In reality, I perceived Jason Silva exactly as I have seen him online for many years: energetic, full of enthusiasm, funny, jovial, a man passionate about life, knowledge and experiences, with a fascinating mind. And an incredible memory – you can see in his materials how many references and quotes he provides. Jason came to UNFINISHED this year, and all I had planned was to meet him, exchange maybe two or three words, and capture the moment in a photo. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about doing an interview for my blog.
But something funny happened. At the dinner organized for the UNFINISHED community in Bucharest, each guest had to find their name on the table under a line of words written on a card and sit there. I circled the table twice and couldn’t find my place, but that’s because – as I was about to discover – Jason Silva had sat in my place. He saw written on the card „word and fear tamer” and thought it was about him. Then I thought maybe it was a sign to interview him, and I did. 🙂 We talked about life and death, about creating despite anxiety and fears, which sometimes take over him, about awe and flow, about his creative process, intuition, and AI. He answered just as he films his videos – philosophizing artistically.
With a background in philosophy and filmmaking, Jason Silva is a philosophical artist, futurist, filmmaker, and public speaker who blends storytelling with cutting-edge ideas in his video projects and public talks around the world. He gained recognition after hosting the show Brain Games on National Geographic, where he explored topics related to neuroscience, psychology, and human intelligence.
In his popular YouTube series, Shots of Awe, Jason delves into deep subjects such as technology, creativity, consciousness and the nature of human existence. Through the poetic language he uses and the passion with which he speaks about wonder, dreaming, creativity and transcendence, Jason inspires millions of people to think differently about life, the universe, and human potential.
I think our intuition often has more wisdom than we think and we can’t explain it fully. And I like to think that I am leaning into the mystery when I do my art. And that makes me feel the knowledge by acquaintance rather than knowledge by description
Jason, I know about you that you are a person who lives with anxiety. How do you deal with fear and anxiety? How do you tame them, so that you can create in spite of them?
I work with words and I believe that through them we can sometimes tame our fears. As for anxiety, it has kind of always been a better fellow for me in the sense that I was an incredibly curious kid, even if I dealt with lots of anxiety as a child. Still, I’m incredibly curious, incredibly joyful, my joy hasn’t been hijacked by fear and intense anxiety. Growing up in Venezuela, you were kind of made aware from an early age that outside of the big walls of the property, out there, they rob you. They steal your car, they can kidnap you. You know, we were economically privileged in Venezuela, and that makes you a target for organized crime. So, I was always anxious about break-ins into the house, or my dad getting kidnapped at gunpoint. These were things in my nervous system that got hardened. Also, my parents divorced when I was young, so, that created that initial anxiety of my sense of home fracturing and the security of having both parents around. So, anxiety was something that was always there and I think that I found relief from anxiety from doubling down into my playfulness. I mean, I was always creative, but I also realized that when I was creative, when I was playful, it was such a sharp contrast to when I was anxious. Like if I used my creativity for play, it was like taking control of my imaginative and using it to feel good, basically. Because otherwise, that same creativity and imaginative capacity could have been used to envision horrific scenarios that made me anxious. Well, this is what I still do, I use my creativity to play, but it is a different kind of play.
It is fascinating that you could do that as a child. How did you manage to go towards joy and not let your fear take you over?
If I had anxiety about certain things, I had to neutralize those things with knowledge and information. So, if I was afraid of a break-in it was like „are all the doors locked? Is it everything safe?”. Ok, then I could let it go. I developed a kind of checklist consciousness to go over the things I was anxious about and how I could deal with that anxiety to dissipate it? How could I solve the fear that I was anxious about? So, I became a very literate person, a very well-informed person. Like, I often would battle anxiety through learning more information and recontextualizing what I was anxious about until I could decide that I could dismiss it.
For example, I always had a fear of death, since I was a kid. Terrified. And I had a terrifying fear of my parents getting older, things like this, but eventually I would be like: „Well that’s a deferable fear right there that’s still decades away before I had to worry about it”. So, I would have negotiations with my mind about how anxiety was more salient or more present, and which one could be pushed aside for now. You develop coping mechanisms, you know? You make friends with your mind, you figure out how to negotiate what is more worthy of your fear. I became very responsible, I think, to be an effective operator and an effective creative. I have to, at least, eliminate all possible anxiety triggers from my immediate environment so that my creativity wouldn’t be thwarted by some unexpected prompt from the environment that would collapse me into anxiety.
Is that sort of exercising control?
Yeah, but I had to be extremely controlling about my play and extremely controlling about my surrender because I enjoy surrender as much as anybody. I want to jump into the pool, you know, but I don’t want to jump into the shallow end of the pool and break my neck. I just became extremely careful, conscious, deliberate and mindful about things like play and surrender. It sounds paradoxical but I decided eventually that creating sacred space means to bring my vigilance to creating safe zones for me to let my vigilance go.
I’m motivated by self-transcendence. I’m motivated by peak experience. I am motivated by the awareness that I myself am an instrument through which I can grant myself access to states of intense experience
You said something very interesting, that we, as humans, we owe it to ourselves to step into our power and embody our beliefs and desires every day. How do you prepare to step into your power every day?
I take care of my physiology to keep it right, so sleep is extremely important and eating well is extremely important. I have to make sure that my nervous system is settled and that I get enough rest. I track my sleep and it means certain compromises. I don’t have much of a nightlife for example, I just have intense days, and I don’t need to have intense evening parties. I realized that the downstream effects of partying in the evenings was that I would have bad sleep and then the next day was horrible. But if I had a great day, and then it ended in an early evening where I had a nice dinner, a bath and had a great sleep, the next day I’m ready to have another intense day. I love down-regulating, resting, and sleeping. And that allows me to have that sustainable intensity, but within frameworks that I’ve developed.
What motivates you to continously create?
I’m motivated by self-transcendence. I’m motivated by peak experience. I am motivated by the awareness that I myself am an instrument through which I can grant myself access to states of intense experience. The inspiration that I desire and that I regularly have access to asks for nothing less than everything. So, I serve my inspiration and my creativity like I was a devotional religious pilgrim, except it’s a DIY religious practice or self-transcendence practice.
And for me, there is what you might call art and self-expression, creativity, sensuality, existential and contemplative practices, and making art and play. All these things are one for me. But that exists within these constraints, which are I have to make sure that I am physiologically rested and well taken care of so that biology doesn’t impede or constrain my capacity to transcend myself. And so, there is that relationship, is using my limits and optimize those limits, and deal with the necessary constraints so that when it’s time to play or shine, I can do so in a fashion that brings me closer to the divine in some way.
Talking about the divine, what do you believe in?
I believe that poetry is real. And I believe that movies are real. So tangible stuff. Well, I believe that reductionism, which has led to, in some sense, to the triumph of science and technology, has a blind spot. It does not account for internal experience and inner life. And so, I’m not saying that the objective perspective or the objective world isn’t true. I think it’s true. But I also think that there’s truth of a deeper sort beyond the literal grid. I think metaphors are just as true as objective facts, but they’re true in a different way. I believe is that we embody more than just the reductionist take on the totality of what we are. And I believe that if metaphor is true, and if literature is true, and if cinema is true, it proves that sometimes fiction is more truthful than reality or as truthful as reality and that art is the lie that reveals the truth. My relationship is with that particular truth, that sits alongside factual truth, I believe in that, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in the truth of facts or in the truth of objective reality. I think I live between worlds because of that. And I think that the people who get into trouble are the people that are militant about only one take on reality. Are we just these bodies? And then we’re born and then we die? And then nothing means anything? Ursula Le Guin said it best: „science describes accurately from the outside; poetry describes accurately from the inside”. Science explicates, poetry implicates, and both celebrate what they describe, between the thesis of objective facts, and the antithesis of poetic truth, and the synthesis is the one that marries both.
What do you think will be after we are not embodied anymore?
I don’t know. I don’t know. What I know is that because I don’t know, I fear death. And what I fear, of course, is the possibility that there is nothing and I find that not just terrifying, but tragic in a way that is interstellarly horrific because the constraint on the life of the substrate that supposedly holds the mind and the heart and the imagination doesn’t make sense to me. The universe has existed for billions of years. An we, with our thinking, dreaming, wonderfully imaginative capacities, our sentience, our consciousness, our inner life, our poetry, what? Just a couple of decades? Like 70, 80, 90 years? No, no, I do not accept. Now maybe there’s more to this whole enterprise. Maybe I don’t know anything. Maybe it’s a simulation. Maybe we’re just made of information. Maybe information is more primary than matter. Maybe consciousness is more primary than matter. Maybe there’s a lot that we find out once we take off the meat suit, but I don’t know. What I do know is that I love being here, and there are people that I love, and I want these people around, and I want to be around. And so, what I’m really interested in is maximizing our vitality and our aliveness. To that end, I’m in full support of biotechnology and nanotechnology and radical life extension and fucking figuring out software patches for biology that eliminate diseases and eliminate cancer the way we eliminate bugs on a computer software. I want to be here to make more art. That’s what I desire.
Awe isn’t about purchasing. And it isn’t about really necessarily working unless you’re working on something you love. Awe is autotelic. It has its own reward
I also liked something else you’ve said a while ago: „I live for bliss, I live for awe”. How do you get into awe?
Drugs? (he laughs) I think that in Berkeley, they study positive psychology at the Greater Good Science Center, and they study specifically awe. The definition of awe they use is really interesting: awe is an experience of such perceptual expansion, such perceptual vastness, that your mental models of the world, which are the maps that you’ve created to orient you in the world, now have become a problem because you’re so stuck in the maps, you forget that the territory is not the same thing as the map. The map is not the territory. But there are some experiences, and when they show up, are so far beyond your maps that awe is just what happens when your maps do not fit what you’re seeing. So, let’s say your are visiting Iceland for the first time or seeing the Grand Canyon of the United States. Now, most people do not have access that often to things that are outside their maps. Most people, when they become adults, they have their maps of reality and they live inside those maps. They’re stuck in habits and routines and that’s it. No more awe. To get in awe, you have to be either really lucky, to have access to experiences continuously that are outside your maps, or if you want to take control of your inner life and expose yourself by design to things that violate your mental models, so that you can travel by immersion in different cultures. I do think psychedelics play also a role in this. I think people who are depressed and anxious are stuck in rigid mental patterns. This is called the entropic brain theory and that psychedelic compounds in certain environments and with the right guard rails shake that snow globe those rigid thought patterns get dissolved and the person enters the virginal noticing again and it’s like „Wow, whereas once I was blind, now I can see”.
If I understand correctly, you say that, in order to be in a state of awe, you have to do something extraordinary?
You kind of have to do that. Or use drugs. Or other ways that are familiar to many people: meditation, breath work, all these things are a way also, but they don’t take you so fast into the awe state. You need to alter your consciousness because you need to change the default setting. The brain wants to economize how much energy it spends, so if it doesn’t have to take in new stimulation and it can just run autopilot on the maps that you’ve internalized that saves energy. All that is expensive floods your brain with dopamine. If a person has to go to work, pay the bills, they’re being taxed in other ways, the brain just keeps them on autopilot, and there is no way to reach the awe from there. There’s a luxury to awe. Awe exists outside of socioeconomics. Awe isn’t about purchasing. And it isn’t about really necessarily working unless you’re working on something you love. Awe is autotelic. It has its own reward. It’s intrinsically rewarding. It isn’t economically necessarily viable in the short term, so that’s why people don’t prioritize it. I am fortunate to do whatever I love. I’m an artist who gets to make a living from doing his art. So, I’m among the luckiest.
How would you explain the flow you are getting into when creating the smart philosophical videos/public talks that you bring to the world?
The intersection between chaos and order is the flow. This is what happens to me in my creative process. My videos are unscripted they come through me, but not from me. I feel like a vessel for something larger than myself, neurobiologically this is known as a flow state. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is the father of flow, and then Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal in the „Flow Genome Project”, describe flow as a state of consciousness where you feel your best and you perform your best. What happens in a flow state is action and awareness merge. So, it’s like this fusion of embodiment with a fluid verbal understanding. And you experience a sense of selflessness where your inner chatter goes away, timelessness where you have time dilation, effortlessness where whatever you’re doing is just super automatic and magical, and information richness in the sense that you have these incredible downloads.
What helps you in your creation process?
Being in the flow. And the best triggers for getting into the flow are deep embodiment, rich environment, and high consequence. Think about it. I make my videos in nature, in a rich environment, I’m connected to my body, and there’s this high consequence: the camera’s on. So, nature, a beautiful natural environment, somebody that I trust near me and, of course, the use of cannabis. It’s something that’s, in a way, a part of me for 20 years now. (he notices my surprised face and continues) You know, there’s a whole history of jazz musicians, freestyle rappers, rock and rollers from the 1960s. I mean, if there was no cannabis, there would be no Beatles. There would be no Beach Boys. There would be no Jimi Hendrix. There would be none of these musicians and their art would exist if not for their relationship with altered states of consciousness. And however, they mediated that access to altered states. And for me, cannabis has just been a great tool that I use with discipline, with intention, like a sacred herb. I use it always where is legal. I don’t use tobacco. I don’t use alcohol. I don’t really use any other drugs at a regular basis at all. But I have this relationship with cannabis. And I tell you, assuming I slept well the night before, I’m in a good environment, nature, friends, set an intention, have music, and a little bit of cannabis, I’ve never not gotten into a perfect flow state.
But if you don’t use it, do you get into a flow state?
Well, I can get into a flow state if I have the high consequence of an audience, for example, or if I have sufficient novelty, I could probably get there. When I give a talk on stage, rich environment, deep embodiment, and high consequence, because there’s an audience, I go into a flow. So that’s very much, for me, a way of life, an orientation, a North Star. It is my practice, my #Praxis (this year’s UNFINISHED theme), it is the structure that governs my everything. Everything is optimized around getting into a flow state and by the way my flow states are in bed with experiences of awe as well, so what begins with flow usually ends or peaks with a bliss, or a peak experience of pure awe.
What do you think holds us back from acting towards living our desires?
I think most people have limiting beliefs, right? They have fears or they’re constrained by their immediate environment. You know, I’m a big believer in feedback loops. And so, if you have an environment that’s not inviting you or prompting you into flourishing or exploration, you start to think „well, there’s nothing to explore or expand towards”. You know, we get prompted, we get authored, we get shaped by our environment. But to wake up is to realize, „whoa, this environment is what’s really affecting me here. Let me change it up. Let me design a better environment that will then design a better me”. If you’re aware of that feedback loop, and you realize that you don’t end at the end of your skin tissue, that your mind and your inner life is mediated and authored as much by what’s around you than by what’s inside you, then one way to change what’s inside you, is by changing what’s around you. Become aware of it.
What questions do you ask yourself periodically to check that you are on the right track with your life?
I check in with how I’m feeling in the morning, how I feel after breakfast, how I feel about every new day. I wake up and I say „Good morning” to the day. When I go to sleep, I say „Good night. I love you!”. So, yeah, I check if I’m good in my body, if I have enough friends, if I live the life I want. Sometime I ask myself why I don’t have a girlfriend at the moment (he laughs), because I want to have kids. I have a really nice life and I want to go through a marriage.
I know you said at some point that you are not such a big fan of marriage. What has changed?
Well, I still don’t think I want to be in that kind of marriage where you get like contractually tied up together because then it just makes it complicated if you decide to part ways, but I definitely believe in union, connection and raising children together. You know, I’ve had some breakups that left clearly some pain and some fear of commitment.
Maybe this is the answer to the question why you don’t have a girlfriend.
Maybe, but there have definitely been people recently that I’ve tried to initiate relationships with and it hasn’t lasted, the calibration hasn’t clicked. You know, I feel like I attract many things into my life, but I haven’t yet seen „the one” manifest.
Do you believe there is „a one” for everybody?
I think there can be many that are archetypally „the one” and then there’s „the one” that happens
where the archetype collapses into the actual. I haven’t yet come across an actual embodiment of the archetype on the same frequency as mine and with whom the relationship lasted. I met someone at Burning Man, do you know what that is?
No, what is it?
Oh, you have to go to Burning Man. It is the most powerful collective initiation portal on the planet, where 70,000 people build a city in the desert. It’s the most transformative gathering on the planet. It’s a mecca for seekers. And they build a city in the desert. It’s the most incredible art you’ve ever seen in your life. You spend a week living in the desert. Surviving. Connecting. Dying and being resurrected psychologically. I was there twice. I fell in love the first time I was there. And she was my archetype. It was beautiful, but she had some traumas, and after a year together, we set apart.
Do you think that, if we don`t understand, integrate and work on traumas from our past, we could have a good relation with the right one?
The past traumas are brought to the doorstep of every moment. So, yeah, we get to keep the memory or the trauma from our past. They run in the loop of our minds. Somehow, something that has happened shaped us or will shape our future and relations, and we are condemned to be in a certain way because of what happened to us – epigenetics tells us that we are the sum of our experiences, and some of them were bad. But here is a thought: our capacity of cognitive framing, our interpretation, our use of language used to reframe, allow us somehow to change the past experiences. So, the story we choose to tell, can actually change the past. Am experience of trauma seen through certain lenses can physiologically create a stress response. But revisiting the trauma through psychedelics or psychotherapy, we can change our response to those past experiences. So, yeah, I think is important to understand our past, but also to work on cognitive framing of what has happened to us as children or adults.
I thought that famous people don’t age but then when I saw famous people aging it was really depressing. I really thought that fame was like a simulation of immortality
Going back in time, how was your relation with your parents?
It was a very good one. My mom, she was the most important figure in my childhood. My dad too, both were important, but I lived with my mom, so I got extremely emotionally dependent on her for stabilizing my inner life. Now we live in different places, I wish I could get my parents to live closer to me. My dad’s pretty close, he’s in Spain and I see him pretty often. My mom’s in upstate New York and sometimes I think it’d be fun to have her maybe move to Amsterdam with her partner or something, so I don’t have to fly nine hours to see her.
What did you learn from your mom as a child?
My mom teaches literature so I was raised with beautiful prose, beautiful poetry. She had one rule: practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. She just kind of told me to do what I love not worry about things like money, but follow my passion, follow my bliss and be kind. My mom’s a hippie, it was so nice to have a wonderful hippie like an educator. She’s a peace and love human, she is very special.
What other characters have impacted your growth?
Cinematic characters, the authors I loved. I loved novels, I loved movies, I was really imprinted by cinematic characters for sure.
If you think of the most transformative experiences you’ve lived so far, which are those and how did they change you?
For sure the most transformative one was while becoming a little bit famous. It was pretty crazy when I had „Brain games” a TV show that became a huge success and my face was on giant billboards all over the world. That was something big, but it didn’t corrupt me, because I think I had already a philosophical analysis about fame. I remember I was like „famous people are like philosophical and immortal”. That was always what I thought that famous people don’t age but then when I saw famous people aging it was really depressing. (he smiles bitterly) I really thought that fame was like a simulation of immortality and so I was curious about it, but I think that, once I had a microphone and people listened to me, it was actually a chance to share philosophy. So, I loved just having a chance to share philosophy in an arty way. Having an audience was transformative and wonderful. And I don’t think it corrupted me. Then, I think that getting to travel the world and do keynote speaking, getting to see the planet, getting to speak at the Sydney opera house in Australia, getting to speak on giant stadiums all over the planet was surreal and also transformative. Then, moving to Amsterdam and picking a place to live in, a cool town, transformed me too.
I live largely in a state of improvisation. I make very few plans, I just go with what I feel moment to moment
How is your life in Amsterdam?
I record all my videos on bike rides in the countryside, so four days a week I’m on my bike ride with my friend, with my camera operator, and we go biking through different beautiful countryside settings. Whenever I’m inspired, I stop, I make videos, and I bike back. I really do live largely in a state of play. And I live largely in a state of improvisation. I make very few plans, I just go with what I feel moment to moment.
No plan whatsoever?
Well, I think I’ll have gorgeous kids. Maybe twin girls. And I think I’ll have a dog. And I think I’m going to be taking my kids on a cargo bike through the Dutch countryside and then doing winters in the mountains of Mallorca. So, I don’t exactly make plans, I have a vision. I have a vision but I’m already living the vision. I just like the idea that this is a vision I see playing out over time.
Talking about that, do you think we are already able to create our future with the power of our mind?
I think that the future is pulling the present forward to meet it. In our greatest moments of insight and inspiration, of connection, of intuition, I think we are receiving messages from our future self, telling us what to do. I think we’re hyperspatial objects casting a shadow into matter and I think that is like the movie „Interstellar” and better angels of our nature are in the Tesseract (note: a geometric shape that extends the concept of a cube to a fourth dimension), pulling us towards the future we deserve.
If we stayed in the present, how does this look for you in terms of projects?
Recording multiple days a week, I have now a longer-term project of „The psychedelic puppet show” that I’m writing, which are short I’m making with a partner, Brad Nesic. Personally, there is a physical training practice I follow regularly, I have a personal trainer now, so I’m doubling down on my physical exercising. I work really hard to have a lot of freedom. Because in my creative process, I work best when I can go in the moment and into the flow. I avoid long-term projects generally, except for the puppet show. I like to do quick projects, get them out into the world and be free again.
Keep creating and embrace these new tools. Experiment. Play with AI. Play with these new tools. You’ve never had such tools, God-like tools, in the palm of your hand
What do you want to leave for the world through your work, your art?
I think that – and I hope this is not just my ego talking, it doesn’t feel that way – I am living intuitively when I make my art and a lot of the biggest decisions have felt intuitive as well. So, I think that that’s why I’m doing what I do. I think our intuition often has more wisdom than we think and we can’t explain it fully. And I like to think that I am leaning into the mystery when I do my art. And that makes me feel knowledge by acquaintance rather than knowledge by description. It makes me feel in my body the secrets of the universe will not be withheld from me and this is what I want to live the world. I mean, I want to be an agent of collective effervescence. And I think if people watch my videos and watch my work alone or with others and feel connection and kinship by relating and seeing themselves reflected in what I put out, I feel like I am sharing that intuitive knowing and intuitive connection. And I always share it in the form of art, which isn’t militant, isn’t fundamentalist and isn’t like politically ideological.
Do you have something to share with young creators?
Keep creating. Keep creating and embrace these new tools. Experiment. Play with AI. Play with these new tools. You’ve never had such tools, God-like tools, in the palm of your hand. So, use the tools to create more of the good, the true and the beautiful. Concerns related to AI development are okay that’s how we measure, we analyze, we decide what works and what doesn’t but, in the end, artificial intelligence is a reflection of us. We’re synthesizing our own mental processes and creating a magic mirror that reflects us back to ourselves. So let it reflect the better angels of our nature, let it be true and let it be beautiful.
How do you think people will love in AI era?
I think people will love the way they’ve always loved and then they’ll expand the ways they love. I think they’ll have loving relationships with artificial sentience, I think they’ll have loving relationships with their dogs, I think they’ll have loving relationships with other humans. I think they’ll have loving relationships with all new kinds of genders that are going to be created as people increasingly practice self-determination. Love is love, and love is not only romantic.
Jason Silva’s Shots of Awe are here.
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