It's an honor to be here with all of you woke humans. I feel lit up by your energy.
My heart feels open. And I'm excited to share with you
guys today. So, as Mia said, some people know me from hosting
"Brain Games" on the National Geographic Channel. Thank you. And "Brain Games" is
interesting because I kind of describe it as, like, "Sesame Street" for the brain.
But the philosophical takeaway of the show really is that our brains perceive the
world and then often misperceive the world and reality is coupled to perception.
And if you can mediate perception, well, you can change reality,
at least subjective reality, the reality that allows you to take action
in the world and exercise agency in the world and make your dreams come true
in the world, right. And so the theme of this event,
Envision Your Future, I mean, that, I got to say, it just really turns
me on, right. Because that's what we do, right. I mean, I believe we are all
"envisionaries," right, or that word from Disney, "Imagineers."
It's such a freaking exhilarating word. We are Imagineers. We have this capacity
to conjure up these delightful future possibilities, choose the most
amazing possibility, and then pull the present forward to meet
those possibilities. One of my favorite poet futurist, Mr.
Ray Kurzweil, wrote at the end of his book, "The Singularity is Near," that our
unique capacity to conjure up these virtual realities, because that's what
they are, in our imagination, these dreams, right. Which, of course,
dreams do not lack reality, they are real patterns of information.
So our capacity to conjure up these virtual realities in our minds,
combined with our modest-looking thumbs, was sufficient to engender a secondary
force of evolution that we call technology. And he says it will continue
until the entire universe is at our fingertips, until we infuse the cosmos
with sentience, literally. So back to this theme
of "envisioneering," right, envisioneering. So I'm passionate
about human imagination. I'm passionate about human creativity.
And, again, this has turned into a passion for technology and innovation,
because I believe that technology is the embodiment of human creativity
in the world. Technology is the literalization of human imagination
in the world. Technology is how we turn the human mind inside out and how we
impregnate the world with mind. The cognitive philosophers,
David Chalmers and Andy Clark, in their Extended Mind thesis,
they described technology as a scaffolding of mind that we use to extend
our thoughts, our reach, and our vision, right, and it has always been so.
There's historical precedent for this. If you go back 100,000 years to the
Savannahs of Africa, when early hominids first picked up a
stick on the ground and used that stick to reach a fruit that was on a really high
tree branch, we've been using our sticks, our tools, our instruments to extend
our reach, to transcend our boundaries, to redefine our limits.
That is what it means to be human, right. As the philosopher, Marshal McLuhan,
famously said, "We build the tools and then the tools build us."
We are in a symbiotic relationship with our tools. Our tools are extensions of our
cognitive apparatus. They are appendages of our minds.
They are our exoskeleton. Now, today, we are living in an age
of radical disruption, the world is being upended
by technological acceleration. There is a vertigo, there is a sense that
the rug is being pulled from underneath our feet. There is apprehension and there
is excitement, simultaneously, all at once. We are disoriented,
we are disjointed, we are terrified, and we are exhilarated.
And more than ever before, we need to be "envisioneers," right,
to build the tools that will build us in return. But technology and innovation has
always upended society. It has always changed the world.
It has always been a disruptive force. The difference, though,
is that the world didn't use to change within our lifespans.
Technology upended the world, but it did so over many generations.
So the world that you were born into and that you died in didn't really change
very much. That's not the case today. Today, within a year,
the world is upended. Today, within a decade, the world
is transformed, right. There are weeks when nothing...sorry.
There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen.
And that's what we're living through today. And the question, of course,
is, why? How do we begin to wrap our brains around why this vertigo,
this exhilaration has become so real, so felt, so visceral? And for me,
the great aha moment was when I stumbled upon the work of Ray Kurzweil.
He makes predictions about the future, he maps future trends,
and he builds on what the founder of Intel Corporation, Gordon Moore,
coined Moore's law. And it's this uncanny, almost like a second law of nature,
this notion that technology comes through us but not from us, and though it is
with us, it belongs not to us. Like, we are engendering this self-organizing
force in the universe, what Kevin Kelly from "Wired" magazine
calls the technium, the seventh kingdom of life. And it turns out that technological
innovation accelerates exponentially, right. Human beings evolved in a world
that was linear and that was local. And now, we live in a world that is global
and that is exponential. And so we are future blind.
We never see the future coming, because it's counterintuitive to how we
think about change. Our brain evolved in a world to immediately make an algorithmic
calculation about how far away that lion was in the Savannah and how quickly it was
going to come over and eat us, a quick linear calculation, right.
But we don't live in that world anymore. We live in a world that is global
and exponential, so we need to make a cognitive leap. We need to teach ourselves
to think exponentially. We need to envision our future,
not linearly, but exponentially. Now, a great example that Kurzweil uses
to illustrate the difference between linear change and exponential change is
this 30 steps example. I often cite it in my lectures around the
world because it's a quick way to get people to understand the implications
of exponential transformation. If you take 30 linear steps, 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, by step 30, you get to 30. Duh. But if you take the same amount
of steps exponentially, I'm not really a math guy,
but again 30 linear steps gets you to 30, 30 exponential steps gets you
to a billion, right. The same amount of steps gets you
to a billion, and technology advances as this exponential rate.
So, that is the reason why the smartphone in your pocket today is a million
times cheaper, a million times smaller, and a thousand times more powerful
than what used to be a $60-million supercomputer that was half a building
in size 40 years ago. Listen to that again.
What used to cost $60 million and be the size of this auditorium and you needed
special permission to get access to it, in 40 years, it shrunk down to a device
that fits in your pocket that is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller,
and a thousand times more powerful. Now, if that's not exponential progress,
how does this change our possibilities to impact positively in the world?
The tools to change the world are now in everybody's hands. The instruments,
new construction kits for our reality, are now in our pockets.
The folks at Singularity University like to say that a young kid in rural
Africa or Bali, with a smartphone, has better communications technology
than the head of state had, than the president had 25 years ago.
The tools to change the world are now in everybody's hands. You have more
computational capacity, the aggregate of human creativity
compressed into a device made of plastic and metal in your pocket,
than the president had 25 years ago. Steven Johnson, in his book,
"Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation," talks
about this notion of the adjacent possible. Talk about envisioning
your future, the adjacent possible is like a shadow from the future that hovers
over the present, and it provides a map of all the ways in which the present can
reinvent itself. This is my challenge to you guys today. Because these tools
and technologies, they're stand-ins, they're metaphors, they are representative
of human creativity externalized and exteriorized. David Deutsch, in his book,
"The Beginning of Infinity," talks about how if you consider the topography of a
modern city, like Manhattan or Dubai, that's a physical topography where the
forces of mind, creativity, human agency, have trumped geology.
Consciousness has trumped geology. That is not mere metaphor.
If you could time-lapse human progress, it would literally look like we're
shrinking the lag time between what we can imagine, what we can envision,
and what we can create. Now, that right there should be the anthem that
you tap into when you wake up in the fucking morning, because the opportunities
for transformation and impact are, again, exponential. This has become, for me,
a central organizing principle in my life, because it means that we can address the
grand challenges of humanity. "Because we can imagine," said
Paul Sartre, "we are free." So I like to express these ideas via video
and try to disseminate them in the interwebs, right. Memes, right,
the new replicators, ideas leap from brain to brain.
They have infectivity. They have spreading power.
And even though ideas are not made of nucleic acid, they have achieved more
evolutionary change and at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
So the first video I want to show you guys today is called To be Human is
to be Transhuman. It's trying to humanize the idea of transhumanism.
People tend to think of, like, "The Terminator" scenario or robots rising
up against us, but we are our tools and our tools are us. When I think
about transhumanity, I think about the human capacity,
the consistent human pattern of overcoming our limitations and redrawing the
boundaries of what we are. The coevolution of us and our tools is
really just how we steer our own development. So, in the back,
if you could play the first video, To be Human is to be Transhuman.
So there's a great line by Shakespeare in which he says, "We know what we are,
we know not what we may be." And in the age of exhilarating
technologies in which we extend the cognitive reach of our minds,
the perimeters of our humanness, with these extensions of self,
these exoskeletons, these technological scaffoldings, you know,
the wings of our aircrafts and the signals traveling through our smartphones,
sending our thoughts, electrified at the speed of light
across oceans of sky, we redefine and extend what it means to be human.
Edward O. Wilson says, "We have actually decommissioned
natural selection, and now we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we
wish to become." We are now the chief agents of evolution.
We have reverse-engineered the software of biology and are about to rewire and
upgrade it, redefine what it is to be a Homo sapien. Juan Enriquez uses the term
Homo evolutis, the being that evolves itself, that transforms itself, right.
Ray Kurzweil, we didn't stay in the caves. We haven't stayed on the planet.
Biology, just another membrane to be transcended. You know,
Marvin Minsky used to say, "Will robots inherit the Earth?"
Yes, they will, but they will be our children. You know, I love this idea,
because we hear the term transhumanism, and what it means to be human is
to be transhuman. We are the species that transforms and transcends. We never stop.
We always did. It's what we are. Thanks, guys. So I've had the opportunity,
the privilege to travel around the world almost for six years now,
speaking to companies and audiences about exponential change, about disruption,
addressing people's fears and trying to infect them with some optimism
as an antidote to the doom and gloom. Humans have this proclivity to think
about the future in scary terms, right. The media feeds this back to us in this
horrendous feedback loop where, if it bleeds, it leads.
But the truth is human progress is astounding, human progress is continuing.
For example, Steven Pinker, in his great TED Talk,
the Myth of Violence, and later explored in his book,
"The Better Angels of our Demons," gives us just one example of how violence
across the world has been declining for decades. You wouldn't tell from watching
the news, but the chances of a human dying at the hands of another human today are
the lowest than they've ever been in all of human history. The progress we have
made is astounding and it's continuing. It just doesn't get enough attention.
So I lecture people about this exponential progress in order to engage people
to think about how we can use these tools to address challenges
in an exponential speed, right. And people say, "Okay, fine,
I get the idea of the 30 steps, I understand it, and I buy it.
Because I've seen it." We've all seen the world change on the
back of digital technology upending the planet. But then people will contest
and say, "What about the world of biology and the world of concrete?" You know,
in order to envision our future, we need to envision the future of the
flesh and the future of the superstructures that we're building
across the world. And it turns out that biology and material science are now
becoming information technologies, too. Software really is eating the world.
And as biology and physical matter becomes information technology,
it will be subject to the same exponential advancement. So let's start with biology.
So, now, the buzzword of the day in Silicon Valley is biotechnology,
synthetic biology. Biotechnology means mastering the information processes
of biology. Because it turns out that we are made of code. Biology is a language.
We are alphabetic all the way down. Our genes are little software programs.
And we are increasingly acquiring the capacity to master and program and
reprogram the biology, the language of biology. I mean,
just think about that for a second. Gene sequencing is an example.
The speed at which we can sequence our genes has been advancing three
times faster than Moore's law, three times faster than these exponential
numbers I was listing before. The eminent physicist, Freeman Dyson,
in a wonderful essay called "The Age of Biology," envisions a near future where a
new generation of artists will be writing genomes with the fluency that
Blake and Byron wrote verses. Now, take that in for a second.
Envision your future, get out of your heads and your
limiting beliefs. We're talking about a capacity to literally steer our
own development, to reprogram our own biological language. Kevin Kelly,
from "Wired" magazine, talks about how impoverished the world
would be if we hadn't invented the technology of oil painting,
because that's a technology, in time for Van Gogh,
or if we hadn't invented the technology of the musical instrument in time
for Beethoven. What new technologies, what new genius is yet to be unfurled
on the back of the technologies? When we can write poetry
out of our genomes, what will we turn ourselves into? What kind of divinity can
we engender? We already practice biotechnology through mate selection,
all right. When you choose somebody to have children with, you are looking
for biological fitness, something that will mix well with your
genes to create something new that's better. We're just increasing our capacity
to steward this process. It's exhilarating. Don't be afraid.
Not to mention the capacity for biotechnology to eliminate
human suffering, whether it's reverse-engineering a mosquito so that it
inoculates you against malaria instead of giving it to you, whether it's radically
extending the human lifespan so that we don't have to wither and rot,
which is the existential fucking conundrum. The worm at the core,
finite beings who dream of immortality, the explicit awareness that you're a
breathing piece of defecating meat destined to die and ultimately no more
significant than a lizard or a potato is not especially uplifting. With our minds,
we can ponder the infinite, yet we're housed in these heart-pumping,
breath-gasping, decaying bodies. I didn't sign up for this. Craig Venter,
who created the first synthetic organism, an artificial lifeform, was asked,
"Do you worry that you're playing God?" And he answered brilliantly, I might add,
"Who's playing?" Envision your future. Larry Page, from Google,
founder of Google, recently created Calico, the California Life
Extension Company, a software company for biology, right. These guys get it.
The cover story in "Time Magazine," Google and the end of death, the end of cancer,
the end of Alzheimer's, the end of the deterioration of the human
spirit bounded by biology that has expired. So I'm really fucking excited
about biotechnology. Nanotechnology. Nanotechnology will allow us to pattern
atoms the way we pattern ones and zeroes in digital technology.
So, by moving around ones and zeroes, that's given us the computer revolution.
By moving around atoms, the physical world becomes a
programmable medium. The seminal book on nanotechnology
by Eric Drexler is called "Engines of Creation." "Engines of Creation," like,
lean into that. That's us on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,
as Carl Sagan used to say. This little fucking spec in the middle
of a dark nothing, and yet this little fucking spec is about to engender its own
divinity and infuse the cosmos with computation, with intelligence,
with sentience. Nanotechnology already exists in the natural world.
When you plant a seed and it turns into a tree, that seed is an information file.
It's software that writes its own hardware. It has the instructions
to self-organize into a tree. If it's allowed for the laws of physics,
if it's allowed by the laws of physics, it cannot be unnatural.
Get over this limiting belief that somehow our technological development and
innovation is unnatural. Fuck that, guys. Like, if it's allowed by the laws
of physics, if we're doing it, it's because it's natural.
And that doesn't mean that it's always good. We have ethics, we have morals,
that's fine, technology is a double-edged sword, can extend or it can amputate.
Fire can cook our food. Cooking acted as an external prosthetic
stomach that allowed us to make food more digestible, and it made the brain grow.
So cooking made us human. But fire also meant burning the village
of your enemy. Fire also means destruction on a massive scale. The alphabet,
an information technology, without which we wouldn't have poetry.
I couldn't say "I love you" without the technology of language.
But that same technology can be deployed by presidents to spread hate speech
and fear. And the weaponization of social media, well, we've seen that with the rise
of fake news. It doesn't mean it's always good. It means it can be good,
it means it extends our capacity to output our imagination and our will,
but it makes us ever more responsible for our fate. And these exponential
advancements in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and, of course,
the elephant in the room, artificial intelligence,
the creation of intelligence in another substrate, not biological intelligence,
but another kind of intelligence not bounded by biology, one that can be
upgraded the way your upgrade your smartphone every 6 to 12 months.
The creation of nonbiological minds, problem-solving cognition,
problem-solving cognitive agents that don't have our limitations.
Imagine the problems we can solve, imagine the poetry we can create.
Now, these three overlapping revolutions in Silicon Valley have forged a kind
of mythological take on the future. You've probably heard of the
term singularity. You guys heard the term singularity? Singularity is a metaphor,
first and foremost, taken from physics. It's what happens when you go through a
black hole. Laws of physics get all distorted and weird.
Great metaphor to describe where we're heading. There have been
singularities before. We've had Cambrian explosions
of novelty before. The origin of language was one such singularity.
If you draw a line on the sand, and you have here the hominids
before language and here are the hominids after language reciting poetry and singing
songs and painting in the caves, and over here, you have a bunch
of monkeys, like, throwing feces at each other. Like, language was a singularity.
Language is a tool which reveals to the mind what the mind thinks.
It is responsible for our self-awareness. It radically upended the mind and created
something new. We've had singularities, and we're about to embark on another one,
and it's up to us to leverage these tools to build the kind of world we want
to live in. "We are the music makers. And we are the dreamers of dreams," said
Willy Wonka, didn't he? To envision this future.
You can please cue the next video, Future of Us. So let's talk about the
future of us. What does that even mean, the future of us? It's a look at what
comes next, it's a look at what might be. Because today, exponentially emerging
technologies are transforming what's possible. They're helping us overcome,
transcend even biological limitations. The very rules of what it is to be human
are up for grabs. We're rewriting the software of life with biotechnology.
We're turning matter into a programmable medium with nanotechnology.
We're creating sentient minds with artificial intelligence that are not bound
by the limitations of biology. These three overlapping revolutions, GNR,
genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, together, will be leveraged to lead us
towards a black hole-like impossible to fathom singularity. It's like staring
into the sun, a moment of arousing symphonic climax, when all of mind,
leveraged and networked together, transcends its biological origins and we
become something more. People worry about the AIs and the "Them."
Well, as Kurzweil says, that's going to be us.
The future of us is ours to dream up. You guys rock, by the way.
So we're about a third of the way into this story. I've painted a science
fiction-esque future. But as Marshall McLuhan used to say,
"It's always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses
his work to prepare the grounds for it." So this is all coming,
but it means nothing unless we deploy these tools in the right way,
unless we use these tools to extend compassion, to extend our hands
to one another, to address the grand challenges of humanity,
to spread kindness and generosity and love. The rising tide must lift all ships.
Now, a while back, I came across this meme put out by folks
at Singularity University, Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, and others,
techno-optimists of the highest order, and they decided to take this notion
of messaging for the exponential age as we envision the future and we envision each
of our own desires for impacting transformation. How about we redefine the
term billionaire? Because one of the sort of incidental cool side effects of this
exponential age, especially among young people, is they all want to be the
next billionaire. They're like, "I want to start a company and be
like Mark Zuckerberg." Like, how cool to aspire to, like,
become that successful, you know? It's now, "I want to be a cowboy when I
grow up," you know. It's like, "I want to come up with an algorithm that
impacts a billion lives." Cool, become a billionaire, great.
But what if we redefine the definition and we say, "Being a billionaire is not making
a billion dollars. That's incidental. That's a side effect.
That's just the icing on the cake." Cool, buy yourself a jet, love it,
make sure it's an environmentally friendly one. But what if, in the age
of exponential technologies, being a billionaire means positively
impacting a billion lives? You know. And that's a beautiful thing, right.
It's like, duh, right? Like, bumper sticker fucking put it on the front
of your wall, like, yes, you know. Positively impacting a billion lives.
And the thing is I've now given you the understanding, I hope,
that this is not a lofty goal, that this is possible,
that this is doable, that each and every one of you,
when looking in the mirror, when you have that faint disquiet late
at night when you haven't slept and you're anxious and you don't know what your
purpose is or you think you might not be able to have enough of an impact,
think exponentially. Understand that it's not just metaphysical
lofty spiritual bumper sticker lingo, although that's all good, too.
But this is all grounded intangible fact, also. It's both. It's poetic truth built
on data-driven extrapolations. So it ticks both boxes, guys.
It's a soulful call to arms, heed the call, impact a billion lives.
It's actually possible. The tools are there.
You could take action, not just stay at home, like,
reading the secret and hoping for a transformation. Like, go do it. Thank you.
So this next... You guys rock. So this next video was shot with a
smartphone and the key idea was to show that "Hey, the tools in your pocket can be
used to spread stories." Like, if you're a musician,
make a song on your phone. If you're a filmmaker,
make a film on your phone. The fact that we have the tools
in our hands, we should use them. We show that it's possible.
So we shot this video with a smartphone, and it's called the Captains
of Spaceship Earth, and that's a Bucky Fuller line, all right,
"We are the captains of Spaceship Earth." So it celebrates this notion that we must
take responsibility to positively touch a billion lives. So if you can cue Captains
of Spaceship Earth, please. We live in a world of exponential
technological advancement. What this literally means is that we have
new construction kits for our reality, new tools with which to probe at the
adjacent possible. So consider the implications, right.
As Marshall McLuhan used to say, "First, we build the tools, and then the tools
build us." We are designed by what we have designed. There are these feedback loops
of mind, tool, and world that radically redefine our boundaries,
that radically transform what it means to be human. To be human today is
to crisscross the skies. To be human today is to create
technosocial wormholes, mind-to-mind communication that overcomes
the limits of time, the limits of space, and distance. And so, what do we do?
Well, we need to radically reach out to one another in ways that we
haven't before. There's a great line that says, "Empathy rarely extends beyond our
line of sight." In other words, if it's out of sight, it is out of mind.
But if anything, these wireless communication technologies are radically
extending our line of sight. They provide new ontological maps
of the real. They're giving us the astronaut overview effect.
We are seeing the big picture. We are seeing that we are the captains
of spaceship Earth. And what shall we do? We need to extend our hands
to one another. We've never had such tools to overcome all of the limitations
of our humanity. We have the power, we have the will, we have the capacity,
the creative capacity to overcome our limits. And so, today,
billions of us linking to one another, creating a global node, a global brain.
What is the new definition of billionaire? The new definition of billionaire is he
who will positively affect the lives of a billion people. He or she who will reach
out and say, "I will positively affect the lives of a billion people."
This should be our goal. This is our responsibility.
Here's our chance. Thanks, guys. So we've talked about innovation,
we've talked about creativity, we've talked about imagination,
we've talked about envisioning our future. But there is one other thing that gets
in our way, ourselves. So I have also a keen interest
in mental health. Because in spite of our radical progress, and there has been
radical progress, we are also living in a time of unprecedented mental distress.
We have anxiety and depression at epidemic levels. We have suicide numbers
on the rise. We have people feeling trapped in a kind of psychosis
of excessive rumination. Excessive rumination,
what Jamie Wheal calls the cul-de-sacs and error messages of a brain that has become
too ordered. Michael Pollan, in his book "How to Change Your Mind,"
for example, talks about deploying psychedelics, technologies of ecstasy,
to amend the brains that have become too ordered, too structured,
that have become trapped by an ego that has become overactive,
the powerful tyrant, right. This is a huge fucking deal,
and we need a revolution in mental health to address it. Some of the most exciting
research happening right now has been stewarded by MAPS, the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies, Mr. Rick Doblin at the helm there,
has actually convinced the FDA to allow them to do stage III breakthrough therapy
designations for using MDMA to treat people who have posttraumatic stress
disorder of the highest level that has not been amenable to conventional medication.
And the results that they've gotten are something like an 80% success rate.
People who take the MDMA in these controlled guided environments no longer
meet the criteria for PTSD after just one or two sessions. Johns Hopkins University
is doing the same with psilocybin, the active ingredient
in psychedelic mushrooms. Two therapists in the room carefully
screened patients who have depression that has not responded
to conventional medications, have a singular mystical experience while
under the mushrooms, and they are absolved of their ills.
And their status checked 6 months later, 12 months later, and still free
of depression, free of anxiety. We're on the cusp of a revolution
in designing better minds, right. Now, look, it's not just about disintegrating
the ego, right. Michael Pollan says, "The ego got the book written," you know.
You need agency, you need will, you need ego. But an ego can
become metastasized. When you think you know it all,
when you're jaded, when you're cynical, when you're trapped by these cul-de-sacs
and error messages, by the inner critic that has become overactive,
by the traumas of your past that you can't let go of, by the stories.
Because we are autobiographical beings, right, we are storytelling animals.
But when our stories, when the stories that you tell yourself
about yourself are no longer serving you, that's the beginning of a personal crisis.
It's time to change the story. So I've developed a keen interest
in altered states of consciousness and how the mediation of consciousness can be used
to lead us towards breakthroughs of the self, cathartic illumination,
enlightenment, right. Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal wrote a
seminal book on the topic called "Stealing Fire," that's another assigned
reading list, wonderful book about the altered states economy,
the length that people will go to change their perception, to change
their cognition, to see things a little bit more clearly. Michael Pollan said
it brilliantly, he says that the brain is essentially like an artificial
intelligence program, right. It takes in data from the present,
compares it with data from the past, and uses it to make predictions
about the future. And it does this automatically all the time.
And so our baseline is a default of low-level anxiety, a consistent
future tense, very rarely in the present. See, on the one hand,
this capacity to imagine our future, to leave the present and imagine what
might be is a gift, but it can also be a curse when it robs of ever being in the
moment and never smelling the flowers. Because if we can't see the world in a
grain of sand or heaven in a wildflower, or if we can't hold infinity in the palm
of our hands, if we can't hold eternity in an hour, like Blake said,
then what the fuck are we building anything for? Because, you know,
if we're never here to enjoy any of it, damn. So this is big.
Consciousness is a new space for exploration. So Michael Pollan says that
one of the things that commends intense experiences, transformational experiences,
psychedelic experiences, even travel and beauty and love,
is that these kinds of experiences, they block all signals forwards
and backwards, right. They get you out of thinking always of the
future and out of always ruminating from the past and instead hurl you into the
flow of the present that is literally wonderful. Wonder being the byproduct
of exactly that sense of unencumbered first sight or virginal noticing to which
the adult brain has closed itself. So you get to see the world as if
through the eyes of a child. You open yourself up to the miraculous
once more. And that's intoxicating. This notion of flow,
this is perhaps the greatest state of consciousness to aspire to.
So, for those that don't know, flow is a state of consciousness in which
you feel your best and you perform your best. It's ecstatic.
It's characterized by a sense of selflessness, when you're in the zone,
when you're in the pocket, when you're the jazz musician who's tapped
into the perfect space, right. When you're in flow,
your sense of self vanishes. The inner chatter disappears,
and you experience that as liberation. You're free from the monkey mind.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is responsible for the constant self-editing
that constantly keeps us, gets in our way, right. Other people say,
"Get out of your own way." Everything you want is on the other side
of fear. Stop second guessing yourself. But when you're in flow,
that immediately goes quiet. Your sense of time disappears.
So you're free from the tyranny of time. You're free from the tick-tock, tick-tock,
tick-tock, that everything is passing. You're in forever now. It's intoxicating.
There's this sense of effortlessness, right. When you're in flow,
you don't feel the labor. Everything is just flowing.
Whether it's your creativity or your work or your relationship, just flowing.
You're surfing that wave, and it's magnificent.
And there's a sense of richness. You get information,
you process more data, you get more insights,
you're more resilient, you're optimized. The seminal writer on flow,
his name is Csikszentmihalyi, wrote a book on the subject.
He called it "Beyond Boredom and Anxiety." See, the problem with human beings is we
tend to oscillate between boredom and anxiety. But there is this state beyond,
and you know it when you're there. I feel it sometimes when I give my talks.
I know you feel it when you sing your favorite songs, when you make love
with somebody you really have chemistry with. You're in flow.
You're playing that instrument, you lose all sense of self,
all sense of time, everything is awesome. You feel the pull of now.
You feel the pull of purpose. You're tapped into your passion.
So flow is huge. So we can't build these tools, we can't architect this future,
we can't envision all these possibilities unless we figure out how to harness our
minds now, today, because mental health is a real big fucking deal.
So this next video talks a little bit about flow and what it feels like.
Please show. People talk about happiness. Certainly, the self-help section in the
bookstore is full of books telling you how to tap into that happiness,
how to be happy, how to think and grow rich, so on, and so forth.
But what I think is ultimately more interesting, my friends,
is those states north of happy. Now, Jamie Wheal, Steven Kotler are the
co-founders of the Flow Genome Project, and the Flow Genome Project aims
to deconstruct the elusive and mystical flow state. Now, in the field
of positive psychology, a flow state is a state of consciousness
in which you feel your best and you perform your best. Think of the athlete
in the zone, think of the jazz musician in the pocket, think of the surfer catching
that perfect wave. And these states of consciousness in which you feel your best
and you perform your best are characterized by the acronym STER,
which stands for selflessness, the self vanishes, timelessness,
your sense of time dilates and dissipates, effortlessness, the activity just kind
of flows magically, and information richness, there's this feeling of a
high-res download of realization and possibility that seems to kind of emerge
from the world around you. So, again, selflessness, timelessness,
effortlessness, and information richness. It's kind of like high-definition reality
in slow-mo, and these states of consciousness have always been elusive.
They're kind of like quasi-mystical states of ekstasis, as the Greeks describe them.
And so Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler's new book, "Stealing Fire," alluding,
of course, to Prometheus who stole the fire from the gods, is about the
fact that, finally, for the first time in history, ekstasis is understandable,
ekstasis is reproducible. Flow can be had on tap.
Ask not what the world needs, ask instead what makes you come alive.
Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive. And this book,
"Stealing Fire," is going to bring that to you, folks. I'm very excited.
I love Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler. Flow Genome Project,
mystical states on tap for everyone. Let's democratize nirvana,
let's democratize ekstasis, and let's upgrade the world.
Just a little end note on that notion. I remember my buddy, Jamie Wheal,
who wrote that book had given a TEDx Talk at Burning Man. It was called From Altered
States to Altered Traits: Hacking the Flow State.
And it was a beautiful notion because he basically described our self-systems
as kind of colanders. We're like these leaky buckets.
And so we need this constant flow to be poured in. Because otherwise,
we're just bleeding, and then we go back into ourselves and
we're like, "Fuck, like, what happened? I had an exalting moment yesterday, now,
I'm bummed," you know. And so he says, "We become blissed junkies."
We get hooked on the state instead of raising the stage. And so he proposes,
through the work in the Flow Genome Project, multidiscipline areas approach
to figuring out what they called the four forces of ecstasy, psychology, technology,
neurobiology, and pharmacology. So it's bringing it all together,
because all of these fields are advancing all of the time, right.
Psychology, technology, neurobiology, and pharmacology, the four forces
of ecstasy that are allowing us to look underneath the hood and figure out the
cycles of flow, how it works, get a better understanding of what are the
flow triggers, and how we can optimize to have more flow more often, right.
The work of the Neurohacker Collective does a lot of the same research as well.
And the key idea then is, if we could change our self-systems
from leaky buckets into chalices, how might we render ourselves whole and
how might we render ourselves holy? And so this is what we can aspire to.
So, in my closing thoughts now, I'd like to talk about the subject of awe.
In the introduction, Mia so kindly referred to the fact that my
YouTube channel is called Shots of Awe, and that's pretty much because, for me,
awe is the holy grail, awe is the "mindgasm," awe is
cognitive ecstasy. You know, Carl Sagan used to say,
"Understanding is a kind of ecstasy." Awe is revelation. Awe is
mystical rupture. Awe is the cosmic download. Awe is an exhilarating
neuro-storm of intense intellectual pleasure. Awe is what the French
call frisson, right, the skin orgasm, when the hairs on the back of your neck
stand up when you're exposed to a beautiful song or a beautiful smile or you
see yourself reflected in the eyes of a lover or a movie scene lifts you up and
carries you away to somewhere better. And it turns out that there's been all
this research in positive psychology on the subject of awe and wonder.
Researchers in Berkeley and Stanford, they described awe as an experience,
again, of such perceptual vastness, right, such perceptual expansion that the mental
models of the world that we normally rely upon, those algorithms,
that autopilot that allows us to get through the day, are forced to accommodate
themselves to new data. So, all of a sudden, the been-theres and
seen-that's of the adult mind get obliterated. And it can be,
whether it's exposure to, like, the Grand Canyon for the first time or the
birth of a child or MDMA experience or sex for the first time, like,
an experience basically of awe, it jolts you. It cracks you open.
It lets in the light, where "Once, I was blind, now I can see."
It's also been described as opiated adjacency. It's what it's all about.
But it turns out that these experiences of awe, of course, they're transitory
enchanted moments. F. Scott Fitzgerald talked about this when he
talked about when humans like from Europe went to the New World for the first time
and the feeling of awe they must have felt when they saw this virgin land,
supposedly, right, what they did afterwards, of course, was horrible.
But that first moment of just seeing this thing, I mean, it's like,
when was the last time? That was the last moment, right,
short of us making a starship and going to a new planet. That feeling of awe
and wonder, transitory enchanted moment in which man must have held his breath,
compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired,
face to face, perhaps, for the last time in history,
with something commensurate to our capacity for wonder. Like, fucking-A,
like that's awe. And so, even though it's a transitory experience,
after the awe passes, right, like after the awe, you're left
with an afterglow of increased feelings of well-being, increased feelings
of compassion, and increased feelings of creativity. Not to mention,
it acts as an anti-inflammatory on your organism and on your body.
So blowing your own mind is good for you. It's medicinal, it's therapeutic.
Yeah. So, imagine what we could do with virtual reality modules,
in combination with legal cannabis, putting people in awe machines, you know,
making people have mind orgasms, like once a week, "I'm going
to mind orgasm. I'll see you later." The future of our well-being could be
so magnificent. We could transcend ourselves. We could overcome the ego.
We could heal ourselves of our fractures or learn to reframe those fractures and
love them instead. So this is the last video I want to leave you with,
and it's about virtualized surrender. It's about submitting to awe.
Because if you cannot submit, you cannot die, and if you cannot die,
you cannot be reborn. So please play the Ego Death.
Let's talk a little bit about experiences of virtualized surrender, right.
Psychologists often tell us that it is in the act of letting go that you find
out who you are. The prospect of ego death, however, the prospect of any kind
of virtualized surrender feels like dying but only to those who resist it.
Those who eventually come to realize that there is no such thing as death, at least,
that psychological dying into the moment is but an illusion, the last hurrah,
the last resistance before you hurl yourself into the abyss and realize that
it's a featherbed. You know, Terence McKenna talked about this.
He said, "This is the secret, this is what all of the shamans,
the professors, the wise men, this is what they understood.
This is the alchemical gold. This is how magic is done.
You hurl yourself into the abyss and you realize that it's a featherbed."
Our society today is constructed, we know this, in a way where many people
are afflicted with a pathological amount of anxiety and depression.
It's what Jamie Wheal calls 21st Century normal, this fibrillating anxious state
from an overactive ego stemming from a misfiring default mode network,
which is the autobiographical mind which has essentially metastasized
into something that is a kind of autoimmune disorder of the self.
And the excessive rumination and self-consciousness that characterize
as depression and anxiety both come from a mind that has become too ordered,
too rigid, too hypervigilant. It's like we're all living with a
perpetual micro-PTSD. And what the research tells us,
and this has informed so much of my creative life, what the research now tells
us is that, in safe containers and with the proper precautions deployed,
the experience of ecstatic surrender, the experience of ego death,
what Jamie Wheal calls the bliss fuck crucifixion, is actually where all the
healing is done, right. It is when you die into the moment that
you realize that all your fears are unfounded. You come to see that everything
you want is on the other side of fear, right. It's like that David Fincher movie,
"The Game," reveals to us in that line that says, quoting the Bible,
John chapter 12 verse something, "Whereas once I was blind, now I can see."
It is hard to put language to these instances of ecstatic surrender, right?
Hurling yourself into the abyss and realizing that it's a featherbed arrives
you at a domain that exists outside of time. The self experiences this as a
liberation from the incessant inner chatter. We are free to be ourselves.
We become infinite is what it feels like. A transitory enchanted moment in which we
hold our breath, compelled into aesthetic contemplations we neither understand nor,
perhaps, even desire, face to face with something commensurate
to our capacity for wonder. We experience afresh the hardly bearable
ecstasy of direct energy exploding on our nerve endings. We recontextualize the self
as a marvelous conduit in a timeless hole from which molecules and meanings flow
from neurons to nebula and back again. We see the world in a grain of sand,
and we see heaven in a wildflower. We hold infinity in the palms of our hand.
We hold eternity in an hour. And then the moment will pass,
and all contradictions are reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods.
And what do we find after these enchanted moments? What do we find after these
moments of opiated adjacency when we spill over, when we overflow,
when the aircraft open so that the light gets in? We find that people report
increased feelings of well-being in their baseline reality, increased feelings
of compassion, increased feelings of creativity, increased feelings of joy,
a sense of having glimpsed in the wake of truth, a sense of having tapped
into the infinite, a feeling of communion with the cosmos, an ontological awakening,
a spiritual experience of forceful reckoning with what is,
a mainlining of space and time through the optic nerve. We become what we behold,
and we behold the infinite. Miguel de Unamuno wrote in "Tragic Sense
of Life," "Eternity, eternity, nothing is real that is not eternal."
So the question remains, right. We know the way, we know the path,
we know what we must do to heal ourselves. How might we turn our passing
illuminations into abiding light? "How might we turn our self-systems
from leaky buckets, right, colanders full of holes,
into chalices," said Jamie Wheal, "How might we render ourselves whole?
How might we render ourselves holy?" This has become the central preoccupation
of my life. Thank you, guys. You guys are so nice. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Oh, so nice. Thank you. Thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
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