Jhana Meditation Live: How Anyone Can Achieve Super Wellbeing

[00:00] just thinking about [00:01] The question of suffering [00:03] Seriously. [00:04] is [00:05] a little bit of a [00:07] contrarian take. [00:08] in the world right now. [00:09] And I think that's silly. If we're already taking super longevity and super intelligence seriously, why not take super well-being seriously? [00:15] We're working to make [00:16] life-changing meditation accessible to everybody. [00:18] And we're starting with [00:20] states known as the Jhanas, which are [00:22] altered states you can learn to enter into with a bit of meditation practice that span the spectrum from [00:27] Bliss to peace. [00:28] and when you learn to create a feedback loop between attention and emotion [00:33] It's a forcing function to [00:34] learn to navigate [00:36] your own nervous system with, I think, an unprecedented level of fluency. [00:40] I'm psyched. I want to see you get into a Janna. [00:55] Stephen, welcome to the show. [00:58] Thanks, Dan. I'm excited to be here. [00:59] Excited to have you. For people who don't know you, you are the founder of Journey, which actually, how do you describe Journey as a company? I know Journey because I went on one of your meditation retreats, but I know that Journey is bigger than that. So give us the spiel on Journey really quickly. [01:16] Yeah, so we're working to make life-changing meditation accessible to everybody. [01:22] And we're starting with states known as the jhanas, which are [01:26] Turns out altered states you can learn to enter into with a bit of meditation practice that span the spectrum from bliss to peace. And when you learn to effectively create a feedback loop between attention and emotion, it's a forcing function to learn to navigate your own nervous system with, I think, an unprecedented level of fluency. And in a world in which so many of us are optimizing everything from our sleep to our diet to our work performance, it raises the question of why not optimize your nervous system fluency?

[01:54] or your relationship with your emotions, because that makes everything else easier. [01:59] and ultimately makes it easier to be the person you aspire to be. So it's in many ways about... [02:06] helping you get to endogenous altered states as fast as possible. [02:09] But that's... [02:10] really just the first goal. The real goal is to... [02:15] set you up so that your subconscious works for you, not against you. [02:19] Wait, say that one more time to set you up so that your subconscious works for you, not against you. Yeah, I feel that. And I have to say, like, I went on one of your week long meditation retreats and I've been meditating for a long time and done a lot of retreats. And it was by far the best retreat that I've ever been on. And it has like. [02:39] generated lasting changes in my practice and therefore lasting changes in my life. So I really, I mean, I love everything that you do and I'm really excited to have you here. [02:50] Love to hear that, Dan. It's a labor of love for the team. [02:55] Good. You can feel it. So we have a bit of a plan here for this show, which I think will be interesting and new, which is... [03:05] we're going to, you're going to get into Ajana or at least get as close as you possibly can to being in Ajana and you're going to narrate your internal experience as you do it. Um, then we're going to, you're going to come out of that and we're going to talk about what happened and just talk about your practice. And I'll talk about my practice and sort of share what these states are and how they've affected our lives. And then we're going to move into, I know there's like

[03:30] There's a lot of stuff on your short-term and long-term roadmap that uses AI to help people do this better. And so we're just going to get into this sort of like technology aspect and the future aspect of this. So... [03:44] I'm psyched. Let's start with... [03:47] I want to see you get into Ajana. [03:49] Terrific. No pressure. That's part of the, the pressure is part of the fun. [03:58] a little bit of context and framing for the listeners. So... [04:01] John has have historically... [04:03] believed to be states that take thousands of hours of meditation practice to enter. And it's, I think, become apparent that that need not be the case. Our thesis journey is the way, the reason these states often take so long and aren't so widespread is because it's a guesswork problem, that meditation is invisible and nonverbal in a way that learning many skills is not. And so your feedback loops get all gunked up with guesswork. [04:32] So at Journey, what we do is we have like a really intentional about feedback loops. And so we'll our curriculum and our group sessions are set up to run rapid fire experiments and kind of give you the tools to sort of assess whether or not your experiments are helping you move in a certain direction. And then you'll come in. [04:50] for your interviews and a facilitator was just going to grill you and be like, what did you feel? Where in the body? What did you know? Did it feel like it had a temperature? Was it oscillating? How did it change over time? And use that to pattern match against other students and say, okay, let's co-create an experimentation plan that you're going to be personally excited about. Go do that. Come back, report, report back, and we'll repeat.

[05:10] So what we're going to do here is I'm just going to... [05:13] throw a lot of the like thinking about your experience out the door. [05:17] and offer like my narrate my experience for on the order of like 10 to 20 minutes. [05:24] I've done this a lot. I did this like every day for many years and still do it very frequently. And so your experience may look different than mine. That's okay. The point is in the same way that better off to watch the, [05:38] a professional serve a tennis ball, uh, then to try to read a book on how to serve. [05:43] a tennis, that it might prime your intuition a bit. So with that context, I think we can jump into me narrating my experience aloud. [05:52] I just want to offer a couple additional things, which is... [05:55] One. [05:57] We talk a lot about collectedness and conductivity. And so the game that I'm going to be playing here is I'm going to be gently collecting all of my attention and experience around an open-hearted feeling. [06:09] It's going to be a [06:10] I might be saying phrases that are all going to be pointing at like a [06:14] a kindness or a gratitude or this kind of thing. [06:17] And the second is we talk about conductivity. [06:20] And that's like embracing anything that comes up. [06:23] like wholeheartedly ranging from distractions to, uh, [06:27] like little pinches of emotional tension, including the pressure that Dan just put on me to try to get on a John alive on a show. All of these things I'm going to be looking to turn towards and like imbue with a sense of compassion or embrace such that nothing is untouched.

[06:43] by this. [06:44] by this like kind compassion kind of thing. [06:47] Yeah. And to add on to that or maybe put a finer point on it, there are... [06:53] endless numbers of guided meditations. [06:56] on the internet or you know on dharma seed or whatever which are helpful um and [07:03] One of the things that I think is so unique about Journey and one of the things I love the most is this thing that you're doing, which is imitate an expert, which is. [07:11] watch an expert navigate their own internal experience, which is infinitely complex and unique to them. And it's not about necessarily copying them. It's not about necessarily like listening to a guided meditation and following all those instructions, although that can be useful. It is... [07:27] about [07:29] watching them navigate and then being like, oh, here's one or two tools I can use that maybe I didn't even realize I could use to then navigate myself, my own experience. And I find that to be incredibly valuable and it's super fun to watch. [07:41] Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think success is you discover something that you didn't know you were allowed to do or you didn't know you could do something, that kind of thing, just because it has a funny shape. You're like, why the hell did he turn left when I was expecting to turn right? Perfect. You're kind of looking for surprise. [07:57] And doing so, if anybody wants to follow along and meditate as we go, do so in just the most gentle, wide open, letting it wash over your intuition. [08:05] You're not trying to hang on to every word. You're just letting your subconscious see if it can be like, oh, that's the general flow we're going in.

[08:14] As a side note, and maybe we'll talk about this later, a lot of this idea came from inspiration from the U.S. military, which is not your typical, or maybe depending on how you think about it, like a classic source of meditation wisdom. This is what I love about you is you're just like, you're pulling from the military. But it's like any source that might be good, like it's like the military over here and like the Buddha over here and like there's like 50 other places over here. And it's just all in this like unique mishmash that really works well. And I love it. [08:44] Thank you. [08:44] That's right. That's right. The reason the military even got mentioned is because there's some related work that was done with the military on tacit knowledge transfer. And that I think is like sort of the key word and some of the things that inspired some of this. So. [08:58] Okay, let's get started. [09:03] To settle, I like to close my eyes and I'm going to take a deep breath in. [09:09] Sigh. [09:11] And just relax to let it out. [09:15] Thank you. [09:16] I'm just... [09:18] watching the end of the out-breath. [09:21] Where does it end? [09:25] And another deep breath in. [09:27] Shh. [09:30] And just let it all out. [09:39] Okay. [09:41] I'm settling into... [09:43] These old habits of mine.

[09:46] Thank you. [09:47] looking for a sense of what it feels like to come home [09:51] Thank you. [09:52] Like... [09:53] coming home after a long day at work and dropping the bags on the floor. [09:57] I'm just going to start dropping any tension in my experience. [10:02] Thank you. [10:04] I've got a racing heart from being on this exciting podcast. [10:08] I'm [10:10] Got a little brain fog from being woken up by my baby in the middle of the night. [10:16] And... [10:19] I had some anxiety rushing around to prepare [10:23] to get on this podcast with you all. [10:26] I'm just gonna start... [10:28] welcoming all those experiences like long-lost friends. [10:32] and letting them gently slide in next to me. [10:35] as we come home. [10:36] after a long day of work. [10:40] . [10:43] . [10:45] Just letting another breath. [10:47] Slow the system down. [10:50] The slower I breathe, the easier I feel. [10:56] and the slower my thoughts are invited to be. [11:03] Amen. [11:05] I have two favorite ways of really settling into relaxation. [11:11] or a sense of coming home. [11:13] before turning [11:15] to a

[11:17] earnest, open-hearted feeling. [11:21] The first is to blow my awareness wide open. [11:26] So vast. [11:28] So wide. [11:30] that if an airplane were to hum overhead, [11:33] where the tiniest tremble were to come through the building. [11:36] in the floor below me. [11:38] I would feel it all instantly. [11:41] Thank you. [11:43] And so I'm not reaching for the airplane or for the trembles. [11:50] I'm just dropping. [11:51] this sense of [11:52] narrowness that I didn't realize I was carrying. [12:00] . [12:03] Thank you. [12:04] Thank you. [12:06] I'm like dropping bags coming home from a long day at work. [12:15] I'm noticing my... [12:18] anxiety a bit in my head and a little bit in my chest. [12:25] I'm having periodic stray thoughts about... [12:29] what Dan's experience is right now or... [12:31] Somebody listening to this. [12:34] And each one of these [12:36] I'm just... [12:38] brushing. [12:39] with a sense. [12:41] of kindness and reception. [12:45] welcoming it into this vast mind.

[12:48] completely uncontained no boundaries. [12:55] Deeply at ease, settling in like a warm hot tub. [13:01] into the sense of coming home. [13:09] I just noticed I had kind of closed down my awareness while talking, and so I let it fall wide open again. [13:16] completely open. [13:19] more open than I might think is possible. [13:23] Thank you. [13:26] Thank you. [13:29] . [13:33] All the talking and thinking is still keeping me up. So I'm going to do one breath silence to just really settle in. [13:41] Thank you. [13:45] . [13:56] With this much ease. [13:59] an openness, like a gentle sense of kindness to anything that might [14:05] quote unquote distract me [14:07] Thank you. [14:09] I'm starting to feel a little gratitude and open heartedness already. [14:17] But before I go all the way into that,

[14:20] I like to take a minute to relax the body too. [14:23] Thank you. [14:25] And so like a warm shower happening in slow motion, I'm going to start at the top of the head. [14:31] and I'm going to relax every muscle. [14:34] As I go down from head to toe. [14:38] finding tension I didn't realize I was carrying. [14:43] And I'm going to try to do the whole thing from this wide open, vast mind. [14:49] no boundaries. [14:51] No containment. [14:53] And when I narrow... [14:55] contract, [14:57] I'm just going to gently open back up. [14:59] Thank you. [15:02] So the top of my head slowly moving down. [15:09] There was a little sound in the distance, and there was a little... [15:13] brain fog or anxiety or sleep sleepiness happening in my head and all of these just gently brushing [15:20] with an open-hearted welcome. [15:23] and carrying on this little body scan. [15:27] Thank you. [15:28] The muscles, my forehead. [15:32] Letting them relax. [15:33] down my ears, the back of my head. [15:37] all around the eyes. [15:39] So many ways to relax the muscles around the eyes. [15:47] Thank you. [15:48] I just found another layer in a moment of silence.

[15:56] Thank you. [15:57] I'm also realizing I'm [15:59] I've been running some thought about what I'm going to say next to you all. [16:02] I'm just going to drop that now too. [16:07] Any fear of making a mistake? [16:11] is going to be brushed with kindness just the same. [16:19] Down my cheeks. [16:21] to my jaw. [16:28] Thank you. [16:30] Thank you. [16:31] Oh, naming that I was a little scared was really good. [16:36] Thank you. [16:39] Now I can just welcome it. [16:41] And I'm feeling myself relax in places I didn't realize I was tense. [16:51] May my fear... [16:53] Be welcomed. [16:57] I'm grateful that it's looking out for me. [17:01] Bye. [17:02] Thank you. [17:04] Back to the body scan. [17:07] down through the neck. [17:11] I can feel my shirt brushing against my skin. [17:14] And I'm just relaxing muscles I didn't realize were tense. [17:20] Both shoulders slump down a little more.

[17:28] Moving down is the arms. [17:32] The elbow. [17:34] I have some pain from lifting recently. [17:37] welcoming that to you. [17:42] down into my forearms and the [17:44] My hands are a little sweaty. [17:47] Welcoming that too. [17:51] And the tips of my fingers. [17:58] letting the kindness of just brushing everything in my experience start to take on a bit of its own momentum. [18:09] The pulsing in my hands is brushed almost as soon as I recognize the pulsing. [18:17] the brush of the cool air on my skin. [18:20] is welcomed with kindness. [18:22] as soon as I recognize the cool air. [18:32] still softening in new ways behind the eyes and in the head. [18:42] experiencing a surge of gratitude for [18:48] It's that fear or sadness that I may mess up here. [18:51] Thank you. [18:55] As gentle. [18:57] as I could possibly be with myself.

[19:01] Thank you. [19:06] May I come home. [19:09] Thank you. [19:13] this kindness and this gratitude and this relaxation or [19:19] In some ways, all the same thing. [19:24] And I'm going to continue on my way down into my chest. [19:28] Relaxing muscles I didn't realize were tense. [19:34] touching every bodily sensation. [19:37] It's a little relaxing kindness. [19:43] Down into my stomach. [19:46] which I was holding. [19:47] And I didn't know. [19:49] Thank you. [19:50] Letting it kind of fall open. [19:52] Vulnerably. [19:55] At ease. [19:57] At peace. [20:02] Thank you. [20:03] savoring a sense of safety that can be found in the stomach. [20:07] When I just let it be at peace. [20:10] No sucking it in. [20:18] Down into the hips. [20:22] The hamstrings and the quads. [20:24] Bye. [20:26] I was softening there in ways I didn't realize I was tense.

[20:35] Just a gentle... [20:38] Warm embrace. [20:41] Grateful for my legs. [20:44] Thank you. [20:46] down into my calves [20:50] My ankles... [20:51] The soles my feet. [20:53] and the tips of my toes. [20:59] and pulling up for a moment and being grateful for this entire thing. [21:04] The whole body. No precision. [21:07] just a cloud of sensations. [21:09] Thank you. [21:10] a throbbing of a pulse all the way from the tips of my toes to my upper lips. [21:19] The gentle in and out breath. [21:21] The shimmering and glimmering of... [21:23] all the tiny vibrations and almost like that noise in the nervous system. You can't tell if those tingles are real or not. [21:33] The whole thing. [21:36] Thank you. [21:38] Letting it be a cause for gratitude and wonder. [21:42] A softening. [21:47] May I come home to it? [21:50] May it come home to me. [21:57] Amen. [21:59] I actually dropped my first tier. [22:02] just a moment ago.

[22:09] I, for years, have... [22:11] Softly cried while meditating. [22:16] I don't know when I crossed the threshold, but at some point... [22:20] the gentle ease [22:22] And slipping into gratitude. [22:26] the relief of coming home. [22:28] begin welling up. [22:31] And I just let it. [22:33] Another thing to brush, in my experience. [22:36] Thank you. [22:37] Thank you. [22:39] Another thing to welcome. [22:41] to be part of a great coming home. [22:48] Thank you. [22:49] And now... [22:51] with this vast, wide-open mind. [22:55] No boundaries. [22:59] So free and at ease. [23:05] in this shimmering, glimmering body. [23:11] I'm gonna begin sharing or repeating. [23:14] Some of my favorite mantras. [23:17] that spark. [23:20] A little extra open-hearted feeling. [23:23] Thank you. [23:25] And as I do so, I'm just going to slip in to where they feel most intense in the body. [23:31] It's like I'm using a metal detector. [23:33] Thank you. [23:34] scanning over all of my experience, and that's where the open-heartedness is most intense.

[23:40] Can I just sink into that in like a hot tub? [23:44] or pretend for a moment as if nothing else in the world existed. [23:55] Thank you. [23:58] I got wondering if Dan would be pleased with this meditation or not. [24:03] And so I'm just going to welcome that thought in. [24:07] and gently brush the underlying fear or the underlying sadness with a little compassion. [24:16] Thank you. [24:20] May Dan be happy. [24:22] May anybody listening. [24:25] Be at ease. [24:33] May I be healthy? [24:38] May I be filled with joy. [24:43] and live live, live a life without suffering. [24:50] Thank you. [24:52] I got a little sort of anxious or tense about how... [24:57] strange or woo this might sound. [25:01] What must it seem like for a grown man to be saying these words on a podcast? [25:07] And that's okay.

[25:11] Just like any other fear or sadness. [25:16] I'm going to brush that with a little kindness. [25:20] Welcome it in. [25:23] Be grateful that somebody's looking out for me. [25:26] for my image. [25:29] And let it be another facet of just coming home. [25:41] I just had a thought about... [25:44] How method actors. [25:47] professional actors [25:49] We'll step into a part. [25:51] so deeply it will fully consume them. [25:54] Their tears are genuine, their laughter is genuine. [25:57] and yet it doesn't require they change their... [26:03] worldview or... [26:06] betray themselves in some way. [26:08] Thank you. [26:10] And just like that, [26:14] I'm going to keep falling into these open-hearted mantras. [26:24] Wouldn't it be nice? [26:26] If all beings were happy. [26:34] What does it feel like in my body? [26:37] in the heart space or in the head.

[26:42] If I knew... [26:44] that all beings could be healthy. [26:53] What does it feel like to wish that they'd be filled with joy? [27:00] Filled with joy. [27:02] Thank you. [27:05] And that one comes with an extra glimmer or shimmer in the heart. [27:10] It's hard to say if it's cool or if it's warm, but there's something there, ever so subtle. [27:16] So [27:18] And may all beings live lives without suffering. [27:23] the peace and relaxation that's sort of gently [27:27] ever so subtly shimmers in my stomach. [27:32] and like a relaxation of the shoulders. [27:38] Each of these phrases sort of pulses just the tiniest of feelings. [27:43] I... [27:45] I actually know where to look for them, and am cheating. [27:49] Thank you. [27:51] They're not yet strong enough for me to... [27:54] recognize if I don't know where to look. [27:56] But I know the familiar feeling of... [27:59] the opening of my heart in a way or the softening of my gut [28:05] The celebratory joy in the back of my head.

[28:12] And as I say these feelings or say these phrases and the feelings spark just a minute, [28:18] They fade out. [28:20] And as they fade out that too... [28:23] It is an invitation to come home. [28:30] Thank you. [28:32] I'm just letting all of these feelings fade away. [28:36] and sinking back into a vast wide open mind. [28:41] An absolutely wondrous body. [28:46] and the backdrop [28:48] of coming home. [28:56] Thank you. [29:00] May all beings be happy. [29:07] May they be healthy. [29:12] May they be filled with joy. [29:18] Like an actor crying on stage. [29:21] Imagining them. Feel them. [29:24] The world filled with joy. [29:26] Thank you. [29:29] and live lives without suffering. [29:38] Thank you. [29:39] Okay.

[29:43] I might suggest we start to bring it to a close here. [29:47] If I were on my own, I'd go another 40 minutes or something just continuing to... [29:54] Thank you. [29:55] just continuing to dance with these feelings and sinking further and further into them. [30:01] Whew. [30:04] That was lovely. [30:07] That was lovely. Thanks for inviting me to do that, Dan. [30:12] Every time I do that in almost any context, you just come out the other side with a little bit more ease. [30:19] Lividness. [30:20] No. [30:21] Yeah, I'm in like a very... [30:25] Different place than when I started. [30:27] Yeah. [30:33] *Bad music* [30:37] Yeah, me too. [30:38] slower and at ease. [30:41] Yeah. [30:43] I think [30:45] I know I just said something to this effect, but the... [30:51] There's sort of like that micro game, and then there's like the more time-oriented game. [30:56] And the micro game is just at every single twist and turn. It's amazing how fast we... [31:03] Don't brush our experience with kindness. [31:06] And it's just this infinitely fascinating game of seeing how gentler and gentler [31:12] You can be...

[31:13] How much more rest and kindness kind of start to look like the same thing. [31:17] And then with time, it's just like sinking into a hot tub and it takes on a life of its own. [31:25] I didn't try to drop a tear, and I wouldn't try in a way for that warmth in my chest to sort of expand to the point where it was a full body experience. [31:34] And yet I know from experience that that's how it would play out if we were to go another... [31:38] 30 40 minutes or whatever [31:42] I'm sort of feeling like I would like to narrate [31:47] what happened for me. [31:49] Yeah. [31:50] Tell me. [31:51] Um, [31:56] So I think right now I'm... [31:58] Just much... [32:00] lower and slower. And one of the things that I think is, [32:05] you do incredibly well that I, I picked up on this retreat is, um, [32:10] It actually surprised me how much time you spent in this sort of like pre-published, [32:16] meditation phase of just [32:19] coming home and like relaxing every part of my body and like, and I started to notice on this [32:29] Yeah. [32:31] As you mentioned, there are all those like little places where I, [32:34] I'm tensed up. [32:36] and [32:38] consciously physically changing the tension level [32:42] changes the overall emotional valence of my like body

[32:46] Thank you. [32:47] Um... [32:49] and there was there's stuff there i'm in an office so like i'm hearing people debating that i have [32:55] I love that. [32:59] And so I was like so annoyed. [33:06] um [33:08] and sort of like self-conscious a little bit. [33:13] Thank you. [33:14] And so you, you, but you have this like brush it with kindness thing that honestly, just the way that you say it. [33:21] I know that you can do it. And so I'm doing it. If that makes sense. [33:27] It's not like... [33:30] You're just saying, yeah, brush it with kindness. You're doing it as you say it. And so I'm just like, I can do it too. [33:36] Um, [33:38] In my experience, I thought there was a bit of a shift at some point. [33:42] I think it was like the beginning of the body scan. [33:44] where I was like, oh, there's all this fear. I didn't realize I was carrying here. And after that, I was like, I think I slowed internally, I slowed down and I wondered if my voice slowed down a bit too. I think it did. And it sort of leaked into me, which is, I love this part of it is like, I'm very sensitive to that kind of thing. So it, [34:01] just maybe I would be like a good hip hypnotist subject or something, but it just happens for me. Um, [34:10] And I found... [34:11] in my experience when i'm getting a little bit deeper [34:14] um there's almost like a warm blanket that comes over my head a little bit and i'm like

[34:20] It just feels like I'm coming up on acid. I don't know. [34:26] And, um... [34:27] Thank you. [34:29] I end up [34:31] feeling like a [34:33] just... [34:35] I'm like energy, if that makes sense. [34:38] And so my physical edges get a little softer and all that kind of stuff. [34:43] um and it was really what was really nice is you had started to like sort of say your phrases and [34:51] And... [34:53] it was for the world. And I was like, I'm just so grateful for you. And so I was just like, pushing it at you. And then you actually were like, I'm grateful for Dan, because you were like thinking about what I was thinking. And then I was just like, Oh, and yeah, like, then I was just in this sort of like, [35:17] gooey, like everything [35:20] just [35:20] The hot tub thing I think is a good metaphor. [35:23] And this is a very common experience for me now, like post-subs. [35:29] journey retreat. And [35:33] One thing that is maybe interesting for you is I think that your opening up motion, that was difficult for me. It was very difficult for me to do that without trying. Yes. And I think this is like a thing that I had to actually unpack during the retreat and also subsequently is one of the things I love about how you teach is, and why the jhanas are interesting, is if you try to get into a jhana, you like fail.

[36:04] for people who are meditating, you're often like a sort of [36:08] optimizer type a like and you're like oh i want to let go or whatever and then you just turn that into i'm going to figure out how to let go i'm going to be super good at letting go and that doesn't work very well and and i you really unlocked in this retreat um [36:23] how to actually just enjoy yourself. [36:27] weirdly and um that enjoying yourself is like the sort of key to getting into that state and the you know your your some of your metaphors about what does it feel like to come home or like relaxing into a hot tub or that kind of thing were helpful but it's still kind of like i couldn't [36:46] That kind of like I just opened up thing. It was just like not that available. [36:52] Thank you. [36:52] And the thing that kind of got me that I was doing as you were talking is, um, [36:59] Okay. [37:01] And... [37:02] I realized that I was already that. [37:04] I was already open. [37:07] you know and that um that feeling is like sometimes you're looking for your glasses [37:13] And then you realize they're on, they're on. And that moment of like, Oh, I I'm already there is like, that's that for me is like the, yeah. [37:25] oh okay i can like i can like relax into it you know i know i know what that i know what that move is and once you identify it then you can do it more and then it's really great there's so much you said there that is is really spot on and i think you're pointing it

[37:40] one of and if not the most [37:42] one of the most important, if not [37:44] and maybe one of the most difficult things to learn when you're playing this game. [37:49] is that it's really about like, [37:52] Can you rest into love? [37:54] in a way, like, and really emphasis on that rest. And there's different frames, like, just [38:00] realizing that you are already this. In fact, it's more about subtraction than addition, or that it's about slipping into a hot tub or... [38:07] It's about like it turns out kindness and relaxation are kind of the same thing. Like these are all subtly pointing at this thing that we can go our entire lives and I think subtly missing because we have the habit of like getting great things done with everything. [38:22] clenching down with like applied effort with what we call mental tension. [38:26] And pointing and beginning to see that mental tension and learning that you can soften it is... [38:31] is is tricky business uh but so freeing when you're able to do it [38:36] There's all kinds of different approaches. And I think one of the things that's fun about getting into this [38:40] space is it there's actually a bunch of stuff i want to i also want to put a mental pin in about like why this is valuable beyond just like us having a [38:49] like a mini love fest for a few minutes. Like, um, [38:53] But you begin to see that like, [38:57] In some ways, like every religion has always been two religions. There's like the mystics and the organizers. And the mystics are sort of having these kinds of experiences and developing these sorts of tools to point at this difficult idea of spotting and releasing mental tension or awareness and love all the way down or recursive self-acceptance. Those are kind of the three ways we like to say the same thing on retreat.

[39:18] uh, [39:18] And [39:20] Some of this stuff I think is brilliant. But if you don't, without the right, I think, clarity, [39:25] or precision of word, it can be really confusing. So like a good example is, [39:30] Some meditation teachers will be like, "Meditation can and should not have any goal." [39:34] It should not meditation should have zero goal. And I hear that and I'm like, that is extremely useful and not true. [39:42] Like you're conflating usefulness with truth. [39:47] Of course meditation has a goal. How could it not? Everything you do has a goal. Whether it's to incrementally relax and take a little edge off your stress or whether it's to become full-on enlightened, there is a goal. The game is how do you relate to that goal with a sense of play and openness as opposed to desperation or obligation? [40:07] And as it turns out, many of us effectively instantiate goals in our nervous system by making them contracts to be dissatisfied until we get what we want. [40:16] And I think, [40:18] Naval has a good... [40:22] little like couple blurbs on that kind of idea. [40:25] And so learning to instantiate goals differently, [40:29] is a huge unlock. [40:31] Imagine if all of your goals were a sense of love and play, how much more sustainable and probably more effective that would be. Has any great performance come from a place other than play, other than flow when you're lost in the soccer field or in the virtuoso musician or sort of? [40:45] lost on stage as a CEO, like, um, that stuff is, I think, uh, can't come from, um,

[40:52] the sort of like self coercive place. And yet, um, [40:56] we for various reasons have sort of like [40:59] selected for and optimized the hell out of our self-coercion instead of our self-acceptance. [41:05] I love this, like kind of what you're saying about play. And I just know for me, [41:10] the [41:11] The times when, as a founder building my company, I was like, I have to do it. And I do it in the way that people are going to do it because it's going to be a real company versus the times where I'm actually just coming from a place of play. [41:26] the business has changed dramatically and has grown way quicker as I've just been like, no, no, the core of it is just like me playing and doing things I like. Um, yeah, [41:36] Very counter... very counterintuitive and very, um... [41:40] actually hard. It's weirdly hard to do because people, um, [41:45] Our default is to be like, well, play is not serious enough to actually do something real. And so you're actually kind of afraid and ashamed of that. [41:52] Yeah. [41:54] So, and there's all these like little layers and subtle things where it's like you can even make the decision to play at the surface level. But then there's all these little micro moments where you're actually not doing that. So it's very, it gets, there's lots of different levels to this game, as you've said. [42:11] One of the things I want to do right now is... [42:14] Talk about pitfalls. You have one that I think you want to bring up and I have some that I want to bring up because I think there are various ways to misinterpret this and how to use it and

[42:29] when to use it and why and all that kind of stuff and [42:32] It would have saved me a lot of time myself if someone had said some of this stuff to me. Time and blood, sweat, and tears and misery basically. So I think the first... [42:46] at least for me, the first subtle... [42:50] way to get this wrong that makes it [42:52] could even potentially harmful is um [42:56] If you are someone for me, I'll just say for me, actually, because it's hard to generalize, but for me, [43:02] I had untreated OCD. [43:04] which is a horrible, horrible, [43:07] moment by moment, like you're just in hell, like pretty much all the time type of experience for like 10 years. [43:14] And so if you hear about the jhanas or maybe meditation in general, and then maybe the jhanas in particular, but I think this applies to lots of different types of meditation practice. You're like, oh, cool. I will use this to get out of that state. [43:30] um [43:31] And my experience is that that's both that it doesn't work and it can be like quite counterproductive. [43:41] And it has been much better for me. There are definitely times where you can be and you're like sad or you're upset or whatever and you can like use this as like a, at least for me, a... [43:53] a touchstone or a bolster from which to like, [43:57] go and examine those emotions and welcome them in. But I think your point about taking seriously the welcoming in of things is actually quite important because if you're using it to solve your

[44:12] painful emotions. It's... [44:15] it's bad or it's not great. And at least for me, [44:20] There's a time where you're experiencing things that are so overwhelming that it is actually like, [44:27] very hard if you're not [44:29] really good at this already to actually actively welcome them. Like it would be, it would be kind of ridiculous. It'd be like, yeah, my house is on fire. Great. Like you actually can't do that. You know, maybe you have a little fire in the living room and you might like welcome that. Cause you're like, I've done this before. I've dealt with the living room fire, but your house is on fire. [44:47] And you go into one of these states, at least like you can really have your whole experience start to be on fire. And it's like, it's really, it's kind of bad. So yeah, go for it. [45:00] Cool. So I think you're pointing at a couple of things that I think are super important. The first is the idea of welcoming something that may overwhelm your nervous system. [45:09] And that's a super important thing, and I think [45:15] We would do a disservice sort of offering a little bit of that like sample imitate an expert like meditation clip without speaking to those limitations. The second is… [45:26] Is this a good idea when real stakes are on the table? [45:29] Like, is it a good idea to lower the stakes for the nervous system? [45:33] And when and why, like when and how is that the case? [45:37] So one at a time. First, on welcoming something that would overwhelm the nervous system, this is super important, and there's a couple different things that –

[45:47] I think... [45:49] it [45:50] Lay out how to work through work with this. The first is this idea of window of tolerance, which is especially big and things like somatic therapy and in related fields. [46:00] And the idea is that you don't ever want to be [46:05] playing with your attention and emotion that gets you to a point of dysregulation, either hyperarousal, which might look like a proper panic attack, or hypoarousal, which might be like a numbness or a strong dissociation. When you're working with something like grade A trauma, folks will have these reactions sort of like associated with these stimuli. And very quickly, if you're playing with grade A trauma, you can end up in that kind of dysregulated place. And [46:32] always the top priority is to stay inside your window of tolerance because if you get outside your window of tolerance you can in fact sort of exacerbate and make things worse you can re-traumatize yourself um it can also be the case that uh you're going to inhibit your learning not help not enhance your learning [46:45] So part of playing this game comes with like figuring out where your guardrails are and learning how to like not go blowing past your guardrails. [46:53] And there's ways to do that. There's grounding and orientation exercises. There's sort of titration. There's, in fact, pay less attention to the body, pay more attention to sort of the external environment, depending on where are some of the more like kind of triggering and charge cues. [47:07] And maybe also, at least from my experience, if you are dealing with actual clinically relevant, really tough mental stuff,

[47:17] It's probably better to deal with that. [47:19] before you start like playing around. And there are ways usually to deal with it to get to get to a place where you're feeling you're obviously going to feel like your full range of emotions. But [47:29] For me, I was stuck in... [47:33] everything is fucking horrible all the time. And I needed to deal with that before I could do any of this. [47:38] Totally. Absolutely. And I know you've written, I think – [47:43] : inspiringly and elegantly about your journeys with OCD and like the fact that when you finally got the right medication at the right time, that really created the base on which you could then like experiment and explore with other things. [47:54] Super important. Yeah. [47:55] There's another piece of this puzzle about the welcoming thing that I think gets lost, and that is that one very simple framework by which to think about this whole game around what you might call nervous system fluency is – [48:10] or [48:12] Maybe I don't want to make such a broad claim around nervous system fluency, but the whole game comes down to this idea. [48:18] Certainly, going down the meditation journey, one thing you can think about is this idea of memory reconsolidation. [48:24] and that being an orienting framework for a lot of what we're doing. [48:27] The idea of memory reconsolidation is really simple. It's that if you co-activate a... [48:33] a prior sort of negative [48:36] emotional charge associated with the given stimuli. [48:39] And, [48:40] uh you can that [48:42] a commensurate sense of safety [48:45] compassion connection at the same time that the two can kind of like wash over each other. And then the default charge associated with that stimulus.

[48:55] can be rewritten. [48:57] and angled more towards something like the safety or the openness or the conduct, the emotional fluence, conductive conductivity. So you have two things here. You want, you want to reactivate the emotional charge, assuming you're inside your window of tolerance. You want to reactivate the challenging emotional charge or feel it live and co-activate a commensurate level of safety, compassion, connection, love, whatever. [49:19] If you do these two things, you can reset the emotional default. [49:23] Knowing that you can reset your emotional defaults is in my mind one of the most [49:26] underappreciated secrets in the world. That... [49:30] developing the skill of [49:33] on a per stimuli basis, per stimulus basis, [49:37] Resetting your emotional defaults means you have root permissions to hack on your personality. [49:41] Like what is your personality then? Like a big bag of like stimuli response patterns. And so that thing that has to do with what your mom says to you or your relationship to that difficult thing at work, it turns out that you can – if you can get yourself into the right state and you can co-activate these two things, you can change the defaults and make yourself lighter of being and more aligned with your values over time. [50:00] I think that's a huge deal. And basically what we're doing when we're doing this emotional conductivity stuff and meditation and leaning into like, you know, like I like to use this analogy of an actor crying on stage, an actor leaning into like an open hearted feeling. [50:13] We're learning for many folks, the challenging part of memory consolidation is having access to the commensurate safety, love, or connection. [50:22] to co-activate along with their challenging stuff. A lot of people can get into anxiety loops, no problem. They got that on tap. You can activate anxiety. Like not a widespread issue in the world today, but co-activating a sense of safety, love connection at the same time to rewrite your emotional defaults to be something that might be more aligned with how you aspire to act.

[50:42] is a really big deal um and and so that's that's basically the game we're playing i think there's other ways of doing this like you can you can argue that this is actually what psychedelics are doing this is the mechanism by which they work um uh is you're getting yourself into a malleable state you're pulling up a schema but because of the set and setting and dynamic you're co-activating and doing memory consolidation [51:00] You can also do this in interpersonal dynamics with like communities that are maybe sharing emotions or vulnerably so. One of the things that's so wonderful about, you know, connecting with loved ones. [51:10] And meditation gives you a self-sufficient and very fine-tuned and precise way of playing this game. And this is one of the ways you can shape your personality over time. [51:19] I think that's totally true. I will say another way, another pitfall that that brings up for me, because I think what [51:28] Where I took that as a younger man is cool. I don't actually have to make some of the hard decisions that I probably need to make and I can just like deal with it internally so that I don't have to have any uncomfortable conversations. [51:42] or make big changes in my life to fix things that are wrong because I can just be blissful all the time. That's cool. Let's just do that. I like where you're going with this. Yeah. And I've actually found that... [51:56] Thank you. [51:57] to properly do this, to properly... [52:01] Thank you. [52:02] express love to yourself or express love to other people. [52:06] Your actions and your words need to be aligned. [52:09] because otherwise you're not going to believe yourself. And if you are acting in a way that is not loving towards yourself by putting yourself into lots of situations that you probably shouldn't be in or hiding your emotions from other people and all that kind of stuff, if you're doing all that and you're saying, I love you to yourself, I'm not going to be in a way that you're not loving.

[52:29] Not going to work. Not going to work. You have to like this sort of like love all the way down thing has to also go love all the way up. [52:37] So at the grossest level of like, [52:40] your actions you they have to kind of match the more subtle things that you're doing too in order to sort of fully unlock this and um it's not a shortcut to just [52:51] have everything in your life be horrible and you just feel good despite all that. Sometimes you [53:00] hard decisions for yourself. [53:01] Totally, totally. And I think this is getting at the sort of the second thing that I – [53:07] you brought up earlier, which is like [53:08] Is this a good idea? Like, is it a good idea to lower the stakes? Do you actually end up sort of just numbing yourself to your problems or like not addressing the things that matter most to you? And... [53:18] That in my mind is a thoughtful and well-meaning critique. But as it turns out, like the way the mechanisms work, [53:25] It doesn't work that way. [53:27] If you were to... [53:30] Yeah, like... [53:32] Let's say like not hold a boundary with a loved one, like abandon yourself and you're getting sort of walked over in a relationship or something. And then you go to your room and you spend an hour doing the whole Jonna game and you're like, I love myself. There, you may soften the edges around some things that are sort of like internally inconsistent. [53:51] And yet you're still abandoning yourself. [53:54] So like... [53:55] You're not loving yourself. It's not going to work. The mechanism isn't going to go all the way through. And this is more of a interpersonal hypothetical.

[54:07] Same thing is true in the professional world. If you, like, one of the things that... [54:13] I used to get... [54:16] Like setting goals for the company. [54:18] If you have intuition that you really should be going in the other way, or you're thinking about taking the money from the investors, [54:25] But there's something deep within you that you haven't yet figured out has already pattern matched. That's dangerous. You don't want to do that. Now's not the time to take money. Or actually, I really need the growth capital because we need to be launching this rocket ship now. We're not moving fast enough. Those are going to be embedded in the system, and you're not going to be able to gloss past them into some sort of happy bliss outland. It's going to require... [54:46] reckoning with those seriously. And so one of the other, one of the ways in which I think [54:52] Maybe the three biggest ways that I think this game really begins to pay dividends in action [54:57] Passed to it with relationships, with building habits, and with improving decision-making. [55:02] Thank you. [55:03] because the system ends up, I think, being more aligned across the three. So I want to, let's go into, I think we've spent enough time on some of the, you know, here be dragons warnings. Let's go into some of the, you know, you've talked about like personality hacking. What are some of the ways that you have changed as a result of this practice? [55:22] Yeah. [55:23] That's a great question. [55:25] So... [55:27] Thank you. [55:29] I'm thinking of a couple stories to sort of capture...

[55:35] One that was really big a little over a year ago in the spring of last year. [55:41] was [55:42] I was... [55:43] Really? [55:45] Missing how much fear I had about the... [55:50] Like the, we were at this point, so we started as a neurotech company. We were, had been collecting a bunch of data. You started as a, sorry. As a neurotech company. Okay. [55:58] And we were collecting a bunch of data to see if we could map the sort of biosignals that would be needed to create better feedback loops for novices. And we needed to start running retreats in order to collect more data for R&D. And when we started running retreats, that's when they kind of took off on us. And we realized we could build a school rather than a lab. [56:17] And then that school could be converted into a lab over time. And it would be a bunch of benefits. You know, we would be defaults alive. We would start a movement. We would get more shots on goal. Each shot on goal would be better than the last. And so this retreat pipeline we've spun up, we see is like the first step of something much bigger, like a launch pad into something that... [56:34] works more effectively and for more people. [56:37] We were some months into running our retreats, and I'm still terrified on these retreats. I'm a grown man basically repeating and sometimes crying in front of a room of people about may all beings be happy. How fucking out of touch am I? These are tech executives. We've had co-founders of some of the world's biggest companies and fastest growing companies come on these retreats. These are all people who I admire in person and on paper, and I'm making a fool of myself.

[57:07] If I make a fool of myself, it's one thing. And then if I don't show them the thing that I find so valuable by the end of the week, it's just – [57:15] There was so much fear there. [57:17] I was blind to this fear. [57:19] And I was actively like... [57:22] because of [57:23] Because of my blindness, we would have these team meetings and we would have our spreadsheets and we'd have behind the scenes, okay, who's this person? What are the top three hypotheses for what support they need? What have we done so far? What have we learned? In my mind, there's just these kind of perennial questions that we're just asking for everybody rapid fire in this meeting. And I'm getting faster and faster and tighter and tighter in my voice. And now... [57:47] Anybody who's working with me is starting to get afraid. You're doing that now. You're getting fast and talking about it. Exactly. I'm stepping back into the memory. [57:59] We need some reconsolidation right now. I can do some of that. [58:06] But when I finally, and like, of course, as this is happening, like it's way harder to meditate. And I'm like, I'm playing the game. This is one of the reasons why meditation is such good with day to day life is like stuff comes up in day to day life, you see it in your meditation because you're like, [58:18] I don't. [58:19] what the hell is going on here? Like, I can't relax. I can't open up. Like, there's now a game to be played. Like, this is the real opportunity. I'm leveling up in the video game, so to speak. [58:28] And finally, through a few different things, I was like, oh my God, I'm terrified. [58:36] come here, terrified Stephen. Like, come here. I will not leave you. Like, and the, had, had,

[58:44] I'm sure I had a little bit of a cry and suddenly can retroactively see all these places I was creating unnecessary friction with the team. And that was certainly hurting our performance and our ability to serve students. And so from there, I was unable to do an apology that would have been difficult for me a few days before to different team members and run the team meetings in a much more effective way and create a culture that would be much more like culture eat strategy for breakfast. [59:10] It would not have been possible if I... [59:12] remained unaware, and if I wasn't able to turn towards it instead of away from it. [59:16] I feel that deeply. I think... [59:21] Thank you. [59:23] The way that it is manifested for me [59:26] is... [59:28] First of all, as like someone coming from a very people pleasery type background, I'm [59:34] Yeah. [59:35] I think you can... [59:38] misinterpret, um, [59:41] a lot of dharma wisdom as maybe maybe we can say the dharma the dharma wisdom which is true of a lot a lot of religions is treat others as you would like to be treated and for people pleasers that's natural [59:55] um that's like you just do that automatically um and and but to the expense expense of yourself which [1:00:03] ironically is like not [1:00:06] actually helpful for other people and it's not helpful for you um and so i had to sort of flip that into the people pleaser rule which is um treat yourself as you would treat others um i like that

[1:00:21] and um [1:00:24] I think once you start to realize that, this is a very helpful practice for actually being like, okay, what is actually loving for myself right now? [1:00:34] Thank you. [1:00:34] And once you have that base, [1:00:38] where you actually start to like or love yourself. Um, [1:00:43] At least for me, I started to notice all of these things that... [1:00:48] about myself that I couldn't [1:00:51] see before because it would be too scary. [1:00:54] Thank you. [1:00:54] that get in the way of your relationships, make you make bad decisions. Like a really simple example for me would be... [1:01:03] Oh, wow. This person, I'm actually pretty jealous of them. [1:01:08] And I would never have... [1:01:11] been able to say that before I would have wrapped it in all these other reasons why I didn't like them. [1:01:16] Yeah, because it was too scary to imagine that you would be jealous. Yeah, and I think that would mean you're a bad person or flawed in some way or something. Exactly. Exactly. And. [1:01:27] And it makes such a difference to be like, oh, I'm jealous. [1:01:31] And... [1:01:32] if you have a close enough relationship with that person to be like, sometimes I get jealous in these situations and that's why I act this way. Yeah. And it just makes everything so much better. So much freedom. So much freedom. It's like, yeah, both, both internally. And then when you, to have that kind of like,

[1:01:52] Thank you. [1:01:53] Live interpersonal apology. Wow. [1:01:56] Yes. And I think you're also, I was surprised. [1:02:03] how much of my personality [1:02:06] wraps around or wrapped around [1:02:10] Trying to feel loved? [1:02:12] And when you can feel loved just because you are you and you just like go home and meditate and you're like, oh, I feel pretty loved right now. It releases a lot of stuff that you thought was your personality, but it was really just you trying to like feel loved for whatever reason. And that is also, I think, a much like a super important benefit of this practice for me. [1:02:35] hugely important. It saves a bunch of energy. It prevents a bunch of like [1:02:39] unhelpful patterns or like repeated behaviors addictions effectively i think um one of the [1:02:47] One of the things I was speculating about the other day is in systems thinking, you can show your stocks and flows, and then if you change the arrival of certain information, you can move a system from – Donna Meadows has got this great chapter in her book about this. [1:03:02] thinking in systems. And if you change the info flows, you can sort of shift the system into a new equilibrium where there's a bunch of oscillating. [1:03:11] instead of like a sort of a static equilibrium. [1:03:14] And I was musing about how if you don't sort of feel the feeling, [1:03:18] that you're avoiding, you can get yourself on these oscillating loops where

[1:03:24] You are... [1:03:27] I think procrastination is like the obvious one that comes to mind, like time management is pain management sort of thing. Like you're avoiding doing something, you're avoiding doing something, so then you go do it really quick, which makes it more likely you're going to fail, and then you fail, so then you avoid doing it again. Or – and these play out constantly in relationship dynamics. Like my mom does that one thing, so then I respond in this way, and it makes it more likely she does this thing in the future. [1:03:49] So – [1:03:50] it saves energy. I think it sort of prevents those kinds of patterns. [1:03:54] And, [1:03:54] I... [1:03:55] then it also gives you so much more latitude and degrees of freedom to [1:04:01] navigate tough calls at work or to engage with relationships in a certain way, it just keeps paying dividends. [1:04:07] Paul Graham's got a great statement about like the value of making yourself, of keeping your identity small in order to give yourself space to like think independently. [1:04:17] It just shows up everywhere. [1:04:19] And I would be remiss if in this podcast, we did not talk about how this all relates to AI. Yes. [1:04:28] So let's go to that at the moment. Yeah. How do you, how are you thinking about that? I know you have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. [1:04:37] Yeah, so macro and micro. At the macro level, I think... [1:04:44] Journey's thesis is effectively [1:04:47] super well-being can [1:04:49] Super well-being is as tractable of a problem and as important as something like super longevity and super intelligence. What is super well-being?

[1:04:57] like this uh [1:05:00] I... [1:05:01] It... [1:05:02] Thank you. [1:05:03] A grown there's so there are folks who will talk about being sort of deep into the meditation path. [1:05:10] Uh, [1:05:11] that will say extreme statements. [1:05:14] Mike. [1:05:14] My baseline well-being now, [1:05:17] My worst day is better than... [1:05:20] my best day from a few years ago. [1:05:22] Like on like a year long basis or like many year long space where you'll see even more extreme quotes. Like I wouldn't trade what I know now and the way I move through the world and this like ease and openness for many years of sort of like a younger or like higher version of myself. [1:05:36] That is completely opposite conventional wisdom about the hedonic treadmill. [1:05:40] Um, [1:05:41] And, [1:05:43] There's actually, I think, a relatively simple explanation for that. It's that the downlink treadmill applies in many cases in which you're looking for the wrong thing. [1:05:48] Like if you go ask a billionaire whether it solved their happiness problems, [1:05:52] It would be, I think, I was just, who was doing this? Probably Nick, probably Nick Kamrad on Twitter had like a great tweet polling from like a billionaire being interviewed or being, or like Naval saying like being successful is not the same as being happy. [1:06:05] And you'll discover that when you're there, that that's not what you were looking for. Like the common trope. [1:06:11] In some ways, I think a lot of what we're [1:06:14] where we're looking for happiness is just a little misguided. [1:06:17] It turns out it's in some ways it's about more non-doing than doing or more like this conductivity move, this like awareness and love all the way down. And I genuinely – in my experience is that it is –

[1:06:28] not just incrementally improved, but I think transformed my baseline happiness. [1:06:31] Yeah. [1:06:33] So this is sort of a nod for what's possible with super well-being. I think that's just getting started. That's using, in my mind, very crude tools. Meditation is a sloppy tool relative to the kind of precision that would be possible with things like neurotech and so on. [1:06:47] Philosophically, [1:06:48] Why be like, what's the point of being smart and old, if not happy, is sort of like the argument. And I also think it happens to be very tractable, given the sort of psychotech that you see prop up across time and space throughout history. And the reports are [1:07:07] of VoxSAT. [1:07:08] like i think sound absurd at the surface but if you really investigate they genuinely believe they're way way happier [1:07:14] There's also other things you could play with here, like there are certain maybe genetic changes. I forget, what's her name? Jo... [1:07:21] Joe Cameron? [1:07:22] I'm talking about the British woman who has a genetic mutation and says she hasn't felt pain in like... [1:07:27] Oh, yeah. [1:07:28] I don't know her name, but yeah. So all kinds of, from neurotech to sort of like genetics to like just thinking about [1:07:36] the question of suffering [1:07:38] Seriously. [1:07:39] is... [1:07:41] a little bit of a [1:07:43] contrarian take. [1:07:45] in the world right now. And I think that's silly. I think if we're already taking super longevity and super intelligence seriously, why not take super wellbeing seriously? [1:07:53] That's the high level. In terms of like what Journey is actually doing and how this ties to AI...

[1:07:58] We, [1:08:00] now have like our first product is this [1:08:02] retreat that gets the majority of people into these [1:08:06] altered states that they will talk about being peak experiences in the order of many months or years or even a lifetime. [1:08:13] They frequently will people talk about it as being is like power, like an endogenous version is powerful psychedelics. [1:08:18] And the traits that come with it. [1:08:22] playing this nervous system fluency game to get to Ajahn are even more valuable. Like change how you relate to your goals. You have these new tools for navigating relationships, decisions, and habits differently. [1:08:33] And then furthermore, when you get to the later stages, you're sort of, even your sense of identity can sort of shift from like identifying as something between your ears and behind your eyes to like. [1:08:43] the relative ratio of how much of this world simulation is me. And that can sort of come with large, like de-threatening qualities. This is on the deep end of, and a lot of people talk about this in non-duality and the like. [1:08:54] And all these things are rolled together. We'll do a part two episode on that. Yeah, that's... [1:09:00] Totally worth a part two. It's – [1:09:05] The claims that advanced meditators make are absolutely absurd. [1:09:09] And so big, if true, that super well-being, I think, in some ways is a lot closer than that fancy term might sound like. [1:09:17] Thank you. [1:09:17] Okay, all that being said, Journey right now has a product [1:09:22] can make the Jhonas accessible. Jhonas allow for memory consolidation, self-sufficient, and fluent, which is a huge boon now for you to do personality hacking and starting to improve your well-being and your lightness of being over time. And the question is, how do we make this accessible to more people, do it more reliably, and make the impact even deeper? It's one thing to have your first stack experience in Jhonas. It's another thing to be able to use Jhonas regularly on a day-to-day basis to make yourself lighter of being. It's another thing to start to see and shift your sense of identity.

[1:09:51] Like there's a lot of depth that can be had there too. [1:09:54] Originally, the plan was to use hardware and things like we were starting with the EEG and other biosensors to create like rapid feedback loops that and personalized feedback loops that would allow you to get go down all of this path faster. [1:10:08] In the couple of years that we've been at this, AI has gotten incredibly good. And basically everything we're doing on retreat can be done reliably by an AI. [1:10:16] And so this, what we're doing behind the scenes already is where like the facilitators are sort of preparing to meet with every student and they're getting hypotheses from AI. And there's other things we can do where it's like the AI can sort of ingest all the student data. We record everything in Journey because we're constantly running experiments and reflecting ourselves. [1:10:46] good at while letting facilitators specialize in the sort of human-human connection that humans are really good at. [1:10:52] All that is happening now and increasingly being built. [1:10:55] I think the thing that I get really excited about in the near term is something like math academy for the jhanas or math academy for like life changing meditation. [1:11:05] Especially if we're starting to get to an AI can do like a dyadic guided meditation with you to do like the paired version or the personalized version of the imitate an expert. Like now we're talking about your experience. And we're like, hey, let's look at this thing with more conductivity or let's go in this direction. We can get that really dialed in and reliably get people to jhana without a human in the loop.

[1:11:24] on the order of like 15, 20, 30 hours or something, you can then also put together like a skill tree, the way Math Academy might, for how you might get to some sort of, [1:11:33] future concept. Now you open your app, you've got your skill tree, you know exactly where you are, you've got a superhuman guide who can engage with you live in meditation and also diagnose or go back and forth. Those are the kinds of things that I think are [1:11:50] imminently ready to be built take my money how do i get it when app when that's like yeah so well okay great now i can sort of pitch the things that journey needs from the world um we're uh uh the in my mind like it's it's just so crazy it's right there to be built and i cannot build it fast enough and uh so [1:12:13] There's a couple bottlenecks. The first is engineering. And so we're looking for a world-class engineer to come join us and be part of that. Have you tried Opus 4.5? [1:12:23] I have not tried Opus 4 or 5. I was... [1:12:29] You must. And I'm excited to do so. I believe that you could build this in like a week in between meetings with Opus 4.5. I have built some of this and it is like amazing how fast I can, I was going with, I think I was using Sonnet at the time because I think Opus 4.5 came out last week. [1:12:47] Is that right? Yeah, yeah. So I was using whatever was latest before. It was two or three weeks ago that I was doing it. [1:12:52] And I'm really torn right now. Honestly, this is something I keep talking about with my co-founder where I'm like, I can almost build this. But I also have a company to run and managing other things. And I would just...

[1:13:06] it's not rocket science. We just need like a brilliant, or we just need someone with like great product taste to like come in and own the whole thing. It's like, [1:13:14] four or five might be good enough but i just don't have the time and so i i've i've thought about like canceling everything in my schedule for a month and seeing if i can just do it myself um and i might still do that but in the meantime we're also we're also looking for an engineer if you were listening to this and you want to build this app [1:13:29] Stephen reach out to Stephen yes please we uh uh [1:13:35] The thing that the retreat pipeline has offered is this incredible testing ground to get really precise. And so we have a journeying bot and we're running an evals process. And we're going to be able to do that. [1:13:45] Inter like looking at transcripts and we're saying okay here's how we want to like other changes system and change the problem you just this iteration loop is already in place like it's just a matter of time so it. [1:13:55] It's exciting that it feels inevitable at this point. [1:13:59] Steven, this is incredible. I think this might be my favorite episode I've ever recorded. Wow, I'm delighted. I've listened to a few of your episodes and I've quite enjoyed them. [1:14:11] Thank you so much for doing this. If people are interested in learning more about you or about Journey, where can they find you? [1:14:19] Yeah. So I'm on Twitter, Stephen underscore Zerfus. And so is Journey, the company. The handle is at Johnatech. [1:14:29] So J-H-A-N-A-T-E-C-H. [1:14:32] Steven's, Earth is S T P H E N underscored. [1:14:35] Z-E-R-F-A-S. And our website is www.journey.io.

[1:14:46] And... [1:14:48] Those are the main ways to find us. [1:14:50] Amazing. We've got to do a part two. [1:14:54] That'd be fun. Yeah. Well, there's all kinds of, but we're, we're thinking about a part two curriculum to really get into the later genres and non-duality and identity shifts. [1:15:02] And there's so many different ways this could go, and it's always fun to talk. [1:15:07] Thank you. [1:15:07] We'll do sometime. Sounds good. [1:15:10] Cool. Thanks, Dan. [1:15:19] Oh my gosh, folks. You absolutely, positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI&I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard. But instead of gold, it's filled with pure, unadulterated knowledge bombs about chat GPT. [1:15:41] on the edge of your seat. [1:15:43] craving for more. It's not just a show. It's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. [1:15:51] So do yourself a favor, hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. [1:15:56] And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.