The School of Greatness - 785 Jason Silva: Break the Cycle of Fear and Doubt

Episode Date: April 17, 2019

SHAKE THE SNOWGLOBE. So often, we talk about the importance of discipline in order to reach our goals. But doing the same thing all the time can keep us from living in the present. We have to find a balance. We’ve got to dance with routine and freedom. So how can you keep your mind in the now? Every night, do something unexpected. Travel. And constantly put yourselves in situations where you don’t know the outcome. On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I talk about the importance of new experiences with a talented futurist and artist: Jason Silva. Jason Silva is an Emmy-nominated and world-renowned TV personality, storyteller, filmmaker, and sought-after keynote speaker and futurist. Jason is known for hosting 5 seasons of the Emmy-nominated, global hit TV series Brain Games on the National Geographic Channel, which is broadcasted in over 171 countries. Jason says that we need to ask each other the questions we’ve been asking ourselves. Let’s talk about why we’re here, and how to find meaning. So get ready to learn more about the biggest questions on everyone’s mind on Episode 785. Some Questions I Ask: What question have you been asking yourself? (7:00) How can we eliminate self-doubt? (40:30) How do we stop comparing ourselves? (54:00) What holds us back the most? (57:00) How do you find fulfillment in a committed relationship? (1:08:00) What’s a question you think you’ll never get answered? (1:14:00) In This Episode You Will Learn: Tools to help you stay in the present (24:00) How to balance routine and excitement (28:00) About the “Entropic Brain Theory,” and how psychedelics help depression (32:00) How helping other people directly can help with feeling directionless (48:00) About the “Terror Management Theory” and how when you remind people of their mortality they become more judgemental (57:30)

This is episode number 785 with the inspirational Jason Silva. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Jim Rohn said,

Happiness is not something you postpone for the future. It is something you design for the present. And John F. Kennedy said, Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. We've got my man, Jason Silva in the house. I'm super excited about this one. I've known Jason for a number of years.

We had him on the show a few years back, but it's been so long and so many episodes have come through on iTunes now that it's not even in the stream anymore. And there's been so much that's happened in my life and his life and what he's been able to create over the last three plus years. I wanted to bring him on to really share some updating things. And I was blown away. Every five minutes, I was kind of like in shock and in awe of the things that Jason was saying. I believe that you're going to be doing the same. You're going to want to tweet out like 30 different times.

There's so many shareable moments on Instagram that are going to awaken you inside and allow you to really see and be aware of where you're at in your life and where you want to be in a more powerful and inspiring way. For those that don't know who Jason is, he is an inspirational television personality, filmmaker, futurist, philosopher, and public speaker all over the world. He's known for hosting national geographic documentaries, brain games, and origins. And his goal is to use technology to excite people about philosophy and science. And in this interview, we talk about discussing the biggest questions that everyone

struggles with. Why are we here? How do we eliminate self-doubt? And what is our purpose? We discuss flow and the best ways to get into this powerful state quicker so that you can maximize your potential at any time. We talk about the power of service and focusing on helping others to bring happiness to your own life, and also how social media has us in the constant comparison loop and how we can break free of this cycle. Super pumped. Make sure you share this with your friends, lewishouse.com slash 785. Tag myself at Lewis House and Jason Silva over on Instagram right now or anytime during this interview so we know that you're listening and we can connect with you over on Instagram as well. All right, guys, I'm excited about this one. Jason Silva has been inspiring

millions and millions of people every single day and week with his inspirational videos online, and now I'm bringing them to you at the School of Greatness. So without further ado, let's dive in with the one and only Jason Silva. in with the one and only Jason Silva. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. We've got the legendary Jason Silva in the house. My man. What's up, bro? Excited. It's a good pop. It's going to be a great interview. Three-year anniversary of you coming on the first time. Can you believe it?

It's been crazy, man. You've grown a lot. We've grown a lot. You've grown a lot. It's been so much fun, man. Amazing to see you, man. It's amazing what happens when you just. Amazing to see you, man. It's amazing what happens when you just show up every week for six years in anything you do. That's right, man.

If you do what you love, it never really feels like work, right? You get caught up in something. It feels like a mission. It feels like a vocation. When we started this podcast, I remember saying... I was in a transition in my life. I was trying to figure out what's the feeling I want to create in my life moving forward. I built and sold a company for seven figures. That was fun, but it wasn't fulfilling.

It was like, cool, we're making some impact. We're making some money. My bank account is full, but it's my heart full. And I remember asking myself the question, what do I want to do that even if I never got paid, I would love to do? And sitting down with brilliant people and asking questions became like my answer when I asked myself that. Sure. You know what that reminds me of actually? Not to interrupt you, but you just sparked this realization.

There's an organization called the Edge Foundation, edge.org, and they basically gather brilliant people to write these amazing essays that answer big questions about the human condition but it's really their log line that i find very inspiring and i think it very much applies to what you've done with school of greatness and in many ways the way i try to curate my own life it goes like this i think it'll set us up for our conversation to 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. Wow, that's what I do. Right, that is what you do. That's my life. And isn't that beautifully put though? There's just this notion of like curating these people whose lives inspire you,

who have done things in the world that resonate with you, that give you goosebumps. And then to be in front of them and to have them, right, to have us ask each other the questions that we've been asking ourselves. Powerful. Which is, like, I think the essence of a true conversation is you sit down and you say, so what have you been asking yourself lately? Like, what's keeping you up at night, you know?

What have you been asking yourself lately? Holy's keeping you up at night you know what have you been asking yourself lately holy shit let's see i'm in my i'm in my mid-30s now me too 36 just turned yeah okay i just i just turned 37 i'm 82 born in 83 okay march baby nice february pisces aquarius oh yeah i don't know what that means my girlfriend my girlfriend knows what it means. The stars and everything. Yeah. So you're 37, what's the question you've been asking yourself? Yeah, so I guess the question is kind of cliché, but it's the question we, I think it's, the human condition is defined by it, which is what are we meant to do with ourselves in response to our unique situation?

And our unique situation is characterized by this expanded awareness, this amount of self-consciousness that we have, that we can think about our own thinking, and that we can contemplate the infinite, right? That human beings are immensely talented, creative, but also very agitated beings. Yes. In some ways, yeah, we can build space telescopes,

and we can marvel at the cosmos, and we can contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite, right? We can imagine the Big Bang. We can try to imagine what came before the Big Bang. All these things that exceed our boundedness, and yet simultaneously we feel very finite and we feel very contained by our mortal bodies, our heart pumping, breath gasping, decaying bodies.

For me, I am still trying to make sense of our situation or rather find some way to absolve our situation. And I don't know if we talked about this three years ago, but this is a book you'll probably start turning to more and more as the years keep passing by. It's a book called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. But the key idea is that we have, you know, man has an inner symbolic life, an interiority. And that signifies a certain kind of freedom. Because we can imagine impossibly large things with this interior symbolic life. Our interior symbolic life can fit mythologies that are this big, right?

Like every story, right, that's ever been told that's bigger than us. It's called Joseph Campbell's monomyth. And we can entertain these vastnesses within us, right? So our inner symbolic self symbolizes or signifies a certain kind of freedom. And yet we also are aware that we have a bounded, finite physical body, which puts a limit on that freedom. Yeah. Makes so urgency. which puts a limit on that freedom. Yeah. Makes so urgency.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like this feeling of bounded possibility, infinite potential that we feel we have that is curtailed only by the notion that the clock is ticking. And we're going to die. Okay.

So sad. Well, I think it's very depressing. How do we extend life? Exactly. Well, how do we extend life? I feel like we're 100 years away. Like, we were born just 100 years shy of actually really learning how to extend it, like, an extra 100 years. Well, that's no doubt.

I mean, we've already doubled the human lifespan. So, like, the progress has been astonishing from, you know, the rise of antibiotics, modern medicine. I mean, we've already made the average lifespan, I think, be over 70. Crazy. What we need to reach is something called escape velocity, where we'll be adding a year of life expectancy for every year that passes. And so when you get to that point- You're escaping it. Yeah, dude. And there's no doubt that that's where we're heading. I mean,

the advances happening in sort of genetics and biotechnology will allow us to increasingly master the language of biology. Have we missed the mark though? Have we missed the time? Well, that's the big question mark is whether some of these, I guess, breakthroughs in our scientific understanding and capacity to manipulate biology will sort of fully flower and sort of emerge into the commercial application in time for us to benefit from those things. But until that happens, all we can do is make sure that we commit ourselves to something every day

that allows us freedom from self-consciousness. So something that feels so important and that we feel so committed to here and now and every day that we get out of bed in the morning feeling like we're slaying the dragon, so to speak. And we have no choice, especially in the Western world, right? It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So it's like, if you can feed yourself and if you can pay your rent, all of a sudden, basic sustenance is not the meaning of life anymore. The meaning of life

becomes one of- Finding the meaning of life. Exactly. Figuring out the purpose of the game becomes the purpose of the game, you know? Your meaning of life, yeah. That's right. And I ask myself, I'm like, I remember when I graduated college, I double majored in film and philosophy, and my romantic fantasies were to be kind of like a flaneur. I don't know if you've ever heard this term. So the flaneur is the walking philosopher. And I'm not sure who came up with the term, but it was used to describe a lot of these, I think it was like Paris in the 20s, when all these artists would hang out in cafes in Paris,

everybody was a painter or a musician or a filmmaker. And all they were doing was just like contemplating what it means to be a person and making art about it. Like what a gift, you know? You're doing that now. Well, that was my fantasy graduating college. I just want to travel the world with my video camera and I want to like think out loud. I want to reflect. I want to be like a writer, but with video. I want to be like a poet, but with video. And then I got caught up in the trappings of becoming successful. And I got my first gig with Current TV, Al Gore's TV network as a television presenter. And I moved to LA and I went to parties and I got an agent and I got a publicist. And I was like, how do I expand my micro fame to create new opportunities, you know, and grow, right, financially and in terms of my capacity

to make a dent with my work. Yeah, social influence, social proof, all those trappings, so to speak. And then, you know, in 2011, Brain Games, like, blew up in a massive way. It's still everywhere right now. Yeah, it's still on Netflix. Like, it's still, people still watch the show. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. That's like my version of saved by the bell you know i'll always be associated with with brain games but so that you know but that was also like oh you know whoa hollywood la like billboards like that whole thing for a little while i did that for five seasons and then i did that other show origins and all of those were wonderful things i'm proud to be associated

with i think content that makes people think about their cognition, their brain, the way they perceive and misperceive reality. But the larger questions of what to do with our brains, what to do with our perceptions and our misperceptions is something that still agitates me. And so being on the other side of like a massively successful TV show and essentially tasting the thing that we supposedly associate with completion and finality, like you've made it. How do they make you feel? Well, it has only made me realize that that is not all there is, you know, and that- It's kind of like the Jim Carrey quote. Have you heard of Jim Carrey's quote where he's like, I wish everyone becomes rich and famous so that they realize the key is not becoming rich

and happiness doesn't come from that 100% and I think the the only aspect where I think it makes sense to want to have some kind of financial success is so that you don't have to be burdened by those lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like it sucks to have to stress about rent. It sucks to have to struggle to pay the bills. And way too many people are dealing with those struggles. And that's the problem. And I think that's one of the reasons that I'm so attracted to Scandinavian countries

or places like the Netherlands. They're much more egalitarian. People have a much better quality of life. Yeah, they tax you more, but you also have free education and free healthcare while still having a dynamic and creative economy. And the people there report higher life satisfaction than many other countries across the world.

These are the happiest countries in the world, whether it's Denmark or the Netherlands. So there are ways, I think, of organizing our society so that people spend less time struggling economically and more time having free time for leisure and or personal development and or creativity. But I think that we make a mistake in thinking that once we create a society that is like that, that then it will be done. Because then new questions sort of emerge from within that we are compelled to try to answer, which is, okay, well, I can pay the rent and I've got a home. Everything's taken care of.

And everything is fine, and yet the clock is ticking. I'm going to die. Nothing lasts, you know, even the feeling of satisfaction that you got from that moment of success where you finally overcame those hurdles. Gone. Yeah, and so then what? And then the big questions from the college dorms when you were stoned, like, come back. What's the meaning of life?

Why are we here? What do we do in the face of death? What happens when our loved ones get sick or our parents get old? And I think that trying to answer that continues to fuel a lot of the work that I do with my digital content, which you've seen some of it. It's amazing. some of it. It's amazing. What do you think is the question that over the last 4,000 plus years is the most common question asked that we've never been able to answer? The one that haunts us all. Is it why are we here? Is what's the meaning of life? I think it's what happens after we die. Oh. I think that's the one that human beings are trying to make sense of. And I think that

there's poetry in certain answers to that question, such as, you know, energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be transformed, and so on and so forth. And I get very little... Yeah, when the brain is down. I get very little reassurance from that idea. I think what frightens me is the idea that there is nothing else, which, again, doesn't get rid of the mystery

of why we're here to begin with, because the richness of our interior experience, our capacity to express our interiority in the form of song and poetry and arts. I mean, when I behold a beautiful piece of art, when I listen to a beautiful melody, I become the melody, I become the artist, I share the subjective experience of that soul that somehow concocted or architected that piece of art. And so I feel like there's something within us that feels divine, that is divine. Jordan Peterson famously says, he talks about that example

of why you need art in your life, and he's talking about people at a museum staring at Renaissance paintings, and he's like a museum, like staring at like Renaissance paintings. And he's like, why are they staring at that? They don't understand what that is. They didn't study art history necessarily. Why are they gawking at that painting? And then he says, the reason that people are staring

or are gawking at this painting is because implicitly they recognize that something transcendent shines through the frame. So they may not know what they're looking at, but they know that what they're looking at is divine in some way or some, it's very similar to, have you heard of the phrase Stendhal syndrome? No.

So Stendhal syndrome is basically what happens when an aesthetic experience, a spiritual experience, is so overwhelming to the senses that you can collapse and have like heart palpitations. And this will happen to like really religious people when they go to like church yeah the sistine chapel in rome or whatever and and they're faint yeah jerusalem that's right that's right they've been praying and thinking about this their whole time then finally they see that statue or that painting and they collapse the emotional overwhelm from ecstasy they collapse from beauty

if there's something that's going to like knock you over the face and throw you to the floor, it's better for it to be because of beauty than because you're getting a stroke or a heart attack. You know what I'm saying? But back to the thing about Jordan Peterson. It's like we don't have to necessarily understand art, know that it hints at an unseen realm of the human heart. And I don't know if that means that we survive past our death, but I know that it makes me want us to. You know, like when I look even at the cosmos at night sometimes,

especially from a place with no light pollution, you know, I can't help but get caught up in like wanting to know, is there some kind of unseen order here? And I don't know if it looks like a god with a beard, but is there something, man? Like, is there some kind of unseen order here? And I don't know if it looks like a god with a beard, but is there something, man? Like, is there an explanation? Is there an equation? Is there a designer behind the design?

And granted, scientists tell us no, but something in the human heart, I think, finds it difficult to recoil with the idea that there is nothing. Because if there is nothing, then why the finds it difficult to recoil with the idea that there is nothing. Because if there is nothing, then why the fuck are we here crying with the question, yearning for there to be something? Yeah. What do you think is the biggest fear then for most people? Is it that none of this is going to matter because I don't know what's happening after I'm gone? Well, I think the fear is uncertainty. I think that's the reason why

there is a billion-dollar industry now teaching people how to become more present. And the irony is if we would have been able to live in the present 100,000 years ago in the savannas of Africa, we would have gotten eaten by the lion that we didn't see coming. It's like living in the present is not evolutionarily advantageous. You know what's advantageous is the fact that we can imagine future scenarios. And the reason we have memory, and Jordan Peterson talks about this, is not so we can relish about past times, is so that we can learn from things that happened in the past and make inferences about what's going to happen in the future. Not get eaten. Right.

When you watch your friend get eaten. Correct. Correct. So then what happens is mitigating against future risk was biologically selected for. Those who did that bred more widely. And so we have inherited that brilliant neuroses of foreshadowing future danger and mitigating against it. The problem is once we've made the world safe, we still are like a hamster in a hamster wheel

or like a dog humping another dog in heat and then you like pull the female away and the male is still humping with his like penis in the air, you know? Like that's us. It's like you may have money, you may be paying your rent, you maybe have a wife and a kid and this and that, but you're still worried about tomorrow.

Like, what's going to happen? Oh my God, the collapse of the government, a terrorist attack, an airplane disaster. Like, that's the wiring. And so ironically, we've gotten to a time where now some of the hardware that has served us so well is now problematic and there's this desire to return to a kind of capacity to be here now and actually like neuter our foreshadowing capacity and our relishing of memory. Interesting. To block the signals forwards and backwards. In fact, in mental health now, there is a renaissance. Again, I'm talking about the rise of learning to be in the present, meditation, mindfulness. All of these techniques are teaching us to neutralize our wiring to think about the future. Michael Pollan's new book, How to Change Your Mind,

the bestselling book that just was written about psychedelics. I want to see this. Wonderful book, and you should definitely have Michael Pollan. In the first few pages of the book, he describes our modern malaise. He basically says that the human brain, human beings are like an artificial intelligence program. We take in data from the present. We compare that data with data from the past. And we use that then to make predictions about the future. And that's what we're always make predictions about the future.

And that's what we're always doing automatically all the time. In fact, a lot of the time, we dispense with the present data altogether and just leapfrog to the conclusion. And so we're living in this perpetual been-theirs-and-seen-thats of the adult mind, also known as jadedness. Like you show up in a restaurant, you're not even excited about what you're gonna eat. I've already had a burger before. I know what this is. I know what that is. So you're just, you're not even there.

You're like, rather look at your phone or you're rather, what movie are we gonna watch later? Like we're just never present because we've leapfrogged to the conclusion because our brain is so effective at saying I know what this is and making predictions about the future. And if the future is not dangerous, then we don't even have to pay attention

to what's happening right now. So we live with this kind of perpetual low-level hum of anxiety, this future tense. We're like having a crooked back. We're like future tense all the time. Never now, always future tense. And maybe that makes you a good businessman or a good planner. But unless you're like an architect and you're like planning the structure you're going to build, like the incapacity to enjoy and smell the flowers is very problematic and is sort of one of the main features

of mental distress. So then he says, well, what are some of the solutions? What are some of the ways that we can neuter our compulsion to constantly leapfrog to the future and leave the present? Travel.

Novelty. Why travel? So travel. This is something new. Yeah. Experiencing something new for the first time. Correct. Not like I've had the same pizza every day.

That's right. I go to the same restaurants every week. That's right. I go on the same date night every, you know. That's right. Experiences that violate your expectations. Interesting. So that's another thing that is good to keep in mind.

Wow. violate your expectations. Interesting. So that's another thing that is good to keep in mind. So travel, art, certain kinds of drugs, like cannabis is very effective for this. What these things do is they block all signals forwards and backwards automatically. It's hard to know what's about to happen if you're in a place that's completely new. When you're off the reservation, you don't know where that path leads. And when you don't know where that path leads, it's hard to imagine where it leads. So instead, your senses are heightened and you're here now paying attention to see where it's going to take you. Living in shock and awe. A little, exactly. It's like living in the wonder. Yes. And that's why I think being a child who's always curious is the way to feel fulfilled and happiness and joy, because you're just like always in the wonder of what is happening.

Why is this happening? This is beautiful. And it also answers this dilemma of our existential conundrum of what to do about death because it's not even that we're afraid of dying tomorrow. We're afraid of dying in 30 years. Like I'm afraid of turning 90 and dying when I'm 90. That already haunts my dreams,

except when I'm traveling, when I'm exposed to great, beautiful art, when I'm making love, when you're high on cannabis, or when I'm flow. What happens is you block all signals forwards and backwards. When you block all signals

forwards and backwards, you enter the flow of the present, in the words of Michael Pollan, a present that is literally wonder-ful. Wonderful. And then he goes on. Wonder being the byproduct of exactly that unencumbered sense of first sight

or virginal noticing. Interesting. Right? To which the adult brain has closed itself. Wow. So you're obliterating the adult capacity to foreshadow everything. And you're returning to a more virginal state of heightened appreciation for what's unfolding in real time. And that seems to be the answer to our ills.

Because when we have those experiences, we have awe. And awe is an experience of such perceptual expansion in the moment that all your mental models about what this is are obliterated. And when they're obliterated, you have to make room for new assimilation. New assimilation means, oh, now I know what a glacier looks like, or oh, that's what a lion looks like in its natural habitat. You are dumbstruck. You are awestruck. And it turns out that even though these are transitory experiences, they leave afterglows. That's why when people take magic mushrooms and have a mystical experience, or when they go to

the Grand Canyon or they see their child be born, they're left with this afterglow for weeks, months, sometimes even years afterwards of increased well-being, increased creativity, and increased compassion for other people. So perhaps, you know, I'm answering my own question here, but perhaps the answer to the existential agitation of what to do with ourselves in the face of death is simply to stop and smell the roses, to learn to steward the contents of consciousness to the here and now, to hack ourselves by learning to block all signals forwards and backwards,

by exposing ourselves to great art, to travel, to do things new and different, and to not get caught up in routine or patterns of thinking because too many patterns in our thinking when we become like excessively when we get caught up in like the excessive rumination and overthinking and self-consciousness that characterizes depression and anxiety what we need is to shake the fucking snow globe to shake the snow globe and so what shakes the snow globe well put you on a plane right now and drop you off in botswana you know on the back of a safari truck

like listening to the inception score and it's just like i love that like before you know me too before you know you're hurled back into the flow of the now it's interesting you say this because yeah it was a paradox because we need routines and rituals to create productiveness in our lives. If you're always doing something new, then you're eating the foods maybe that aren't healthy for you that's going to make you stronger and healthier. You're not ever doing something consistent that's going to help build your business or relationship forward because you're traveling and you're never there, whatever it may be. business or a relationship forward because you're traveling and you're never there, whatever it may be. So there's a paradox of routines and rituals every morning, day and night, but also the newness of life that brings you joy and wonder fullness. Beautiful. So you've got to constantly dance with this. Learning to oscillate with that is the dance. So it's like, okay,

ritual routine for six weeks, but then when you feel a little itchy and scratchy, it's like, do something unexpected or every like do something unexpected. Or every night do something unexpected. Maybe it's a little bit every day you can have a ritual routine where you know you're going to get a workout in, you're going to take care of your health, but you're going to do something that scares you. That's beautifully put. And I feel like I keep coming back to Jordan Peterson

because I find him so brilliant. We had him on twice. Yeah, he was great. Oh, beautiful, twice. Like 24 million views on a video we did with him. It went viral. Wow. It was crazy. That was brilliant. Yeah, him so brilliant. We had him on twice. Yeah, he was great. Oh, beautiful, twice. Like 24 million views on a video we did with him. It went viral. Wow. It was crazy.

That was brilliant. Yeah, he is brilliant. One of the things that I also love is he's saying that you have to do things to take care of yourself today, but you also have to take into account the well-being of your future self because your future self is going to be you very soon. The decisions you make today will affect your future self. So can you, so when he, actually, this was one of his best videos.

So he was like, what to do, how to deal with an existential crisis is, well, first of all, like find a passion or orientation that takes care of you today, that satiates your itch today, but that also doesn't alienate the people that you love that are around you. You have to take into account something that gets you off, but that also doesn't alienate, yeah, that doesn't hurt other people. You have to take other people into account. But you know who you also have to take into account is your future self. So if the answer to all your problems today is to do heroin and smoke cigarettes,

that's not a favor to your future self. So that's not going to work. And it's also going to make your friends and family worry about you. But perhaps the answer to your problems today is to learn to work abroad, figure out a situation where you can work remotely, develop a routine where in the mornings you work out, you drink coffee, and you do your work for four or five hours, and then every afternoon you commit to doing a different hike

or to doing a different kind of hobby. So you're kind of ticking all those boxes of satiating your need for novelty and adventure and enthrallment while being responsible and meeting the criteria of taking care of your future self and taking care of yourself. And if you can, I guess, if you can manage all of those things, if you have the capacity for discipline and for surrender. Actually, you see me wearing a Venn diagram here. Something, nothing, and mystery. Yeah, yeah.

So I have a very similar one. Instead, it goes discipline, surrender, and they overlap in flow. And so flow, for me then, is that towing the line between chaos and order. Because order is discipline. Chaos is surrender. Flow is where they overlap.

Flow is towing that line. What do artists do? Artists flirt with chaos. It's creativity. Flirt with the unknown, right? They contend with the unknown, but what do they do? With a structure and a framework. That's right.

They bound it. They bring it back into tangible form. They articulate it. They make sense of it. They summon coherence, you know? And I think that's something that we can sort of apply to our lives because we need that balance. It's kind of cliche to say that, but there's a guy called Robin Carthart Harris in the Imperial College of London who's been doing

some studies on how psychedelics tend to alleviate anxiety and depression that has not responded to conventional medications. And he came up with a theory to account for why they are so effective at doing this. And it's called the entropic brain theory. But basically the idea is that the brain has a certain kind of order and coherence. And it turns out that either through trauma or things that have happened in your past that have jolted your nervous system in a way that it has experienced this threat, this feeling of potentially being obliterated by being attacked, by having trauma. So it's always on guard? Yeah. Fight or flight.

All the time. Stressed. Always. Always stressed. And so basically, when they did fMRI scans on the brain of these people that suffer from these diseases, they found that the default mode network, which is the part of the brain that sort of governs self-awareness, what they call the ego construct, has become a tyrant, is a great metaphor to describe it.

The ego is necessary. The ego gets the book written. The ego gets you out of bed in the morning. The ego makes you go to work. We need some ego in our lives, but when the ego metastasizes into a despot, into an authoritarian, it's no longer like an elected president, but a dictator. And it's super paranoid that everybody's against it, that the brain essentially has become too ordered. And those are the diseases of depression and anxiety and excessive

rumination and looping thoughts and obsessive thinking and OCD and all that stuff. Too much order. But again, on the other extreme is too much chaos. Those are the diseases of psychosis. Too much freedom. Well, psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, that's a brain that's completely lost touch with any kind of tetherings. You don't want that either. But what seems to happen with psychedelics is that it takes brains that are too ordered and shakes the snow globe.

And it's like a reset that doesn't necessarily send them all the way to chaos, but introduces a little bit of chaos in a brain that's too ordered to get it back to center back to again balance back to towing the line between chaos and order back to like flow between discipline and surrender wow it's too much discipline you're a martyr you're a slave right yeah too much disorder while you're like a crazy hippie artist living on the street who can't monetize to save his life, and he's got to get his shit together, right? Because that's also important.

So can you have both, right? Can you be a creative and a neurotic? Can you be free and disciplined? It's kind of like Steve Jobs. He was kind of both, and he built one of the most influential brands of our generation, arguably. And maybe he was a little too influential brands of our generation, arguably. And maybe he was a little too chaotic at times.

Oh, yeah. But he was able to be smart enough to have a team and structure where he could push the boundaries all the time of crazy, chaotic thinking and demands, creative demands, but also monetize it too. He was brilliant. And he always talked about, I think, the importance let's monetize it too. He was brilliant. And he always talked about, I think, the importance of being like a polymath. When he was in college, he took a class that was like a calligraphy class. Yeah, like, so be interested in a lot of different things.

Be like a polymath. Jack of all trades. Yeah, pursuit. Master of none. It's kind of been my life. I call myself a decathlete of life. I actually did the decathlon in college. I was like, I'm never going to be an All-American or reach the top of any one event.

I just wasn't talented enough. I didn't have the gift of speciality to be great at one thing. I wasn't fast enough to win the 100. I wasn't good enough. I was like a distance. I wasn't strong enough to throw the shot pit. enough to win the 100 I wasn't good enough as like a distance I wasn't strong enough to throw the shot pit but if you put 10 of the events together I could kind of get really dangerous at all 10 to where I could be good at 10

things as one that's kind of been my life it's like I'm not really that brilliant at any one thing yeah but you kind of try a lot of different things it's what a Robert Greene talks about the great author of 48 Laws of Power and Law of Attraction and Mastery. He said his life was, he was really good at lots of different writing styles, but he was never great at script writing. He was never great at novels. He was never great at copywriting or advertising writing, but he tried them all until he found this uniqueness of these types of books that kind of encompassed all of it. And that made it great. That's beautiful. Yeah. That's

beautiful. I'm curious about your fears in the last seven years in your thirties. You've had great, it's probably like all your training of your life has culminated to be successful in your thirties of reaching the heights in TV and billboards and all these other things you've done, social media following. It's all happened in the last seven, eight plus years. While you've achieved probably the greatest social successes of your life in the last eight years, what's been the biggest fear you've faced during all of it at the same time?

What's been the biggest emotional stress at the same time? What's been the biggest emotional stress at the same time as the highest success? Yeah, I mean, I think it just goes back to kind of struggling with enjoying the moment as it's unfolding. That's been your challenge? Yeah, man, because I guess the same discipline with which I plotted course and the work ethic and planning for tomorrow and looking out for my future self, that also can metastasize into an inability to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

You're always thinking of the next. I've got to get bigger. I've got to create a bigger video. That's right. The more distance between me and my last cathartic piece of work there is, the less I can receive a compliment. Really? Let's say like. I need to come out with something next week.

Yeah. So like if I was in Tulum like two weeks ago and I took my sort of partner in crime for a lot of this video content. Relationship partner or business partner? No, wonderful DP. He's a director of photography and we make art together, basically. We just dance. And my videos are profound reflections of poetic reverie. Of your imagination. I'm out of my head.

When I make my content, what you're getting is pure, I'm like a vessel. I mean, I never script my stuff and I think when I get in those flows, I mean, you know those flows. They're unbelievable, yeah. Yeah, and so, thank you.

Yeah, of course. So when I'm fresh from those spaces, like when I make time for it, when I can go there and when something comes through, right? It's like that Khalil Gibran quote, it comes through you but not from you, even though it is with you, it belongs not to you. But like at least I can come out of that experience and be like, i feel absolved i feel something's fine yeah and also it's it's cathartic because i i i contended with the unknown and i brought something wonderfully coherent to share with the world you know and chaos go order beautiful yes it's art ballet like full on yeah and and then for like

the next week or two i'm like in this natural blissed out high. I'm like sleeping in. I'm like enjoying food. I'm like, I'm smelling the roses. Every kiss is like this beautiful experience. Everything is awesome. And then when I receive, you know, not that one needs to depend on that. Positive feedback.

Positive feedback. Validation. Walking around, I love your work. I love your videos. You know, something that you probably get all the time as well. When I'm fresh from a shoot, I can receive that because I feel connected to the person that produced that work. That's me. And I'm like, oh, thank you.

Yeah, I'm fulfilled and you're fulfilled from it. Great. But if it's been a couple of weeks that I haven't gone there and then all my neurosis starts coming back and all that restlessness starts coming back and all that second guessing and all that self-doubt and all that what's it all about. You know, all the lessons that I learned in my last video that I then developed amnesia for a couple weeks later. Or the videos from a year ago. That's right. Then when I get stopped and somebody's like, I love your work, then I kind of recoil like a nervous artist. You know what I feel like?

I haven't done anything in a while. That's right. I feel like one of those, you know, have you ever heard those best-selling authors that have written one book, and they like, you know, they struggled in the self-loathing and the doubt and the denying writer's block, and then finally they write something and it becomes a huge hit.

And then like, finally, they're getting all the validation they wanted, and then they're at like a book reading and a fan comes up and they're like, what are you working on next? Nothing, yeah, yeah. And they're like, I feel like an imposter. How am I supposed to like deliver or outdo what I've already done?

And that feeling emerges when there's too much temporal distance between me and my last work. So how do you think we eliminate self-doubt? I think, I don't know if we eliminate it. I think that we develop a different relationship with it. Because again, we should feel privileged to have one great idea in our lives. It's true. We've already won the lottery, right? The sperm that reached your mother's egg.

The fact that you didn't have any congenital diseases. That you didn't die in a car accident, that you have the privilege to be shooting this podcast right now on a weekday, talking to your friend, asking him questions you've been asking yourself. We've already won the lottery in so many ways. But why do we doubt ourselves? Well, I think it's because when you're doing what you love, that fills your holes.

That makes you feel whole. And then when what you love impacts the world, that also makes you feel whole. But everything is a transitory moment. So yesterday I was doing what I loved. And then yesterday I got validation for it. But then what have I done today? Like every day is a new day. Yeah, like I don't know that I can ever rest on my laurels in any way that I would be being honest with myself. Like if I was to come in here and be like, oh, yeah, yeah, everything's great because of everything I've achieved.

That's bullshit. Five years ago. Yeah, that's bullshit. Like everything's not great because of everything I've achieved. That's bullshit. Five years ago. Yeah, that's bullshit. Like, everything's not great because of what we've achieved. Like, if we can't make every day significant, then the day is wasted. The years shall run like rabbits.

You know? I don't know if you ever saw that Richard Linklater movie before Sunset. No. It's a movie about two people who meet on a train in Europe and spend the day together and fall in love and the whole time they're together

they're talking about how fleeting this moment is. Gone. That's right. Yeah, yeah. And it's going to end. How do you hold on to it?

Well, you can't. How do you extend the moment? That's right. This is the story of my life. And at the end of the film it's dawn and he recites a poem by W.H. Auden, and it goes, and all the clocks in the city began to whir and chime. Oh, let not time deceive you. You cannot conquer time. In headaches and in worries, vaguely, life leaks away, and time will have its fancy tomorrow or today.

Oh, my gosh. tomorrow or today. And so it's like, I think for me, it's like, well, yesterday I was able to evoke a poetic reverie. I was able to create something beautiful. I was able to get off on the beauty that I was creating. And I was able to hopefully touch someone else and make their life a little bit better. So that ticked all the boxes. I had ecstasis, I had catharsis, and then I had that feeling of communion with others who were affected by my work. That filled me to the brim. But something that Jamie Wheel from Flow Genome Project says is that our self-system are fundamentally like leaky buckets. We're colanders. So we can keep filling that leaky bucket with the art we do, the people we love, the things we create

in the world. We fill that bucket with purpose every single day. But then we go to sleep, and then a few days later, it's just leaking from the bottom. We can never trap the bucket? Not- Fill the holes? Yeah. Well, I think masters are people that are able to upgrade their self systems from leaky buckets.

The way they think? The way they think, maybe through meditation, maybe through transcendence, maybe through techniques of ecstasy that I certainly am not an expert in yet. systems from leaky buckets, from colanders into chalices, then not only could we render ourselves whole, but we could render ourselves holy. He says, instead of getting hooked on the state, on the high, what about raising the stage altogether? And how do we do that? Well, no doubt techniques like meditation and mindfulness, I think the psychedelic psychotherapy stuff, I think creating art that shifts our mind state, events like Burning Man tend to give people a different perspective and a high

that lasts for six months after the event. Just knowing that human beings are capable of creating something so magnificent together just uplifts the human spirit and makes you feel fundamentally less isolated and more connected to fellow man. And it's like, well, we may be mortal beings, but we are mortal beings that can make music that will melt the stars. Right, right, right. And that's our responsibility. If someone came to you and said, I'm just constantly doubting myself.

Yeah. I've gone after everything in my life and I've achieved so many great things, my relationships, my career, my business, whatever. I always achieve it, but I never feel enough. Someone who's achieving everything, but it's like, oh, I just sold this hundred million dollar company, but now what do I do? I have to start something new. How do I eliminate this self-doubt to the person who is like, I have no clue what to do with my life, why I'm here. I have no talents, no skills. I doubt myself every moment. To either one of them, how would you say is the best way to overcome self-doubt? You know what I think one of the best ways to crack ourselves open from the curse of self-obsession

is that South African saying, Ubuntu? Ubuntu, yeah. The one that says, I am because you are. That's great. I find that moments of radical and sudden empathy or radical and sudden compassion immediately dissipate all those gnawing thoughts of like self-doubt and self-loathing and self-pity and and just desire they're obliterated by this immediate communion

with another being and i know that they call that the helper's high actually people who work people who work in volunteerism or of service especially when it's the kind of service that you have direct encounter with the people you're helping. You see the transformation. That's right. So it's not just like in your beautiful office. Yeah, I mean, that might help for like a sound. But like it's when you see the people that you affect. It's like I can look at the view counts on my videos and be like, oh, it's cool.

I'm being successful and I'm affecting people. But it's really, I feel better from one person who I have a five-minute conversation with on the street who tells me that they were depressed and then they saw something I did. And what happens in the helper's eyes, actually, it's not even that you have time to think about, oh my God, I feel so much better, my ego. No, no, no, no. It's actually the compassion that you feel for a person suffering and some part of you that realizes that you were able to alleviate that suffering. So it's not like pity where it's like you feel bad for them, but you can't do anything. It's realizing that like, oh, I've made a difference. And there's some, something really freeing in that moment

from the pathologies of self-obsession so maybe that's what I would tell people I'm like find a way of having

direct encounters with people that you can serve in some fundamental way stop focusing on your ego of what you don't have and start helping

other people easier said than done much easier said than done and it's the kind of experience that I would say cannot be described. So there's two forms of knowledge. There is knowledge by description and there's knowledge by acquaintance. So I could tell you, I could describe to you, I could be really poetic and tell you what it feels like to be next to another human and help them out and have the compassion

and the connection and the empathy of realizing I am because you are. We are all one. And the freedom from the self that that gives us. I could describe it. I could write a poem about it. I could approximate the experience. That's knowledge by description. But that is very different than knowledge by acquaintance.

Knowledge by acquaintance would be you having the felt experience of that, like undergoing the experience for yourself. People describe psychedelics the same way. They're like, you know, you can tell a depressed person that there's a different place to plant their feet. A depressed person, their lenses of perception have limited and constrained their worldview. They have a failure of the imagination.

This is what Kierkegaard says. The failure of the imagination means that the system by which you can imagine a different life for yourself is broken in a depressed person. It's broken. It's like faulty mechanics. How do we expand our imagination? Right. So listen to this. So you have these lenses of perception and you mistake those perceptions for reality, right? Your brain is always filling in the blanks. You're getting limited information from the world and you're filling in the blanks with your own lenses. Right, but listen to this.

You see with your lenses and you see through your lenses, but you know what you don't see? The lenses themselves. Therefore, if the lenses aren't serving you, but you're not aware that you have those lenses, you think what you see is reality. I'm depressed and everything is depressing and there's no hope.

Everyone's out to get me. You don't see that your lenses are coloring your reality. So therefore, knowledge by description won't help these people. Like you can tell them about all the ways their life can be better. They can't hear it. The fucking lenses won't let it in. But there's experiences that are knowledge by acquaintance. Take that depressed person, tie them with a rope and throw them over a bridge in a bungee

jump thing or fly them on a plane and put them in an African village where they can be volunteers, you know, or give them a psychedelic experience. You know what that does? It smacks them over the face with the felt experience. That becomes knowledge by acquaintance. That is undeniable because it shows them another place to plant their feet.

And what that does is it makes the possessor of a lens of perception aware that they have a lens of perception because once you physically make them stand over here,ically and physically now they can see where they were standing before but until you pick them up and put them in that other place there was no way you could tell them a million descriptions and reasons why there's another place from which to plant their feet not until they physically are planting them so you become aware that you're a possessor of a lens of perception and then you you can go, dispense those lenses of perception. And that I think is the future of mental health. And

that's how we fucking heal our fractures. It's true. I think Tony Robbins says something around the lines of trade your expectations for appreciation and you'll live a completely different life. It's, you know, change the lens, but also see, like, someone who has less off than you. Go experience something. Maybe you're being in service to someone who has less off than you or someone who's experienced a different, more challenging life than you. And you can start to say, oh, I don't have it as bad as this person or this community or this culture or this country. Like, all the things to be grateful for. It's a simple exercise. Gratitude and

appreciation is so simple. And maybe it's like too dumbed down. I don't know. But every time I focus on what I'm grateful for and what I'm appreciative, it's like my ego starts to fade away. I start to tap into a deeper sense of pure love as opposed to anxiety and scarcity. And this sense of abundance pours through my soul. It's like a golden light is just exuding through my pores. And you stop thinking about the ego and what you're lacking. You start focusing on what you have and appreciate it. That's right. But then the part that I think can be tricky for that is that if people have had, especially material success, they've built a bubble around themselves and they're living a siloed existence where their social media is like reinforcing their own belief systems and feeding their comparison and their FOMO with other people.

They're hanging out with people that are too like-minded that maybe are not challenging them or that are reinforcing certain thought patterns and so on and so forth, that then you can tell yourself to be more appreciative until you go to lunch with your friend and he's saying, so man, how's your growth this month? Or how's the thing?

I mean, we all get caught up in those trappings. Comparisons of Thieves of Joy, right? Is that Einstein? I think Einstein said comparisons of Thieves of Joy. It's like if you're always comparing to your friend circle or your family circle or to the social media followers, people you follow,

and you're always like, well, Jason got 30 million views on this video. I only got 10 million. I freaking suck this week. That's right. Like you can compare all day long and it'll rob you of joy. Oh, 100%.

And the Buddha said, do not compare yourself to others for you will become vain and bitter. That's true. And by the way said, do not compare yourself to others for you will become vain and bitter. It's true. How do we stop comparing ourselves? By the way, even a self-proclaimed enlightened being can be caught up in that. I have had moments where I have felt

like I have tasted a vision of such sort of inspiring proportions that I feel like, oh, wow, this must be what enlightenment feels like. I know that sounds really arrogant. But I know that sounds really arrogant. But I know how wrong I was when I find myself thinking, oh, man, like, am I having as much of success? And look at what these other people are doing.

And am I focusing enough? And then it's like how quickly you can throw yourself off your own fucking pedestal. But then the problem is not, that's the thing, is you don't want either extreme. You don't want to put yourself on a pedestal that's too high where your self-love makes you blind to the suffering of others. But then you also don't want to compare yourself to others and throw yourself under the bus to think that you're like a worthless piece of shit. It all comes back to chaos and order in the middle. But how do we stop comparing ourselves when social media is in our faces every day when our friends are always talking about the great things they're up to when yeah we want to grow and expand ourselves but then everyone else is expanding quicker than me how do we stop judging and comparing and well you tend to

you tend to only really compare yourself to people who are similar enough to you that their success somehow means your lack. You know, you don't tend to yourself, I'm sure you don't compare yourself to world champion gymnasts. No, like LeBron James or something. Yeah, like you don't really like compare yourself with him because it's not like that's close enough to what you do to feel that his success is somehow threatening to you you might compare from a scarcity mindset well you

might compare yourself to other people who do video podcasts and who have thought leaders on their show right and you might what are friends you grew up with or yeah yeah also family and you might think that their success somehow minimizes your success. That the 10 million people that watched them somehow made the 2 million people that watched your episode count less. Yeah. Whereas if you actually encounter one of those people on the street, you'll see that just touching one person is enough to make your day better. Huge game changer.

One person. One person. One person is enough. You should be making work to impact one person. That's right. Not to be like, well, I need to change the world. Huge game changer. One person. One person. One person is enough to me. You should be making work to impact one person. That's right. Not to be like, well, I need to change the world. That's right. If that happens, great.

That's right. That happens a lot to actors, dude. Like movie stars. You know, you see these movie stars and you're like, oh man, they're so cool. They're so famous. They make such beautiful art. They're celebrated around the world because they're comparing yourself to the younger, hotter, newer actor.

Yeah, I'm a has-been. I'm a Brad Pitt's 40-something. They're 50 now. It's like, well, I'm not this young guy anymore. Dude, hotter, newer actor. Yeah, I'm a has-been. I'm a, dude, it's 40-something or 50 now. It's like, well, I'm not this, like, young guy anymore. Dude, I've seen interviews. I think it was with Ethan Hawke, who I adore. I think he's wonderful. He's done so many amazing films. And he was talking about how he was on a movie

and he's getting the best reviews of his career and how does it feel. And he was very honest. He was like, well, you can have 99 amazing reviews, but then there's, like, that one review that is bad. And you're like, oh, they saw through my performance. They know. So again, it can play with us both ways, right?

One person that tells us something nice can make your day, but one person that tells us something negative can ruin our day. Ruin your year if you focus on it. Human beings, we're so sensitive. I've always asked myself this question. More so now than ever. Why is it that a great day, we're so sensitive I've always I've always asked myself this question it's like more so now than ever why is it that a great day

we're sad that it's going to end too soon and a bad day we're sad it's never going to end right a relationship with time

you know thinking about the great day of like oh I wish this would last for so long but it's going to be over soon and like holding on to it yeah

but then the bad day never ends so you think it's going to last forever like why can't we be like oh the bad day will end very fucking quick if we just let go of anger. What do you think holds us all back the most? What's the thing that holds us back from our greatness? Fear of what?

Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of the judgment of other people. Well, I think all those fears are rooted in the fear of death. And there's a theory, it's called terror management theory. And it comes from Ernest Becker's work in the denial of death. But these psychologists have done these studies that basically say that if you remind people of their mortality, even subliminally, they tend to become more judgmental of the other, more sort of hostile towards people who are different than them. When you remind people of their mortality. Yeah. And that's why politicians, populist politicians, like the man we have in office, he uses fear to get people to

hate the other, the immigrants or the this or the that. And it's like he keeps using these words, it's dangerous. they're coming after us it's a threat because you remind people of their mortality which makes people recoil and become like more again more hostile

towards the other people are afraid to die then they're going to vote in a different yeah and they're not even thinking mortality just a threat any kind of threat

but isn't it the is it the country or the culture of Bhutan is that what it is yeah five times a day they focus on their death they pray and on their death.

They pray and acknowledge their death. And in that thought process, five times a day, they make the happiest country or culture in the world because they're always focused on being present and being joyful of what we have. Because one day, this will all end. Well, I guess they've acquiesced to that reality. It's acceptance. It's acceptance. It's acceptance. And they're not clinging. And by not clinging, they suffer less.

There's an app called WeCroak. Oh, God. It's called WeCroak. I think it's called W-E Croak, like the frog. Yeah. And it texts me five times a day, you're going to die. With a quote of being in the now. It texts you five times a day? It's like a notification quote of like being in the now it texts you five times a day it's like a notification on my phone that comes up that's all it does five times a day it

says yeah that might be you were gonna die i don't know if i want to sign up for that one and it's you should try it for a week it's just experiment and just allow yourself to say okay let me be it allows you to say none of this is going to matter one day yeah but that would make me so let's be joyful in a moment let's appreciate the moment let's be grateful let's make the most of the moment because this could all end tomorrow yeah I don't know yeah that is helpful until it's not because doesn't that also make you more anxious I have a very strange relationship with attachment because I know that attachment brings suffering. But I also know that love and passion and drive is fueled by an attachment to an idea, an attachment to a moment, an attachment to a person.

An obsession. Obsession. The artistic temperament is ruled by unruly emotions. It's being committed and unattached. It's like, how do you be committed to the dream, the desire, the outcome, but being unattached to how it happens, the mechanism for how it happens. There you go. If it happens.

Maybe it's, I'm going to give it my f***ing all. That's it. If it doesn't work out, I don't give a shit. That's it. And that's what I've come. It's more about the journey. You know, it's loving the process of trying to get there whether it happens or not is actually irrelevant if you fail at not making the dream happen but you learn about the beauty of life and that 10-year span or

five-year span of trying to create it that's success in itself yeah that type of theory so wait the terror management theory it goes back to what again now? If you remind people of their mortality, even subliminally, they will be much more hostile towards other groups and people who are different than them. Yeah. It's very scary because it shows us that there's a relationship with our mortality that's underneath our self-awareness and our self-consciousness that's just this reptilian brain thing. And it can be exploited by politicians. And it can be exploited by social media. You perpetuate fear.

People's amygdalas get activated. And you can create vitriol. And you can create hatred. And you can close the ego to be more hyper more like hypervigilant, you know? Well, you said the fear of death was what you were talking about here. Yeah. And that's the thing that holds us back the most is having this fear of death. Well, I think just letting fear paralyze us and keep us from doing what we must do.

I did a video recently about the utility or the healing power of death practices. Of putting yourself in the grave. Having psychological death experiences. I'm not saying for people to kill themselves. I think suicide is tragic, but I'm talking about experiences of psychological death, like voluntary killings of the ego, which is very different from involuntary killing of the ego. Involuntary killing of the ego is somebody stabs you in the back when you weren't looking, like your love of your life betrays you by cheating on you or something. That's got to hurt. But voluntary submission, voluntary killing of the ego might be, I'm going to jump off a plane.

I'm going to go skydiving. Bungee jumping. Yeah, bungee jumping. I'm going to sit in Peru and drink some magic mushrooms, and I'm going to die to my old self so that something new can be born. That's why the MDMA psychotherapies are very effective as well. It seems to me that these contained and compressed psychological experiences that allow us to put ourselves to the side, to die to who we were, us to put ourselves to the side, to die to who we were. We must let go of the life we've planned so that we can lead the life that is waiting for us, said Joseph Campbell. And I feel like that is definitely true. For me, it has been true temporarily. So I have found cures to my distress, at least for weeks at a time, through the psychological death practices. Now, I've used mostly cannabis has been my medicine for that, which is a plant medicine that's now legal in California.

It's been used for thousands of years in ceremonial contexts. I find that in the right container, cannabis can allow you to inhabit a space outside your normal narrow-minded focused and self obsession space and there can be something really therapeutic about planting your feet in different space in a different modality of perception seeing the world through a different lens all of that is very healing because it is a kind of death practice it's a death to your ego at least a little bit it's a death to your neurosis it's the death to whatever ego at least a little bit. It's a death to your neurosis. It's a death to whatever you were obsessed with or thinking about a few hours ago. Any experience of letting go is going to be ultimately healing. So maybe we could design, you know, we're in the experience economy after all, you know, maybe we should encourage our friends at Summit Series to design,

to integrate into their summits these kinds of well-prepared death practice stunts, you know, where people can, I remember even in high school, I went on this survival and leadership workshop. And one of the things that they used to do was blindfold us and have like somebody else like guide us like through the forest and like have to like get us back to surrender. Yeah. Yeah. Or like even trust falls, you know, and all those kinds of experiments that allow us to face our fears. I mean, it sounds cliche, but it makes a lot of sense. Maybe we can get more creative with it.

Maybe virtual reality, actually. Yeah, you're doing stuff on virtual reality, too. You know, I've played with it. I've done some videos on it, but I definitely think that, you know, I was listening to this doctor, actually. Well, he works for a hospital, but he's in their VR department,

and he was saying that VR is like the new syringe. You know, it gives us direct access to the mind. And so what medicine are we going to put in that syringe? And could it be like an exercise where you put on the thing and in the VR, you jump off a building? Or in the VR, you experience something like really profound? Not to bring old technology as an example, but one of my favorite tools or machines for experiencing empathy, which is also a death of the self a little bit. It's funny because as soon as you care about somebody else, you cease to exist and you cease to matter. And the other person's welfare becomes your welfare and the sense of self expands. Cinema was once called the machine for empathy because it shows you what it's like to be another person, to step into another person's shoes, right? To assume the viewpoint of another and have freedom from

oneself. Now, a lot of movies today are really cheesy and tacky, but cinema as an art form or as a way of sculpting in time really was an opportunity to step into someone else's shoes. And if we would use it in that way more more i think that's something else that we could sort of religiously put into our daily death practice or a weekly death practice like what film am i going to see today maybe in the future we combine these cinemas and we we treat them more like temples or churches maybe you arrive to the cinema and they have incense and you have to take your shoes off and you have to like do you know put a little like little make a little offering to the poster to like Christopher

Nolan or Steven Spielberg and then and then maybe they have like little cannabis vape pens and that makes you more open and more suggestible it makes you more susceptible to the hypnotic trance of the film so you have a little cannabis and, and they take away your cell phone. You leave them in a locker so that you don't even have the opportunity to turn it on during the movie. And then you go on, and the films have been selected

by a curated group of academics, philosophers, and thinkers, and cinema as therapy, cinema as catharsis. I mean, I certainly know that with that kind of presentation and setup, and even having the cannabis, the context, the everything set up like ritualistically and ceremoniously, I feel like a film like

Inception, a film like Interstellar, a film like The Fountain, you know, these films could be literally like soul medicine. I mean, holy shit. Wow. Maybe that we should do that. We should organize this and make it happen.

Yeah, exactly. I'm curious about what it's like being in a relationship with you, a committed, intimate relationship. I'm a lover, man. You're a lover. How do you find joy staying in a committed relationship when novelty wears off? When you were talking earlier about how the novelty is the thing that brings us joy and interesting. But when the wonder is no longer there, it's probably been a question for hundreds of years with people.

For sure. When the wonder of the newness of the experience of the magical love in the first year, two years, whatever it is, when it starts to fade because you're in the same routine, how do you... Well, I think it helps to have an understanding of your own neurochemistry. So there is something called hedonic adaptation, which simply means the best chocolate cake you've ever had in your life, if you have it every day for a week, by the seventh day, it literally tastes like shit. But if you have it once every other week, it'll taste delicious every time you have it.

But when you're next to someone every day. Well, but maybe we need to call into question the way we arrange our romantic relationships. Maybe you guys each keep your own apartment instead of buying a home together. Maybe you see each other four times a week and you take solo time for the other days so you can think about each other and miss each other. Maybe you decide that when you get together

you're going to spend a year traveling around the world and every month the new backdrop spikes your dopamine and makes the familiar person become strange again. Maybe you do rituals and sacraments and ceremonies together that heighten your perceptions, that make you see them more clearly. Blake was the poet who wrote that famous line that I think I've repeated in every one of my videos. But it's something I aspire to. It's like, this is what I want in my bumper sticker in my car, you know, like to see the world in a grain of sand, to see heaven in a wildflower, to hold infinity in the palm of our hands,

to hold eternity in an hour. Like if we could do that, we'd be gods. We'd be gods, you know, and maybe that's enlightenment, you know, is to see the infinity in every moment, in every person, to see the mystery in a person that's been lying next to you for three to four years. But I think having an awareness of how our minds work, an awareness of how spaces, context, situations trigger us, an awareness of our relationship with habit, with routine, situations trigger us, an awareness of our relationship with habit, with routine, and then just design for more fulfillment. I actually think it's, we're talking ultimately about a design challenge, everything. Can we design for fulfillment? Can we design for happiness? Can we design for purpose? Can we design for passion? You know, architects understand the cognitive impact of built

environments. You know, like it's a big thing, man. There was this article in New York Magazine called The Psychological Impact of Boring Buildings. And it was saying how like certain buildings designed in certain utilitarian ways rather than in ways that are conducive to human flourishing. Yeah. Too much engineering, not enough psychology. You know, all about efficiency and nothing has to do with human flourishing. Can actually make people depressed, can make people like,

all this, people can have all these psychological negative effects based on the built environments that surround them. But the opposite is also true. You can design

for human flourishing. You can design for human creativity. And so I think it's, you know, city planners could design for that. I know that in aviation, the Dreamliner aircraft was the first aircraft interior design in combination with psychologists to make it feel more airy, to make it feel more comfortable, to space the seats in a way that is just outside of making you feel claustrophobic. But this is a huge thing because everything we design in the world,

and this is an insidious but also amazing thing, is designing us right back. And we don't normally think of that circular relationship. We think of like, I'm going to design my room. It's going to look cool. I'm going to design, pimp out my car. It's going to look cool. I'm going to design my, pimp out my car. It's going to look cool. I'm going to design my dream house. But what do you, I mean, it's like feedback loop. What are you actually doing? No, what you're designing is the way that is going to design you right back. What you design has then a script. And then that script is broadcasted in your direction whenever you're inside that dwelling or that design. This chair

is designing my comfort level, which is informing the thoughts that naturally emerge in this conversation. This chair was like leaning forward and it was like uncomfortable backrest. I wouldn't be as loose. You know, all those things are affecting us. And so maybe what we need to do is deploy, you know, architects and psychologists and designers to work together to think of the design of the world as the design of the mind. And so we could design for better minds. And maybe that's going to be like our next stage of development. Wow, man. That's fascinating. So how are you designing your relationship to make sure it flourishes? We travel a lot. It's a rainforest, not a desert.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we've had the opportunity to do some traveling. I think one of my little shortcut hack situations was when my speaking career took off in the middle of brain games and the opportunity to travel the world and talk to audiences, which was like, hey, feeling of purpose, feeling of inspiring people, feeling of impact, but then also having a business model that took me to different places, and then I could just stay longer. I'm never going to fly somewhere for a day and fly home. No, you're just going to go a week or two. Yeah, totally.

If I have a speech in Cancun, I'm going to Tulum. I have a speech in Iceland coming up in May, and then I have a speech in Brazil in June. And so it's like, bring it on. And so I'm taking my girl on some of these journeys. And I'm like, if not now, when? If not us, who? Like, let's do this, you know?

I also think it bonds you together. The more strange the landscape that surrounds you, the more it pushes you into this, like, intersubjective space where you're having a common experience, right? It's like the two of you are next to each other, but it's a shared experience, man. And so it expands the narrative of us. And that's a very powerful thing.

So I'm trying to design for that. That deepens the relationship, it bonds the experience. Thousand percent. Yeah, bro. What's the question you think you'll never get answered? What's the question you think you'll never get answered? Pffft. Pffft. You know, I struggle with the whole concept

of faith and belief. Huh. I came across this line recently that I really responded to. It said, collect ideas, not beliefs. If you collect ideas, right, it means that you're like, oh, that's interesting, and then that's interesting, and then that's interesting, and then that's

interesting, and then this is interesting, and then that's also interesting. And some of these contradict each other, but it's okay, because I don't have to believe any of them. I can just entertain their feasibility and find them interesting, so I can collect all these different ideas. The problem with beliefs is that when you collect one belief, you, well, you knock offline any belief that contradicts that particular belief. And so if you get too stuck with your beliefs, you narrow your worldview. And you also narrow your critical thinking. You're more judgmental.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. You become very judgmental. Exactly. That's exactly what happens. And so... I'm not saying that's right or wrong. It's just, it is what it is.

Yeah. So when you asked me what question I think I'll never be able to answer, I was going to say, even though I struggle with beliefs precisely because I want to collect ideas, one belief that I desperately cling to is that all questions will be answered. That I, like, I'm, like, stubborn that way. And I'm like, no, no, no. I will, everything will be found out in due time. Like, I will live to know everything. Like, I want to pinwheel in deep time. I want to, like, witness a celestial event in the cosmos.

I want to be able to ride on a starship one day. Like, I'm just clinging to the possibility that all my sci-fi wet dreams will come true. Who do you think was the smartest person ever to live that had the best knowledge of most answers or most questions that they answered them somehow? Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell, he wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

He's the guy behind the monomyth idea that every story tells the same story. I think the wisdom there is seeing a brilliant understanding of the difference between literal truth and metaphorical truth, between objective facts and poetic facts. Werner Herzog famously said, if all you want is facts, buy the phone book. Right. It's full of facts. Lewis Howes, 974-7542, Jason Silva, 972, 1745. Full of facts. But it doesn't illuminate.

And it's important for people not to confuse what I'm saying. I'm not saying that facts aren't important. I don't support the weaponization of fake news on social media. We need objective scientific facts and consensus and architecture and physics and design to build things that work. We have to agree when the light is green, when the light is red, the world is round and so on and so forth. But when it comes to interior experience, when it comes to subjective experience, when it comes to what it's like to be a person, that's very hard

to describe from the inside. Description from the outside is easy. You're a human being, your heart beats at this many beats per second, you have a nervous system, you have a brain, you might have a chemical imbalance or not have a chemical imbalance. These are all objective facts that describe accurately from the outside, right?

Science describes accurately from the outside. Poetry describes accurately from the inside. So when I speak of poetic facts, or when I speak of ecstatic truth, I speak about the truth of mythology. I speak about the truth that Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson talks about. I speak about the truth of an artistic rendering. I speak about the truth of the way a poem describes the smell of a flower. I speak about the truth of the anguish and the agony of love that only a Beethoven melody can appropriately convey. You know, sometimes art is the lie that reveals the truth. Sometimes

fiction is more truthful than reality. And that's, you know, and Joseph Campbell is very good at understanding that. And so is Jordan Peterson. I remember he was talking with Sam Harris and he was talking about astrology. And Sam Harris, of course, was dissing astrology. And I love Sam Harris. He's a friend. And what he was saying is astrology is not scientific. Like, duh, it's like superstition

and it doesn't help us in any way. And Jordan Peterson's answer was very interesting. He was saying that may well be true, that astrology is a fiction compared to astronomy. But he basically said that astrology was astronomy in its earlier form and that what we did with astrology was drape the cosmos with our consciousness. We looked up and we projected our minds onto that canvas. And that North Star guided early sailors across the oceans, and they might as well be space-faring explorers going into the unknown, being guided by that North Star that they might have called God. Even though they projected their wishes, longings, and dreams into the stars through astrology, that still was the first step.

It got us out of bed. It got us onto the water. It made us jump, you know, into the unknown. And so in that sense, it was still a healthy drive. And so to have an understanding of the relationship with those two things, like science and art, I think it's just very important. And I think it can be summed up with the line that I just said, like science describes accurately from the outside and poetry describes accurately from the inside. Yeah. I think it was Ursula Le Guin who said that.

So good. What are you most excited about? Thank you for helping bring this out of me. Of course, man. This is powerful. What are you most excited about lately? What are you working on? I'm excited about learning more and more trust, right?

Trust with what? More and more just to practice like trust falls. So trusting yourself, trusting other people, trusting the universe. Taking more chances. My cousin, Michael, I don't know if you see this hat, I'm wearing Flo Conant. So he's an entrepreneur and he used to work at Merrill Lynch

and then found out to be soulless. And then he quit, traveled the world for a year, went back to Venezuela, fell in love, met the love of his life, did a bunch of psychedelics, got rid of his limiting beliefs, took a Tony Robbins course, read a Richard Branson book, changed his whole life, started a new business in Venezuela selling stevia, was successful for a few years. Venezuelan economy crashed and burned, business crashed and burned, lost it all, then moved to California to get into the cannabis space. And five years later, he is the number one flower brand in California with a half billion dollar

valuation, Flo Khanna. And that guy is a guy, he's my cousin I grew up with, that guy has no fear. I often make, self-deprecatingly will admit, I'm really good at understanding ideas, like really coming up with insights and articulating those insights. Not so good at putting them into practice. Not so good. Whereas like my cousin, he's somebody that understands insights like that, like limiting beliefs, getting out of our own way. Everything we want is on the other side of fear, taking the road less traveled by, and that will make all the difference. He read the Richard Branson book. He took the Tony Robbins course,

and then he went and applied it. And four years later, he's a tycoon in the cannabis space, bringing a magical medicinal medicine and herb to millions of people, and in the process, creating a company that's now valued at half a billion dollars. And so I am inspired by his capacity to maybe feel the fear and do it anyway. And I want to lean more into that in my own life.

There are a lot of things that I have overcome, you know, stage fright being one of them. I'm timid and I'm introverted and I get up on stage in front of thousands of people. I have overcome a lot of my fears kicking and screaming. the stage in front of thousands of people. I have overcome a lot of my fears kicking and screaming. I would like to overcome the rest of my fears with equanimity and a kind of stoicism. What's the biggest fear that you have yet to overcome that you want to, if you could overcome it this year, it would be a huge victory. So two of them, one of them, I, I, I've, I've had a lot of financial success, but I still live with an attitude of scarcity.

Oh, interesting. So I am like a Jewish grandma, like my Jewish grandma, who I love very much. But she grew up in the Depression. And so even though my grandfather was very successful in Venezuela and she had a marvelous life of abundance, she was always like, she had like a hypervigilance of scarcity. Like every penny, like worried about it. And so you're always like worried. You're always worried, she had like the hypervigilance of scarcity. Like every penny like worried about it. And so you're always like worried. You're always worried, you know.

And I kind of want to just like trust. Like look, all the great things in my life have not happened when I was looking for them. All the great things in my life, all the success in my life always happened when I was in my zone doing my art, doing my thing. And the right thing showed up. And all I did was seize it when it was there. When I get stuck thinking, planning, worrying about what's the next thing, I'm out of my flow. And it's when literally I'm not thinking about it,

and I'm just trusting that the thing has showed up, and then I've seized it. So I want to try to infuse that attitude into how I feel about financial you know financial stuff and this and i just like stop worrying you know like just look at the facts the facts are everything has been great and so just not live from a place of scarcity be more like my cousin in that sense and then the other thing i would like to get over is um i'm a bit of uh i just i i'm a bit of like a kind of like a hypochondriac like i just you know i'm very healthy but i'm always like worried like oh what happens if this person hypochondriac. Like I just, you know, I'm very healthy, but I'm always like worried. Like, oh, what happens if this person gets sick? Or what happens if that person gets that? You know, I just wanted to just like have a little more like trust.

I'm like, look, I take care of myself. I've always been healthy. And I just like assume the best and not lose sleep over worrying about what if scenarios in the future. You know, those are two things. If I could let go of those two things and just like trust the abundance is coming and trust in like, you know, good health and good vibes,

I think I'll be a much happier person. Less stressed out. And be able to take more chances without losing sleep over it. Yeah.

How can I support with that? Text you every few months to just check in on you? Make sure you're okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just be like, hey bro, are you doing it? Are you leaning into the discomfort your fears yes yeah i went to

burning man this year that was huge first time have you been i've never been i haven't been called okay i feel like you got to be called 1-800 lewis house called for you feel called i'm calling you right now ring ring ring ring ring i'm sure that is that is an experience i avoided it for seven years. Yeah. And my fear was like, I won't be able to sleep with the bomb, bomb, bomb,

bomb, bomb, bomb of the rave. I was able to sleep, but I'll tell you, it's not really even about the parties. It's about witnessing what is created from scratch in a couple of weeks.

Witnessing a level of art and a level of creativity that is like multiple slaps in the face. Probably the most profound element, aside from riding your bicycle in a playground for a week and a half and seeing so much art, is the temple. So the temple is a non-denominational temple where people can come to grieve and to burn their grief.

So it's full of sort of photos, handwritten letters, images of people who have lost people close to them, so people that have died, like people's kids or people's grandparents or ex-girlfriends or somebody died from an illness. And so when you walk there, not only are people in their whacked-out costumes at all hours of the day, but they're crying. People are crying. People are crying. Some people are crying alone. Some people are crying in groups. Strangers are hugging

and crying. So it's this communal place of grief. And grief is so cathartic, you know, we avoid it like the plague, but man, there's few things that feel as good as a good cry, especially when you actually allow yourself to cry in the presence of strangers and you realize that they're actually kind. And so the feeling of communion and shared grief, which tells us, again, we don't know how we got here. We don't know why we're here. And we don't know where we're going. We're like a fucking moat of dust suspended in a sunbeam in the worlds of Carl Sagan. But he said we are also a way for the cosmos to know itself.

And so let's be brothers and sisters in light. Let's hold hands. Let's cry naked here in the desert. And let's say that we'll be there for one another. And that will have to be enough for now. Wow. That alone was worth the price of admission so i i think you would actually love it i'm sure i think you would love it dude you have a heart

this big so i have no doubt that you will love it just the commuting up there the dirty desert that it's not as bad as you think just just a really nice RV just get a really nice situation you know some people go and they go for like two grand you know you have to spend like ten grand just get a really nice RV

and you can even pay somebody to drive it in for you although the drive from Lake Tahoe is not bad man four or five hours two friends you really love

get a meal plan from one of the camps so that you don't even have to cook there you go and just be okay and enjoy my life electric bikes yeah and you will you will dominate everybody's experience um this is called the three truths i think i asked you last time but in case you forgot uh imagine this is your last day yeah as many years away as you want it to be,

you've extended your life as far as you can go, but one day you've got to turn off the lights. Sure, sure, sure. And you've accomplished everything you want. Yeah. You've lived the dream life. You've got the relationships, the experiences, the success, everything. But it's the last day, and you've got to take everything with you.

Everything you've created, your ideas, your thoughts, your work of art has to go with you. And you get to leave behind a piece of paper or something etched in stone that says my three truths. The three things you know to be true about all your experiences in life that you would then give as your commandments to the world. This is all that they would have to be reminded reminded of your lessons. Yeah, yeah. Jason Silva's three truths, what would you say? First one would be Nietzsche, to say those who were seen dancing were called insane by those who could not hear the music.

That would be the first one, first truth. What does that mean? It means don't be afraid to be yourself. March to the beat of your own drummer. Carve your own path. Take the journey. Be willing to be yourself. March to the beat of your own drummer. Carve your own path. Take the journey. Be willing to be ridiculed. The whole thing.

Those who were seen dancing were called insane by those who could not hear the music. Interesting. Okay, number one. Number two. Number two. Number two. The only people for me are the mad ones.

Mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. Those who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. And that, I think it's Jack Kerouac, but that quote is about celebrating your crazy, celebrating your unique dance and way of being. Do not compare yourself to others, for you will become vain and bitter. Embrace your contradictions. you know, be mad to live, be mad to talk, be mad to be saved, you know, want it all at the same time. It's a celebration, I think, of that beautiful passion that characterizes the human condition. And it does come with a lot of suffering, but it is through overcoming that suffering that we might become whole. So that would be number two.

And then number three. Oh, yeah. Flaubert. Human speech is but a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms while we long to make music that will melt the stars. And, of course, what that means is we may be crude, we may be fumbling, stumbling monkeys, you know, doing our best, you know, like trying to like render beauty in the world. And granted, we've done pretty good, man. Look at our gothic cathedrals and our beautiful music. I mean, but in the end, like, even when we talk,

like, it's still crude in terms of what we yearn to express with our crude tools, which is to make music that will melt the stars. And there was an article recently in Nautilus magazine that was saying that some of the, I guess, chemicals in our DNA were first forged in stars. And so we are made of stars, like literally. And so, of course, it makes sense that we were made by those stars and we want to return the favor and make those stars weep and melt with our beauty.

I like those. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning. That's great, man. Well, I want to acknowledge you, Jason, for your childlike curiosity. Thanks, bro. Because every time I'm around you and every time I watch a video of yours, I feel this sense of curiosity and desire for reason and answers, but also creating a sense of certainty and peace in people's hearts.

I think a lot of people are suffering, especially in the first worlds. In our world, here in our country, it's like, we may seem like we have it all, but we're suffering inside more than everyone else is. And you bring a sense of peace and love to people's hearts that are desperately needing it through your art and through your childlike wonder. So I acknowledge you for consistently showing up, man, over the years and, and putting your art into the world and having that curious drive to help others heal. So thank you for that, man. Well, I want to acknowledge you, man. I mean, talk about showing up every day, man, bringing another inspiring individual and letting them

shine. You know, it takes a man, it takes a real man to bring in, you know, you talk about like we were talking about before of like not comparing yourself to others and avoiding the trappings of FOMO and like the way other people have done it. And yet you actually have created a stage to celebrate everyone else that's doing their thing. And in doing so, you become the celebrated one in turn. It feels so honest and so authentic and so real and so true. And I can feel your heart, man. I can always feel your heart in all your content. It's, I think, what shines through is just the earnestness,

the inquisitiveness, and the realness of who you are. It's like, oh, yeah, that guy's got a big heart. And I think it's very helpful that you're also just like a man's man, like you're a real alpha, and it's good for other alphas that are spending all their time maybe being told that they have to punch people in the face that they see such an alpha like you, who's got like a heart of gold

and it's like a sweetheart, you know what I mean? Like that's- It's a big teddy bear. Yeah, dude. Like that's beautiful, man. So thanks for what you're doing. Appreciate it, brother. Yeah, of course.

Final question is, what's your definition of greatness? Definition of greatness. Oh my God. Definition of greatness. I think what makes us great at our best is the refusal to cower down in despair. Right. To experience the terror, the doubt, the fear, the fatalism, the resignation, the disquiet, the agitation,

and with all of that, still get up and make something happen. It's not easy being a human being, dude. It's not easy being gifted with the self-consciousness that we are gifted. easy being gifted with the self-consciousness that we are gifted. It's not easy to conceive that everything you love and everyone you love will be taken away from you in time. And to still make a contribution and to still be willing to contribute and to do something worthwhile in the world, there's nothing greater than that. Jason, thanks for that. the world, there's nothing greater than that. Jason, thanks for that. Boom shakalaka. There you guys have it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Jason Silva constantly shares these wisdom bombs that just make you unlock this feeling inside of yourself

and say, yes, I need to start changing. I need to start evolving, adapting. I need to look at things differently. I need to change my perspective and open my mindset and open my belief system to see what's more powerful for my life moving forward. If you enjoyed this, please share it out with your friends. When you text one friend the link, when you send this on your Instagram story or your Twitter or Facebook, you can help spread the message of inspiration for other people. That's what we're all here to do. We're here to inspiration for other people. That's what we're all here to do. We're here to help and serve others. That's my mission, but I can't do it alone. I need your support. We just crossed a hundred million downloads a couple of weeks ago,

and now we're looking to get to the next hundred million, but we need you to continue to listen, share it out, and I'm going to keep bringing you the brightest minds in the world so you can continue to learn and grow. So send someone the link lewishouse.com slash 785. Follow both of us at Lewis House, Jason Silva over on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, connect with us there and let him know what you thought about this. Make sure to send him some love. Let him know what you thought. You have the potential to break free of anything that has been holding you back, but it takes awareness, it takes insights, and it takes work to push yourself through the darkest places you'd never want to go through so you can get out on the other side much lighter,

pure, and really glowing with a bright light that inspires you and reflects alongside many other people to inspire them as well. Again, as Jim Rohn said in the beginning, happiness is not something that you postpone for the future. It's something you design for the present. And you have the ability to do that right now, guys. You don't have to wait to achieve something to be happy. You can be happy right now. You can be loved right now. You can be one right now. And that's your opportunity. So I hope you enjoyed this episode.

I got a ton of value out of it. I hope you did as well. I love you so very much. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Thank you.