Stephen Zerfas of Jhourney demonstrates and narrates, live on the AI & I podcast, how he guides himself into a Jhana—a meditative bliss state that traditionally requires thousands of hours of practice. Hosted by Dan Shipper, who attended one of Jhourney's retreats where most participants reach a Jhana in their first week. Topics include a primer on Jhana meditation, a step-by-step guided entry into the state, why Jhana is about resting into what already exists, approaching meditation with play and curiosity, potential pitfalls of Jhana practice, using memory reconsolidation to change personality traits, why Jhana can't be used to numb oneself to real problems, how the practice has changed Zerfas, and how Jhourney is using AI to make Jhana more accessible. # Channel Presentation Observations — "The Meditation State Most People Never Experience" ## Explicit Self-Description Evidence ### Show Name - The outro explicitly names the show: **"AI and I"** — the host asks viewers to *"smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I."* - The closing joke frames the show around AI topics: *"pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about... ChatGPT"* and *"a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship."* ### Host Identity - The host is identified repeatedly as **Dan**, and the outro names him fully: **Dan Shipper**. - Dan self-describes as a **meditation practitioner with long experience**: *"I've been meditating for a long time and done a lot of retreats."* - Dan also identifies himself as a **company founder**: *"the times when as a founder building my company."* ### Format Demonstrated - Interview show with a single expert guest (**Stephen**, founder of "Journey"/Jhanas meditation company). - Host states the episode structure explicitly: guest narrates a live meditation, debrief follows, then discussion of technology/future direction: *"we're going to get into the sort of like technology aspect and the future aspect of this."* - Host offers a **part-two continuation model**: *"We'll do a part two episode on that."* ## Intended Audience - **Tech/AI-interested, optimization-minded listeners.** Evidence: - Guest frames meditation via optimization language: *"in a world in which so many of us are optimizing everything from our sleep to our diet to our work performance."* - The AI discussion centers on building an app — the host responds *"Take my money. How do I get it? When app, when test flight."* - Guest references retreat attendees: *"these are like tech executives. We've had co-founders of some of the world's biggest companies."* - Audience is addressed as potential **hires/collaborators**: *"If you were listening to this and you want to build this app... reach out to Stephen."* - **Longtime meditators.** Both host and guest discuss advanced practitioner topics (jhanas, non-duality, retreat culture) and warn about pitfalls for people with clinical conditions — an audience expected to *practice along*: *"if anybody wants to follow along and meditate as we go."* ## Claimed Scope - The show's closing promotional bit claims broad AI-focused edutainment: *"a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter"* — though this is delivered in an obviously parodic, exaggerated tone. - Demonstrated scope in this episode: **AI + consciousness/wellbeing intersection**, entrepreneur interviews, and applied technology (LLMs, product building, e.g., discussion of Opus 4.5 and Math Academy as a model). ## Claims by Creator (Host) About His Own Experience - *"I went on one of your weeklong meditation retreats and... it was by far the best retreat that I've ever been on"* — host testimonial, not a channel claim. - Host discloses personal history: *"I had untreated OCD... for like 10 [years]."* ## Observed Presentation Patterns (Demonstrated, Not Claimed) - **Enthusiastic, high-energy host persona**: *"I'm psyched. I want to see you get into a Jhana"*; *"this might be my favorite episode I've ever recorded."* - **Promotional ending segment**: a hyperbolic like-and-subscribe plea closing with a comedic line (*"Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you"*) — suggesting a playful, irreverent outro convention. - **Audience callouts**: listeners are invited to meditate along and to contact the guest, indicating an interactive, action-oriented listener relationship. ## Guest Attribution Notes - Statements about the company "Journey" (jhanas retreats, AI roadmap, hiring an engineer, handles @Stephen_Zerfas and jhāna-related site "journey... .io") are **the guest's claims about his own venture**, not the channel's self-description, though the host amplifies them (*"Take my money"*). # Delivery Observation Document ## "The Meditation State Most People Never Experience" ### Conversation Format - Two-speaker interview: **Dan** (host) and **Stephen** (guest, founder of Journey). Turn-taking is marked with `>>` throughout. - Unusual structural choice: the episode centers on a **live narrated meditation** (~10–20 minutes), framed before and followed by debrief and discussion: > "you're going to get into Ajanna or at least get as close as you possibly can to being in Ajanna and you're going to narrate your internal experience as you do it." --- ## Tone ### Stephen - **Earnest and warm**, especially during the meditation narration itself: > "I'm just going to start welcoming all those experiences like long lost friends" - **Casual and playful** in the discussion segments: > "Why the hell did he turn left when I was expecting to turn right? Perfect." - Willingly names **live performance anxiety** mid-meditation: > "I got a little sort of anxious or tense about how strange or woo this might sound. What must it seem like for a grown man to be saying these words on a podcast?" ### Dan - **Enthusiastic and affirming**, frequently echoing or validating: > "That was lovely." > "Take my money. How do I get it? When app when test flight." - Uses casual, humorous interjections: > "now we got a proper love fest going on." --- ## Vocabulary and Recurring Phrases - **"Brush with kindness"** — Stephen's signature instruction, repeated many times during narration: > "each one of these I'm just brushing with a sense of kindness and reception" > "It's amazing how fast we don't brush our experience with kindness." - **"Coming home"** — repeated metaphor for settling: > "looking for a sense of what it feels like to come home" > "May I come home? ... May it come home to me." - **"Wide open" / "vast"** — repeated awareness-widening language: > "I'm going to blow my awareness wide open. So vast, so wide" > "no boundaries, no containment" - **"Welcoming"** — extremely high-frequency verb: > "Welcoming that too. ... Welcoming that too." - Named **jargon/teaching terms**: *Jhanas, collectedness, conductivity, window of tolerance, memory reconsolidation, imitate an expert, nervous system fluency.* - Repeated mantra structure: > "May all beings be happy. May they be healthy. May they be filled with joy." --- ## Recurring Metaphors (Teaching Habits) Stephen teaches almost entirely through physical analogies: - **Hot tub**: > "Settling in like a warm hot tub into the sense of coming home." - **Dropping bags after work**: > "like coming home after a long day at work and dropping the bags on the floor." - **Metal detector**: > "It's like I'm using a metal detector scanning over all of my experience." - **Warm shower**: > "like a warm shower happening in slow motion" - **Actor crying on stage**: > "like an actor crying on stage, imagining them fill the world filled with joy" - **Tennis serve**: > "better off to watch a professional serve a tennis ball than to try to read a book on how to serve a tennis" --- ## Communication Patterns - **Self-correction and restarts** from both speakers — frequent false starts: > "the our thesis journey is the the way the reason these states often take so long" > "So, uh, to settle, I like to close my eyes" - **Stephen models the practice while explaining it** — a habit Dan explicitly comments on: > "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.'" - **In-the-moment disclosure during narration** (noticing distractions and naming them aloud): > "I got wondering if Dan would be pleased with this meditation or not." > "I just noticed I had kind of closed down my awareness while talking" - **Dan mirrors structure back** — reformulates Stephen's points as catchy inversions: > "the people pleaser rule which is treat yourself as you would treat others." > "time management is pain management" - **Filler habits**: Stephen uses "like" and "kind of" heavily in discussion; Dan uses "um," "and sort of" ("and and sort of share what these states are"). - **Repetition for emphasis** — both speakers double words: "Totally. Totally.", "So much freedom. So much freedom.", "That's right. That's right." --- ## Shifts in Delivery - A clear **register shift** between discussion (fast, casual) and meditation narration (slow, present-tense, declarative): > "I'm just watching the end of the out of the outreath. Where does it end?" - Dan observes the shift in himself afterward: > "I'm in like a very different place than when I started... slower and at ease." - Stephen acknowledges leaving the state when telling a stressful story: > "You're doing that now. You are. You're getting past even talking about it." --- ## Closing Note (Anomalous Segment) - The final block is a **highly exaggerated outro** (likely AI-generated or scripted), tonally unlike the rest: > "You absolutely positively have to smash that like button... Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you." --- ## Uncertainty - **Timestamps or paralinguistic pacing** (pauses, breathing rhythm during the meditation) cannot be verified — the transcript includes `[clears throat]`, `[snorts]`, `[laughter]` markers, but no timing data for silence (e.g., the "one breath silence" is not measurable here). - Speaker attribution for a few short interjections (e.g., "Terrific." / "No pressure.") is inferred from `>>` markers and context. - The outro's origin (scripted vs. generated) is not stated in the transcript; only its observable tonality can be reported. # Observation Document: "The Meditation State Most People Never Experience" ## Participants - **Host (Dan)** — host of the show "AI and I" (identified via closing segment: "Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship") - **Guest (Stephen)** — founder of Journey; handle given as Stephen_Zerface on Twitter --- ## Core Thesis and Claims ### Stephen — Journey's Mission and the Jhānas - **Mission statement**: "We're working to make life-changing meditation accessible to everybody," starting with **the Jhānas** — described as "altered states you can learn to enter into with a bit of meditation practice that span the spectrum from bliss to peace." - **Super wellbeing framing**: If we take super longevity and super intelligence seriously, "why not take super wellbeing seriously?" He claims super wellbeing is "as tractable of a problem and as important" as those other goals. - **Stated deeper goal**: The first goal is endogenous altered states; "the real goal is to set you up so that your subconscious works for you, not against you." ### Stephen — Why Jhānas Take So Long (Diagnosis) - **Historical claim**: The Jhānas were "historically believed to be states that take thousands of hours of meditation practice to enter." - **Counter-claim**: "I think it's become apparent that that need not be the case." His thesis: the difficulty is a **guesswork problem** — meditation is "invisible and non-verbal," so feedback loops get "gummed up with guesswork." - **Journey's solution**: Deliberate feedback loops — rapid-fire experiments, facilitator interviews ("What did you feel? Where in the body? Did it feel like it had a temperature?"), and personalized experimentation plans. ### Stephen — Pedagogical Approach - **"Imitate an expert"**: Watching an expert navigate internal experience live is better than reading instructions — analogy: "better off to watch a professional serve a tennis ball than to try to read a book." - **Success criterion**: "You discover something that you didn't know you were allowed to do… you're kind of looking for surprise." - **Source attribution**: Some inspiration came from **US military work on "tacit knowledge transfer"** — a source he acknowledges is unusual ("not your typical… classic source of meditation wisdom"). ### Dan — Endorsement of Journey - Reports the weeklong retreat was "by far the best retreat that I've ever been on" and produced "lasting changes in my practice and therefore lasting changes in my life." - Values the imitate-an-expert format: "It's not about necessarily copying them… it is about watching them navigate and then being like, 'Oh, here's one or two tools I can use.'" --- ## The Live Narrated Meditation - Stephen narrates ~10–20 minutes of entering a Jhāna, describing **collectedness** (gathering attention around an openhearted feeling) and **conductivity** (embracing anything that arises with compassion — including anxiety about performing live). - Techniques described: breath settling, "coming home" imagery, wide-open awareness, head-to-toe body scan, mantras ("May all beings be happy"), and "brushing" all experiences with kindness. - Notable self-reports: he cried during the meditation; "for years have softly cried while meditating." - **Honest qualification**: "I actually know where to look for them and I'm cheating. They're not yet strong enough for me to recognize if I don't know where to look." - He notes he would normally continue "another 40 minutes." ### Dan's Synchronous Experience - "I'm in like a very different place than when I started" — "much lower and slower." - Reports a "warm blanket" feeling, "it just feels like I'm coming up on acid," physical edges softening, "I'm like energy." - Describes a reciprocal affection loop: he was "pushing" gratitude at Stephen while Stephen voiced gratitude for Dan. - Reports difficulty with the "opening up" motion: "It was very difficult for me to do that without trying." ### Shared Insight — "Already Open" - Dan's unlock: "I realized that I was already open" — likened by both to looking for your glasses while wearing them. - **Stephen's elaboration**: "It's really about… can you rest into love" — "more about subtraction than addition"; kindness and relaxation "are kind of the same thing." The obstacle is "mental tension" — the habit of achieving through "clenching down." --- ## Claims About Goals, Effort, and Play ### Stephen — On Meditation Goals - **Critique of a common teaching**: Some teachers say meditation "should have zero goal." His assessment: **"That is extremely useful and not true"** — "you're conflating usefulness with truth." - **Mechanism claim**: "Many of us effectively instantiate goals in our nervous system by making them contracts to be dissatisfied until we get what we want." Learning to instantiate goals as "love and play" is "a huge unlock." - Rhetorical question: "Has any great performance come from a place other than play?" — he suggests great performance cannot come from "a self-coercive place." ### Dan — Founder Experience - His business "has grown way quicker as I've just been like no no the core of it is just like me playing." - Qualification: this is "weirdly hard to do" because "play is not serious enough" and people are "afraid and ashamed of that." --- ## Pitfalls and Warnings ### Dan — Using Meditation to Escape Pain - Discloses **untreated OCD for ~10 years** ("you're just in hell pretty much all the time"). - **Warning**: Using Jhānas/meditation to escape painful states "doesn't work and it can be like quite counterproductive." - **Fire analogy**: A "little fire in the living room" can be welcomed with prior experience, but "if your house is on fire… your whole experience start[s] to be on fire and it's… kind of bad." ### Stephen — Window of Tolerance - Draws on **somatic therapy** concept: never push attention/emotion into **hyperarousal** (panic) or **hypoarousal** (numbness, dissociation). Going outside the window "can in fact… exacerbate and make things worse. You can retraumatize yourself" and inhibit learning. - Guardrails: grounding/orientation exercises, titration, shifting attention to the external environment. - **Recommendation**: If dealing with "clinically relevant… really tough mental stuff, it's probably better to deal with that before you start like playing around." - **Dan agrees**, referencing Stephen's writing about how getting "the right medication at the right time… created the base" for exploration. ### Dan — Spiritual Bypassing - Pitfall: using practice to avoid hard decisions and uncomfortable conversations — "I can just be blissful all the time." - **Counter-principle**: "Your actions and your words need to be aligned… otherwise you're not going to believe yourself." "This sort of like love all the way down thing has to also go love all the way up." - "Sometimes you have to actually have to make real hard and hard decisions for yourself." ### Stephen — Agreement with Mechanism - Example: if you abandon yourself in a relationship, then meditate "I love myself" — "the mechanism isn't going to go all the way through." - Professional parallel: unaddressed intuitions (e.g., about taking investor money) are "embedded in the system" and can't be glossed past into "some sort of happy bliss outland." --- ## Memory Reconsolidation and "Personality Hacking" - **Stephen's framework**: **Memory reconsolidation** — co-activating a negative emotional charge with "a commensurate sense of safety, compassion, connection" can "reset the emotional default." - **Strong claim**: Knowing you can reset emotional defaults "means you have root permissions to hack on your personality" — personality as "a big bag of stimuli-response patterns." - **Asymmetry observation**: "A lot of people can get into anxiety loops no problem… co-activating a sense of safety, love, connection at the same time" is the challenging, valuable part. - **Speculative extension**: "You can argue that this is actually what psychedelics are doing" — a malleable state plus schema reactivation. Meditation offers a "self-sufficient" alternative. - Related reframes mentioned: "spotting and releasing mental tension," "awareness and love all the way down," "recursive self-acceptance." - **Religion claim**: "Every religion has always been two religions. There's like the mystics and the organizers." --- ## Personal Change Stories ### Stephen — Fear at Company Retreats - Journey started as a **neurotech company** collecting biosignal data (EEG); retreats were originally run for R&D data, then "took off" and the pivot became building "a school rather than a lab." - He was "terrified" leading retreats — crying in front of tech executives while repeating mantras; this fear "was blind to" him and leaked into tense team meetings. - After turning toward the fear ("Come here terrified Stephen. I will not leave you"), he could retroactively see "unnecessary friction" and make apologies "that would have been difficult for me a few days before." ### Dan — People-Pleasing and Self-Love - Reoriented the golden rule into **"the people pleaser rule": treat yourself as you would treat others.** - Reports new capacity to admit jealousy: "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." - **Identity claim**: "I was surprised how much of my personality wrapped around… trying to feel loved. And when you can feel loved just because you are you… it releases a lot of stuff that you thought was your personality." ### Stephen — Systems-Thinking Speculation - References **Donella Meadows** (Thinking in Systems) on information flows and equilibria; suggests avoided feelings create **oscillating loops** (procrastination as example: "time management is pain management"). - Cites **Paul Graham** on keeping identity small for independent thinking. --- ## AI and Future Plans ### Stephen — Super Wellbeing Thesis - Advanced meditators report "my worst day is better than my best day from a few years ago" — claims this is "completely opposite conventional wisdom about the hedonic treadmill." - His explanation: the hedonic treadmill "applies in many cases in which you're looking for the wrong thing" (e.g., billionaires finding success ≠ happiness). - Mentions genetics (a British woman, "Jo Cameron," with a pain-insensitivity mutation) and neurotech as other avenues. **Qualification on his own claim**: "maybe I don't want to make such a broad claim around nervous system fluency." - Meditation is "a sloppy tool relative to the kind of precision that would be possible with things like neurotech." ### Stephen — Current AI Usage at Journey - "Basically everything we're doing on retreat can be done reliably by an AI." Facilitators already receive AI-generated hypotheses; AI ingests student data for QA and facilitator training; humans specialize in "human-human connection." ### Stephen — Roadmap Vision - Envisions **"Math Academy for the Jhānas"**: an app with a skill tree, a "superhuman guide" engaging live in meditation, and reliably reaching Jhāna "without a human in the loop on the order of like 15, 20, 30 hours." - Claims "it feels inevitable at this point" — a "journeying bot" and eval process already exist. - **Bottleneck**: needs a world-class engineer; he's considered "canceling everything on my schedule for a month" to build it himself. ### Dan — AI Tools - Jokes that Stephen should try "Opus 45" and could build the app "in a week in between meetings." Stephen says he has "built some of this" (using Sonnet, at the time) but lacks time to run the company and build it. ### Later-Stage Claims (Deferred to "Part Two") - Stephen claims identity can shift from "something between your ears and behind your eyes" to "the relative ratio of how much of this world simulation is me," with "deep threatening qualities." His own qualification: "The claims that advanced meditators make are absolutely absurd and so big if true." --- ## Notable Tensions and Qualifications Preserved - Stephen simultaneously praises "no goal" teachings as useful **and** false — recorded as stated. - Stephen flags his memory-reconsolidation framing as potentially over-broad before making the adjacent broad "root permissions to hack on your personality" claim. - Both speakers present strong enthusiasm for the practice **while** explicitly warning against escapism, bypassing, and trauma reactivation. - Outsider/first-person status of claims: Dan's and Stephen's reports of lasting change are personal testimony, not independently verified in the transcript. # Observation Record: "The Meditation State Most People Never Experience" ## Video Metadata - **Video ID:** 01a0f15a-b5a5-7bd4-8938-87966c261bdd - **Title:** The Meditation State Most People Never Experience - **Curated metadata:** None supplied; identity/roles inferred from transcript only. ## Speakers and Roles ### Dan (Host / Creator) - Identified in transcript as **Dan**; guest addresses him as "Dan" and closing promotional segment names him **Dan Shipper**, "captain of the spaceship" of the show "AI and I." - Role: **Interviewer/host**. Introduces guest, sets the episode plan, shares his own meditation experience, poses questions. - Self-discloses: attended a Journey weeklong meditation retreat; long-term meditator; describes himself as coming from a "people-pleasery" background; mentions his own history of untreated OCD and later medication; founder building his own company (unnamed). ### Stephen (Guest) - Identified as **Stephen**; introduced by Dan as **founder of Journey**, a meditation company. - Role: **Guest / expert practitioner**. Delivers the extended live narrated meditation, explains Journey's methods, AI roadmap, and super-wellbeing thesis. - Contact info given at end: Twitter handles **Stephen_Zurf** (spelled aloud as "S Pen Ze RF F-A") and **Jhanach** (spelled "J Ha an N A T C H"); website **www.journeyh.io** ("journey with an h"). ### Additional voice (Promotional segment) - An unnamed speaker (marked only by "\>\>" cue changes) delivers the **end-of-episode promotional outro** urging viewers to "smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I," ending with "Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you." Speaker identity is **unidentified** in the transcript. ## Provenance and Referenced Sources ### Sources/claims cited by speakers (not independently verified) - **US military** — cited by Stephen as inspiration for "tacit knowledge transfer" methods. - **Window of tolerance** concept — attributed to "somatic therapy and related fields" by Stephen. - **Memory reconsolidation** — presented by Stephen as an orienting framework. - **Donna Meadows** — cited by Stephen for a chapter in her book *Thinking in Systems*. - **Paul Graham** — cited by Dan regarding "keeping your identity small." - **Naval (Ravikant)** — referenced by both speakers regarding goals/dissatisfaction; a tweet polling a billionaire attributed by Dan to "probably Nick Conrad on Twitter" (speaker uncertain). - **Jo Cameron** — British woman with a genetic mutation preventing pain, cited by Stephen (he forgets then recalls her name). - **Psychedelics** — Stephen claims memory reconsolidation "is the mechanism by which they work." - **AI tools** — Dan mentions "Opus 45" (guest hasn't tried it) and guest mentions building prototypes with "Sonnet." ### Third-party claims repeated - Retreat attendees described as including "co-founders of some of the world's biggest and fastest growing companies" (Stephen). - Claims of meditators whose "worst day is better than their best day from a few years ago" (Stephen, secondhand reports). ## Promotional Segments (Flagged) 1. **Opening cold-open** — Stephen's pitch for Journey ("we're working to make life-changing meditation accessible to everybody"), reused verbatim in-episode. 2. **Closing outro** — unidentified voice urging likes/subscribes to "AI and I," praising the show and host. 3. **In-episode promotion** — Stephen pitches Journey's retreat product, and explicitly solicits: **hiring a world-class engineer**, and directs listeners to Twitter handles and website. Dan invites listeners: "If you're listening to this and you want to build this app... reach out to Stephen." 4. Dan's repeated endorsements of the retreat ("best retreat I've ever been on") — disclosed that he attended, relationship beyond that unstated. ## Availability Limits - **Comments:** No metadata supplied; comment availability **unknown**. - **Timestamps:** None present in transcript; statements cannot be tied to time positions. - Full speaker surnames, show/channel identity beyond "AI and I," and the outro speaker's identity are **not established** in the source. If we're already taking super longevity and super intelligence seriously, why not take super wellbeing seriously? We're working to make life-changing meditation accessible to everybody. And we're starting with states known as the Jas, 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 like your own nervous system with I think an unprecedented level of fluency. I'm psyched. I want to see you get into a Janna. \>\> Stephen, welcome to the show. \>\> Thanks, Dan. I'm excited to be here. \>\> Excited to have you. Uh, for people who don't know you, you are the founder of Journey, which um, actually, how do you describe Journey as a as a company? I know Journey because I went on one of your meditation retreats, but I know that that Journey is bigger than that. So, give us the spiel on Journey really quickly. \>\> Yeah. So, \[clears throat\] we're we're working to make life-changing meditation accessible to everybody. And we're starting with states known as the Jas, 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 like your own nervous system with an 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 with your emotions because that makes everything else easier. Uh and it ultimately makes it easier to be the person you aspire to be. So it's uh in many ways about helping you get to indogenous 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. \>\> Wait, say that one more time. To set you up so that \>\> your subconscious works for you, not against you. \>\> Yeah, I I feel that. And and I have to say like I went on one of your weeklong 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. Um, and it has like generated lasting changes in my practice and therefore lasting changes in my life. So, I'm really I mean I love everything that you do and I'm really excited to have you here. \>\> Love to hear that, Dan. It's a labor of love for the team. \>\> Good. Um, you can feel it. So, we have a we have a bit of a a a plan here for this show which I think will be interesting and new, which is um we're going to you're going to get into Ajanna or at least get as close as you possibly can to being in Ajanna 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 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's a that uses AI to help people do this better. And so we're just going to get into the sort of like technology aspect and the future future aspect of this. Um so uh I'm psyched. Let's start let's start with I want to see you get into a Janna. \>\> Terrific. \>\> No pressure. \[laughter\] \>\> That's part of the pressure is part of the fun. So a little bit of context and framing for the listeners. So Jonas have historically believed to be states that take thousands of hours of meditation practice to enter. And uh it's I think become apparent that that need not be the case. the our thesis journey is the the way the reason these states often take so long and aren't so widespread is because it's a guesswork problem that uh meditation is invisible and non-verbal in a way that learning many skills is not and so your feedback loops get all gummed up all gked up with guesswork. So, at Journey, what we do is we we have like a uh we're really in intentional about feedback loops. And so, uh 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 uh 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? Um 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 back, and we'll we'll repeat." So, what we're going to do here is I'm just going to um \[clears throat\] throw a lot of the like thinking about your experience out the door and offer uh like my narrate my experience for on the order of like 10 to 20 minutes. I've done this a lot. I did this like every day for many years um and still do it very frequently. And so your experience may look different than mine. That's okay. The point is in in the same way that better off to watch a professional serve a tennis ball uh than to try to read a book on how to serve a tennis uh that it might prime your intuition a bit. So um uh with that context, I think we can jump into me narrating my experience aloud. I'll I'll I want just want to offer a couple additional things which is one uh we talk a lot about collectedness and conductivity. And so the the game that I'm going to be playing here is I'm going to be gently collecting all of my like attention and experience around an openhearted feeling. Uh it's going to be a uh I might be saying phrases that are all going to be pointing at like a a kindness or a gratitude or this kind of thing. And \[snorts\] the second is what we talk about conductivity and that's like embracing anything that comes up like wholeheartedly ranging from distractions to uh uh like little pinches of emotional tension including the pressure that Dan just put on me to try to get on a John live on a show. Um, all of these things I'm going to be looking to turn towards and like imbue with a sense of compassion or or embrace um such that um nothing is untouched by this by this like kind compassion kind of thing. \>\> Yeah. And and to 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 or whatever which are helpful. Um, and one of the things that I think is so unique about Journey and one of the things I loved 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, following all those instructions, although that can be useful. It is about um 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. \>\> 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 some 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. Uh, and doing so, if anybody wants to follow along and and meditate 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." Um uh as as a side note and maybe we'll talk about this later. Um a lot of this idea came from inspiration from the US military which is which is uh not not your typical or 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 \[laughter\] 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 50 other places over here and it's just all in this like like \[clears throat\] unique mishmash that really works well and I love it. \>\> 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 tacic knowledge transfer and that I think is like sort of the key word and some of the things that inspired some of this. So okay let's get started. So, uh, to settle, I like to close my eyes and I'm going to take a deep breath in and just relax to let it out. I'm just watching the end of the out of the outreath. Where does it end? And another deep breath in. And just let it all out. I'm settling into these old habits of mine, 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. 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. And I had some anxiety rushing around to prepare to get on this podcast with you all. And I'm just going to 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 of work. Just letting another breath slow the system down. The slower I breathe, the easier I feel. And the slower my thoughts are invited invited to be. I have two favorite ways of really settling into a relaxation or a sense of coming home before turning to a earnest openhearted feeling. The first is to blow my awareness wide open. So vast, so wide that if an airplane were to hum overhead with the tiniest tremble were to come through the building and the floor below me, I would feel it all instantly. And so I'm and 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. \[clears throat\] Like dropping bags coming home from a long day at work. I'm noticing my anxiety a bit in my head and a little bit in my chest. I'm having periodic stray thoughts about what Dan's experience is right now or somebody listening to this. And each one of these I'm just brushing with a sense of kindness and reception. Welcoming it into this vast mind. Completely uncontained. No boundaries. Deeply at ease. Settling in like a warm hot tub into the sense of coming home. 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. All the talking and thinking is still keeping me up. So, I'm going to do one breath silence to just really settle in. With this much ease and openness, I can and this gentle sense of kindness to anything that might quote unquote distract me. I'm starting to feel a little like gratitude and openheartedness already. But before I go all the way into that, I like to take a minute to relax the body, too. And so like a warm shower happening in slow motion, I'm going to start at the top of the head. And I'm going to relax every muscle as I go down from head to toe, finding tension I didn't realize I was carrying. And I'm going to try to do the whole thing from this wide open vast mind. No boundaries, no containment. And when I narrow, contract, just going to gently open back up. So the top of my head slowly moving down. There was a little sound in the distance and there was a little brain fog or anxiety or sleep sleepiness happening in my head. in all of these. Just gently brushing with an openhearted welcome and carrying on this little body scan. The muscles, 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. I just found another layer in a moment of silence. I'm also realizing I'm I've been running some thought about what I'm going to say next to you all. I'm just going to drop that now, too. Any fear of making it of making a mistake is going to be brushed with kindness just the same. down my cheeks to my jaw. Naming that I was a little scared was really good. Now I can just welcome it. And I'm feeling myself relax in places I didn't realize I was tense. May my fear be welcomed. I'm grateful that it's looking out for me. Back to the body scan down through the neck. I can feel my shirt brushing against my skin and I'm just relaxing muscles I didn't realize were tense. Both shoulders slump down a little more. Moving down as the arms, the elbow have some pain from lifting recently. Welcoming that too. down into my forearms and my hands which are a little sweaty. Welcoming that too and the tips of my fingers. Letting the kindness of jump of just brushing everything in my experience start to take on a bit of its own momentum. The pulsing in my hands is brushed almost as soon as I recognize the pulsing. The brush of the cool air on my skin is welcomed with kindness. As soon as I recognize the cool air, still softening in new ways behind the eyes and in the head, experiencing a surge of gratitude for just that fear or sadness that I may mess up here. as gentle as I could possibly be with myself. May I come home? This kindness and this gratitude and this relaxation are in some ways all the same thing. And I'm going to continue on my way down into my chest, relaxing muscles I didn't realize were tense, touching every bodily sensation, a little relaxing kindness down into my stomach, which I was holding and I didn't know. letting it kind of fall open vulnerably. At ease, at peace, savoring a sense of safety that can be found in the stomach when I just let it be at peace. No sucking it in down into the hips, the hamstrings, and the quads. Softening there in ways I didn't realize I was tense. Just a gentle, warm embrace. Grateful for my legs down into my calves, my ankles, the soles of my feet, and the tips of my toes. And pulling up for a moment and being grateful for this entire thing, the whole body. No precision, just a cloud of sensations. a throbbing of a pulse all the way from the tips of my toes to my upper lips. 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. the whole thing, letting it be a cause for gratitude and wonder, a softening. May I come home to it. May it come home to me. I actually dropped my first tear just a moment ago. I for years have softly cried while meditating. I don't know when I crossed the threshold, but at some point the gentle ease and slipping into gratitude, the relief of coming home began welling up. And I just let it another thing to brush in my experience. Another thing to welcome to be part of a great coming home. And now with this vast wide open mind, no boundaries, so free and at ease in this shimmering, glimmering body. I'm going to begin sharing or repeating some of my favorite mantras that part that spark a little extra openhearted feeling. And as I do so, I'm just going to 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 openheartedness 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. I got wondering if Dan would be pleased with this meditation or not. And so I'm just going to welcome that thought in and gently brush the underlying fe \>\> \[clears throat\] \>\> the underlying fear or the underlying sadness with a little compassion. May Dan be happy. May anybody listening be at ease. May I be healthy. May I be filled with joy and live life, live a life without suffering. I got a little sort of anxious or tense about how strange or woo this might sound. What must it seem like for a grown man to be saying these words on a podcast? And that's okay. Just like any other fear or sadness, I'm going to brush that with a little kindness. Welcome it in. Be grateful that somebody's looking out for me, for my image. And let it be another facet of just coming home. I just had a thought about how method actors and professional actors will step into a part so deeply it will fully consume them. \[clears throat\] Their tears are genuine. Their laughter is genuine. And yet it doesn't require they change their worldview or betray themselves in some way. And just like that, I'm going to keep falling into these openhearted mantras. Wouldn't it be nice if all beings were happy? What does it feel like in my body, in the heart space, or in the head? If I knew that all beings could be healthy. What does it feel like to wish that they be filled with joy? Filled with joy. And that one comes with an extra glimmer or shimmer in the heart. It's hard to say if it's cool or if it's warm, but there is something there ever so subtle. And may all beings live lives without suffering. the peace and relaxation that sort of gently, ever so subtly shimmers in my stomach and like a relaxation of the shoulders. Each of these phrases sort of pulses just the tiniest of feelings. I I actually know where to look for them and I'm cheating. 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 of my heart in a way or the softening of my gut, the celebratory joy in the back of my head. 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. I'm just letting all of these feelings fade away and sinking back into a vast wide open mind. An absolutely wondrous body and the backdrop of coming home. May all beings be happy. May they be healthy. May they be filled with joy. like an actor crying on stage, imagining them fill the world filled with joy and live lives without suffering. \[clears throat\] Okay, I might suggest we start to bring it to a close here. If I were on my own, I'd go another 40 minutes or something just continuing to \>\> just continuing to dance with these feelings and sinking further and further into them. \>\> That was lovely. \>\> That was lovely. Thanks for inviting me to do that, Dan. It's uh every time I do that in in almost any context, you just come out the other side with a little bit more ease and \[clears throat\] vividness. \>\> Yeah. I'm in like a very different place than when I started. \>\> Yeah. \[snorts\] \>\> Um \>\> Yeah, me too. slower and at ease. Yeah, I think I I know I just said something to this effect, but the there's sort of like that micro game and then there's like the the the more timeoriented 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 like 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 uh with time it's just like a sinking into a hot tub and it takes on a life of its own. I didn't try to drop a tear. Uh, 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. And yet I know from experience that that's how it would play out if we were to go another 30, 40 minutes or whatever. \>\> I'm sort of feeling like I I would like to narrate what happened for me. \>\> Yeah, tell me. Um, 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 I picked up on this retreat is um it actually surprised me how much time you spent in the sort of like premeditation 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 as you mentioned There are all those like little places where I'm I'm tensed up and consciously physically changing the tension level changes the overall emotional veance of my like body. Um, and there was there's stuff there. I'm in an office, so like I'm hearing people debating that I have. \[laughter\] \>\> I love that. And so I was like so annoyed um and sort of like self-conscious a little bit. Um and so you 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, um 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." Um I 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. But \>\> 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 \[laughter\] just happens for me. \>\> Um \[clears throat\] and I found in my experience when I'm getting a little bit deeper um there's almost like a warm blanket that comes over my head a little bit and I'm like \[sighs\] it just feels like I'm coming up on acid. I don't know. Um, and um, I end up feeling like a just I'm like energy, if that makes sense. Um, and so my the physical edges get a little softer and all that kind of stuff. Um, and it was really, what was really nice is you had started to like sort of say your phrases and 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 and then I was just like, oh, \>\> now we got a proper love fest going on. Yes. Um, 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. Um, and this is a this is a very common experience for me now like post journey retreat. Um, 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. \>\> Yes. And I think this is like a thing that I had to actually unpack during the retreat and and also subsequently is one of the things I love about how you teach is um and why the Jas are interesting is if you try to get into a genre, 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. \>\> \[snorts\] \>\> and that doesn't work very well. and and I you really unlocked in this retreat um how to actually just enjoy yourself 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 that kind of like I just opened up thing. It was just like not that available. And the thing that kind of got me that I was doing as you were talking is um I realized that I was already that I was already open. \>\> Yeah. you know, and that um that feeling is like sometimes you're looking for your glasses and then you realize \>\> they're on they're on. \[laughter\] \>\> That's exactly right. \>\> And that moment of like, oh, I I'm already there is like that's that for me is like the \>\> Yeah. \>\> Oh, okay. I can like I can like relax into it, you know? I 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 at one of and if not the most one of the most important if not and maybe one of the most difficult uh things to learn when you're when 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 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 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, there's 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 like a mini love fest for a few minutes like um but uh you begin to see that like 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 uh recursive self-acceptance is like those kind of the three ways we like to say the same thing on retreat. Uh 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. Like \[laughter\] 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 dep desperation or obligation. And um how do you uh and 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. Uh and uh I think Naval has a good um little like couple blurbs on uh on that kind of idea. 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 on the soccer field or in the virtuosa musician or or sort of lost on stage as a CEO? like um that stuff is I think uh can't come from the sort of like self-coercive place and yet um we for various reasons have sort of like selected for and optimized the hell out of our self-coverion um instead of our like self-acceptance. I love I love this like kind of what you're saying about play and I 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 going to do it because it's going to 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. um very counter very counterintuitive and very um 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 \>\> and so we actually kind of afraid and ashamed of that. \>\> Yeah. 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 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 \>\> time and and blood, sweat, and tears and misery basically. \[laughter\] \>\> Yeah. 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 it's hard to generalize but for me \[snorts\] 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 And so if you hear about the Janna or maybe meditation in general and then maybe the Janna in particular, but I think this applies to lots of different types of meditation practice, you're like, "Oh, cool." Like I will use this to 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, and it has been much better for me. There 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 ser 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 are there are there's a time where you're experiencing things that are so overwhelming 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' be like, "Yeah, my house is on fire. Great." Like you actually you 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 a 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. \>\> Cool. So I think you're pointing at a couple 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 system. This is super important and there's a couple different things that I I think lay out how to work through work with this. The first is this idea of window of tolerance which is uh especially big in things like sematic therapy and uh in related fields and the uh the idea is that you don't ever want to be playing with your like attention and emotion that gets you to a pl a point of dysregulation either uh hyperarousal which might look like a proper panic attack uh \[clears throat\] or hypoarousal which might be like a numbness or a strong dissociation. When you're working with something like gradea trauma, um folks will have these reactions sort of like associated with these stimuli. Um and very quickly if you're playing with greata trauma, you can end up in that kind of disregulated place. And 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 retraumatize yourself. Um it can also be the case that uh you're going to in 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 um 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 um 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. And maybe also um at least from my experience, if you are 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. Um, and there are ways usually to deal with it to get to you 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 horrible all the time and I needed to deal with that before I could do any of this. \>\> Totally. Absolutely. And I I I know you've you've written I 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 uh gets lost and that is that one very simple framework by which to think about this whole game around what you you might call like nervous system fluency uh is uh or or or maybe I don't want to make such a broad claim around nervous system fluency but um 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 work for a lot of what we're doing. This the idea of memory reconation is really simple. It's that if you co-activate a uh a a prior sort of negative emotional charge associated with a given stimuli and uh you that a um a commensurate sense of safety, compassion, connection uh at the same time that the the two can kind of like wash over each other and then the default charge associated with that stimulus can be rewritten uh and angled more towards something like the safety or the openness or the the conduct the the emotional fluence conductive conductivity kind of thing. 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 alive 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. Like what is your personality then at like a big bag of like stimuli response patterns. And so that thing that has to do with that 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 of an actor crying on stage, an actor leaning into like an openhearted feeling. you what we're we're learning for many folks the challenging part of memory reconsolidation is having access to the commensurate safety love or connection 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 \[laughter\] 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. 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. You can also do this in interpersonal dynamics with like communities that are maybe sharing emotions or vulnerably so um 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. \>\> 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 um 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. \>\> Yeah. \>\> Um 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 \>\> I like where you're going with this. \>\> Yeah. And I have actually found that um to to properly do this, to properly um uh express love to yourself or express love to other people, your actions and your words need to be aligned. Um 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 like you probably shouldn't be in or hiding, you know, your emotions from other people and all that kind of stuff. If you just if you're doing all that and you're saying I love you to yourself, not going to work. \>\> Not going to work. \>\> You have to like uh this sort of like love all the way down thing has to also go love all the way up. Um, so at the grossest level of like your actions, you they have to kind of match the more subtle things that you're doing too in order to sort of fully un unlock this. And um it's not a shortcut to just have everything in your life be uh horrible and you just you just feel good despite all of that. Sometimes you have to actually have to make real hard and hard decisions for yourself. \>\> Totally. Totally. And I I think this is getting at the um the sort of the second thing that I I you brought up earlier, which is like is this a good idea? Like is it 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 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 if you were to um yeah, like um let's say like not hold a boundary with a loved one, like abandon yourself and you're getting um 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 Janna game and you're like, I love myself. Um there you may soften the edges around some things that are sort of like internally inconsistent. Um 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 uh like uh like personal uh uh hypothetical. Same thing is true in the professional world. uh if you like one of the things that um I used to get uh 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 um but there's like something deep within you that you haven't yet sort of figured out has already pattern matched that's dangerous you don't want to do that like now is 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 embedded in the system and you're not going to be able to gloss past them into some sort of happy bliss outland. Um it's going to be it's it's going to require reckoning with those um 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 has to do with relationships with building habits and with improving decision-m because the 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 on some of the you know, here be here be dragons warnings. Um let's let's go into some of the you know you've talked about like personality hacking. Uh what are some of the ways that you have changed as a result of this practice? \>\> Yeah, that's a great question. So, I'm thinking of a couple stories to sort of capture um one one that was really big in um 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 neuroto company. We were had been collecting a bunch of data. \>\> You started as a sorry \>\> as a neuroch company. \>\> Okay. \>\> And we were collecting a bunch of data to see if we could map the uh the sort of bio signals that would be um needed to create better feedback loops for noviceses. 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. And then that school could be converted into a lab over time. And there would be a bunch of benefits. You know, we would be default to live. we would start a movement, we would get more shots on goal. Each shot on goal would be better than the last like um 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 um works more effectively and for more people. 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 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. Like these are all people who I admire in person and on paper and I'm making a fool of myself. \[laughter\] 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 it like there was so much fear there. I was blind to this fear and I was uh actively like because of because of my blindness we would have these team meetings and we would have our spreadsheets and we have you know behind the scenes okay who's this person what like what are the top three hypotheses for what they need fix for for what support they need um what have we done so far what have we learned like in my mind there's just like these kind of perennial questions that were just like asking for everybody rapid fire in this meeting and I'm like getting faster and faster and tighter and tighter of my voice and Now, anybody who's working with me is starting to get a afraid. \>\> You're doing that. You're doing that now. You are. You're getting past even talking about it. \>\> Exactly. \[laughter\] I'm I'm stepping back into the memory and you can like it all. Yeah. All \>\> need some reconsolidation right now. \>\> I could do some of that. Yeah. So, but when I finally um 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 what 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. Come here terrified Stephen. Like come here. I will not leave you." like uh and the had I'm sure I had a little bit of a cry and um suddenly can retroactively see all these places I was creating unnecessary friction with a team and that was certainly hurting our performance and our ability to serve students and so uh from there was then able 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 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. \>\> I I feel that deeply. I think um the way that it has manifested for me is first of all as like a someone coming from a very peopleleasery type background. \>\> Yeah. I think you can misinterpret um a lot of dharma wisdom as maybe maybe we can say the the dharma wisdom which is true of a lot a lot of religions is um treat others as you would like to be treated and for people pleasers that's natural. Um that's like you just knew that automatically. um and and but to the ext expense of yourself which ironically is like um not 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. \[laughter\] And um 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. Um, \[snorts\] and once you have that base where you actually start to like or love yourself, um, you start, at least for me, I started to notice all of these things that about myself that I couldn't see before because it would be too scary, that get in the way of your relationships, make you make bad decisions. Um, like a really simple example for me would be, "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. \>\> Yeah. Because it was too scary to imagine that you would be jealous. \>\> Yeah. And \>\> like that would mean you're a bad person or or flawed in some way or something. \>\> Exactly. Exactly. And and it makes such a difference to be like, "Oh, I'm ju 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." \>\> Um, \>\> 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 to have that kind of like live interpersonal apology. Wow. \>\> And I I think you're also it also I was surprised um 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." \>\> Um, 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. Um, and that is also I think a much like a super important benefit of this practice for me. \>\> Hugely important. It saves a bunch of energy. It prevents a bunch of like unhelpful patterns or like um repeated behaviors, addictions effectively. I think um one of the one of the things I was speculating about the other day is in um 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 um Donna Meadows has got this great chapter in her book about this um 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, you can get yourself in these oscillating loops like where um 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 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 in again. Um or and 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 like 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 flex 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 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 \>\> and um I would be remiss if in this podcast we did not talk about how this all relates to AI. \>\> Yes. \>\> Um \[laughter\] so at the moment \>\> Yeah. How do you um how do how are you thinking about that? I know you have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. \>\> Yeah. So macro and micro at the macro level, I think 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. \>\> What is super well-being? like this uh it grow 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 on like a year-long basis or like many year long space or um you'll see even more extreme quotes like I wouldn't trade what I know now and the 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 that is completely opposite conventional wisdom about the hydonic treadmill. Um and there's actually I think a relatively simple explanation for that. It's that like the hyonic treadmill applies in many cases in which you're looking for the wrong thing. Like uh if you go ask a billionaire whether it solved their happiness problems um it would be I think um I was just who was doing this? Probably Nick probably Nick Comrad on Twitter had like a great uh tweet polling from like a billionaire being interviewed or being or like Nal saying like being successful is not the same as being happy. Um 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 um 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 um this this conductivity move this like awareness and love all the way down and I genu in my experience is that it is not just incrementally improved but I think transformed my baseline happiness so this is sort of a nod for what's possible super wellbeing 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 neuroch um and and and so on So philosophically, why be like what's the point of being um smart and old if not happy? Uh is sort of like the argument. And I also think it happens to be very tractable given um the sort of psychotech that uh that you see prop up across time and space um 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. There's also other things you could play with here like there are certain maybe genetic genetic changes. Um I forget what's her name. Joe Joe 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 \>\> I don't know her name but yeah \>\> so all kinds of from neuros from neuroch to sort of like genetics to like just thinking about the question of suffering seriously uh is a little bit of a um 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 wellbeing seriously? That's the high level in terms of like what what Journey is actually doing and how this ties to AI. Um 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 on the order of many months or years or even a lifetime. They frequently what people talk about it as being as like power like an indogenous version as powerful as psychedelics and this the traits that come with um uh playing like playing this nervous system fluency game to get to Ajanna are even more valuable like you're change how you relate to your goals you have these new tools for navigating relationships decisions and habits um differently and then um furthermore when you get to the later stages your sort of even your sense of identity um 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 deep threatening qualities. This is on the deep end of and a lot of people talk about this in non-duality and they're like and all all these things are rolled together. \>\> We'll do a part two episode on that. \>\> Yeah, that's uh \[clears throat\] totally worth a part two. It's it's um the claims that advanced meditators make are absolutely absurd and so big if true uh that super well-being I think in some ways is a lot closer than that fancy term might sound like. Okay. All that being said um Journey right now has a product can make the Jas accessible. Jas 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 well-being and your lightness of being over time and uh 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 experience in Janna it's another thing to be able to use Janna regularly on a day-to-day basis to sort of make yourself light 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 Originally the plan was to use um hardware and things like we were starting with EEG and other bio sensors uh to create like rapid feedback loops that 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. Uh, 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 adjust all the student data. We record everything in journey because we're we're constantly running experiments and reflecting ourselves. um and you can ingest all the data and then um begin sort of saying like hey we're missing this on this student or like it can be a combination of qu of QA plus facilitator training um and and increasingly take the things that machines will be very very good at while letting facilitators specialize in the sort of human human connection um that humans are really good at all 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 Janna or Math Academy for like life-changing meditation where you um if especially if we're starting to get to an AI can do like a diatic guided meditation with you to to do like the 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 dialed in and reliably get people to Janna without a human in the loop 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 um future concept. Now you open your app, you've got your skill tree, you know exactly where you are, you've got a superhuman uh like guide who can engage with you live in meditation and also um uh like you know diagnose or go back and forth. Uh those are the kinds of things that I think are imminently ready to be built. \>\> Take my money. How do I get it? When app when test flight. \>\> 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 there's a couple bottlenecks. The first is engineering. Um and so we're looking for a world-class engineer to come join us and um uh be part of that. And \>\> have you tried Opus 45? \>\> Ah I have not um I have not tried Opus 45. I was \>\> you must \>\> and I'm excited to do so. \>\> I believe that you could build this in like a week in between meetings \>\> with open 5. I I 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 uh at the time because I I think it opens 45 came out last week. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Um so I was using whatever was latest 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 with 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 and own the whole thing. It's like four or five might be good enough, but I just don't have the time. And so I I I've I've thought about like canceling everything on 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, Stephen, reach out to Stephen. \>\> Yes, please. we uh uh the thing that the retreat pipeline has offered is this incredible testing ground to get really precise and so we we have a journeying bot and we're running an eval process and um and like looking at transcripts and we're saying okay here's how we want to like change the system and change the and you just this iteration loop is already in place like it's just a matter of time so it it's exciting that it feels inevitable at this point \>\> Stephen this is uh incredible this is my I This might be my favorite episode I've ever recorded. \[laughter\] \>\> Wow. I'm I'm delighted. I' I've listened to a few of your episodes and I've quite enjoyed them. So, \>\> um thank you so much for doing this. If people are interested in uh learning more about you or about Journey, where can they find you? \>\> Yeah. So, um I'm on Twitter. I'm Stephen\_Zurface. Uh and so is Journey the company. Uh the handle is Jonath. So J Ha an N A T C H Stephen Zurf is S Pen Ze RF F- A and our website is www.journey with an h.io. Um and those are the main \[clears throat\] ways to to to find us. \>\> Amazing. Um we we've got to do a part two. \>\> That'd be fun. Yeah, we there's all kinds of like we're we're thinking about a part two curriculum to really get into the later genres and and non-duality and identity shifts and there's so many different ways this could go. Uh and it's always fun to talk. So, we'll do sometime. \>\> Sounds good. \>\> Cool. Thanks, Dan. \>\> 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 \[snorts\] 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. \>\> \[snorts\] \>\> 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.