JASON SILVA: I still like to believe
that that's actually a myth.
JAMIE WHEAL: Which?
JASON SILVA: That people don't actually die.
[LAUGHS]
That we actually won't.
It's something that happens to other people.
You know what I mean?
JAMIE WHEAL: I think that is the great mellowing of life,
isn't it?
JASON SILVA: So on "Shots of Awe," one of the things
that we try to do is summarise these kind
of ecstatic realizations.
I stumble upon something fascinating,
and I want to explain it, and share it, and kind of hold it
in stasis.
And this guy right here, my friend Jamie Wheal,
is the co-founder the Flow Genome Project.
And Jamie, you did a TEDx talk called "From Altered States
to Altered Traits." and it's all about hacking the flow state.
You are also creating a flow Dojo,
which is helping people reverse engineer their flow states,
and create these ecstatic states of mind in which people perform
their best and feel their best.
So tell us about some of these tools and techniques
that you're implementing in the flow Dojo with Steven Kotler.
What are you guys doing?
JAMIE WHEAL: Sure, well, what we're teeing up
is the world's first research and training
facility dedicated to ultimate human performance,
or flow states.
And the premise is what would happen
if we took the hands-on science museum like the Exploratorium
here in San Francisco, with all the sort of kinetic exhibits
the kids get to monkey with and learn about bigger forces,
and apply it to, basically, kinetics--
our bodies-- and sort of this notion
that as we train our bodies and brains to work really well
together, then our waking cells get
to experience more accurate information processing, greater
resourcefulness and emotional resilience,
and generally amplify pattern recognition, perspective
holding, and, therefore, more increasingly sophisticated
and accurate decision making.
JASON SILVA: Flow states-- you feel your best
and you perform your best.
Elite athletes when they're in the zone, jazz musicians when
they just literally go crazy and they're just improvising,
channeling almost.
Now, these states are associated with
these brief, transitory instances
that we get to peek at Nirvana.
But what you're saying is that now, through advances
in technology, psychology, neurobiology,
and pharmacology-- drugs, right-- we now
have the capacity to back-door access these flow states,
so that they're not haphazard, fleeting, ephemeral states,
bu that they become part of the human experience
on a daily basis.
JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah, for sure.
And so that's the reverse engineer part.
JASON SILVA: OK
JAMIE WHEAL: So in the past, how we
would experience it would be I seeking a flow state.
I might be lucky, have one by dumb luck or design.
But either way, I'd have it.
And it would come and go.
And then I'd come back to me.
JASON SILVA: Right.
JAMIE WHEAL: Right.
JASON SILVA: Easier than ever to get high, as hard as it's
always been to stay that way.
JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah, the perennial ennui.
Curses, back here again.
JASON SILVA: Brief dopamine hit, back here again.
I've orgasmed and now it's over.
JAMIE WHEAL: What a moment of clarity and regret
that is for so many.
JASON SILVA: Clarity, regret and despair.
JAMIE WHEAL: But like the evolutionary impulses
cease to intoxicate me and hijack my motor skills.
JASON SILVA: I cannot stabilize ecstasy.
The goosebumps are gone as quickly as they can.
But you're talking about literally
creating the conditions where you could just
keep surfing that wave.
Aren't we acting almost Promethean?
I mean your own work with Steven Kotler talks
about stealing fire.
Like, are human beings prepared?
Should they be allowed to know the secret songs that
orchestrate the universe of the neurochemistry
of lived experience?
Do we get to tweak and upgrade subjectivity?
Because that's what you're talking about, right?
JAMIE WHEAL: Tweaking and upgrading subjectivity,
yeah, I would say, and add a multi perspectival
in front of that subjectivity, and I
think you're off to the races.
JASON SILVA: And so how do we do it?
Flow Dojo-- you design spaces that design us back.
I mean, we're talking ontological design.
We're talking harnessing feedback loops to change
behavior and change patterns.
JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah, I mean, basically just think of it
sort of the training center for creating, like, Iron Man.
Like imagine if a future sort of Tony Stark was like,
OK, I'm going to put together the best technologies
to hyper train or hyper condition
my physical capacities, cognitive skills,
visionary tracking.
You just take physical fitness out
of the kind of beach muscles, cosmetic and aesthetic,
and you turn it into athletic and neurokinetic.
So you've just completely just rebooted physical culture.
And actually, is more of a throwback to 19th century
Germany and the Gymnasium effect, which
is a throwback to Plato and the original Academy
and Pythagoras, and that whole crew.
So there's this beautiful Western tradition
of radically embodied cognition, philosophy, celebration,
the symposium, drinking together,
all of it-- celebration, wine, women, and song.
It became the Aquarian, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
And so we go along.
And here we are.
JASON SILVA: And so we go on.
We may contribute a verse and all that jazz.
JAMIE WHEAL: Sure.
JASON SILVA: Yes, this gets me really excited.
Now one of the things he talked about in your TEDx talk
was how technology is allowing us
to pump dual awareness through satellite dishes
into iPhones, beaming brains.
And you talked about that trajectory.
You talked about Bob Dylan playing
a small, little concert, and then plugging
in his Stratocaster and beaming electrified
musical expression into 100,000 minds.
I'm paraphrasing, but talk about the role of technology
in allowing us to literally radically extend these insights
and transformations, to mediate and tweet consciousness
with tools and technologies.
JAMIE WHEAL: Well, I think I think you pretty well said it.
I mean, it's that sense that we are able to shape
and prime our environments and our psychosomatic experiences.
JASON SILVA: Yes.
JAMIE WHEAL: So with music-- with deep,
thumping bass and incredibly high image amplified,
so different directional sound, projection mapping
of incredible high definition, resolution and ridiculous--
especially when synchronized with music and beat.
You start dislocating all of our geospatial or proprioceptive
reference points.
So I'm not even sure what I'm looking at.
Where did the horizon line go?
What's happening here?
JASON SILVA: And it doesn't even matter, because you're just
rolling with bliss.
JAMIE WHEAL: Well, those things, and then you do the syncopation
and the different beats per minute, which
also entrain bodily features.
It's that old-- it wasn't Johannes Kepler.
It was one of those early watch makers who, remember,
discovered that the pendulums all
would synchronize in his clock shop, his watch shop.
And what he realized is they all synchronized
to the rate of the largest pendulum.
So there's this coherence effect around waveforms.
JASON SILVA: OK, and we're harnessing that.
We're exploiting that for our own gain, for our own bliss.
JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah.
JASON SILVA: I like that.
I mean, we've always used tools and technologies
to create bliss.
I mean, we use language to write poetry.
We use musical instruments to create melodies
that act as wallpapers for our minds,
to use your term from last night.
But what new forms of human beauty and human subjectivity
will become possible as we create a new generation
of mind-melding technologies?
New drugs-- I mean, now we're seeing a renaissance in America
with the use of psychedelics being more widely
acceptable as psychotherapeutic tools for people with PTSD.
But the article in "The New Yorker,"
written by Michael Pollan, talked about the idea
of making well people better.
So we can actually create a new generation of smart drugs
and mind-altering chemicals, both internal ones
and external ones that we can use to make well people better.
That it's not just about fixing an affliction,
but it's about expanding what it means to be, and perceive,
and be human.
You know, I keep coming back to this idea
that human beings-- you know, we're getting better.
We're looking up the skirt of Nature,
looking under the hood of our own brains.
And we're getting increasingly better
at mapping these ecstatic states, these flow states.
And we're getting increasingly better
at mediating these ecstatic states, right?
So I want you to talk to me about the poetry
of these ecstatic states, in the sense that, like,
of course we want to mediate ecstasy,
because ecstasy is the most beautiful thing in the world.
It's standing at the playa of Burning Man,
or going into an iMax theater and listening
to some beautiful Hans Zimmer score that moves you to tears,
or the Grateful Dead concert you were talking about yesterday.
[LAUGHS]
Remember when you were talking about that,
the band is going to play with Phish?
Talk to me about that place, why we go there,
and why it's good to want to go there,
the nobility of what Flow Genome is doing.
JAMIE WHEAL: Well, I mean, I would
say what we are hoping to do is to start a conversation,
and build a community of people of like minds
that are passionate as well about the upper limits
of human possibility.
JASON SILVA: The upper limits of human possibility-- I mean,
one of the things that you guys are going to talk about, you
and Steven Kotler in your new book,
is the altered states economy.
JAMIE WHEAL: For sure.
JASON SILVA: OK, the fact that people spend upwards
of billions, trillions of dollars to alter
their consciousness, to feel good, $20,
gimme an Indiana Jones thrill ride.
Here's $100.
Send me to a dream within a dream in "Inception."
Here is $100.
Take me to "The Never-Ending Story."
There's something we're willing to pay for and labor for.
And so you're saying we barely have glimpsed what's possible.
You're probing the contours of the upper limits
of human experience.
I just want you to tell me about that dance.
I love what you guys are doing.
I want to turn my colander into a chalice.
I want to mediate my ecstasy.
I want-- I want everybody to be able to experience that.
So what we need to do?
What's missing?
Where are we on that trajectory right now?
JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah, I think we're right there with all the parts
and puzzle pieces.
And as far as literally and reliably
being able to put people into as expansive and interesting
states of awareness as they can manage, and at the same time,
that's not the fail point.
The fail point is what it's always been,
which is you human discipline.
And so we get distracted.
And we get knocked off the path.
And we get bored.
And we get frustrated.
And we dabble, and we hack, and we obsess, and we crash.
And that notion of we think it should be endless peak
moments instead of the plateaus of mastery practice
until the next one.
And you'll get an integration, which often
happens in that theta state.
And in fact, theta, depending on who's
research you're following, gamma bursts,
those integrative Gestalt ahas, the Eurekas,
can only occur in a substrate of theta waves.
Right, so that's one of the things.
JASON SILVA: Say that again.
Eureka moments can only what?
JAMIE WHEAL: So the burst of gamma waves,
of neurologic activity, is correlated with the Gestalt
integrative experience.
JASON SILVA: Seeing the whole pattern.
JAMIE WHEAL: The Eureka aha, I got it.
JASON SILVA: Aerial view, big picture, Gestalt.
JAMIE WHEAL: Shazam.
JASON SILVA: Shazam.
JAMIE WHEAL: Right, and that occurs only
on a substrate of theta wave activity.
So that's where that particular bolt of lightning goes.
So putting yourself into a theta state on purpose
through respiratory regulation, through any kind of neuro bio
feedback, through cardiac controls and practices,
through any of those components, you're then putting yourself--
you're like Ben Franklin flying the kite with the key
in a storm.
You're right there waiting for it to hit.
JASON SILVA: How often do you get it in your own life?
JAMIE WHEAL: Goodness gracious, I mean,
I feel like I am blessed with getting to experience it as
often as I pay attention to it.
JASON SILVA: OK.
JAMIE WHEAL: Which varies.
JASON SILVA: That requires a kind of priming, too.
You've got to be there.
You got to be present.
You've got to have the cognitive resources to witness
and trigger those states.
JAMIE WHEAL: I mean, yeah, and I think
ultimately, I think my experience of it--
and maybe this is just me, maybe I just
had this coming in spades-- but I
have found that the more time you spend
in those kind of effortless effort conditions, the more
important is to have your house in order.
So you sort of-- and I don't-- I mean,
I have no presumptions whether this is a universal truth
or just my experience.
But it seems like there's a price for experiencing it.
And the price for experiencing it
is acting on the information, acting on the goodness, truth,
and beauty that you apprehend while there,
and then trying to live up your damnedest
to that example and inspiration when we're back here.
And if you skip that step, it's on your mortal soul
the next time you go back to the wishing well.
[LAUGHS]