Alex's first-of-its-kind accomplishment is a timely reminder that we humans are capable of unimaginable things. AI progress is challenging our ideas of reality, creating a massive fear response that results in many feeling paralyzed. Alex triumphed because he's trained his brain to silence fear. fMRI of his neural activity show a silent amygdala. Achieving what you want in life can be done with a similar shift in neural architecture. What could you accomplish by overcoming default patterns such as silencing fear? As a species, what if instead of destroying our enemies, we destroyed the concept of enemies. What could we then climb together? That may seem impossible of humans, but as Alex shows, the risk is shorting our potential to change beyond our imaginations.

In this article, for live-streaming my mushroom trip, I'm harpooned by several psychedelic insiders for "ego enrichment", "a circus of self-indulgence" and "digital narcissism". Here's what's going on: when someone violates a tribe's norms, the tribe's priests don't try to understand the new behavior, they seek to delegitimize the actor in order to protect their own status and try and claim superiority. By doing this they are confessing new boundaries of possibilities have been set and their inability to take a similar risk. If they can't win on position or strength, they try to win on virtue. When you're out on the frontier, expect this kind of behavior. Humans do it without realizing they're doing it. Humans are NPCs. We all are. We're lucky if we can escape NPC mode for a fraction of our life. Go build something cool. Redefine boundaries. Push past people's comfort zone. When people squawk, understand they're NPCs chirping but it's really just a song they're singing called progress.