yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Jason Silva's Origin Story | Origins: The Journey of Humankind


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[music playing]

JASON SILVA: I think that I was a restless kid, a very creative but restless kid that wanted answers. So I was afflicted by the bug of question and questioning everything.

And that inquiry sent me to beautiful spaces of mind and imagination, but also sent me to very dark spaces, whether it was thinking about mortality or thinking about impermanence and all these horrible things. I felt that my way of dealing with pushing away the darkness was by losing myself in beautiful things, so ineffable, transcendent experiences, the rhapsody of poetry, or the high you get from a beautiful film when it sucks you into its wonderland, or the orgasmic ecstasy of falling in love, ineffability, magical transience spaces of mind that were characterized by feelings of selflessness and timelessness.

So losing yourself, essentially, became my escape from existential dread. And I felt like it was my responsibility to find a way of clothing these numinous experiences. That's where the verbosity, the desire to bring back these experiences and share them with others has come from.

So in the same way that a musician might find inspiration and then he composes a song to describe that [inaudible] experience, or the way that a poet might have some inspired rhapsody with a lover and then he comes back and then writes a few words that touch a billion people.

People say some things just can't be put into words. I disagree. I think that's a form of laziness. I think that what's magical about words is that they can be used to describe everything. I really do believe that.

And so the more complex, sublime, beautiful, and ineffable an experience, the more I want to try and make a piece of content about what that is. It's me, in a way, having a creative battle against ineffability. It's like the universe is saying you cannot explain me. And I'm like, oh, yes, I can. So that's kind of my thing. It's a control issue for sure.

More Articles

View All
Pike Surprise | Life Below Zero
This time of year, the pike are spawning in the shallows. There’s a grassy area just up around the corner where I might find some. I haven’t caught a pike yet this year, so you never know exactly what you’re going to find, but I’m hoping for some good fis…
How Much Should You Spend After Fundraising? - Gustaf Alströmer
How much money should I spend after I erase my seed round? The reason I feel so strongly about this topic is I see way too many companies spend way too much of their money way too fast. Running out of money is a top concern; your company will die. You sho…
Make Plasma With Grapes In The Microwave!
So today I’m at the University of Sydney with Steve Boie, and we are exploring everyone’s favorite state of matter: a plasma. Well, actually, my favorite state of matter is the Bose-Einstein condensate, but that’s just me—that’s for another episode. So f…
15 Books To Read After You Made $1 Million
So you made a million dólares, now what? $1 million isn’t what it used to be, but now you’ve got some finance and experience to go exponential. If you’re not there yet, we recommend you go ahead and watch part one of this series, where we handpick the vid…
Fire Starter Extraordinaire | Dirty Rotten Survival
Now we’ll find out if Dave really is the fire-making Maestro he claims to be. Depending on your environment and your resources, a very, very difficult challenge. I’m going to use everything that Dick and Johnny have in their kits, as well as what I have i…
Jamestown - the impact of tobacco
When we left off in the last video, things were not going particularly well for the English settlers at Jamestown. They had managed to survive a couple of years by the skin of their teeth, but by 1610, they had endured such incredible starvation that they…