Our Best Selves | Jamie Wheal | SU Global Summit

[Music] [Music] so I have found myself in an impromptu 24 hour experiment and and I'd like to invite you guys to join me in it so I've spent the last week way up in the mountains above 9,000 feet in the Wasatch in Utah off the grid with no phone service and when I came back down the mountain yesterday to hop on a flight flight literally to get here just in time for the dinners last night I found my thumb starting to twitch and I reached into my pocket and I actually hit I said hmm I said I said Apple news I wonder and I clicked on and I saw a bunch of headlines and I and I stopped myself and then I scroll over to my Atlantic Monthly app and I clicked on that little bad boy and I saw a bunch of very straight like the Atlantic normally kind of has the sort of vibe of the week kind of thing and I saw the headlines and it's all about all right identity politics I think huh what's going on here and then I clicked on a couple of my social feeds and I see post you know outraged postings testaments values and I didn't click on any of them so I am actually one week out of time right now and because as soon as I get off this stage I hop in a lift and I go straight back to the airport and straight back to those mountains to actually lead 70 folks many many peers and colleagues of you guys off the grid in a drop deep retreat for planning the future I'm staying off this puppy so I'm gonna invite you guys / us you guys / guilt you guys into doing the same so can we all just take out our phones go on hold them up hold them up testify people hold them up there we are every uh okay now slide those sons-of-bitches into airplane mode for 15 minutes okay truly truly hahahahaha yes truly all right yeah be kidding me no way yes no yes and here's the deal I will put skin in the game myself there are no there are no pretty pictures for me this is the first and only time in my life I have ever given a public talk without a slide deck so that's how much I'm putting it on the game right because we at great expense and investment of all of our time and resources are here together now in this space can we do that for 15 minutes because what I noticed is that and what I found is that in that week that I was up in these mountains busting my ass by the way so it wasn't like lounging I actually found myself unwinding day by slice slightly by day and what I was unwinding from was the relentless always on stimulation of our lives these days and what did this felt like to me especially I mean I you know am I the only one or did it feel like the world kind of lurched off its axis about 12 months ago right it was right around kind of the political conventions it was brexit it was all that and things just haven't exactly seen the same since we're sort of living in this weird comic book version of reality where that you know the villains are 12 my stash is and where the heroes and and there's tons of damsels in distress right and and the pace of this is breaking us it's almost like if anybody's been on a farm or a ranch and you've seen like electric fences you know and back when you're kids you're always tempted to grab them because you would see what it'll do you know and you grab those things and what happens with the electricity right it contracts your muscles and you can't actually let go of the fence and that feels like that's where we are these days it's just fiber optics between our hands instead of barbed wire and the statistics back this up right the World Health Organization has now established that more of us globally take our own lives than war tornadoes earthquakes floods famines and plagues combined we have become our own worst enemy in fact the pressures of trying to survive and thrive in the world as we know it and live it today it's so great that a million of us a year stopped to step off the mortal coil rather than continue to try and face it and fight it and there have been many think pieces in this last year's in particular about this notion of diseases of despair right how it particularly for displaced middle Americans demographics typically 40 and up often without college degrees frequently wandering I mean here we are at SU right talking about this bleeding edge of future disruption they've been disrupted they don't see a world where they have a part in it and they're dying of despair they're dying of these diseases of despair as they are called but maybe maybe they're not diseases at all maybe they're symptoms symptoms of a larger problem that we can't quite put our fingers on and what that problem might be is that we our brains and our minds and our bodies aren't built for this millions of years of evolution right slow paced acute present embodied very low bandwidth realities very high consequence for not being present in this exact moment and now we're facing a world where cities from all of human history until 2012 every bit of information ever created the at the libraries at Alexandria right every song every story every Scripture and sacred text all of it from the dawn of time until 2012 we now generate that much data every 48 hours so we are drowning in information and starving for motivation Oh somebody somebody gets a red flag where was that little phone going goodness gracious uh-hum and what's happening is three things volume what we just talked about velocity how fast it's coming at us right and complexity because what's happened between the twentieth century in the 21st and I know you guys are all deeply vested in exactly this not to crack is that we've moved from complicated problems how do you do Kaizen in a factory and get a you know a million cars off with good quality control and a good price point how do you get the trains to run on time you know thank you the Swiss right how do we solve for lots of moving parts but not that much ambiguity right ultimately there's that there's there's an app for that there's a manual for that but what we've done is we've stepped across that chasm and we've now entered the world of complex problems and if you attempt to continue to solve complex problems with merely complicated process you create wouldn't you know it more complications so even think about Bill Gates's malaria initiative they ran the numbers they did the analysis they concluded that malaria and that's best bang for a buck on saving lives and sub-saharan Africa period let's go do that makes great sense right thank you Bill and Melinda and yet you suddenly drop you know you drop in from mortality you drop many of those deaths what do you get you get population growth you get increased ecological pressure you get internecine warfare you get collapse of unstable states and you ultimately end up net negative on human suffering even though the actual intention was wholly positive right that's trying to manage a complex problem with a complicated analytical solution right and so and so what that leaves us with and the technical term for those complex problems is wicked problems and I'm sure you guys you know you deal with these in our world and wicked problems are not actually solvable by singular binary rational logic and what that leaves us with is is a snafu this is the issue all of the problems we face today are wicked none of them submit to singular binary solutions so rather than these diseases of despair being something over in the kind of humanitarian and social services space and these wicked problems being over here and kind of the techno utopian disrupter space might we consider them flip sides of the same coin and if we do how on earth can we begin to solve these wicked problems and interestingly the simplest is to think Roger Martin at the Rotman School of Business up in Canada wrote a great book if anybody hasn't read it super encouraging it's called the opposable mind and his premise after surveying AG Lafley at Procter & Gamble Martha Graham creatives and leaders and innovators across disciplines realize that what these folks do that virtually or very few others are consistently able to pull off is that they are able to hold creative creatively hold the tension between dynamic and opposing ideas and that sounds really straightforward that sounds like the fodder for good Gillian's of dollars of management consulting workshops and off-site retreats hey I'll get to our innovative place but reality is is that's not a skillset it's actually a state of mind and that state of mind is actually tunable today now anthropologists have a very specific term for this they classify cultures by whether those cultures are mono phasic or polyphasic and that's just a complex way of saying one channel of consciousness or many channels of consciousness right and if you think back to most traditional societies they are polyphasic they recognize and validate dreams premonitions possessions trances visions you name it epileptic seizures they're like well what did you need if you come in too near the kitchen you know in in rural Mexico fifty years ago you say abuela I just had this dream there's like no shut up that's just your unconscious projections of your unresolved issues with your mother have your cereal right now they say they say what what did grandfather say to you oh let's act on that okay so how did we end up in this monophasic culture well you know you wind back the clock you know and blame it on the French right so so the Enlightenment Descartes all right cookie toe ergo sum I think therefore I am give me five senses give me ration reason and empiricism right let's get rid of superstition let's get rid of all of those things and let's create all right this rational binary logical world and it worked beautifully I mean let's give full credit we would not be here in a climate control high-tech building community city we wouldn't be able to do any of the things that we do without that rational binary logical prefrontal cortical self so so let's you know give it up for the PFC okay but right no we never built an off switch we forgot to build an off switch and mark Leary at Duke who wrote who wrote a book called the curse of self literally describes that pernicious problem we turned on this hyper self-aware always-on hamster wheel mind of ours and particularly is that in the house now intersected with this information ridiculous super high where we all just get flattened on a daily basis it's killing us so the possibility is what's happened to our dial and is it completely rusted shut stuck on this one channel or do we have the ability to like kind of just rock it loose Lube it up a bit and regain and reclaim the full spectrum of consciousness and awareness that it will allow us to begin taking a crack at the wicked problems that we are all facing and that everyone in this room is is committed to solving so you know that's a hell of a setup right for the yes fortunately right now but there is an answer which is yeah fortunately right now there might be and what's happened is that there have been four overlapping socio-economic forces that are literally crossing right now I mean maybe for the last three to five years and hopefully for the next five to ten and those four forces are psychology neurobiology technology and pharmacology or you could call the four forces of ecstasy and X ptosis just meaning back to the ancient Greeks any experience that lets one step outside one's self and that self being that rational binary logical waking state and the reason those four are interacting so effectively is that festival neurobiology right we have the ability F MRIs scanners EEG s all the smart tech that's out in the exhibit hall right amazing incredible stuff and what is allowing us to do is actually map and model non-ordinary states of consciousness that's Johns Hopkins professor Stan graphs term and OSC are just are basically anything other than contemporary 21st century normal and rather and who had access who had access to these states in the past it was it was mystics and madmen and you couldn't really take either of their words for it so now with neurobiology we can say oh when you are experiencing oneness in fact Andy Newberg at Penn and you know has pioneered the entire field of neuro theology and he is mapped and model a multitude I mean Franciscan nuns Tibetan meditators right people having you know Joan of Arc who you know famously you know may have may well have experienced temporal lobe epilepsy right we can decouple the subjective experiences from the actual mechanisms of action it lets us strip out the mythologies why this thing is what it means how many times you're supposed to spin around three times and say you're being you say you know your grandma's name backwards before something's supposed to happen we can strip out the mythologies we can keep the technologies psychology does something similar it stretches our realm of who we think we can be it gives us more permission to roam think about even for instance just the simple fact of how much time we spend in happening alter-egos on the lowest least interesting level our social media profiles whose my insta self oh I'm always having fabulous brunches you can always see my toes pointed up at the end of a lounge chair on the edge of an infinity pool right that's me not really but that's me so we inhabit an ersatz version of ourselves doing that comic-con fairies Burning Man you name it right people are creating not just and in the past if you really weren't success with that you'd be institutionalized or at least in for some stiff therapy bells Oh for the indefinite future now people are expanding their sense of self to the point where creating and inhabiting and interacting with others doing the same completely fictive avatars is okay right amazing alright and and and the last two technology I think speaks for itself but the simplest point about technology is it's taking sync what used to be singular non-ordinary experiences the classic mountaintop epiphany right of Moses or Joseph Smith or you know fill in the blanks it takes those and scales them now at Electric Daisy Carnival you have three hundred thousand candy flipping high schoolers all right all dropping in we're kick with the most intensive sound systems light media all this kind of stuff getting dropped into a collective and coherent group state now what do they do with it and made that it doesn't even figure out how to pick up their trash at the end of the night but those the tech is that the proof of concept that there is there and so is the market and pharmacology it is also sort of equally self-evident but what pharmacology is doing now particularly in the realm of serotonin system into Interactive's aka psychedelics right what is happening now is you're not just back to the Summer of Love notion right you're not just having people just bum down compounds and seeing what happens you're actually getting to connect this with the neurobiology so Roman caja at Harris the Imperial College in London has been running studies on MDMA LSD and I believe psilocybin but what they're doing is they're saying hey here's these huge you know 3 Tesla fMRI machine their clunky as hell you can't put them on a backpack you can't wait and pop them out when something interesting happens right you have to go to the lab schedule an appointment cram yourself into this tube and dural the clicking and clacking and hope that you can also get into an interesting state while you're in it well pharmacology Prime's that pump lets us do that and do it in conjunction with incredibly high resolution imaging what that has done is in three years of their studies it has advanced our notion of self and consciousness more than the last hundred years of philosophical pontificating and what they found is that in fact when you juice the serotonin system and out in our brains you end up with two things one is you end up with certain networks basically a self-awareness is not a singular location there's not a zip code for it it is actually a network effect generated by a bunch of different connections and self reflections and feedback loops in our brains that X sort of give rise to mind if you knock out a few of those nodes is this like sort of Luke Skywalker and the you know fighting the Death Star trying to get the shield's down if you knock out one or two the whole thing powers down and we end up with selflessness we ended up with peace we end up with the absence of our inner critic and simultaneously not not only does that happen but other parts that normally don't connect start talking to each other you end up with amplified pattern recognition increased problem-solving right heightened ability to start taking a crack at some of those wicked problems and this has been backed up by a bunch of different studies across a lot of different domains including James Fadem and anybody familiar with James Fatima's research on micro dosing seems like half of the Silicon Valley engineers that we ever meet with it speak with kind of you know come up to us after afterwards like hey talk to me about microdose what's that my whole team's doing it you know and this kind of thing so we have that but that's easy all right that's just simple pharmacological priming what's interesting is that in the same way in fact I think Peter Diamandis has talked about this the virtualization of stuff you know how the how on our phones right at 8:00 our cameras at 8:00 our GPS is it 8:00 our rolodex is right it just continues to eat stuff and end up on the same phone as bits and bytes well in the same way our understanding of human consciousness and tuning states of consciousness has gone from pharmacology the obvious blunt instrument now to technology the muse headbands the EEG headsets the HIV feedback right and to the point where we will have effectively sort of they will become virtualized and it will just become part of our new operating system and what that is allowing us to do is is crack the code and and so those four forces technology psychology pharmacology and neurobiology have given us a map of human awareness and the neurobiological correlates and once we have that right and what we what we would call the genome of flow right what are the core building blocks that allow this we know we know a bunch of new and interesting things the first is that is that 21st century normal has a predictable and consistent signature and almost all of us are in it right now unless you're sort of nodding off in your post coffee post breakfast funk all right and what that is looks like it looks like relatively high neuroelectrical signature in the beta range it looks like a steady kind of drip drip of baseline stress chemicals norepinephrine and cortisol it tends it looks like it looks like a catabolic heart rate rhythm and variability so sort of all over the place a little bit jaggedy like a stock market and and generally posture shoulders rolled chest hunched diaphragm mildly collapsed and about third of our lungs poor air exchange with carbon dioxide pooling in the bottom of them right so unless we can at least hack that you everybody everybody ready roll your shoulders back sit up straight take a deep breath yeah so we just busted that son of well done but that's normal for us think I mean everything we do is forwards and roll everything right if anybody I would highly recommend just as a recursive as as a remedial measure go to a Brazilian jiu-jitsu class right you put your entire game is on your back writing you this entire back half of our body we disavow we pay no attention to it if you learn to move from the right it's a powerful upgrade in bringing half of our biology back online so if we know that that's what 21st century normal looks like and that's the signature and not much happens there and it can't solved the wicked problems we have in oh by the way is leading us to despair depression and suicide one in four of us are on psychiatric medicines maybe we want to get the hell out of Dodge right maybe and interestingly the other half of that matrix what would be the right-hand side if I had my supercool slide up here right weed is very different we slow our brainwaves down we take them from far spinning beta down into alpha potentially even into theta we engage nitric oxide which it occurs in in popular society in general two locations one is in GNC for all those muscle builder pumper guys right they use the nitric oxide because it's the phase our dilator but so do those old Bob Dole guys with little blue pills so if anybody's wanting a juice of just now honey this is just this is just for my flow hacking you can tell them and what happens then is the nitric oxide is a neurotransmitter that flushes all of the stress chemicals ever on our bodies and brains and they get replaced with performance-enhancing pain relieving pleasure producing neuro chemicals what we would call the big six so norepinephrine is on the start can actually serve dual purposes right too much of it all the time steady drip drip kills us right but enough and the right situation to make me alert and aware dilate my pupils shunt my blood stream Jack my heart rate I'm ready for action right so norepinephrine dopamine endorphins serotonin oxytocin and an and amide right they all do various good things which we won't go into right now but I'm sure many of you are familiar with many of them so if we learn to slow down our heart rate create get a greater coherence more variability right we become more resourceful if we don't have over jacked neuro chemistry we become more present our pattern recognition goes up our ability to make lateral connections between two things your chocolate in my peanut butter hey Reese's penis pieces alright the ability to do these things goes up significantly and it doesn't just go up it doesn't just go up a little bit it doesn't just go up 50% or even a hundred percent the studies that had been done at DARPA the study's been done with McKinsey the studies that have been done with the Navy SEALs I'm a Special Operations community right we're looking at numbers ranging from 200% on the low end all the way up to capping at 490 to 500 percent on the high end so if we want to unlock what's best in us what's possible in our teams in our organizations and how can we solve for the problems of tomorrow that is our potential ways not that we're trying to train the skill of being able to solve wicked problems there is no such thing we need to be able to cultivate the states that put us with all of our talents all of our gifts all of our training all of our dedication all of our initiatives into a place where we can hold more than one browser window open at a time without crashing the software and you know it's it's it's fascinating it's 50 years ago in this very city probably right around this block right was the Summer of Love and you know just graced Harvard professor Timothy Leary who Richard Nixon once tagged the most dangerous man in America right why did he say that because Leary so famously in flippantly said tune in turn on drop out and that might might have worked 50 years ago it does not anymore there is no where to drop out to we're in this we are on this little blue marble together so what if we flip that on its head what if we tuned out the digital distractions what if we turn off our tools our devices our leashes and what if we drop in through our bodies to ourselves to our relationships to our communities and to the work to all of our work to get this done in time thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Singularity University Summits

Views: 25,524

Keywords: SU, Global Summit, Singularity, Singularity University, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, tech, technology, future, Jamie Wheal, Stealing Fire, human performance, performance, humanity, prosperity, abundance, earth, adventure, planet, nature

Id: koHeGZn1p9M

Length: 27min 22sec (1642 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2017