JASON SILVA: So I've always been fascinated
by the relationship between creativity and madness, right?
Like Timothy Leary famously said, in order
to use your head, you've got to go out of your mind.
Now this of course implies a kind of willingness
to sort of go to unknown places, to visit mental landscapes that
A willingness to sort of leave one's comfort zone,
to decondition one's thinking, one's
reflexive responses to stimuli; to go
Catalyzing the imagination is like diving head-first
And there's always a potential of getting hurt.
You know, it is said that the mystic and the madman
are swimming in the same waters.
But the mystic, he's like an artist surfing it down.
He's bringing back souvenirs from these ecstatic spaces
But at the end of the day, the artist does become depleted.
The artist is sacrificing part of himself
to bring back those visions, to create a phase change
in the consciousness of society.
He leaves the consensus trance.
He leaves our cultural operating systems.
He shows us different reality tunnels that gives us
Us as consumers of art, we pay money for them to take us
to spaces that we cannot go by ourselves.
These are cultural luminaries.
They are madmen that somehow have
been able to sort of coax and domesticate
This idea of always having functional output.
To go to Oz, to tumble down that rabbit hole,