Episode 5: Jason Silva

This is Tim Ferriss.

Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show. This episode is brought to you by hip dial, the easiest way to make conference calls. If you ever need more than two people on the phone, you give them a number. No pin. You don't have to sit and wait on an empty line with crappy music. You get a text message when anyone joins. It's very easy, relieves just a bit of the headache of life. And you can get a free month by going to hipdial.com hipdial.com. Tim, take a look, check it out. And our guest for this episode is Jason Silva, friend of mine. I first reached out to him for advice related to television because he is very well known as the host of Brain games, which I believe is the highest rated show on National Geographic ever to be broadcast. But he's much more than that. He's very international. Born in Venezuela. And you could call him a performance philosopher. What on earth does that mean? You will find out. He is a filmmaker. He is one of the most spectacular speakers I've ever seen. And he has been called by the Atlantic Timothy Leary of the viral video age. And we will learn exactly what that means, exactly who he is in this episode. I hope you enjoy it.

Minimal at this altitude. I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

All right, Jason Silva, welcome to the Tim Ferriss podcast, the nascent fetal Tim Ferriss podcast. And I'm really excited to have you here to chat. This is obviously going to be a meandering conversation, like all of my conversations are. But I want to introduce those people who may not know you to your work because I find it so fascinating what type of work you've carved out for yourself. And, I mean, the Atlantic has described you as Timothy Leary of the viral video age. Not sure if that really does credit full credit to what you do, but you are really a modern day working philosopher, for lack of, perhaps a better description. I would be curious to know how you explain what you do or answer the question, what do you do?

Yeah, well, it's interesting. I was having a conversation recently with a writer that I really like, and she said that I was addicted to cognitive ecstasy because I often describe myself as an epiphany addict. And what I mean by that is that I feel that I am most alive. And I think most people can relate to this feeling. I feel like I am at my most alive when I have these profound moments of just kind of revelation and understanding, these moments when the Gestalt is revealed, when I see something in a new way, when a pattern is revealed. There's that great Isaiah Berlin line that says, to understand is to perceive patterns. And so I guess you could say that I'm an autodidact and I'm a lifelong learner, and I'm very curious by nature, but it's mostly about where I arrive when the moments of curiosity finally deliver. Right? So, again, that cognitive ecstasy. And so my work, my content, the media that I make, is a direct reflection, I think, of these obsessions and sensibilities, the best incarnation of which now is shots of awe, which is my web series, which again, is a kind of stream of consciousness orgy, if you will. I kind of go and delve and rant and riff on a variety of topics that have to do with maybe futurism, existentialism, metaphysics, the technology, the coevolution of humans and technology. I mean, I guess basically anything that I'm reading about or thinking about that is leading me to these headspaces of wow is what I try to capture with shots of awe. Now, I know that sounds like a mouthful, but that's really what it is. It's just my best attempt at sort of dealing with my obsessions and meanderings through media as the output for me.

There are a few things that really jump out and have jumped out about your work. The first is a lot of people would consider themselves lifelong learners and autodidacts, but you're really good at connecting dots that perhaps have not been connected publicly before, and drawing connections that leads other people to have these aha. Moments. And I remember we were chatting a few weeks ago. Obviously have been very eager to learn from your experience hosting on television. I mean, you've done current tv brain games, obviously, which has been a huge hit for National Geographic. You're one of the best presenters, I think, on television. I really believe that. And not only that, but you're one of the best presenters I've ever seen on the stage and aid I recall seeing, watching your presentation, we are the gods now from the festival of dangerous ideas. And I just remember thinking to myself the whole time, I could not do that. Like, how does this guy speak so fluidly as you sort of slalom through these different subject areas? How did you hone the craft of presenting and teaching really is, I think, how I look at it, but you're so damn good at it. Take us back. And there are natural gifts. Did you have a natural gift for this type of thing? How did it come about?

Wow, man. Thank you so much, first of all for the incredibly kind words and observations. But it's interesting because hearing you just now, just the way you even formulated the question, you seemed like you were in a flow state. You seemed like you started off somewhere and you went on these descriptions and then eventually you brought it back. And then you asked me the question, which was great. And I often tell people that what I just noticed in you is pretty much what I try to create or to deliver or really to induce in myself when I'm talking about ideas, which is to go into a flow state. You're probably familiar with. Yeah. So he just wrote his new book, the rise of Superman is all about how athletes seem to have honed in. They seem to have hacked flow, essentially. And of course, flow is connected to states of maximum optimum human performance. So, of course, extreme sports athletes are really good at doing it. That's why they're able to push the envelope of what's possible in the sport. And these flow states have to do with, I guess, with the skill set, finding the space, the opportunity to fully express itself. After you've achieved your 10,000 hours of practice or whatever, you get to this kind of no mind state where you're kind of hyper focused, but at the same time, you're not all there. You get out of your own way, so to speak. And I think for me, my sport maybe, is this kind of verbal wordplay, like, improvisational wordplay, is kind of my sparring. It's my freestyle scheme. In this whole search for the elusive fugue state known as flow, there's been a lot of science recently, they've done fMRI scans on freestyle rappers when they go into these flow states. And, of course, freestyle rappers are literally doing stream of consciousness. They start rapping about a topic, and the whole thing is an unscripted flow. And they compared those fMRI scans with the brains of a rapper doing, like, reciting memorized lyrics. And what they found out is that a part of the brain responsible for self editing? I think it's the lateral prefrontal cortex. I might be wrong, but a specific part of the brain responsible for self editing seems to go dim. So whatever it is that's in there, in their subconscious, is being served up to their frontal lobe. Like that scene in the movie limitless, when the guy takes the pill for the first time. And all of a sudden, everything he's ever read, every half read magazine article, every book, every Ted talk he ever sat through, everything that he never even thought he had registered to full memory, gets all of a sudden served up