Why you should listen –
Jason Silva is the host of National Geographic Channel’s #1 rated and Emmy-nominated series, Brain Games. He gives viewers the “why” behind the “wow,” through a series of man-on-the-streets and experiments, and is joined by top experts in the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience and psychology. On this episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dave talks to Jason about Kolbe scores, transhumanism, Brain Games experiments, reincarnation, the ego and more. Enjoy the show!
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Quote: “There’s a humbling quality to realizing there are other states of consciousness.” – Jason Silva
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Jason Silva: Exactly. How could something so trivial become … cause such hysteria. I think it’s because at the end of the day, when your entire reality is called into question by something so trivial, it’s a big deal. It’s like an ontological panic, you could say. People used to think that was a Brain Games guerrilla marketing thing. Everybody kept tweeting on Twitter, and my Twitter went crazy when that happened. People made the immediate connection between “the dress” and the show, which to me says, we really gotten there. We’ve reached people, especially young people. They love the show. It’s been a treat. Yeah, like you said, there’s so much science coming out on the brain these days. Exponentially more in our capacity to understand the brain. I think it’s just nice to have a show that’s bringing this stuff to the masses, you know? Dave Asprey: The Kolbe Score is something that Dan Sullivan, one of the big entrepreneurial coach guys who’s been coaching for like 40 years, some very, very successful entrepreneurs. He coaches me. He uses this thing called the Kolbe Score, which is just 4 numbers. You answer a bunch of questions and it gives you a score. The first number, it’s called your fact finder index. I find it fascinating because some people, like if you’re a 9 or a 10 on this scale, you’re going to get every bit of information before you make a decision. If you’re a 1, you’re like, “Sounds good,” and you just go with it, right? I’m like a 4, so I’m kind of in the middle. I’m going to get enough information, it doesn’t mean I can’t get all the info, it doesn’t mean I can’t move quickly. It’s because my instinct is to get enough info to be reasonably certain, and then to take action. Jason Silva: For ingenuity, and creativity, and goal seeking behavior. I think it’s mostly about the knobs and lever, as Jamie Wheal and Kotler talk about, to editing subjectivity, to editing our fundamental logical experience. Maybe it’s not fully obliterating the ego, but maybe it’s just knowing when to set it aside, when to dissolve it temporarily. Then, once you reconstitute, maybe you’ll have a different set of priorities, you know? I’m interested in that whole space. The subjective space, and how to play with it. Dave Asprey: You come to it with like, “I have a certain degree of anxiety fueling me,” and you can make something amazing. You can flip it over and say, “I have like passion to create something amazing, or something that’s going to help a lot of people.” For me, my whole career, especially in the early days, it was driven by curiosity, but it was out of this like, “Oh my God. I’m going to starve. I’m not good enough,” and all the negative anxiety things. Dave Asprey: Well there’s, for me, what did it was heart rate variability training, which consciously trains you to turn off that fight or flight. Then, when you have a lie detector, basically, on your head looking at brain waves. You’re like, “I’m not afraid,” and it’s like ‘BZZ!’ You’re like, “aw, fine.” Jason Silva: I think biology is a technology, and the knobs and levers approach to biology, to optimizing our self systems, as Jamie Wheal says in his great TEDx doc. We turn our leaky bucket, our colander, into a chalice. Why not optimize all the way? Yeah, the external interventions can come when they come, but I agree. In the meantime, radical optimization from within is hugely important. Ironically, it’s not immediately accessible. Other than shopping at Whole Foods, I wouldn’t really know where to start, you know what I mean? Jason Silva: Then you’re like, “Oh! So she did go!” I guess my question to those people who have near-death experiences, religious experiences, people who take Ayahuasca and see God, and say that space and time collapse. If there was a way of measuring subjective time, if we had the equivalent of that head mounted camera for the tripper who says that the LSD opens a portal to another dimension, and we could say, “Okay. Well, we filmed them from the outside and they were only tripping for 6 hours,” but the camera inside their subjective world recorded a thousand days. Then, it’s like the movie Inception. Then it’s like dream within a dream. Dave Asprey: When I do some of the advanced neuro-feedback stuff, you trip. I’ve dissolved into the universe. I’ve seen past lives. Like, crazy stuff that shouldn’t happen. There is no drugs involved. All you’re doing is you’re basically … Every time your brain does something you don’t want it to do, you tell it to shut up and eventually it gets out of it’s own way. You’re like, “Okay. Hold on. Like, stuff’s happening. I don’t have arms right now.” Okay, no drugs involved. Just advanced meditation kind of stuff; but meditation with rubber bumpers. When you do it wrong, it gets quiet, so it’s easier. It’s cheating. When I’ve done that sort of thing, I do at the end of it, I say, “How much time was it?” Jason Silva: I’m usually like a double or triple iced espresso in the morning. Then, like a workout. I’ll wake up, I’ll do some push ups, I’ll do some push ups. Just spend like 30 minutes or something just doing something. If I’m in West coast or something, I love hiking, so I’ll go for a hike. I’ll do whatever, something like that. My mornings are usually left brain productivity, task orientated. Then my afternoons, in an ideal day, are decompress, free association or creative. That’s kind of how I do it. It’s like the morning is coffee, the afternoon is divergent thinking. Yeah, yeah. What You Will Hear
- 0:15 – Cool Fact of the Day
- 1:10 – Wix
- 2:09 – Introducing Jason Silva
- 4:52 – “Timothy Leary of the Viral Video Age”
- 11:43 – Neurofeedback
- 19:16 – Kolbe
- 21:42 – The Ego
- 29:50 – Transhumanism
- 35:41 – The case for reincarnation
- 42:55 – Brainwave equivalence
- 44:21 – “God Brain” episode of Brain Games
- 49:39 – Jason’s routine
- 58:28 – Top 3 recommendations for kicking more ass and being Bulletproof
Featured
Wix
National Geographic
Brain Games
Jason Silva
Jason Silva on Facebook
Jason Silva on Twitter
Shots of Awe on YouTube
Resources
Hippocampus
Default Mode Network
What the Dormouse Said
Peter Diamandis
40 Years of Zen
Kolbe
The Denial of Death
Transhumanism
Stanislav Gof
Ayahuasca
Bulletproof
Bulletproof Cookbook
Brain Octane Oil
Bulletproof Coffee
Moldy
The Better Baby Book
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