How to Transform Your Brain, Overcome Trauma, and Live in the Moment | Conversations with Tom

[Music] it is so much fun to be sitting across from you dude dude it's great to see you again you know I feel like we do this once a year we we are really close to that whether it's on camera or off and one thing that got me thinking about this show which by the way everybody welcome to conversations with Tom bill you Jason civil here today very much was the evening that you and I spent with Jamie wheel in the Petit ermitage yeah like just out under the the stars it was a winner even about all kinds of [ __ ] and it was one of those times where because there were no cameras because it was just three people riffing and talking with no worry about how you come across or where your thought process is you could really think through it that that really planted a seed for me to start thinking is there a show format where I can explore my thinking in real time because I love impact Theory I love what it's become yeah it's it is an amazing platform for me to feature somebody and to give them a platform to really rock through the ideas that are already solid but all of my change happens in the researching process and then I'm just trying to take them somewhere where I know they [ __ ] shine and where they're really gonna add value but it it wasn't allowing me to advance my own thinking in real time to push my ideas that are sort of at the edge and everybody talks about if you want to develop you've got again outside that comfort zone you got to be reaching for something that you kind of understand but like you're just beginning to graph grapple with it and put it together and so wanted to create something that was more free-flowing longer format and more intimate more intimate that's the [ __ ] word I've been talking to the team about that like how we create that level of intimacy intimacy is huge well it even we're we've begun we have we break okay does that seamless and wonderful Wow well great to be here with you great to have you thank you um I salute you for what you're doing in the world it's been wonderful to watch you grow from afar you were so kind and generous to me the very first time a guest on your show I guess even before impact the earth science a blast yeah yeah yeah and I just felt an immediate kinship with you and with your heart and what with you want what we what with what you want to do in the world and it's just been great to see you shine dude you really I don't think you know how much you impacted my trajectory so when I so I grew up in an age without social media without the Internet and so I was really suspicious of social media when it came along yeah I was really terrified someone's gonna steal my identity that sounds so stupid now especially someone that's had like so much fraud you had to [ __ ] deal with that either through it but before it ever happened I was like just ultra paranoid so I lied about my birthday on Facebook and all that fine but my social did like I understood it as a marketer and that was how we built quest was all social media so I got that but like I didn't understand I'm not at this point I will say and certainly this is true back then as well yeah I'm not extroverted so I didn't have a need to be in front of the camera or anything like that and I was really resistant and my chief marketing officer was like dude I'm telling you marketing has changed you really understood it in the beginning but you're losing touch with what it is now and where it's going is this personal branding and really having a voice and not letting the company be nameless faceless and you talk about that behind the scenes but you're not really living at marketing I was like no no I don't want to be out front like that's not interesting to me for sure and then he showed me your [ __ ] shots of awe and I was like holy [ __ ] and the level of of awe of your ability that I had was it bothers me a little bit because I was so convinced and we talked about this last time but I'm so convinced that it was natural talent and I couldn't fathom that I could push my skill set like that and that was the first sort of shot across the bow that made me think [ __ ] am I really prepared to let somebody outpace me that hard let me see if I can do this isn't it interesting how our sense of self can get agitated when when we witness something that I guess reflects or mirrors something within ourselves that we feel like we want to let out but we haven't been able to yet it's a it's a trapping of the ego when the fact that someone else shines feels like it impedes upon our own capacity to shine it's almost like we come from a scarcity mindset and we think that there is no room for two people to shine I'm like well that guy's excellence somehow diminishes the space in which I can stand and I've experienced that as well like I've experienced that feeling I know that disquiet you know it's it's it's somehow the existence of another negates my own but they can't be true it's not true you know what I mean like that that that is that is that is a trapping of the ego that is also a trapping of comparison you know I think comparison is only healthy if it inspires you to want to do better yes not if it makes you sane and bitter yes which it can do to have to all to all of us dude you know it's so weird about that to me though yeah proximity is is such a huge part of that you compare yourself to the people you see every day and I know you love movies so yeah there was a line in I got I got my Silence of the Lambs mmm that low really [ __ ] lame oh my god the movie so good and this moment land of me really hard he said you don't seek out things to covet you covet what you see every day ah the chills so good and that is one of those where the people that you're around they're going to influence you in a terrifying way because you're just around them so you don't think to look beyond them they're the people that you encounter and this is why I think people have to be so careful with who they follow online how to cultivate their online world because it used to be you couldn't get too freaked out there were only so many like incredible people around you yeah but now it's like [ __ ] you can curate this feat of people who are extraordinary at the very thing that you want to be extraordinary Atman you there farther ahead and you can convince yourself that you can't get there and it becomes like this where you're you're in this weird thing where you're inspired by them but like you said it's also diminishing their sense of self you have to be it's very interesting right because they say you know on a small scale you become the people that you hang out with yes this is the mutual mental mirroring that occurs when your interface with other humans you can't help the process of osmosis by which you mirror and/or acquire the qualities of that which you surround yourself with including the people you surround yourself with and but what can also happen is you can compare yourself to the people that you're around and that might be oppressing in a constrained environment like high school where you're limited to that scale of that world and so if [ __ ] man if like that's the popular guy and you can't be popular like your [ __ ] there can only be one prom king or there can only be one guy that's the best at math and one of the kind of liberation that one of the Liberation's of graduating high school is that you can graduate into a much bigger world where you're not as constrained what you're free to find your voice and there's enough room for everybody to be who they want to be but but then what happens now with people like us like you were saying okay so now you're not surrounded necessarily just by the physical people that are around you which is again as a constrained limited size now you're also surrounded by the feeds you follow you're surrounded by the instagramers that you follow and so every time you scroll you become what you behold but you also compare yourself with and it can give you the illusion that the world and the the marketplace is smaller than it actually is and so it's like [ __ ] that guy's got a million followers like he's eclipsing my capacity to have a voice or that guy's got 500 million likes he somehow eclipsing the integrity of the work I'm putting out but that's also an illusion and I'm reminded of how much an illusion that is simply you know you you fail to realize the hedonic adaptation it used to be oh your video gets 10,000 views that's cool oh your video get a million views that's now it's not cool because that [ __ ] getting 15 million views but guess what dude when you get yourself out of this the matrix like I guess trappings of those comparisons on social media and you go back to the original high school scale I just got back from South Paulo Brazil and I was keynoting at the singularity summit and there were maybe two thousand people there but when you go back from the Internet to the meet space and you see two thousand individuals and how many people that actually is would you get excited by two thousand views probably not well you get excited by two thousand comments probably not but when you have the physical encounter with two thousand people you I guess you you you remember how powerful it is to even reach one person do you know what I'm saying totally and so there is freedom in realizing that like you got to do the content because it fulfills you and you got to do the content because you trust it will find those it needs to find and sure work to scale and work to grow it but also realize that at the end of the day like you know your capacity to impact one person somewhere should be enough do you know what I mean does that make sense everything until the last sentence so I respond violently against the idea of it's enough to impact one person and the the reason is I really really think that that is okay so I think everything comes down to worldview and I think it is very okay if somebody is truly mapped a worldview that says it's enough to impact one person I actually get that and I don't want to talk somebody out of that and and if that's where you are and that's what you value and you have a neurochemical response I help that one person and all of my labor was for that and I'm okay with that that isn't my frame of reference that isn't the value system that I've taken a long time to construct so I'm writing a book right now and it is utterly fascinating how it's forcing me to really crystallize my thinking and when I really try to stop to identify why I act in the world the way that I act and you said something a minute ago you become what you behold and I think you also become what you desire to value or what you decide to value the problem is most people the the desire to value things happens based on proximity where they grew up with their parents like with the culture around them likes all that without realizing it's all it is the matrix so the matrix is this you can't see it you can't taste it you can't touch it it's everything that's around you but what people don't fully understand is all of that was a choice you just weren't making the choice consciously and so you can decide to value something new and my my life's work is about okay how and why do you decide to value something new in the house pretty critically important but not to to get too far afield from where I started so my thing is I have chosen over time to value scale I didn't have to choose that but I did choose that and now I've reinforced it in my mind so many times that I have an actual neurochemical response to the scale and when you say like oh it's enough to help one person I immediately my mind jumps that I know yeah I imagine helping one [ __ ] person and I'm like Jesus Christ all of this energy and effort has to be it has to be played or deployed against something a vision something you're trying to do and achieve now I don't want that ever to happen by accident and so part of what I'm deploying my energies against is my vision of scale it is saying I have chosen to value this I want to impact a lot of lives that I don't want to have live to only help one person largely because I would deploy a totally different strategy so it's like if my strategy works to one-on-one like a social worker really help like individual people and to be very meaningful in their lives i get i think that's [ __ ] beautiful it just isn't the value system that i have built into my own life so I have this visceral response when people say that and err enough and and honestly if I'm real God if you want to just crawl inside my mind and I stop like with the sort of hedging I think the reality is that isn't a win for most people and they're that is the psychological immune system kicking in and saying basically even if you fail it's okay now to tease all of that out would take a whole [ __ ] episode on do you feel like even if you fail that's okay yes definitively and that's well that's very important because okay so you want to reach as many people as possible which is a beautiful endeavor a desire to make a dent in the universe a desire to extend your hand towards others and impact others and sleep better at night knowing that you've made a difference in the lives of others and if you fail let's say at reaching a billion people but you reached 300 million instead are you gonna be okay and and furthermore you know a question that I have for both of us is like what is it that we are ultimately sharing with others that we feel will positively impact their lives now I imagine from you it's your experience in overcoming obstacles and allowing you to become so successful in life so that others can realize that when they run into difficult moments that they start to question themselves that they have the capacity to overcome those obstacles and those insecurities and those second-guessing chatter of the overactive default mode Network and that they can in fact thrive so sharing your own experience becomes a meme that you can pay on forward in the hopes that it infects others with optimism and a sense of possible is that fairly accurate that that's the first half of it the second happen is I want to give them an instruction manual on how to actually do it yes so my my whole thing this this really did it was a two-step thing I big brother for a kid for a and F years his name was rashon and I completely failed him and and I just had like a like this really surprising emotional moment the other day so I recorded a video that called the master plan video and I want to like Babe Ruth I want to call my [ __ ] shot and say this is exactly what we're doing and 15 years from now when you realize that we have executed against this [ __ ] step by step for over a [ __ ] decade and that like we're really I have the chills in my head that people will realize this was truly a master plan but to get them to understand it I I have to start with rashon and I had this wave of like I think for the first time in my life I allowed myself to just say it I failed him and in saying it's so naked Lee it was just really really heartbreaking and so I tried to help him and I fail because I'm too young and too stupid I don't understand myself yet I still have a fixed mindset I'm totally [ __ ] lost I'm insecure I'm a mess and the I I hope that I showed him that somebody loved him that's like my one hope but I definitely did not give him the tools to change his life flash-forward 15 years later and I have the tools I know what I did I have the self-awareness I've walked myself through this insane transformation that I truly believe any out of average human can do and in trying to like pass it on to my employees because I had about a thousand of my employees group really [ __ ] hard men like really I used to think they grew up what hard like in the inner cities watching people get shot to death being involved in gangs like just unimaginably hard and I was like okay wait this reminds me of rashon I'm not gonna fail more people how do I convey this and so I start getting obsessed with this notion that it it was learn about for me and therefore it is learn about for other people I did not have any entrepreneurial skills or instincts when I started business none whatsoever and so how do I codify this how do I hand it off and in trying to do that I realized the layer one is inspiration motivation spiritual entertainment and I noticed with some pride and a whole lot of terror that I had a two hour declining impact on people's lives for two hours I could make them believe that they could do anything but if they didn't stay with me that would in a declining arc they would go from you know right after hanging out with me they felt like they could take on the world and then a half hour later he's a little more distant an hour later and then by two hours was nothing Jamie wheel who we both know and you've had on one of your shows once described what you just said he's so witty with language he called it saccharine catharsis so catharsis obviously is a deeply meaningful psychological experience of deep learning and revelation and healing you know catharsis is when you're cracked your set you crack yourself open it's a kind of bliss [ __ ] crucifixion to death and resurrection but he says that that can also be induced right or mediated by an experience you know whether it's a staged experience or natural experience but that sometimes that catharsis can be not inauthentic but it was like it was like I'm not opposed to staging experiences of transformation I am NOT but I think that we have to be careful and again staging the experience in trim it can just be you lecturing at somebody for two hours in a powerful environment in which they get caught up in what you're saying I mean I'm not opposed to that that's what I do in shots of awe you know what I mean like we're doing the same thing in that sense but that we have to be careful that the audience doesn't get so caught up in what is ultimately a staged experience whether it's a video that I've prepared for them or a lecture that you prepared that they have a catharsis that's not a real catharsis because it doesn't have the integration and it doesn't have the follow-through and it doesn't have the practices that then they need to deploy in their lives to make that a lasting change and so he used to call he says that a lot of times motivational speakers lead this three-day workshop you know change your life that the audience can get caught up in the frenzy in the altered state of consciousness of that workshop and have a saccharine catharsis saccharine of course is the artificial sweetener we put in coffee that's actually terrible for you so that it's not it's not a real catharsis you know it's like it's like cheating which is I think similar to what happens when people think that if they take a psychedelic like ayahuasca our magic mushrooms for one night that they're gonna have they're gonna pierce the veil and everything will be different and while no doubt you can have glimpses of that which is beyond the known when you take psychedelics in the right environments if you don't integrate if you don't go back to your day to day default world and implement changes and codify learnings in a way that makes you whole right and then can incan and can bring some of those insights into practical daily endeavors then again it's us then it's an artificially induced catharsis with no with no lasting impact so and so it's exactly what you were saying it's like they have it for two hours and then it wears and then it wears out you know give me this step-by-step how the [ __ ] do people do that and this is the so the punchline to what I was saying before this I want to get to the point where I can and and this is what the book really is it is a step by [ __ ] step do this repeat this stand here say that like as as much as that's humanly possible with the brain so walk me through integration in fact I don't know that there is a human being I have ever encountered that is able to integrate ideas more powerfully than you what is your process for integrating the catharsis so that it actually becomes a part of you and you have that ability and dude if it's [ __ ] just repeating it a thousand times awesome I I don't care what the answer is but how the [ __ ] do you get all of these ideas to mesh in your mind to become a part of your race yes that's a really great question and one of the things that I sort of fight against is is similar to muscles it doesn't matter if you train for three months and you build your body real strong because that you stop for three months they will atrophy granted there's an element of muscle memory and you can sort of recover that fairly fast but still what that tells us is that there's got to be some kind of daily or weekly practice what are you incorporating was your life well okay so for example for me one of the most healing insights that that I keep coming back to is just this it's just the power of overcoming the trappings of time right being caught up in the future worried about what's next and or regretful or or clinging to what once was and is no longer which is the platitude cliche bumper sticker like be here now that Baba Ram Dass says that's the solution to so many of our anguishes and Agony's is to just be present now I've had that insight 1000 [ __ ] times I've talked about mental health as being freedom from self freedom from chatter the flow that you find in no mind these transitory enchanted moments in which we gasp for air compelled into in the words of f scott Fitzgerald aesthetic contemplation we barely understand nor desire face to face with something can measure to our capacity for wonder I mean that is that is the great aha right that is the divine realm these are the divinations of the mythopoetic spaces that we enter where we feel connected with something larger than ourselves and we are in the eternal right now I've had that a thousand [ __ ] times dude the the the amnesia of two days later when I go back into the cycles of the day to day has shown me that the only answer is simply to incorporate practices that allow me to revisit the present and for some people that can be meditation for some people it's yoga for some people it's simply building an environment around them that broadcasts to them the qualities that they wish to aspire to on a daily basis well real [ __ ] might be the set you've built for yourself like every day that you wake up what do you do what is a chase I chase okay so for me for me it's aesthetic experiences combined with novelty movies like what are we talking about rabbit is huge for me interest and we go to Amsterdam Amsterdam I just got back from Brazil yeah so you've heard of Michael Pollan's new book how to change your mind I've heard of it I've recently become super interested in him but I am NOT okay I'm a total novice highly recommend you check out his new book how to change your mind it's about psychedelics and healing but in the preface of the book there's a very interesting passage that I will share with you he says that anything applies to answering this question of how I do it he says brace basically that one of the things that we have to get used to about our default setting is that the brain is essentially future tense you know and and then towards the future angle towards the future with a low-level hum of anxiety as our default state and the reason for that is a hundred thousand years ago in the savannahs of Africa if we were not thinking ahead about what was around that next Bush we were gonna get eaten by predators and so we are the descendants of those that were the most neurotic and future-oriented those that were blissfully in the Garden of Eden Eden got eaten okay and he goes further he says the brain is like an artificial intelligence program in that it takes in data from the present right and it compares that data with data from the past and then it immediately makes inferences about the future right so it's a prediction machine and the line he uses is the good news is I'm seldom surprised the bad news is I'm seldom surprised right so you're mitigating against future threat and if you do that effectively you survive yay no surprises here but the problem is that there's also no delightful surprises there's also no finding yourself off the reservation in the present senses heightened you know deeply engaged you know when the stakes are high because you get so good at cushioning your life by saving money in the bank and preparing adequately for the future and putting yourself in a safe environment that then you grow stale and then you grow bored that's why some people are so poor all they have is money yeah and so my mom used to tell me that quote when little all the time because I wanted so badly to be really rich my grandfather was very wealthy and I want to be rich like my grandfather and she was like yeah some people are so poor all they have is money but anyway so so this is the default setting right low level hub anxiety future-oriented behavior and future-oriented attitude and so leapfrogging from the present right leapfrogging into the future and concluding what this already is and never engaging with them now so then how do we fix that so Michael Pollan writes one of the things that commends travel art and novelty right and certain kinds of drugs whether it's cannabis or other psychedelics is that these experiences get this they knock they knock off line they block all signals forwards and backwards so the future modeling right the expectation building and future modeling that is automatic gets knocked off line and the comparison between the now and the past gets knocked off line so certain kinds of visceral art travel certain drugs encounters with radical novelty anything that radically dissenters you write block all signals blocks all signals forwards and backwards hurling you into the flow his words the flow of a present that is literally wonder full wonder - full wonder being the byproduct of that unencumbered sense of first sight to which the adult brain has closed itself right and so for me that that is right there I'm like I need then to organize my life to curate my life around regular encounters with experiences that violate my expectations I need to thwart the default future modeling of my brain the jaded miss and the bin there's and seeing that of the adult mind the part of me that thinks I know what this is I understand this I've seen this before I've been to that neighborhood what that's gonna be oh I know what this party is oh I know what that crowd is all those things that allow us to dismiss engaging with the world by assuming that we know what we're engaging with and therefore assuming that we don't really need to pay that much attention in fact it's also Michael Pollan who in an earlier book called the botany of desire said what is banality and boredom except techniques that the educated mind employs against experience so that again so that it can get through the day without being continually exhaustingly astonished so that that sort of adult arrogance and then assumption of that we think that we know anything you know is often just a way of protections against engaging with a world that's actually full of mystery and because I'm guilty of doing this I then have to I have to seek out experiences that violate my expectations because then what happens is I'm in virginal terrain I'm off the reservation and I have to finally I guess re-engage with what is happening now and find out who I am in that moment and and if I have regular access to those kinds of experiences then I get I get new data new data for my videos new material with which to integrate but I guess for me the process of integration is to put into practice practices that hurl me into the present right that's super interesting said the knowledge from that is not enough the knowledge from east each of those instances of finding myself in the present the healing that happens in each of those instances is not enough it's like I got to go back to the Wishing Well is it going back to the well or so this originally started with because that that whole notion of getting yourself out of context I think is really really interesting violating your ex mutation yes super powerful I definitely had not thought of that yeah but the this started with integration like how do we integrate the ideas that we have so when I think about what I do it comes back to you and I'm not sure this is exactly right so this is me at the edge of what I already understand trying to grow up and and find something new but I think of this as obsession so I always tell people if you want to be successful in business let me tell you one of the like key factors nobody talks about it is so [ __ ] real I don't even know how to like get it across if you were not obsessed you're not going to win why because you need your mind to constantly like worry over that problem to to like you run like if you've ever chipped your tooth running your tongue over that chip over and over and over and over and over and over like your mind has to do that with these big problems otherwise you're never going to be able to solve them like you or it I really believe cognitively I'm quite slow and I think because people see me at the end of a very long journey they think what do you mean like you're able to put ideas together very fast now I'm not not unless I've already thought about them over and over and over but I'm very good at making something a problem and I use that word in quotes but making something a problem worthy of my attention so that I'm planting this notion in my subconscious I'll actually sometimes think about here's an idea that I want to process overnight or right before I meditate here's an idea that I want an answer to or something I need a solution or ideas that I'd like to connect somehow because I need my subconscious mind more than anything to just be like working over this problem over this problem over this problem and if somebody like I listen to everything at 2x if it's normal human speech and partly because if there are gaps where somebody is like pausing to think too long my mind will immediately go back to that problem and I really believe that for me that process of integration has been choosing to value that my mind is gonna work on this problem that feeding into obsession and rewarding myself for obsessing over something picking a very small number of things to really obsess about so that I'm looping over them to spend time meditating not just meditating to empty my thoughts but what I call Finca tating where I'm taking that alpha wave brain state that I get into from trying to empty my thoughts and then deploying that against some problem that I'm trying to do or I find in terms of what you're talking about of creating these moments where you're you're putting yourself in a certain cognitive place hot showers do that for me so even though I've become obsessed with cold showers I always end because my mind goes into what feels exactly like a meditative state because I was sure pre told myself to worry my mind and I'm using that word worry in a way that I think people misinterpret I'm I'm setting my mind to walk along an idea and because I I do that as a force of habit and not as something that's just natural I think I do already have an inclination towards that fair enough but then I've I've grabbed a hold of that process and said I need to make this a part of my life I don't just want it to be something that I skim across I really want to like take this thing and now really [ __ ] understand it and so in that process so I've set my mind to it and in that process the goal that I've given myself is to understand it to the point where AI could explain it to a five-year-old and be I can do it in steps and by combining those things then I find with one addition that you have to create space for your mind I find any people to get me well I guess I guess you could say that um you know I think that the diseases are the pathologies of mental distress of mental health these days are diseases of personal personal crisis diseases of getting too caught up in our own narrative about who we are and what we're doing here and are we successful enough for no we're not successful enough and what's gonna happen with this relation assuming of course like Maslow's hierarchy of needs assuming that you know you you're fed and and you have enough of an income to have a home and you've met these like basic needs then then the needs that have to do with like personal meaning and personal impact and what is the meaning of life in the face of being a mortal being and all these things become really problematic one of the things that they've I don't know if we talked about this last year when I was here we talked a lot about anxiety but that that the diseases of personal crises that that stem from too much anxiety and depression are diseases of excessive self-consciousness excessive rumination so becoming becoming I sound like a cheesy Buddhist but becoming overly I identified with the voice in your head and and or the ego as they say now granted and Michael Pollan says to sue the ego is necessary you know the ego gets the book written the ego takes care of the machinery right it makes sure that you get enough rest that you feed yourself well that you put yourself in a comfortable shelter that you surround yourself with nice people the ego is the executive conductor of the orchestra it's necessary right but when the ego becomes overly caught up with itself you know pass the point pass the threshold of taking care of the machinery so that then you can function well in egoless States an ego that becomes overly identified with itself goes from being the executive of the orchestra to a tyrant that is hyper vigilant and always on guard right and then this creates the excessive mental chatter that is associated with the excessive rumination of the diseases of anxiety of depression it's actually a brain that has become too ordered and and robbing cart Hart Harris who I believe is in the Imperial College of London and is doing all this research on psychedelics and and mental health came up with a theory called the entropic brain theory and basically the theory and this is based on fMRI scans that they did with all these people is that essentially people who suffer from depression and anxiety the diseases of personal crises have brains that have become too ordered obsessive thinking okay um North Korea instead of the United States so it's like the ego is so obsessed with protecting itself and or and or scaling and or climbing and or succeeding that that that you become that the self obsession becomes like a storm in your head you're never good enough or you're anxious you're gonna fail you're comparing yourself to others or all these things right and and then eventually those those those thoughts and those patterns of thinking they become so fixed because there's the grooves are so overly carved on right that again it's it's it's it's too much order in the brain too much identification with the self and that what is actually needed then for healing is regular encounters with experiences that smack you over the face and as they put it shake the snow globe what happens when you shake the snow globe all those ski routes that you've been you know those obsessive thoughts those self-identifying thoughts that again some of them are necessary the ego gets the book written the ego gets you to bed at night the ego has you work out and get your things done but too much of that then you know then you over identify with the self which is also multum Utley a transitory thing anyway that it's gonna cause you pretty much suffering in the end so shaking the snowglobe as they say resets the system reboots the system and also offers you encounters with modalities of awareness in which all those obsessive intrusive thoughts aren't there and whether it's flow or whether there's just the the stillness or the meditative trance of finding freedom from your own voice can be very healing and I guess for me the integration is simply realizing that I have to on a regular basis just like nutrition you got it you can't just eat healthy today and then the insights of that healthy meal are gonna carry over you got to eat healthy all the time or the majority of the time so I need to expose myself or put myself in situations that humble the voices in my head that quiet the inner chatter enough that allow me to merge with my environment to become enmeshed and or entangled with a majestic encounter with nature or a beautiful song or a lovemaking session with a lover took time and I'm gonna stop you there yes please because you you say things sometimes that are so rad but you're so poetic that you blow past them and I promise myself and this I was like the [ __ ] next time I'm with this guy and he says something like that I'm gonna stop him so you become enmeshed with your environment that's really interesting are you talking about the breakdown of the ego and that like when you say enmeshed yeah I'm talking about losing track of your own boundaries and forgetting yourself for a while now those of us that are highly disciplined highly driven highly ambitious and go on highly caught up in our own thoughts and and highly caught up in thinking about what we think about things can create a kind of rigid wall between us and the world because we've thought about everything so much we know what everything is and so we can rely more on our own thoughts than on our experience or encounter with something outside of ourselves because it's just like I know what that is I just got a guard of the vessel and I don't have to really engage with that losing track of your own boundaries temporarily can be like a kind of vacation from yourself in which the normal pre mapping of circumstance and pre mapping of experience and pre expecting what's going to happen that your brain is doing automatically is knocked off line and so what happens is it's like you find yourself porous and unguarded and it's it's the unexpected feeling of like being struck by something so magnificent that it takes your breath away and and and I think just these are transient experiences of eternity because they take place in a liminal space outside of time but when you have them and then you you pop out on the other side of those experiences and finally and you you know find yourself again a little bit that's that's when you get new material because that experience like where'd you go when that was happening you know I I just got back from Kauai and I was one of the most beaut it's one of those beautiful islands in Hawaii and we went to this famous and Napali coast which is this rugged Jurassic Park like coast of the island that you can only see by boat and it's like I mean it's like this might sound really vulgar but it's like it's like nature like like ejaculating on your face you know it's like it's like extact you lations of amazement there's actually there's a guy who was the the first Westerner whoever took psychedelic mushrooms with with indigenous cultures in Mexico and he wrote for Life magazine when he when he about his experience back in the 60s and his his description is apt he said that he spent the evening uttering ejaculations of amazement but but the point is yeah like we just we need it we need to experience humbling in comprehension you said on a regular basis humbling why that word well because there's a kind of intellectual arrogance that comes with being a person that spends their whole life trying to make sense of things understand things and optimize things to make them better which is something that I definitely tend to do and I infer that you do it too and and and that that's fine right like you're you to be brilliant and ambitious and intelligent and to put so much labor into making sense of things and distilling things and explaining things to others like what a beautiful endeavor as long as every once in a while you know we we experience a kind of gobsmacking you know we witness something so beautiful so magnificent so unexpected that oh my god it's an it's just it's new material it's it allows for it like a new aha in everything and I think it's just like I just think we just need that I know that I need that on a regular basis so my integration practice is simply realizing that I have to go back to the wishing well like I just that that that this is like something that needs to be part of my diet on a regular basis because otherwise my tendency is to simply collapse back into patterns that serve me for a little while and eventually become problematic you know what I mean you you're putting poetry to something that haunts me I think more than just about anything else in my life so I read this tell me what haunts you bro it this really doesn't tell me table that are used to listening me have heard me talk about this before but if you studied that people who've won Nobel Prizes they almost always get a Nobel Prize in their 60s for work they did in their 20s and a quote bubbled up out of that which is genius as a young man's game and as somebody who feels like a late bloomer that's definitely a part of my identity like it really took me a long time to develop self-awareness I didn't get into business until I was in my late 20s like it it took me a very long time to wrap my head around a lot of things and I've always felt like I'm just a step slower than a lot of people and so I'm okay with that like that doesn't actually damage my sense of self as long as I can keep that window open forever my opportunity for genius if you will so when I heard that quote I was like [ __ ] you no way like who are the outliers in that and thankfully that piece where that quote came up was talking about a guy who was one of the few people to ever win multiple Nobel prizes and he's continued to produce relevant work into his later years and he said my whole thing is every 10 years I have to reinvent myself and I I really really really want to believe even though I know there's a part of just like the level of brain plasticity does diminish over over time I think that's unfortunately a reality does not go away and it never drops to zero but it definitely you're not as plastic as you get older but I think a big part of the reason that so much profound work is done in one's 20s is because it's that moment where the the notions that you've been [ __ ] around with are now beginning to congeal and useful wisdom and you have the skillset with which to deploy them so you've learned all this [ __ ] it's coming together in your head your brain has finally developed at the age of 25 it comes together in this highly usable way but it's not become like calcified Dogma yet so you're still open everything is new you're having these ecstatic Jack you lations ejaculations is you're you know mumbling ah into the universe and it's like you you're at this magic moment where you're finally competent but yet you're still open and so when I hear you talk about all that stuff it feels like you're saying you have you have to using your words shake the snow globe as a way to remain open because you have all this competence your brain is like grabbing onto it it's defining you more and more you're becoming more ordered that I'd never heard it said like that but that makes a lot of sense in in that way where it's like okay the risk becomes I calcify and I'm no longer open to new experience I no longer go back to the wishing well I don't have new ideas all my genius was when I was young but the calcification actually like if you think of bones as being your [ __ ] skeleton you can move around and do [ __ ] all you need you need enough calcification for your bones I said the ego is necessary the ego gets the book written the patterns of behavior that make you effective in the world no doubt are necessary but that's that that the same governing mechanics that underlie the ordering processes of the ego which is the default mode Network can become metastasized when people suffer from the pathologies of anxiety and depression so the default mode network the ego that keeps border over the machinery the patterns that serve you can also be can also lead to patterns that trap you yep so right so the patterns that serve you can become the patterns that trap you if they metastasize just like healthy tissue can become cancerous when it metastasizes and so the shaking of the snowglobe is a necessary reboot you know the data in your computer is important if it's a reflection of all the documents and everything you've put into the you know that you've learned and that you've written down that you organize and do you've assemble together it's very important but what about like the whole fragmentation that happens with all that data unless you like defragment the hard drive every once in a while and I imagine that that's the what robbing cart heart Harris from Imperial College of London is referring to when he says that in this case they're talking about psychedelic experiences taken in controlled environments that introduced actually disorder into the brain temporarily and by flooding the brain with disorder it's like instead of taking the same freeway to work your neurons the way they communicate with each other you're taking all these side root side roads all of a sudden and so people have this temporary you know five our experience of egoless communion with the divine but it turns out that the last afterglow is the couple comes from shaking the snowglobe and then popping out on the other side feeling like wow like I just went through something that called into question many things in my life many certainties in my life and that being hung upside down for a while like that was amazing because I got to behold the miracles that we live next to often and ignore you know it's it's like that Yeats quote says the world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper and it'sit's the same thing that causes hedonic adaptation you know that flower is stunning and it'll stop you in your tracks once twice three times but the fourth or fifth time you don't even see the flower anymore because you're busy doing something else and that's fine but maybe two weeks later you need to get knocked over the head by something and gob some actually you remember the flower and so it's it's I guess ping-pong and back and forth between like highly ordered and disciplined states and then absolute an ecstatic surrender there was a wonderful Venn diagram that my friend made from the imaginary foundation and and basically here it was a discipline was one of the circles and the other circle was surrender and then there was a circle in the middle that overlapped them both and was called flow you know and I think about yeah 30 seconds ago you could not have convinced me that I would be like yes a render but saying it yet drawing a line to flow that makes sense yeah and also another term for it is is calling a discipline surrender mmm chick send me hi said accepting limitations is liberation and that's not and that's the guy that wrote the book on flow Csikszentmihalyi kind of the term well this is a this is a fantastic quote that's actually something that I've been thinking about a lot lately because I have labored intentionally to give myself as much freedom as possible in my life you know I worked in television as a presenter I hosted TV shows for Current TV five seasons of brain games origins I did that to have been doing shots of awe you know doing a lot of speaking and I probably like kind of put more effort into generating speaking opportunities for me because it's like okay like it's it's one-off gigs that pay well that give me the maximum amount of freedom it's like aside from like going wherever I'm booked I'm like okay I have a booking in Europe let's stay in Europe for three weeks and explore booking in South Africa let's stay in South Africa for three you know radical freedom but too much freedom without constraint is actually problematic because it can give you a kind of cognitive vertigo and decision fatigue you know I open up Netflix sometimes I browse it for ten minutes I see [ __ ] 11 things that I want to watch and then I hover back and forth between deciding which one is more of a priority to watch tonight then I browse a little bit more see like five other things I want to watch and then I'm stressed from the 15 minutes I spent browsing Netflix and then I closed it and I end up opening iTunes and watching a movie I bought two weeks ago that I've seen three times because it's familiar and comforting so too much freedom just like too much discipline is equally problematic and so then I stumbled upon this chick send me Highline they said accepting limitations as liberation it's like okay well choose our constraint like choose a hobby choose a career choose a [ __ ] city that you're gonna move to for three months like just [ __ ] choose it you know you just know it's not forever but like commit to it impose a constraint so that inside that constraint you can be free dude I agree with that violently yeah so one of my big frustrations with people that they want they don't have passion in their life they want to start a business but they don't know what business like whatever just [ __ ] pick like and it's one of those it really does just come down to just pick nothing is ever going to feel like a magic answer nothing nothing yeah and people have and and we reinforce it in pop culture the sense that hiding within me is some great passion yeah and I need to do an archaeological dig I need to uncover that and then everything is gonna be great in my life and the [ __ ] reality is that nothing is ever gonna feel right it's never gonna feel like the right movie or whatever I know that feeling so [ __ ] well and you simply decide and in allowing yourself to decide with with no sense of like this is going to somehow dictate the rest of my life it's a [ __ ] decision and the most important thing is to not hesitate and so my wife and I have a sort of joke inside joke line where if you do something and you hesitate we say your hesitation has almost killed us once again and just just to brilliant sort of enjoyably remind each other that there's no like where we go to eat doesn't [ __ ] matter it's being afraid to make a decision that is wildly problematic and that will echo through your life and some terrifying ways but just saying we're gonna eat here even if you get there and it ends up being a substandard experience so [ __ ] what you didn't hesitate to make a decision this is this is at the moment one of my Achilles heels because I became successful and I had all that freedom and so making choices when there is no constraint sometimes will deplete my my cognition until I'm fatigued that my time I do make a choice I am too tired to enjoy it so this is like it's like FOMO but take it to the next level so FOMO everybody knows FOMO with a fear of missing out so recently the term that comes to mind for me is the fear of future regret mm-hmm you know and that's a big one and it can be something as tedious it's like okay I'm in the mood to shoot some new shots of all material I never outline or script my videos my videos are always a response to something meaningful that transpired so what I do is I try to design for a stage I try to design for an experience of surrender of egoless surrender so that on the other side of that I'll have new material like you know I plan for delightful surprises and then trust that the material that will come through in the end will be great for a shot so far so then I might be like okay well so where do I want to go for a couple weeks to shoot is it is it Amsterdam is it Copenhagen is it South Africa is it Switzerland I mean these sound like high-class problems but I'm just talking about an example because the degree to which I'll over deliberate about saying well if I choose this what if it ends up not being amazing and then I'll wish I would have chosen that instead it's such a intoxicating and and polluting example of excessive rumination getting in the way of realizing that actually no matter what you choose if you evoke an experience of radical presence in any of those choices you'll experience the timeless wherever the [ __ ] you are and that it's only in the timeless that the healing will occur and so I've been trying to practice a little more of like snap decisions without thinking about it too much you know and then just trusting yeah and then and then and then making sure that once I'm in that place that I that I commit to to the surrender here's what I find even more interesting about that so I think that because we're so obsessed with reproducibility like when you do when I do have an encounter in a place that was transformative that was healing that I got gobsmacked by inspiration that all this material came from I want to bookmark that place on a bookmark that moment I want to bookmark that circumstance and then the next time element what do you want to do next month I want to go back to that place where that thing happened I don't know that that's true I'd have to want to you want to go back to that place where you felt that creative and you had that sort of flow experience that's right but I will always in my brain will always go to the last place in which that happened and it creates a kind of tunnel vision that makes me think that it has to be there this is where it's fascinating to me how different people are because that that wouldn't be a trigger for me but one the thing that I often whenever I have something that I don't feel that I've earned that I didn't work my way to that ability okay then I have a real fear that it won't show up for me when I need it and so that's another reason that I don't value things that were given to you like I have absolutely no sense of pride or anything over how tall I am right so that's just like I didn't do anything to earn it - why the [ __ ] would I give a [ __ ] so but things that I've worked my ass off for then I can feel like I know it's gonna be there for me when I need it because I have worked it's a process like it was something that I could sort of grab ahold and bring to me but really fast I want to go back to where you were saying about like making snap decisions which i think is really important but part of what makes snap decisions so powerful to me is I think there are there are actual real consequences to making a poor decision and that's what makes being able to make a snap decision so powerful because you really may make a snap decision and it really may be a suboptimal outcome now you've got a way to deal with that which is to find a way to be present when you're there so that it actually is still the gobsmacked and you remind yourself that you can have that moment [ __ ] in a god what are those chambers called the sensory deprivation right fear you don't actually need any stimulus from the outside you can take yourself there in a mental place so I think that's a really smart way to deal with it but the very thing this goes back to my notion of value hierarchies I value decisiveness in and of itself why because I choose to do and believe that which moves me towards my goals and when I think about the ultimate thing that releases me from anxiety from things that would otherwise make me feel badly about myself it is that driving value of hey does thinking you're an [ __ ] does that move you towards your goals which by the way my like top-level goal nothing is higher than this thing is I want to feel good about myself when I'm by myself I want to recognize that life is a very weird cocktail of neuro chemistry so at the end of the day that's the only game you're playing but fulfillment which I'll say is shorthand for feeling good about yourself when you're by yourself is this weird [ __ ] thing that survives even like absolute like a painful down experience and you can be in the middle of that down experience and still have a sense of like no no I'm proud of Who I am I'm proud of how I'm dealing with this situation and so because that's like my highest aim is to have that the only sort of neurochemical state that I have found that is essentially bulletproof I can be up I can be down and it gives me this even keel sense of self and Worth and respect and all of that stuff and being decisive is one of those things that is intrinsically valuable and it does so often move me towards my goals that in and of itself even in a momentary moment where it may give me a sub optimal outcome I know it is far better to invest in being decisive because indecision indecision always leads me to a sub optimal outcome even in the rare occasion where I did [ __ ] and debated it for so long that I finally ended up on an answer that's correct and and this is where I get into my cancer analogy of of building yourself the thing that you think of is as you is so [ __ ] complicated and it's made of all these different things values a sense of identity beliefs rules in your life habits routines like they all come together in this so intricately interconnected way that's why you use cancer it's like you can't tell where the cancer ends and the the normal tissue begins it's just so intermixed and teasing out what any one of these things is would be next to impossible and I say that because part of the reason that I so value decisiveness is because I've realized the utility of momentum and momentum isn't just speed it's it's getting you and others pointed in the same direction and moving at speed and because I know that momentum is so valuable in terms of striving towards your goal basically whatever your goal is quite friendly that you have to end up valuing decisiveness so it's like it's so interesting that you and I are looking at essentially the same thing but we're looking at it in like these radically different ways and and going back to what you were saying earlier like I so see in myself the the I have created the separation between me in the world in a way that is so hyper aggressive and yet what I long for are those moments of shaking the snowglobe like I'm constantly trying to do both and we touched on this briefly the last time we talked where it's like holding two competing ideas in your head is so critical and being good at that like I know when to say no no I need to be that ultra regimented super strict very predictable to myself and to others and then I know other times where I've got to [ __ ] shake this up I've got a radically and now I'm trying to quote you here radically decontextualize myself right and I think you so nailed it with the notion of texts like have you ever seen someone that you've seen multiple times and a part of your brain is like you know them but you're like who the [ __ ] is this only because you're seeing them out of context and it's moments like that where I realize holy hell context really matters have you had Rick Doblin on your show I've never even heard those sounds put together okay beautiful he's the creator of maps the multidisciplinary association of psychedelic studies and not to bring up psychedelics again but they are in vogue these days and the work of maps in particularly is important they're working primarily with MDMA MDMA people know it as ecstasy the drug I must want to try used in you know it part of like rave culture in the 80s and 90s and subsequently banned what most people don't know is before it was banned and used by club kids it was actually primarily being used by psychotherapists for marriage counseling interest yes it's a subset of psychedelics called in pathogenic s-- that MDMA falls into in the sense that they are empathic genic drugs they open up the heart and increase empathy so Rick Doblin and maps have no doubt from the research realized that these these is a substance that should be brought back into psychotherapy to work not just with marriage counseling but with post-traumatic stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder for those that don't know is like let's say you're serving the army and you see some horrific violence and service and then you come back and you can't integrate what you've seen into your day-to-day life and and in your your nervous system is permanently altered by that traumatic experience and so you bring that agitation that anxiety that panic that distressed at the doorstep of every moment your past experience your past trauma now colors everything you encounter now your past is over determining the present right and it turns out that one or two sessions with MDMA and a psycho and a psychiatrist in the room with an average PTSD person people actually with treatment resistant PTA one or two sessions and they no longer meet the criteria of PTSD that's so [ __ ] crazy Huard okay so so so so here's what's interesting about that how does that work how does that work well the the best description is in the same way that trauma can semi permanently alter your nervous system an experience that is of such darkness and gravity can make it so that you you know the body keeps the score as they say so you bring that past trauma to the doorstep a very moment and it colors how you see the world the opposite is also true an experience of such sublime heart-opening radiance can act as a kind of inverse PTSD so now you've seen what is through the looking-glass now you found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow now you've seen the promised land and from that optimal arousal zone that space that MDMA is able to evoke for people then you can do cognitive Repat earning you can go back and examine your trauma you can remember things and put them into different context you can contextualize them differently yes through that lens and the spontaneous self-healing that takes place in the body at the level of the nervous system is undeniable so III experienced this with the nurse twice you've done MDMA yes get the [ __ ] out and I did it in a therapeutic cause me through therapeutic context the most amazing experience of it was the radical self-acceptance that it allows you to sit with and marinate in now a lot of people that are ambitious and I'll probably group myself into this if I was psychoanalyzing myself suffer from a narcissistic wound so those that need to achieve usually that stems from some early experience when they felt they were not enough I believe the line is if I am not lovable for Who I am then I will become lovable for what I can do and what I can achieve and granted I think it's unhealthy to have a desire to make something of yourself the desire to achieve is a healthy drive but the degree to which that desire comes from thinking that you are unworthy if you don't achieve that desire that's problematic and MDMA because of these empathic genic qualities and allowing you to encounter and be in dialogue with yourself from a radical self-acceptance neurochemical space is so [ __ ] powerful because we're not talking about narcissistic self-love or self obsession you're talking about actually having compassion for yourself and forgiving yourself and accepting yourself people have these talk about ecstasy and catharsis as Jamie wheel would say it'sit's really transformative and that's just me alone with the nurse oh absolutely they hold space they hold space they provide a mirror so if you having these revelations they nod and they think they dig at you to keep going they're not meant to introduce their own material into the nurse and not a therapist well it's kind of the same the same the same thing you have to realize this is not fully legal yet even though even though with the FDA where it phase three designations for breakthrough therapy so we're almost we're almost at full legalization but right now people still do it on their own if they want experiment but anyway I then had the experience of experimenting that was just me with with the nurse of worldspace but then I wanted to try that in a relationship I was a marriage counselor what happens if I try you know MDMA with my girlfriend you know at the six-month mark and at the nine-month mark of our relationship now I believe that this PTSD idea is something that all of us to a certain degree are afflicted with there's the trauma of just being born there's the trauma of growing up divorced parents being bullied in school being insecure being sensitive and rejected and key moments in your life like we all carry trauma and we bring that trauma to the doorstep of every moment in many ways we bring that the most into our relationships and our patterns of neediness and codependency and its need for control and have to do with these patterns so to firstly experience that amount of self-acceptance in the face of somebody that maybe you were seeking for their validation of you you know so many of the interpersonal dynamics are like you need the approval of your partner but what happens when you approve yourself and you're able to be around somebody you love but not need their approval that's an interesting thing that can happen and then also to witness them and behold them with no self concern because a lot of the times I'm like I love you but I love you for how you make me feel or I love you for the fact that you're giving me companionship so I'm not lonely or I love you but I want to control you through the MDMA lens you get to behold them and you get to love them unconditionally unconditionally means you're not attached to an outcome you're not even attached to them staying with you you actually that is not a concern whether they stay with you or whether they find somebody else in that moment you get to know what it's like to just want them to thrive simply because it feels so good to shine love on them and that's very powerfully healing too and I think you know your cells are a technology that turns experience into biology so I think that in some ways simply undergoing that open-heart surgery of the psyche through a process of just experiential osmosis will seep into the pores of your day-to-day as long as you integrate in journal and talk about what has transpired but I think for me the powerful thing was to witness myself my truest self in a state in which I could be who I was and then realizing that who I was was wonderful do you call back on that experience is that how I tried to I tried to I mean there there's patterns of behavior in my life that maybe are not so useful I get caught up in a ambition bubble I get caught up in the making money bubble I get caught up I go back to like oh I'm lonely why isn't she texting me or you know what I mean like that happens but I but I try to remember I try to remember you know step back and like remember you know we just had a neurosurgeon on health theory yesterday and he was talking about how you get in a electrical rut just the same that you can get in sort of a behavioral rut so as the neurons begin to wire together people understand how that creates an efficiency but he said a lot of people don't understand that you have an electrical firing pattern that also has an ease to it so if the default network are the things you think all the time then the part of what makes something in or part of the fabric of the default network is the electrical firing pattern and he said one of the ways you can disrupt he was talking specifically about depression is you put an electrode right into a certain part of the brain and then like a pacemaker it changes the electrical firing pattern nothing changes about the physical structure of the brain which you also can do over time but he said without needing to change the physical structure of the brain just change the electrical firing pattern yeah and so when I think well that's what Steven Kotler said neurons that fire together wire together I wasn't percent yeah and what what fascinates me is when I think about psychedelics and where I think when I think about where all this technology is going and the way that a single [ __ ] session like you're talking about can create permanent and lasting change it was something like 80% of people that do it in a particular setting where they're being walked through and it's very acute exciting no longer meet the criteria crazy right so I'm like whoa whoa whoa what I know about the brain is neurons have fire together wire together but that's an overtime thing so going back to what you were saying about not just an overtime thing because think about trauma that exactly singular experience if sufficiently powerful can that fire together and wire together and scar scar tissue I mean yeah you can build muscle over time which is to get them back to the long term thing fire together wire together over time but if you if you grab a nice and slice yourself that's gonna cause an instant scar just from one time not from cutting every day so that's how trauma works and that's how the inverse of it works well how do we just reverse work without drugs that's what I want to know now that I'm opposed to it by the way you know what Valley you know what Lee said though knowing they asked him all about drugs he says I am drugs so we are we are like we are neural chemistry nothing that is introduced by these external ecstatic technologies is is something that cannot naturally occur in the brain you know people describe the MDMA state as something similar to the post orgasmic halo but lasting for like five hours you know so it's it's a highly concentrated experience and you could argue that it's like it's kind of like you can play you can learn to play a guitar but then there's what happens when you turn on the guitar amplifier you know and so I sing seen through this lens yes sure it's MDMA is not something you want to do every day you want to integrate some of these lessons and you want to be able to synthesize an MDMA like approach to living for sure because it's a glimpse of the perfect human state but I think it's gonna be a lot harder to get people to deploy the practices necessary to get there over sufficiently long amounts of time rather than to be able to offer them which is I believe what these therapies are gonna offer a chance for this this one really deeply meaningful encounter so that they can taste it for sure so that they can experientially taste it for sure and then go back and you know fetch water and chop wood you know yeah to use the famous phrase all right I want to ask you how do you approach learning like the so you've been called a DJ of ideas and what I really want to understand is how do you get like if I'm a DJ I go to iTunes and I download a song or I go to the vinyl shop and I pick up the record how do you go about approaching getting these new ideas that you can then synthesize I think that I the process of finding myself in a engaged and receptive State is always gonna be a kind of magical realm that I have to create the conditions for but I but other than that there's nothing I can do do you have any memory and so the not I don't have any like specific disciplined practice to memorize quotes no I mean when a court is really good I write it down because but but I but typically what makes me want to remember it is because the words makes so much sense and are articulated in such a concise manner but loaded with so much truth and and and and expository power and that they expose they reveal that I can't help but want to write it down and remember it because it's it just feel well they're the same reason that there's bumper stickers with certain phrases and not with others but it just makes me it makes me feel like like remembering that means remembering all the wisdom that is associated with that so rather than memorizing pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of knowledge I just memorize one quote that will uh that will prove that that that quote triggers the unconscious with by flooding all the material of acquired knowledge related to that quote that if I tried to memorize those pages and pages of pages pages I wouldn't you know I'll give you one example and again just to answer your question of how I create how I try to learn these things is I tried to cultivate a state of mind in which I'm most receptive and I'm most receptive typically when I'm well rested when I eat well when I exercise when I have novelty when I'm present and how do you pick your books or is it books books its articles its I have to trust serendipity you know I have to trust that the dots will connect with something that at some hunch I've been having that's been looking for an answer and then stumbling upon the answer in like some tweet or some article that has like some link to something and you know that's that's a magical space but for example recently you know I am very interested in in truth and human truth in the truth that heals us but I'm also an empirical thinker and I believe in silent in science and I believe you are entitled to your opinions but not to your own facts right like I understand this we need that nowadays and yet right art is the lie that reveals the truth mythology is not true from the outside but it's true from the inside there are empirical facts and there are poetic facts and even though poetic facts may be less accurate than journalism and describing the details of an event they nevertheless reveal truths that are beyond the literal grid as Allen's ipython sedia sometimes fiction is more truthful than reality you know how do you reconcile this idea of like the scientific lay or the empirical objective layer of reality and the interior subjective level of reality with its own set of you might call them poetic facts so I think about this all the time because in my shots of awe videos I'm sometimes talking about technology and innovation and and and the importance of scientific discovery and human enterprise and this and that I'm talking about a lot of objective empirical things but then I often talk about inspiration transformation catharsis things that we better that are healing that happened from within that that live in the realm of your own personal personal mythology and the realm of poetic faxes how do you reconcile those two things so this is a whole mind map of associations there and if a material for a thousand videos no doubt and I finally found one [ __ ] line from Ursula Le Guin that encapsulates the whole thing this is in fact this was a whole book of opinions and ideas and mind maps linked together the front of the book would have this Ursula Le Guin quote and hat tip to a brain picker for tweeting it or writing about it science describes accurately from the outside poetry describes accurately from the inside science explicate s-- poetry implicates both celebrate what they describe but like I mean how much doubt dense how beautifully dense is that's it right science describes accurately from the outside poetry describes accurately from the inside yes science explicate s' yes poetry implicates yes so it's like okay I needed to remember that cuz it's so [ __ ] perfect just like those four sentences ring like truth you know they feel truth like truth and so that's that will be something but then I just like I know I have to remember that that's gonna be relevant humans are really [ __ ] different any my is so like when I think about the one I love being around you because I think you you assimilate information that I find utterly fascinating in a way that I do not assimilate it and so mmm what what intrigues me is would I respond to that quote if you weren't saying it and I think the answer is no I think I let's assume I've read that quote now it's like yeah and then just moved on but when I hear you say it sure then I'm like [ __ ] and I see you doing like the movements that you get by the way we're the same both times you did it so there's clearly some I for you for sure around those words your excellency I would see one that would be an example right there of me which could be I could be a stand-in for nature or some experience you're having I'm violating your expectations and that's what's making the line resonate whereas when you were reading or skimming or speed reading because that's optimizing like I have friends who listen to podcasts at 2x I don't know if they're minimum okay so that might have been a line that came in front of your field of awareness and that you were like oh yeah I know what that is and what is this what is this uh that's the thing there isn't scene that's at the adult mind uh I reckon it you know it's just fine we all do it it's it's um it's kind of like a codec for digitizing video you're taking pixels that are not changing very much in the frame and replacing them with a single stand-in and the only pixels that you're changing are the ones that require changing and it makes the file size smaller so we do that same thing with the world you know there's certain things that we have to engage with that are changing but the things that are static we rely on there models in the bin there isn't seen that savvy at all tonight and that is good most of the time but it's not good because it's often not a good filter about what gets to get in and and meaningfully touch you or reach you and my problem which I think we probably both share and maybe it's not a problem for you but I call it a problem for me is that I'm also very good at doing uh-huh I'm really [ __ ] good at it dude I'm like I'm like the expert I like uh-huh yeah yeah yeah but I also know that when I go ahh then I'm like I'm like in my head like Mackin a ting you know like nothing's really and it's only when something goes boom like that's beautiful that's poetry dude right that's poetry those are the moments of poetic transformation it's like it's like that line from Dead Poets Society when Robin Williams is saying you know um science engineering mathematics these are noble pursuits necessary to sustain life but poetry love poetry these are the things we stay alive for and so i ultimately do i want to reach people yes i want to succeed yes do I want to make money yes do I want to feel like I'm contributing in the world yes but all those things are tiny they're things I got a tick from the box just like eating and sleeping so that I can then go back to the wishing well go back to that the mythopoetic trance III maybe I'm a plate honest somebody said this to me recently I was with a psychologist to hang out with in Brazil so Plato wrote about the platonic realm or the realm of ideals this kind of universal space of consciousness where things become archetypal I like like living in that space as much as possible everything else is just taking care of the mechanics taking care of the procedures but the but the archetypal space is the space of myth sitting around the campfire the space of inspiration the space of being played by a melody this is really interesting have you seen Jordan peterson and sam harris debate yeah my thing is like you you guys do understand that the only problem is that you're approaching the world from fundamentally different places like sam is saying that the when you look at the world through the lens of logic it's the it's the only way forward and Jordan is saying when you look at the world through the lens of emotion right science the what you were saying in the quote right yeah the two differences neither are wrong they're just two different approaches to the world and when you mistake your own representation as the only representation for sure and you can have these two extraordinary people who who seem to really respect each other and obviously get along swimmingly but but they're as they're debating these ideas it's like it seemed so fascinating to me that that that one simple insight seems to be the only thing that that holds them apart which is it is two different ways of explaining the world yeah and it's funny it's I'm glad you brought that particularly example because that's exactly what they often talk about and and I'm friends with Sam Harris I love I love his nuanced analytical mind and I've never met Jordan Peterson but I'm a fanboy there's a bunch of rants of his particularly when he talks about music and transcendence or the healing power of art or how to curtail a personal crisis like I think he's brilliant he plays the piano when he talks I see his fingers move him like oh this guy's channeling how brilliant but he's also trained clinical psychologist so it's more interesting to see a trained clinical psychologist tackle religion than it would be to see just a religious scholar tackle religion because he understands also temperament and psychological motivations and unconscious patterns and our thinking and all these things and he can when he brings that into his take on religion it's very interesting but in that same talk one at one of the three talks were peterson and sam harris were in debate i guess that the subject of astronomy and astrology came up and of course astronomy is a real science astrology is not right and so sam harris was clear about that and he's like look you know astronomy allows us to study the movements of the planets and it's an empirical science and we've learned a lot from it and so on and so forth whereas you know some people may be like lead their lives by astrological signs and that this is a total pseudoscience and therefore should be dismissed and look I get that point that that is a valid statement in many ways but then Jordan speeders Jordan Pearson's answer was very interesting because just just what Sam Harris said alone about astrology being a form of magical thinking therefore not useful and not not comparable to real science like astronomy there's truth there but is there like a third answer here you know and that's where Jordan Peterson's answer was very interesting he said well well you think about what astrology is is astrology was astronomy in its earlier form that essentially you know here we were these these questioning thinking early human humanoids in a world that we didn't understand a world that was fundamentally incomprehensible and so what do we do we looked up at the stars we didn't understand anything and so what we did is we looked up at the stars and we draped we draped the cosmos with our own consciousness which is similar to what we do with cinema all right I mean cinema reflects mankind's historical drive to manifest as consciousness outside of his eye outside of his mind in front of his eyes alright cinema is our own mind looking back at us but that's so earliest Riley astrology we looked at the cosmos he said and then we draped it with our consciousness mm-hmm so we we turned our minds inside-out and placed our drama out in the world and labeled the star as gods and goddesses and all the fundamental archetypal human dramas were unfolding in this domain of the gods but guess what that fiction right that fiction was enough for these early sailors for example who were like [ __ ] starship explorers before we had [ __ ] satellite communication draping the Stars with with our minds and calling something the North Star and that was sufficient for us to get on these boats and sail into the great abyss you know and so it may have been a fiction but it is a fiction that willed us into action in which we bared the burden of not knowing and contending with the unknown and taking off into the darkness and how could we ever dismiss that as not being like fundamentally wonderful yes and that's that's some I'm paraphrasing what he said but I thought holy [ __ ] pretty [ __ ] good paraphrasing bored that to me is is really interesting in and it has become the or maybe it's always been the central question of my life which is the ability that we have as humans to communicate through I think of it as as film but storytelling right so how do we communicate going back to your scientific versus poetic truth so impact Theory was born because I realized that 2% of the world if I just look at you and I tell you think this way act this way step one two three four do these things and I know that while it's never gonna have a universal addictive outcome it's it's predictable in a lot of people just based on human biology yeah but there's 98 98 percent of the [ __ ] world is only going to respond if I can hit them at an emotional level if I'm able to grab their attention so when you were describing like media as I read pass something what's really happening is for whatever reason a certain idea either hits me emotionally or does not if it hits me emotionally becomes part of me getting back to how do you synthesize these ideas something really has to hit me emotionally for it to disrupt my current level of thinking so going back I mean this is all sort of coming together now to the of our conversation like what are the things that gobsmacked you that really make you recontextualize yourself rethink of your own knowledge and for me it's things that hit you at an emotional level so when I think about it even that is still have that has to do with pattern recognition like even something hitting you emotionally is because the dots are connecting in a certain way that's triggering some association that's making you respond to that but it has to do also with your filters of pattern recognition so the brain is a is doing two things at once it's inhibiting your response to the incoming data and it's searching for meaningful connections and it has to do that because if your brain didn't inhibit you'd be overwhelmed by all the information coming and you'd be incoherent you'd be schizophrenic like you everything that's what schizophrenia is everything is embedded with meaning all the time so it's like this sign is the Illuminati and they're spying on me and that camera is surveillance and the AI you know I mean like that's what that's that's the the disease of them of that kind of mental illness where they see meaning everywhere and so we have to inhibit and filter out what we determine is being fundamentally unmeaning 'fl but in some sense schizophrenics are suffering from the truth it's just that the truth doesn't let us do anything with it because everything is meaningful right all of this is made of atoms this is powered by electricity that's meaningful this is a beautiful design that incorporates mathematics that makes us stand like this you know that light is powered by electricity which is also meaning that television is that ever I mean everything is meaningful but we can't engage with everything all the time so we inhibit but that inhibitory muscle in order to concentrate in order to focus in order to get things down can also metastasize and can make us go uh so once in a while we throw ourselves into new environments because new environments are more likely to register something emotionally meaningful it's more likely to do that particularly because you don't have it already map you can cuz it's all new but you also that's just the external work of putting yourself in a new place the other thing is what agents do you introduce internally to make you to heighten pattern recognition and make you more receptive for something to register emotion for example marijuana does that the first thing that marijuana the first thing that marijuana does is flood you with dopamine which increases pattern recognition some people get paranoid or anxious when they're on pot because the first thing that happens when they start getting more signals is they interpret those signals as anxiety inducing because they're just they're getting too much data they don't know what to do with it but maybe that's just they smoke too much pot you know a little less pot and the right environment might flood them with the same dopamine but instead they're getting this dopamine hit at a pace they can absorb and then they start connecting the dots in a new way without being overwhelmed and then it can be real positive and then whatever's in front of you is more likely to register emotionally and then you're like holy [ __ ] I'm getting all these interesting ideas and then uh and so maybe it's not pop maybe it's meditation maybe it's doing the [ __ ] cold shower plunge for 15 minutes before you know opening up these this book to see if it engages you just something that's gonna prime you to be more open and more receptive right and one of the descriptions of the phenomenology phenomenological effects of cannabis is that anything what is that phenomenology is like subjectivity phenomenology is the study of like first person I've experienced from inside out is that cannabis and again I think anything that cultivates a capacity to be present will do this but that cannabis increases reactivity to stimuli both from within and from without so when you make yourself more porous to the incoming signals your disinhibited the inhibitory functions of the mind you're making yourself a little more I don't want to say crazy but you're making yourself a little more like a person who's paying attention to the seemingly irrelevant and then connecting the dots in a new way that's why creative people flirt with crazy people in that sense because crazy is simply no inhibition whatsoever and so everything is coming in and disor in a disorganized manner right but like creativity is also disinhibited somewhat and I think these things exist on a spectrum so what you want to do it it's not like on/off what you want to be able to kind of move the knob and bring it to a place where you're like getting more pattern recognition but not to a place where you're seeing pattern isset e and c patterns where there are none and that's a different thing but there are both on a spectrum right here is very limited things are connecting for you you're very very very sober here it's like oh the dots are connecting I'm seeing increased information and increased data but it's at a rate that's interpretable and useful and then all the way up here it's like okay I'm seeing patterns everywhere and this is like somebody who got too stoned at a party and it's getting really paranoid because they think everybody can tell they're high that's really just them miss reading a situation because they have too much dopamine and too much pattern recognition and so they're actually seeing patterns that aren't there so interesting I wish we'd hit me like that like when I hear people for whom it really works and talk about it I'm like ah man that sounds amazing and then I try it and it just it it feels like someone is pressing play and pause on my brain it doesn't feel like I have some cool new amount of stuff coming in yeah and actually one of the ways it makes me feel and this comes back to what I was saying about speaking to people on an emotional level I don't I don't have any intellectual experience with the anxiety it is purely a sense deep in my body of unease and what I like about speaking to somebody emotional is you're speaking to the body and the body is a lot harder to ignore than the mind and once you've got somebody at a body level where they feel it's something visceral they may not even know how to interpret it but they have that feeling this is why I think it's so critical that at impact theory we develop the ability to communicate in the language of emotion so going back to what you're saying about you've got science and you've got the poetry but I'll say poetry is the link of emotion it's a body talk it's getting to somebody in a way that they feel far more in a then just in a way that they understand and because I think humans are so different and because I think so few people have done the work to connect the mind in the body so that they can interpret the signals it's like the only way to grab their [ __ ] attention is to make them feel something to give them the chills to make them sad to make them laugh to make them happy whatever and then I think it has the priming effect that you're talking of making them more porous so that the ideas can come in and I don't know if it's just it sort of bumps them into a slightly different state of course it does of course I that's where it gets interesting and when I think about how much in my life I've been influenced by movies because they lower my defenses like I remember when I saw the matrix yeah the before it hit theaters I got a ticket to go see it at Warner Brothers Studios and I had never once ever in my life made noise during a movie other than to laugh yeah and when Trinity jumps up and the camera moves around her I screamed out loud and as I'm screaming realized everyone else in the theatre is screaming and I realized that's not true at the time I didn't realize [ __ ] I was just going for a ride but now looking back I realized whoa like I was just in a different place for me to be screaming before I even realize that I'm screaming yeah you you get to that notion you say of dis dis inhibiting people well that's that's the function of the the movie theater having a massive screen high fidelity surround sound violating your expectations with a counterintuitive narrative because when a film is formulaic and predictable and it doesn't violate your expectations and so you go uh you know what this film is so when a film does all those things when it deploys the tools of counterintuitive original storytelling massively amplified sound and sight and image comfortable chair in the dark so you're not self-conscious about how you come across when you're reacting to what's happening I'm telling you if movies were watched with the lights on people wouldn't get as immersed yeah all those things are performing the same function as what the cannabis example I was saying before of increasing your reactivity to the stimuli both from within and from without right because so your own thoughts and responses and your own capacity to absorb what's coming in cannabis is just like adding Astroglide to that so that you're you're allowing you're allowing the cinema you're allowing the cinema to literally like I can't even you but but I hate to be so so violent I love it but it's like it's like you want the film to like to penetrate you right and so and so and so any narrative anything I literally can hold on to it too when if I'm high I can't say hi am i watching the Munoz cuz you were too high I will let you dictate the dos because I would love something yeah and I don't I would obviously prefer it be internal but I don't mind exogenous I'm very open yeah if it is reliably effective yes I'm all for it and I just yeah I don't know man and I am trust me when I'm say when I say I am very open to I'm just doing it wrong super oh yeah cool look I think I think I think that the way to you to think of all of these things is as tools right like you can learn to talk without a microphone man but sometimes and I don't know if you're gonna do this on this show but I recommend getting your headphones headphones for both you and the guest it's super weird yeah in a great way some people find it weird but I was gonna say what that does is it allows you to hear yourself amplified in your own ears and that feedback loop actually makes your speech in my case more precise that's somehow the the echo effect of hearing myself here makes the nuance of every word more interesting and makes me less likely to feel pressured to come up with an original way of saying something because just the off-the-cuff quality of human language becomes enough and somehow it somehow it disarms me even more that's just a thought I had but again this is a tool right you don't need this to a bicycle right you can walk and train your calves and run and jog and do all those things you don't need the bicycle but the bicycle is just a different instrument and through riding the bicycle you interface with the world differently and I'm not saying you should be dependent on the bicycle like walk to but sometimes you want to bring the bicycle in because it's different you know and so think of think of all these things as that microphones the guitar amplifier you can play the acoustic guitar sometimes you want the electric guitar I'm not saying that cannabis or MDMA for therapy are things we need to depend on but I think they're tools that are coming out of the closet and being legitimized as effective lifestyle tools that we can deploy to help heal ourselves you know man I cannot think of a bet placed and we got a rap Sunday you gotta get the [ __ ] out of here but dude thank you so much for kicking this off and and just being you this is so much fun I cannot believe how fast the time went so dude I want to salute you and celebrate you thank you for having me it's it's an honor I am your hustle and your muscle and your scale is is beautiful and admirable and I just I just wanna I just want to thank you for including me because I often feel not impostor syndrome but there's definitely a sense somehow of like you know what if I don't deliver takeaways what if people don't you know don't learn anything other than here the spectacle that is me talking but then but then like you make me feel welcome and and I just really appreciate that dude you're welcome here anytime my friend and thanks is there anything you want to tell people about before you go yes follow me on the interwebs I always like to engage with people on my social channels I'm Facebook is great at Jason L Silva Instagram I hear is the one to focus on these days I am trying to grow that as well so at Jason L Silva on Instagram as well any a shots of on YouTube I'm gonna be producing a six episode limited run video podcast conversation thing with a couple of people I don't know how you have the stamina to do this all the time I bow down before you but I'm gonna be recording probably six conversations one of the people is gonna be Michael Pollan so keep an eye out for that where and what's it gonna be called probably flow sessions I'm gonna do podcasts and YouTube it'll be video conversations but just just six episodes but um I think it's for people who want to see me maybe unpack some of the ideas with some of the people I often quote yes that's kind of how we're picking some of the people and like that's fine who are the most let's look through my footage who are the people quote the most and let's have me then like engage with them and see if we can get somewhere deeper so that should be interesting - that will be really interesting yep count me in man thanks bro awesome beautiful thanks again thanks for having me peace out everybody later the neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create and so he chokes in his introversion that's actually interesting yeah but the neurotic and the artist are both super sensitive they both taken the world with intensity but again the neurotic cannot create so he chokes on his intro versions whereas the artist takes in the world and reworks it into his art

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 204,658

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, jasonsilva, Jason Silva tom bilyeu, conversations with tom, impact theory, transform your brain, overcome trauma, live in the moment

Id: almcckviRng

Length: 104min 13sec (6253 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019