741 How to Be a True Billionaire with Jason Silva

POSITIVELY IMPACT THE WORLD AROUND YOU. If you were to ask my grandfather what a billionaire is, he would tell you it’s someone with a billion dollars. Today, that definition has changed - even by Forbes standard. Now a true billionaire is someone who impacts a billion lives. The value of money is declining, and in order to have true value in this world you need to add positivity to the world. It’s so much easier today than ever, especially in the digital age. To dive into this more, I revisited a conversation I had with Jason Silva for this Five Minute Friday. Jason Silva is a media artist, futurist, philosopher, keynote speaker, and tv personality. He is the creator of Shots of All, a short film series of trailers for the mind that serve as philosophical espresso shots exploring innovation, technology, creativity, futurism, and metaphysics of the imagination. He is also the Emmy nominated host of National Geographic’s channel, hit TV series, Brain Games, which airs in over 100 countries. Learn what it means to be human today on Episode 741. In This Episode You Will Learn: What it means to be human today (1:02) The Extended Mind Thesis (2:13) What three questions everyone should ask themselves (4:19) Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:11Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to this very special interview, an episode with the one and only Jason Silva. We cover a lot today, but for those that don't know who Jason is, this is a guy you want to make sure you follow online and on TV. Jason is a media artist, futurist, philosopher, keynote speaker, and TV personality. He is the creator of Shots of All, a short film series of trailers for the mind that serve as philosophical espresso shots exploring innovation, technology, creativity, futurism, and metaphysics of the imagination. He is also the Emmy nominated host of National Geographic's channel, hit TV series, Brain Games, which airs in over 100 countries.

• 1:00Lewis Howes?

  What do you think it means to be human today?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Hmm, well, it's, I did a video recently called Redefined Billionaire, which was inspired by some of the ideas put out there by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis from the X Prize Foundation, which is that the new definition of billionaire today on the back of these exponentially emerging technologies is not somebody who has a billion dollars, but somebody who positively affects a billion people. That's the new definition of billionaire. Like empowered by smartphones, empowered by the fact that, you know, a young kid in Africa with a smartphone has better communications technology than the US president had 25 years ago. How does that allow us to change the world? When the supercomputers of yesterday now fit in your pocket, how does that allow us to impact the world in a positive way?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  A kid in a garage, a kid with passion, has the communication, has the power, has the technology that only governments and corporations used to have a few decades ago. So to be human today is to crisscross the skies. To be human today is to communicate instantaneously across the world, to turn our ideas, electrify them at the speed of thought, get them out there, reach other people. I mean, we are miraculous beings. You know, there's these cognitive philosophers that I love called... David Chalmers and Andy Clark, who wrote a thesis called "The Extended Mind Thesis", where they basically put on the notion that iPhone, therefore I am. That are tools, that these technologies are actually cognitive appendages. Like, if you drew the Vitruvian Man today, you know?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  And like, you're pointing to all of his physiological features of like, the ideal human form, that he'd have an iPhone in his hand, and you'd point to it and identify it, the same way you point to the neocortex, or you point to like, his limbs. Like, that this is, even though it's outside of our skin tissue, it's very much part of like, the mental apparatus of the human being. So, we are extended minds. Our intellect, our cognition is distributed between biological and non-biological props and scaffolding. So it's like, that's, I think, what's to be human today, is that we are extended.

• 2:59Lewis Howes?

  And it almost never leaves our body, except when we're asleep. And it's maybe an arm's length away.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  A thousand percent, yeah. And then some people like, get freaked out. They're like, "Oh, we're so dependent on our phones." But like, dude, we've always been symbiotically co-dependent on our tools. Like, when we started, we discovered fire, started cooking food and using stone tools, our jaws shrank over a couple generations. Like, our physiology has always been transformed and affected by the tools we create. Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist in the 70s, the visionary, he used to say, "We build the tools, and the tools build us." Feedback loops. Remember we were talking before about the feedback loops? "Everything we design, designs us in return." And Stephen Johnson, "Our thoughts shape our spaces, our spaces return the favor." You know, like, that's us. And so, that's what it means to be human today. These cameras are extensions of our mindedness and our agency and our will.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Like, our thoughts, you know, electrochemical activity within our brain goes way beyond the brain, you know? It's going into other brains. It's changing other people's neurochemistry today. So, we're becoming a superorganism. Or we've always have been, but it's like, now it's sort of blooming.

• 4:07Lewis Howes?

  I'm just in the jazz pocket.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Awesome, we are in the pocket, I love this.

• 4:16Lewis Howes?

  What would you say if you could come up with three questions that everyone everyone should ask themselves to have a richer, fuller, more expressive, healthy life? What were those three questions? Or maybe a couple of questions, Peter?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  You know that great line that says, "Ask not what the world needs, ask instead what makes you come alive?" Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive. So then the question, of course, is, "What makes you come alive?" And what do I mean by that? Well, what gives you the goosebumps? What gives you the chills? What makes you well up? It's a great line by Alan de Botton, the UK philosopher, where he says, "We don't cry because something is sad. We cry because something is more beautiful than we expected it to be." So those moments, make note of those moments. When do you find yourself witnessing something that's more beautiful than you expected it to be? What induces that? What are the precursors to that? Right? Because I'm all about control. How can we preconfigure more of those experiences? Preconfigure more of those moments of grace?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Reverse engineer, author more of those moments for ourselves? Instead of allowing those moments to be haphazard, coincidental moments that just happen. "Oh, it just happens." No, we can make more of that. We can make more inspiration. We can make more flow, more grace, more transformation. And that's what I want, man. I want to just constantly epiphanize myself. And I think people should ask themselves, "How can I epiphanize myself more?" Yeah.

• 5:37Lewis Howes?

  I like that. Okay.