Jhana Meditation Live: How Anyone Can Achieve Super Wellbeing

We had someone guide himself toward Jhana live on our podcast. And he narrated himself from start to finish. Jhanas are meditative bliss states and they traditionally require thousands of hours of practice. But Stephen Zerfas and his team at Jhourney are changing that—creating retreats where most participants hit a Jhana in their first week. Dan Shipper went to one of their retreats earlier this year, and it was by far the best he’s been to. So we had Stephen on AI & I to show us how he gets into a Jhana and what the future of super wellbeing might look like. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Timestamps: Introduction: 00:00:56 A primer on Jhana meditation: 00:01:18 Zerfas guides himself towards Jhana: 00:05:47 Why Jhana is about resting into what already exists: 00:36:04 Approaching meditation with play and curiosity: 00:39:30 The potential pitfalls of Jhana meditation: 00:45:04 How to hack your personality through memory reconsolidation: 00:48:21 Why Jhana won't let you numb yourself to real problems: 00:53:10 How Jhana meditation has changed Zerfas: 00:55:36 How Jhourney is using AI to make Jhanas more accessible: 01:09:41 Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Stephen Zerfas: Stephen Zerfas Jhourney: https://www.jhourney.io/ The Donella Meadows book Zerfas refers to: Thinking in Systems: A Primer

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Just thinking about the question of suffering seriously is a little bit of a contrarian take in the world right now. And I think that's silly. If we're already taking super longevity and super intelligence seriously, why not take super well-being seriously? We're working to make life-changing meditation accessible to everybody. And we're starting with states known as the jhanas, which are 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 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.

• 0:40Dan Shipper?

  I'm psyched. I want to see you get into a jhana.

• 0:56Dan Shipper?

  Steven, welcome to the show.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Thanks, Dan. I'm excited to be here.

• 1:00Dan Shipper?

  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.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we're working to make life-changing meditation accessible to everybody. And we're starting with states known as the jhanas, which are, 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 or your relationship with your emotions, because that makes everything else easier and ultimately makes it easier

• 2:01Speaker 00

  to be the person you aspire to be. So it's, in many ways, about helping you get to endogenous altered states as fast as possible. But that's really just the first goal. The real goal is to set you up so that your subconscious works for you, not against you.

• 2:19Dan Shipper?

  Wait, say that one more time to set you up to that.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Your subconscious works for you, not against you.

• 2:24Dan Shipper?

  Hmm, 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, generated lasting changes in my practice and therefore lasting changes in my life. So I really, I mean, I love everything you do, and I'm really excited to have you here.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Love to hear that, Dan. It's a labor of love for the team.

• 2:55Dan Shipper?

  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, you're gonna get into a Jhana, or at least get as close as you possibly can to being in a Jhana, and you're going to narrate your internal experience as you do it. Then you're gonna come out of that, and we're gonna 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, 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 gonna get into this sort of

• 3:39Dan Shipper?

  like, technology aspect and the future aspect of this. So I'm psyched. Let's start with, I want to see you get into a Jhana.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Terrific.

• 3:51Dan Shipper?

  No pressure.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  The pressure is part of the fun. A little bit of context and framing for the listeners. So, Jhanas have historically 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 non-verbal in a way that learning many skills is not. And so your feedback loops get all gunked up with guesswork. So at Journey, what we do is we have like a really intentional about feedback loops.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  And so 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 for your interviews and a facilitator is 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, we'll repeat. So what we're going to do here is I'm just going to throw a lot of the like thinking about your experience out the door and offer like my narrate my experience for on the order of like 10 to

• 5:22Speaker 00

  20 minutes. 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 a professional serve a tennis ball than to try to read a book on how to serve 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. I'll just want to offer a couple additional things, which is, one, we talk a lot about collectedness and conductivity. And so the game that I'm going to be playing here is

• 6:03Speaker 00

  I'm going to be gently collecting all of my like attention and experience around an open-hearted feeling. It's going to be a, I might be saying phrases that are all going to be pointing at like a kindness or a gratitude or this kind of thing. And the second is, we talk about conductivity. And that's like embracing anything that comes up, like wholeheartedly, ranging from distractions to 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 by this, by this like kinds compassion kind of thing.

• 6:47Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. And, and to add on to that, or maybe put a finer point on it, there are Endless numbers of guided meditations on the internet or, you know, on Dharma seed or whatever, which are helpful. And 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 watch an expert navigate their own internal experience, which is infinitely complex and, 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.

• 7:26Dan Shipper?

  It is about 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.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's absolutely right. Like, I think success is, is you discover something that you didn't know you were allowed to do, or you didn't know you could do something, that, 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. Like, you're kind of looking for surprise. And doing so, i- i- if anybody wants to follow along and, and meditate a- as we go, do so in just the most gentle, wide open, like letting it wash over your intuition. You're not trying to hang on to every word. You're just letting your, your subconscious see if it can be like, oh, that's the general flow we're going in. Oh, as, as a side note, and maybe we'll talk about this later, a lot of this idea came from inspiration from the US military, which is, which is not, not your typical, or, or maybe depending on how you think about it, like a classic source of meditation wisdom.

• 8:26Dan Shipper?

  This is what I love about you is you're just like, you're pulling from the military, but it's like, any, any, 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 fifty other places over here and it's just all in this like, like unique mishmash that really works well and I love it.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  That's right. That's right. The, the, the reason the military even got mentioned is because they, there's some related work that was done with the military on task knowledge transfer. And that, I think, is like, sort of the key word in some of the things that inspired some of this. So, okay, let's get started. So, hi. To settle, I like to close my eyes and I'm gonna take a deep breath in. And just relax to let it out.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  I'm just watching the end of the out, of the out breath. Where does it end?

• 9:25Speaker 00

  And another deep breath in.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  And just let it all out.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  I'm settling into these old habits of mine.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Looking for a sense of what it feels like to come home. Like coming home after a long day at work and dropping the bags on the floor. I'm just going to start dropping any tension in my experience.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  I've got a racing heart from being on this exciting podcast. I'm got a little brain fog from being woken up by my baby in the middle of the night.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  And I had some anxiety rushing around to prepare

• 10:23Speaker 00

  to get on this podcast with you all. And I'm just gonna start welcoming all those experiences like long lost friends and letting them gently slide in next to me as we come home after a long day at work.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Just letting another breath slow the system down.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  The slower I breathe, the easier I feel.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  And the slower my thoughts are invited, invited to be.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  I have two favorite ways of really settling into a relaxation or a sense of coming home before turning to a earnest, open-hearted feeling.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  The first is to blow my awareness wide open.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  So vast, so wide, that if an airplane were to come home overhead or the tiniest tremble were to come through the building and the floor below me, I would feel it all instantly.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  And so I'm, I'm not reaching for the airplane or for the trembles. I'm just dropping this sense of narrowness that I didn't realize I was carrying.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  I'm like dropping bags coming home from a long day at work.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  And I'm noticing my anxiety a bit in my head and a little bit in my chest.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  I'm having periodic stray thoughts about what Dan's experience is right now, or somebody listening to this.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  And each one of these, I'm just brushing with a sense of kindness and reception.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Welcoming it into this vast mind, completely uncontained, no boundaries.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Deeply at ease, settling in like a warm hot tub into the sense of coming home.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  I just noticed I had kind of closed down my awareness while talking, and so I let it fall wide open again. Completely open, more open than I might think is possible.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  All the talking and thinking is still keeping me up, so I'm gonna do one breath silence to just really settle in.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  With this much ease and openness, I can, and a gentle sense of kindness to anything that might quote unquote distract me.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  I'm starting to feel a little gratitude and open-heartedness already.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  But before I go all the way into that, I like to take a minute to relax the body too.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  And so like a warm shower happening in slow motion, I'm gonna start at the top of the head.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  And I'm gonna relax every muscle as I go down from head to toe.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Finding tension I didn't realize I was carrying.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  And I'm gonna try to do the whole thing from this wide open, vast mind.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  No boundaries, no containment. And when I narrow, contract, just gonna gently open back up.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  So the top of my head slowly moving down.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  There is a little sound in the distance, and there is a little brain fog, or anxiety, or sleeplessness happening in my head, and all of these just gently brushing with an open-hearted welcome.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  And carrying on this little body skin.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  The muscles in my forehead, letting them relax, down my ears, the back of my head, all around the eyes. So many ways to relax the muscles around the eyes.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  I just found another layer in a moment of silence.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  I'm also realizing I've been running some thought about what I'm gonna say next to you all. I'm just gonna drop that now too.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Any fear of making a mistake is gonna be brushed with kindness, just the same.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Down my cheeks, to my jaw.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Naming that I was a little scared was really good.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Now I can just welcome it, and I'm feeling myself relaxed in places I didn't realize I was tense.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  May my fear be welcomed.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  I'm grateful that it's looking out for me.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Back to the body skin, down through the neck.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  I can feel my shirt brushing against my skin, and I'm just relaxing muscles I didn't realize were tense.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Both shoulders slumped down a little more.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Moving down is the arms, the elbow. I have some pain from lifting recently, welcoming that too.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Down into my forearms, my hands, which are a little sweaty, welcoming that too.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  And the tips of my fingers.

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Letting the kindness of just brushing everything in my experience start to take on a bit of its own momentum.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  The pulsing in my hands is brushed almost as soon as I recognize the pulsing.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  The brush of the cool air on my skin is welcomed with kindness as soon as I recognize the cool air.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  Still softening in new ways behind the eyes and in the head.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Experiencing a surge of gratitude for

• 18:48Speaker 00

  this fear or sadness that I may mess up here.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  As gentle as I could possibly be with myself.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  May I come home?

• 19:14Speaker 00

  This kindness and this gratitude and this relaxation are in some ways all the same thing.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  And I'm going to continue on my way down into my chest,

• 19:29Speaker 00

  relaxing muscles I didn't realize were tense.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Touching every bodily sensation with a little relaxing kindness.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Down into my stomach,

• 19:46Speaker 00

  which I was holding and I didn't know.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Letting it kind of fall open vulnerably.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  At ease, at peace.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Savoring a sense of safety that can be found in the stomach when I just let it be at peace. No sucking at it.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Down into the hips.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  The hamstrings and the quads.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Softening there in ways I didn't realize I was tense.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Just a gentle, warm embrace.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Grateful for my legs.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  Down into my calves.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  My ankles, the soles of my feet, and the tips of my toes.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  And pulling up for a moment and being grateful for this entire thing. The whole body, no precision, just a cloud of sensations.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  A throbbing of a pulse, all the way from the tips of my toes to my upper lips.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  The gentle in-and-out breath, the shimmering and glimmering of all the tiny vibrations and almost like that noise in the nervous system. You can't tell if those tingles are real or not.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  The whole thing.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Letting it be a cause for gratitude and wonder. A softening.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  May I come home to it?

• 21:50Speaker 00

  May it come home to me?

• 21:59Speaker 00

  I actually dropped my first tear just a moment ago.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  I for years have softly cried while meditating.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  I don't know when I crossed the threshold, but at some point, the gentle ease and slipping into gratitude,

• 22:26Speaker 00

  the relief of coming home began welling up.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  And I just let it. Another thing to brush in my experience.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Another thing to welcome, to be part of a great coming home.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  And now, with this vast, wide-open mind, no boundaries,

• 22:59Speaker 00

  so free and at ease,

• 23:05Speaker 00

  and this shimmering, glimmering body.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  I'm gonna begin sharing or repeating some of my favorite mantras.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  That part, that spark, a little extra open-hearted feeling.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  And as I do so, I'm just gonna slip in to where they feel most intense in the body. It's like I'm using a metal detector, scanning over all of my experience. And ah, that's where the open-heartedness is most intense. Can I just sink into that like a hot tub? Or pretend for a moment as if nothing in the world, nothing else in the world existed?

• 23:58Speaker 00

  And I kept wondering if Dan would be pleased with this meditation or not. And so I'm just gonna welcome that thought in and gently brush the underlying fear, the underlying fear or the underlying sadness with a little compassion.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  May Dan be happy. May anybody listening be at ease.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  May I be healthy?

• 24:38Speaker 00

  May I be filled with joy?

• 24:43Speaker 00

  And live a life without suffering?

• 24:53Speaker 00

  I got a little anxious or tense about how strange or woo this might sound.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  What must it seem like for a grown man to be saying these words on a podcast?

• 25:08Speaker 00

  And that's okay.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Just like any other fear or sadness.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  I'm gonna brush that with a little kindness.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Welcome it in.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Be grateful that somebody's looking out for me, for my image.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  And let it be another facet of just coming home.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  I just had a thought about

• 25:45Speaker 00

  how method actors, professional actors, will step into a part so deeply it will fully consume them. Their tears are genuine, their laughter is genuine.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  And yet it doesn't require they change their worldview or betray themselves in some way.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  And just like that,

• 26:14Speaker 00

  I'm gonna keep falling into these open-hearted mantras.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Wouldn't it be nice if all beings were happy?

• 26:34Speaker 00

  What does it feel like in my body? In the heart space or in the head?

• 26:42Speaker 00

  If I knew that all beings could be healthy?

• 26:53Speaker 00

  What does it feel like to wish that they be filled with joy?

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Filled with joy.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  And that one comes with an extra glimmer or shimmer in the heart.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  It's hard to say if it's cool or if it's warm, but there's something there, ever so subtle.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  And may all beings live lives without suffering.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  The peace and relaxation that sort of gently, ever so subtly shimmers in my stomach.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  And like a relaxation of the shoulders.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  Each of these phrases sort of pulses just the tiniest of feelings. I...

• 27:46Speaker 00

  I actually know where to look for them. And I'm cheating.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  They're not yet strong enough for me to recognize if I don't know where to look. But I know the familiar feeling of the opening of my heart in a way, or the softening of my gut.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  The celebratory joy in the back of my head.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  And as I say these feelings, or say these phrases, and the feelings spark just a minute, they fade out. And as they fade out, that too is an invitation to come home.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  I'm just letting all of these feelings fade away and sinking back into a vast, wide-open mind.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  An absolutely wondrous body.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  And the backdrop of coming home.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  May all beings be happy.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  May they be healthy.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  May they be filled with joy.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Like an actor crying onstage, imagining them fill the world filled with joy.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  And live lives without suffering.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  I might suggest we start to bring to a close here. If I were on my own, I'd go another forty minutes or something, just continuing to

• 29:55Speaker 00

  just continuing to dance with these feelings and sinking further and further into them.

• 30:05Dan Shipper?

  That was lovely.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  That was lovely. Thanks for inviting me to do that, Dan. It's

• 30:12Speaker 00

  every time I do that in almost any context, you just come out the other side with a little bit more ease and vividness.

• 30:21Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I'm in like a very

• 30:25Dan Shipper?

  different place than when I started.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, me too. Slower and at ease.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think

• 30:46Speaker 00

  I know I just said something to this effect, but the

• 30:51Speaker 00

  There's sort of like that micro game and then there's like the more time oriented game. And the micro game is just at every single twist and turn. It's amazing how fast we don't brush our experience with kindness. And it's just this infinitely fascinating game of seeing how gentler and gentler you can be. How much more rest and kindness kind of start to look like the same thing. And then with time, it's just like sinking into a hot tub and it takes on a life of its own. 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.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  And yet I know from experience that that's how it would play out if we were to go another thirty, forty minutes or whatever.

• 31:43Dan Shipper?

  I'm sort of feeling like I would like to narrate what happened for me.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, tell me.

• 31:56Dan Shipper?

  So I think right now I'm just much lower and slower. And one of the things that I think you do incredibly well that I picked up on this retreat is it actually surprised me how much time you spent in this sort of like pre meditation phase of just coming home and like relaxing every part of my body and like, and I started to notice on this retreat and have taken it through. And I think this is happening now is

• 32:31Dan Shipper?

  as you mentioned, there are all those like little places where I'm tensed up. And consciously physically changing the tension level changes the overall emotional valence of my like body.

• 32:49Dan Shipper?

  And there was, there's stuff, I'm in an office, so like, I'm hearing people debating shit that I have.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  I love that.

• 33:01Dan Shipper?

  And so I was like so annoyed.

• 33:08Dan Shipper?

  And sort of like self-conscious a little bit.

• 33:14Dan Shipper?

  And so you, but you have this like brush it with kindness thing that honestly, just the way that you say it, I know that you can do it. And so I'm doing it. If that makes sense, you know?

• 33:28Dan Shipper?

  It's not like. You're just saying, yeah, brush it with kindness. Like you're doing it as you say it. And so I'm just like, I can do it too.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  I even, in my experience, I thought there was a bit of a shift at some point. I, I think it was like the beginning of the body scan. 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.

• 33:54Dan Shipper?

  I think it did. And it sort of leaked into me, which is, I love this part of it is like, I am very sensitive to that kind of thing. So it just. Maybe I would be like a good hypnotist subject or something, but it just like, it just happens for me.

• 34:10Dan Shipper?

  And I found in my experience, when I'm getting a little bit deeper. There's almost like a warm blanket that comes over my head a little bit. And I'm like.

• 34:21Dan Shipper?

  It just feels like I'm coming up on acid. I don't know.

• 34:26Dan Shipper?

  And.

• 34:30Dan Shipper?

  I end up feeling like a. Just, I'm like energy, if that makes sense.

• 34:39Dan Shipper?

  And so my physical edges get a little softer and all that kind of stuff.

• 34:45Dan Shipper?

  And it was really, what was really nice is you had started to like, sort of say your phrases. And.

• 34:53Dan Shipper?

  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. Cause you were like thinking about what I was thinking and then I was just like, oh.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Now you got a proper love fest going on.

• 35:14Dan Shipper?

  And yeah, like then I was just in this sort of like gooey, like everything, just the hot tub thing. I think is a good metaphor.

• 35:25Dan Shipper?

  And this is, this is a very common experience for me now, like post journey retreat.

• 35:32Dan Shipper?

  And one thing that is maybe interesting for you is I think that your opening up motion. It was, that was difficult for me. It was very difficult for me to do that without trying.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:47Dan Shipper?

  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, um, and why the jhanas are interesting is if you try to get into a jhana, you like fail. And, um, uh, for people who are meditating, you're often like a sort of 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.

• 36:23Dan Shipper?

  How to actually just enjoy yourself. Weirdly, and, um, that enjoying yourself is like the sort of key to getting into that state in 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, that kind of like, I just opened up thing. It was just like not that available.

• 36:53Dan Shipper?

  And the thing that kind of got me that I was doing as you were talking is, um.

• 37:01Dan Shipper?

  I realized that I was already that. I was already open.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:07Dan Shipper?

  You know, and that, um, that feeling is like, sometimes you're looking for your glasses. And then you realize like, oh, fuck, they're on, they're on.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 37:19Dan Shipper?

  And that moment of like, oh, I, I'm already there is like, that's, that for me is like the.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:25Dan Shipper?

  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 that's really great.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  There's so much you said there that is, is really spot on. And I think you're pointing at one of, and if not the most, one of the most important, if not, and maybe one of the most difficult things to learn. And when you're, you're playing this game is that it's, it's really about like, can you rest into love? And in a way like, and, and really emphasis on that rest. And there's different frames, like just 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 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, uh, we can go our entire lives.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  And I think subtly missing, um, because we have the habit of like getting great things done with clenching down with like applied effort with what we call mental tension. And pointing and beginning to see that mental tension and learning that you can soften it is, is, is tricky business. Uh, but so freeing when you're able to do it. There's all kinds of different approaches. And I think one of the things that's fun about getting into this space is, is actually a bunch of stuff I wanna, I also wanna, I put a mental pin in about, like why this is valuable beyond just like us having a, like a mini love fest for a few minutes, like, um, but, uh, you begin to see that like,

• 38:57Speaker 00

  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, these like, this difficult idea of spotting and releasing mental tension, or awareness and love all the way down, or recursive self-acceptance is like, those are kind of the three ways we like to say the same thing on retreat. And some of this stuff I think is brilliant. But if you don't, without the right, I think, like clarity or precision of word, it can be really confusing. So like a good example is some meditation teachers will be like meditation can and should not have any goal. It should not, meditation should have zero goal. And I hear that and I'm like, that is extremely useful and not true.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Like you're conflating, like you're conflating usefulness with truth. Like, of course meditation has a goal. How could it not? Like, everything you do has a goal. And whether it's to like incrementally relax and take a little edge off your stress, or whether it's to become full on enlightened, like there is a goal. The game is, how do you relate to that goal with a sense of like play and openness? As opposed to desperation or obligation? And how do you, 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. And I think Naval has a good little like couple blurbs on that kind of idea.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  And so, learning to instantiate goals differently is a huge unlock. Like, imagine if you're, if all of your goals were a sense of like 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? Like, other than flow when you're like lost in the soccer field or in the virtuoso musician? Or sort of lost on stage as a CEO? Like, that stuff is, I think, can't come from the sort of like self coercive place. And yet, we, for various reasons, have sort of like selected for and optimized the hell out of our self coercion instead of our like self acceptance.

• 41:05Dan Shipper?

  I love, I love this, like, kind of what you're saying about play. And I just know for me, the, the times when, as a founder, building my company, I was like, I have to like do it. And I do it in the way that, you know, people are gonna do it because it's gonna be a real company versus the times where I'm, it's like actually just coming from a place of play. The business has, 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.

• 41:36Dan Shipper?

  Very counter, very counterintuitive and very.

• 41:40Dan Shipper?

  Actually hard, it's weirdly hard to do because people um our default is to be like, well, play is not serious enough to actually do something real.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 41:49Dan Shipper?

  So you're actually kind of afraid and ashamed of that.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:53Dan Shipper?

  Um, so, and there's all these like little layers and subtle things where it's like you can even make the decision to to play at the surface level, but then there's all these little micro moments where you're actually not doing that. Um, so it's it's very, it gets, there's lots of different levels to this game as you've, as you've said. Um, one of the things I want to do right now is um, talk about, talk about pitfalls. Um, and I, you have one that that I think you're, you want to bring up and I have some that I want to bring up because I think there are various ways to sort of misinterpret this and how to use it and when to use it and why and all that kind of stuff. And um, it would have saved me a lot of time myself if someone had said this, some of this stuff to me. Um,

• 42:39Dan Shipper?

  time and and blood, sweat and tears and misery, basically.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:45Dan Shipper?

  So I think the first, at least for me, the first subtle way to get this wrong, that makes it could like even potentially harmful is um, if you are someone for me, I'll just say for me, actually, because I don't know, it's hard to generalize. But for me, I had untreated OCD, which is a horrible, horrible moment by moment, like you're just in hell, like pretty much all the time type of experience for like 10 years. And so if you hear about the Jhanas or maybe meditation in general, and then maybe the Jhanas in particular, but I think it does applies to lots of different types of meditation practice. You're like, oh, cool. Like, I will use this to

• 43:28Dan Shipper?

  like get out of that state. Um, and my experience is that that's both, it doesn't work and it it can be like quite counterproductive. Um.

• 43:42Dan Shipper?

  And it has been much better for me. There are, there are definitely times where you can be in, you're like sad or you're upset or whatever. And you can like use this as like a, at least for me, a, um, a touchstone or a bolster from which to like, go and examine those emotions and like, welcome them in. Um, but I think your, your point about like, really serio- like taking seriously the like welcoming in of things is, is actually quite important because if you're using it to solve your painful emotions, it's, it's bad, um, or it's not great. And at least for me, there, there, there's a time where you're experiencing things that are so overwhelming

• 44:25Dan Shipper?

  that it is actually like, very hard if you're not 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. But you actually can't do that, you know? Um, maybe you have a little fire in the living room and you might like welcome that because you're like, I've done this before. I've dealt with the living room fire. But if your house is on fire and you go into one of these states, at least like you can really, uh, have your whole experience start to be on fire. And it's like, it's really, it's kind of bad. So, um, yeah, yeah. So I, yeah, go for it.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Cool. So I, I think you're pointing at a couple of things that I, that I think are super important. The first is, uh, the, the idea of welcoming something that may overwhelm your nervous system. And, uh, that, that's a, that's a super important thing. And it, I think it would, it, 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, is this a good idea when real stakes are on the table? Like, is it a good idea to lower the stakes for the nervous system? And, uh, when and why? Like when and how is that the case? So one at a time. First, on, uh, welcoming something that would overwhelm the nervous

• 45:42Speaker 00

  system. This is super important. And there's a couple of different things that, uh, I, I think.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Lay out how to work through, work with this. The first is this idea of window of tolerance, which is especially big in things like somatic therapy and in related fields. And the, the idea is that you don't ever want to be playing with your like attention and emotion that gets you to a point of dysregulation. Either a hyper arousal, which might look like a proper panic attack, or hypo arousal, 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 the stimuli. And very quickly, if you're playing with grade A trauma, you can end up in that kind of dysregulated place. And always the top priority is to stay inside your window of tolerance.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  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. It can also be the case that you're going to inhibit your learning, not help, not enhance your learning. 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. The, 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.

• 47:07Dan Shipper?

  And maybe also, at least from my experience, if you're dealing with like actual like clinically relevant, like really tough mental stuff, it's probably better to deal with that 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, you're feeling, you're obviously going to feel like your full range of emotions, but it's, you're not, for me, I was stuck in, everything is fucking horrible all the time. And I needed to deal with that before I could do any of this.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Totally. Absolutely. And I, I know you've, you've written, I think, 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. Super important, yeah. 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 like nervous system fluency is

• 48:11Speaker 00

  or maybe I don't want to make such a broad claim around nervous system fluency, but the whole game comes down to this idea. But certainly down going down the meditation journey, one thing you can think about is this idea of memory reconsolidation. And that being an orienting framework for a lot of what we're doing. This, the idea of memory reconsolidation is really simple. It's that if you co-activate a prior sort of negative emotional charge associated with a given stimuli. And you that a commensurate sense of safety, 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 can be rewritten.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  And angled more towards something like the safety or the openness or the conduct, the emotional fluency, conductive connectivity. 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. If you do these two things, you can reset the emotional default. Knowing that you can reset your emotional defaults is in my mind, one of the most underappreciated secrets in the like in the world. That developing the skill of, of on a per stimuli basis, per stimulus basis. Resetting your emotional defaults means you have root permissions to hack on your personality.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Like what is your personality than 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. 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, the like, I like to use this, this analogy of an actor crying on stage, an actor leaning into like an open hearted feeling. You, what we're, we're learning for many folks, the challenging part of memory consolidation is having access to the commensurate safety, love or connection to co-activate along

• 50:23Speaker 00

  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, 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 is a really big deal. 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. 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. You can also do this in interpersonal dynamics with like, communities that are maybe sharing

• 51:05Speaker 00

  emotions or vulnerably so. One of the things that's so wonderful about, you know, connecting with loved ones. 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.

• 51:19Dan Shipper?

  I think that's totally true. I will say another way, another pitfall that that brings up for me, because I think 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.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:43Dan Shipper?

  Or make big changes in my life to like, fix things that are wrong, because I could just be blissful all the time. Like, that's cool. Like, let's just do that. And

• 51:51Speaker 00

  I like where you're going with this.

• 51:52Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. And I have actually found that.

• 51:58Dan Shipper?

  To properly do this, to properly

• 52:03Dan Shipper?

  express love to yourself and express love to other people, your actions and your words need to be aligned. 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, not going to work.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Not going to work.

• 52:31Dan Shipper?

  You have to, like, this sort of like love all the way down thing has to also go love all the way up. So at the grossest level of like, your actions, they have to kind of match the more subtle things that you're doing too, in order to sort of fully unlock this. And it's not a shortcut to just have everything in your life be horrible and you just feel good despite all of that. Sometimes you actually have to make real hard decisions for yourself.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. And I think this is getting at the sort of the second thing that you brought up earlier, which is like, 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 that, in my mind, is a thoughtful and well-meaning critique. But as it turns out, like, the way the mechanisms work, it doesn't work that way. If you were to, yeah, like,

• 53:32Speaker 00

  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 up to your room and you spend an hour doing the whole John-a-game and you're like, "I love myself." There, you may soften the edges around some things that are sort of like internally inconsistent. And yet you're still abandoning yourself. So like, you're not loving yourself. It's not going to work. Like, the mechanism isn't going to go all the way through. And this is more of a like interpersonal, sort of like personal hypothetical. Same thing is true in the professional world. If you, like, one of the things that...

• 54:13Speaker 00

  I used to get like setting goals for the company. If you or if you have intuition that like you really should be going in the other way, or you're thinking about like taking the money from the investors. But there's like something deep within you that you haven't yet sort of figured out has already pattern matched that that's dangerous. You don't want to do that. Like 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. Like 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 be, it's, it's going to require reckoning with those seriously. And so one of the other, one of the ways in which I think maybe the three biggest ways that I think this game really begins to pay dividends in action, pass today with relationships,

• 54:58Speaker 00

  with building habits and with improving decision making. Because the, the system ends up, I think, being more aligned across the three.

• 55:06Dan Shipper?

  So I want to, let's go into, I think we've spent enough time on, on some of the, you know, here be, here be dragons warnings. Let's go into some of the, you know, you've, you've talked about like personality hacking. What are some of the ways that you have changed as a result of this practice?

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm thinking of a couple of stories to sort of capture. One, one, one that was really big in a little over a year ago in the spring of last year was I was really missing how much fear I had about the, like the, we were at this point. So we started as a neurotech company. We were, had been collecting a bunch of data.

• 55:54Dan Shipper?

  You started as a, sorry.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  As a neurotech company.

• 55:57Dan Shipper?

  Okay.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  And we were collecting a bunch of data to see if we could map the, 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 and 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. 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 default alive. We would start a movement. We would get more shots on goal. Each shot on goal would be better than the last, like, and so this retreat pipeline we spun up, we see is like the first step of something much bigger, like a launch pad into something that works more effectively and for more people.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  We had, we were, you know, some months into running our retreats and I'm still like terrified on these retreats. Like, I'm a grown man, basically repeating and sometimes crying in front of a room of people about may all beings be happy. Like, how fucking out of touch am I? Like, and, and these are like tech executives, we've had co-founders of some of the world's biggest companies and fastest growing companies, like, come on these retreats. These are all people who I admire in person and on paper, and I'm making a fool of myself. And then on top of that, if, if, 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, like, it's just, like, there was so much fear there.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  I was blind to this fear and I was actively like, because of, because of my blindness, we would have these team meetings and we would have our spreadsheets and we'd have, you know, behind the scenes, okay, who's this person, what, like, what are the top three hypotheses for what they need, for, for what support they need? What have we done so far? What have we learned? Like, in my mind, there's just like these kind of perennial questions that we're just like asking for everybody, rapid fire in this meeting. And I'm like getting faster and faster and tighter and tighter in my voice. And now, anybody who's working with me is starting to get afraid.

• 57:50Dan Shipper?

  You're doing that now. You are, you're getting faster, you're not even talking about it.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Exactly. Stepping back into the memory and you can like,

• 58:00Speaker 00

  yeah.

• 58:00Dan Shipper?

  We need some reconsolidation right now.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  I could do some of that, yeah. So, 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. And 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, I don't, 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. And, and finally, I, through a few different things, I was like, oh my God, I'm terrified.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  Come here, terrified Stephen, like, come here, I will not leave you, like, and the had, I'm sure I had a little bit of a cry and suddenly could 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 eats strategy for breakfast.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Would not have been possible if I remained unaware and if I wasn't able to like turn towards it instead of away from it.

• 59:16Dan Shipper?

  I feel that deeply. I think

• 59:23Dan Shipper?

  the way that it has manifested for me is first of all, as like a, someone coming from a very people pleaser-y type background.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:36Dan Shipper?

  I think you can misinterpret 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. That's like, you just do that automatically. And, and, but to the expense, expense of yourself, which ironically is like, not actually helpful for other people and it's not helpful for you. And so I had to sort of flip that into the people pleaser rule, which is treat yourself as you would treat others.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  I like that.

• 1:00:21Dan Shipper?

  And

• 1:00:25Dan Shipper?

  I think once you, once you start to realize that, this is a very helpful practice for like actually being like, okay, what is actually like loving for myself right now?

• 1:00:36Dan Shipper?

  And once you have that base where you actually start to like or love yourself,

• 1:00:43Dan Shipper?

  you start, at least for me, I started to notice all of these things that

• 1:00:48Dan Shipper?

  about myself that I couldn't see before because it would be too scary.

• 1:00:55Dan Shipper?

  That get in the way of your relationships, make you make bad decisions. Like a really simple example for me would be

• 1:01:04Dan Shipper?

  Oh, wow. This person, I'm like actually pretty jealous of them. And I would never have been able to say that before. I would have wrapped it in all these other reasons why I didn't like them.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, because it was too scary to imagine that you would be jealous.

• 1:01:19Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  And that would mean you're a bad person or flawed in some way or something.

• 1:01:24Dan Shipper?

  Exactly, exactly. And and it makes such a difference to be like, oh, I'm jealous. And 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.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Dan Shipper?

  And it just makes everything so much better.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  So much freedom, so much freedom. It's like, yeah, both internally. And then when you to have that kind of like

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  live interpersonal apology, wow.

• 1:01:56Dan Shipper?

  Yes. And I think you're also, I was surprised

• 1:02:04Dan Shipper?

  how much of my personality wraps around or wrapped around trying to feel loved. 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.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  Hugely important. It saves a bunch of energy. It prevents a bunch of like unhelpful patterns or like repeated behaviors, addictions effectively. I think one of the, one of the things I was speculating about the other day is in systems thinking, you'll, you can like show your socks and flows. And then if you change the arrival of certain information, you can move a system from that Donna, Donna Meadows has got this great chapter in her book about this. Thinking in Systems. And if you change the, the info flows, you can sort of shift a system into a new equilibrium where there's a bunch of oscillating instead of like, like a sort of a static equilibrium. And I was musing about how if you don't sort of feel the feeling that you're avoiding,

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  you can get yourself in these oscillating loops like where.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  You are, I think procrastination is like the, is the obvious one that comes to mind like time management is pain management sort of thing like you're, you're avoiding doing something or 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. Um, or in, in these play out constantly in relationship dynamics. Like my mom does that one thing. So then I responded this way and that makes it more likely she does this thing in the future. Like, uh, so it saves energy. I think it sort of prevents those kinds of patterns. Um, and, uh, then it also like gives you so much more latitude and flexible degrees of freedom to navigate tough calls at work or to engage with relationships in a certain way. It just keeps paying dividends. Paul Graham's got a great statement about like

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  the value of making yourself, of keeping your identity small in order to give yourself space to like think independently. It just shows up everywhere.

• 1:04:19Dan Shipper?

  And, um, I would be remiss if in this podcast, we did not talk about how this all relates to AI.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:29Dan Shipper?

  So.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  It's a little smarter at the moment.

• 1:04:31Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. How do you, um, how, how are you thinking about that? I know you have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So macro and micro. At the macro level, I think

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  journey's thesis is effectively super well being can, is, super well being is as tractable of a problem and as important as something like super longevity and super intelligence.

• 1:04:56Dan Shipper?

  What is super well being?

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  Like this, uh,

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  it, it grown, there, there's, so there are folks who will talk about being sort of deep into the meditation path, uh, that will say extreme statements. Like my baseline well being now, my worst day is better than. My best day from a few years ago, like on like a year-long basis, or like many year-long basis, 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 prior version of myself." That is completely opposite conventional wisdom about the hedonic treadmill. And there's actually, I think, a relatively simple explanation for that. It's that like the hedonic treadmill applies in many cases in which you're looking for

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  the wrong thing. Like, if you go ask a billionaire whether it solved their happiness problems, it'd be, I think, I was just, who was doing this? Probably Nick, probably Nick Comrade 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." You'll discover that when you're there, that that's not what you were looking for. Like, the common trope. In some ways, I think a lot of what we're, like, where we're looking for happiness is just a little misguided. 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 has not just incrementally improved, but

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  I think transformed my baseline happiness. So this is sort of a nod for what's possible with superworld being. I think that's just getting started. That's using, like, 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. So philosophically, 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 of folks that, like, I think, sound absurd at the surface, but if you really investigate, they genuinely believe they're way, way happier.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  There's also other things you could play with here, like there are certain maybe genetic genetic changes. I forget, what's her name? Jo? Jo Cameron? You know, I'm talking about the British woman who has like a genetic mutation and says she hasn't felt pain and like.

• 1:07:28Dan Shipper?

  I don't know her name, but yeah.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  So all kinds of from neuro, from neurotech to sort of like genetics to like just thinking about the question of suffering seriously is a little bit of a contrarian take in the world right now. And I think that's silly. I think if we're taking, if we're already taking super longevity and super intelligence seriously, why not take super well being seriously? That's the high level. In terms of like what, what journey is actually doing and how this ties to AI, we now have like our first product is this retreat that gets the majority of people into these altered states that they will talk about being peak experiences in the order of many months or years or even a lifetime. They frequently

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  will people talk about it as being as like power, like an endogenous version is powerful as psychedelics. And there's the traits that come with playing, like playing this nervous system fluency game to get to a Jana are even more valuable. Like your change how you relate to your goals. You have these new tools for navigating relationships, decisions and habits differently. And then furthermore, when you get to the later stages, you're sort of even your sense of identity can, can sort of shift from like identifying as something between your ears and behind your eyes to like 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 and non-duality and the like. And all these things are rolled together.

• 1:08:55Dan Shipper?

  We'll do a part two episode on that.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's totally worth a part two. It's, it's the claims that advanced meditators make are absolutely absurd 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.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  Okay, all that being said, Journey, right now, has a product can make the Jana's accessible. Jana's allow for memory reconsolidation, self-sufficient, and fluent, which is a huge boon now for you to do personality hacking and starting to improve your wellbeing and your lightness of being over time. And the question is, like, 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 Jana, it's another thing to be able to use Jana regularly on a day-to-day basis to sort of make yourself lighter of being. It's another thing to start to see and sort of shift your sense of identity. Like, there's a lot of depth that can be had there, too. Originally, the plan was to use hardware and things like, we were starting with EEG and other biosensors,

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  to create like rapid feedback loops, and personalized feedback loops that would allow you to get, go down all of this path faster. 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. And so this, what we're doing behind the scenes already, is we're 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 at Journey, because we're constantly running experiments and reflecting ourselves. And you can ingest all the data and then begin sort of saying like, hey, we're missing this on this student. Or like, it can be a combination of QA plus facilitator training, and increasingly takes the things

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  that machines will be very, very good at, while letting facilitators specialize in the sort of human-human connection that humans are really good at. All of that is happening now, and like increasingly being built. I think the thing that I get really excited about in the near term is something like Math Academy for the Jana's, or Math Academy for like life-changing meditation, where you, 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 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 to really dial in and reliably get people to Jana without a human in the loop on the order of like 15, 20, 30 hours or something. You can then...

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Also put together like a skill tree, the way Math Academy might for how you might get to some sort of future concept. Now you open your app, you've got your skill tree, you know exactly where you are. You've got a superhuman like guide who can engage with you live in meditation and also like, you know, diagnose or go back and forth. Those are the kinds of things that I think are imminently ready to be built.

• 1:11:52Dan Shipper?

  Take my money. How do I get it? When app? When test flight?

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, well, okay, great. Now I can sort of pitch the things that Journey needs from the world. We're 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 so 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.

• 1:12:21Dan Shipper?

  Have you tried Opus 4.5?

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  I have not, I have not tried Opus 4.5. I was

• 1:12:29Dan Shipper?

  You must.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  And I'm excited to do so.

• 1:12:30Dan Shipper?

  I believe that you could build this in like a week in between meetings with Opus 4.5.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  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. 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. And I'm, I'm really torn right now. Honestly, this is something my, I keep talking about my co-founder where I'm like, I can almost build this, but I also have like a company to run and like managing other things. And like, I would just, 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, own the whole thing. It's like 4.5 might be good enough, but I just don't have the time. And so I, I've, I've thought about like canceling everything

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  in my schedule for a month and seeing if I can just do it myself. And I might still do that. But in the meantime, we're also, we're also looking for an engineer.

• 1:13:26Dan Shipper?

  If you were listening to this and you wanted to build this app, Steven, reach out to Steven.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  Yes, please.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  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 like looking at transcripts and we're saying, okay, here's how we want to like how to change the system and change the prime. And you just, this iteration loop is already in place. Like, it's just a matter of time. So it's exciting that it feels inevitable at this point.

• 1:13:59Dan Shipper?

  Stephen, this is incredible. This is my, I think this might be my favorite episode I've ever recorded.

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  Wow, I'm delighted. I've listened to a few of your episodes and I've quite enjoyed them. So.

• 1:14:12Dan Shipper?

  Thank you so much for doing this. If people are interested in learning more about you or about Journey, where can they find you?

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I'm on Twitter, Stephen underscore Zerfas. And so is Journey the Company. The handle is at Jhanatech. So J H A N A T E C H. Stephen Zerfas is S T E P H E N underscore Z E R F A S. And our website is W W W dot Journey with an H dot I O. And those are the main ways to find us.

• 1:14:50Dan Shipper?

  Amazing. We've got to do a part two.

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  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 Jhanas and non-duality and identity shifts. And there's so many different ways this could go. And it's always fun to talk. So we'll do some time.

• 1:15:09Dan Shipper?

  Sounds good.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  Cool. Thanks, Dan.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, folks, you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and 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. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat 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. So do yourself a favor, hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.