Jason Silva argues that exponential technology has amplified human creative power, and redefines ambition: a billionaire should mean someone who positively impacts a billion lives. He frames consciousness and flow—a selfless, timeless mental state—as the frontier for exploration and creativity.
Chapters
30 linear steps gets you to 30. 30 exponential steps gets you to a billion. The same amount of steps gets you to a billion. And technology advances at 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 dollar supercomputer that was half a building in size 40 years ago. 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 a head of state had, than a president had 25 years ago. Because these tools and technologies, they're stand ins, they're metaphors, they are representative of human creativity and 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. 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. 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. Be like Mark Zuckerberg. Like, how cool to aspire to, like become that successful. It's not, 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. 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? 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, 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. This is all grounded in intangible fact. Also, it's both. It's poetic truth built on data driven extrapolations. But it's actually possible. The tools are there, you can take action. Don't just stay at home like reading the secret and hoping for a transformation like go do it. 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. 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 us 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, 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 if we're never here to enjoy any of it, damn. 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, 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. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is responsible for the constant self editing that constantly keeps us. Gets in our way, right? 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. 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. Flow. You're surfing that wave and it's magnificent. And there's a sense of richness. You get more information, you process more data, you get more insights. You're more resilient, you're optimized. The seminal writer on flow, his name's Csikszentmihalyi, wrote a book on the subject. He called it Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. 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, 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. 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 this 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.
