Dreamlabs

 If you recognize that as the voice of SN Goenka, you've probably been to a 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat. If not, you're in luck because I just got back from one of those retreats, and today I'm going to be sharing everything that I learned. I'll share what actually happens inside your mind at a meditation retreat and why I think meditation is such a great tool, not only to make you happier, but also, yes, I'm going to say it more productive.And what's cool about meditation is that while it's something that you can go really deep on, it's also something that you can do right now. Like, yeah, right now, seriously, let's try it. Take a deep breath in through your nose, hold it and breathe out slowly through your mouth.That's nice. But back to my point, if you wanna really feel the benefits of meditation, you need to go big like 10 days fully offline, meditating, non-stop the entire time big. Because when you do that for the first time, you realize that voice in your head. You know the one that's always saying.Yeah, that one in neuroscience, this constant internal chatter is called the default mode network, or DMN. And outside of the moments when you've been in deep sleep or extremely concentrated on a particular task, it has never shut up, not once, not in your entire life.And there's nothing that will make you realize this more than your first few days at a meditation retreat because during that time you do a technique called on upon a breathing. Which is basically just paying attention to the sensation of your breath as it comes in and out of your nose. But what it really is, is an epic battle between you and your default mode network.The metaphor that I would use to describe this is imagine if you were a piece of driftwood that was trying to settle down on the shore. You find a good spot. You're in the sand. You think everything's gonna be fine. You're breathing in, you're breathing out. You're breathing in, you're breathing out. But then you start to feel a little water coming up under you as a wave rolls in.At first, it's not much, just a little water tickling you, but then suddenly you realize you're not touching the sand at all anymore. You're completely free floating at the whims of the tides. And somehow you've been thinking about an angry email that you got from a customer last year for the last five minutes.And once you realize this, you remind yourself, that's not what I'm supposed to be doing. And again. And really it goes on like this nonstop for three days where this is all you're doing. But the cool part is you really start to improve over the course of just a few days. On the first day, you might find that you can't focus for even a couple of minutes straight on your breath.On the second day, you start to have longer periods where you're really zoned in on the breath, and on the third day, you might even find yourself sitting for a whole hour without ever getting derailed by a distracting train of thought.In Buddhist terms, this is called developing your samati or concentration. It's a mastery over the mind that makes you the boss and allows you to turn off the DMN whenever you want. So now that you have this control over your mind, what are you gonna do for the seven remaining days of the meditation retreat?What? What was that?Okay, this sounds kind of weird, but I really mean it. You take all of that focus that you cultivated during on upon it and use it to gain an acute awareness of all of the sensations happening inside of your body. And what you immediately realize is that because of all of the noise that the DMN has been making all of your life, there's way more going on at a sensational level than you've ever been aware of.And this in and of itself is really cool. It's really cool to just notice what your left pinky toe feels like or that little tingling sensation that's always been there somewhere deep in the middle of your right thigh. And as you become more aware of your sensations. Even in the austere environment of a meditation center, life just becomes more vibrant.But these meditation retreats aren't just about having a nice time. They are about upgrading your mind at a very deep level, and you do this by observing the sensations in your body and just not reacting to them. It's pretty much as simple as that. A body scan, but with total awareness of all the feelings in your body and where whatever you feel, you just observe objectively rather than reacting to it.Now, this might sound easy, but if you're sitting for an hour straight, it starts to get pretty painful. And what you'll notice is that your default reaction to this pain would of course be to simply move, change your position. But when you're doing these long meditation sits, you're trying not to do that.But as you continue to observe it, there comes a moment where you can just look at that pain and.Instead of being controlled by it in this reactive way, you're able to just view it objectively as just another sensation in your body. You try to take on this attitude of just, oh hmm, that's what I'm experiencing right now. And not really reacting to it in any way. The reason why this whole practice becomes so powerful is because if you think about it, among the five senses that we have, physical sensations are really the ones that hit us the hardest, and at the same time, they're the ones that were the least conditioned to pay attention to.I mean, it's shocking when you begin this process and you realize that you actually couldn't even feel a lot of what was happening inside of your own body, whereas you never really have that problem with the things that you see, hear, or smell. And yet, physical sensations are actually the thing that we care about the most in a lot of ways.I mean, think about this. If I told you that I was gonna show you the most beautiful image that you had ever seen for five minutes, how would you rate that experience against? Feeling the most blissful, pleasurable sensation that you could possibly feel for the same amount of time. I think most people would probably opt for the sensation.It just feels way more real. And so in this Buddhist philosophy of mind, the idea is that. Most of our psychology is actually built up around our relationship with our sensations. Every time we've felt something that hurt us, we build up a new complex that wants to avoid that type of thing. When we've felt pleasure, we've suddenly become attached to that, and even the things that we've experienced through other senses that we liked, whether it was taste, smell, or visuals.The thing that made them good or bad was actually the accompanying physical sensations that goes along with those experiences. Physical sensations at the end of the day are where our mind's, entire concept of what is desirable or not desirable kind of comes down to. So the idea is that if you can get down to this root level of how you're reacting to the sensations and solve that, there's not really any.Deeper that you can go and the rest of your psychology will just kind of sort itself out. It might seem like a big claim, but having experienced it myself, I would definitely say that it works, and when I say that it works. What I mean is that as you continue to do this process, you kind of reach a state in which you're sort of mentally invincible.The things that would normally bother you no longer do the things that would normally feel good, feel even better, and it unlocks a kind of creative brilliance that I have never experienced in my entire life any other way. Basically, you can enter flow state at any time. Nothing can distract you, and it gives you a kind of creative clarity where the best ideas seem to just fall directly into your lap, fully formed at the perfect moment for you to execute on t...

 Today on episode one of Dream Labs, we will be discussing a topic that I could not be more excited about how I made, yes, that's right. I'm talking about that little Diddy that you just heard when the show started. Goes a little bit like this.That's right. No band, no orchestra, no singers. That sample that you just heard was generated completely by ai. Okay. Well, not completely by AI because. I also had a big part in the creative process. You see, SUNO, the leading app for AI generated music, has just dropped a new feature that I have been waiting for my entire life.When you use this feature, you can upload an audio sample that you created yourself, and then give the AI prompt about what kind of song to generate with it. It lets you take a clip like this, which I hummed.An output, something that sounds like this...y'all, this is so great. It's like a mid journey moment for music, but actually it's much better because when you think about it, when you generate images on Mid Journey, you're still limited by what you can describe in text for what you generate. Or you could use a tool like CREA that's more advanced and actually lets you input images that the images that get output are based on.But in order for that to work, you still need to have some basic drawing skills. And while you could say the same about this new way of making music with Suno, I personally think that more people are gonna have a little Diddy that they can hum out and then create something really cool with. Then are gonna have the tool set and skillset to actually be able to generate an image.That's a good starting point for AI generated artwork. So what we're about to see is an explosion in musical creativity. People who never thought that they could have been musicians in the past are now just going to be able to take any idea that they can hum and turn it into a full fledged song. I don't know what this is gonna do for the music industry, but I'm very excited about what it'll mean for me personally.'cause I have a lot of crazy song ideas and I want to express 'em. So let's hear another song that I just recently made using this technology.Now look, if you could hear the input to this, you would think it was hilarious. It's absolutely ridiculous. Oh, you actually want me to play it? Okay. Okay, fine. Here it is.So that input created this beat, which it didn't have lyrics. Then I downloaded this beat, wrapped over it and re-uploaded that to create the final product.A piece that I still feel like I'm missing is being able to really hone in the voice that ends up on the final track, so that it sounds exactly the way that I want right now. I don't feel like I have the ability to control that voice to sound a little bit more like my own voice. Now, I don't want it to sound exactly like me.But I do want to be able to create the specific voice that I'm trying to, and I don't feel like I have that ability yet. There's another piece of software that I think is much better for this. It's actually one of our portfolio companies, ACE Studio. Ace Studio allows you to create custom voices and generate lyrics in those voices in a way that Suno still really doesn't give you control over.So if I wanted to create a fully finalized version of this song or others, what I probably would end up doing is generating the beat. And then creating the choruses using suno. But probably for those raps where I actually want them to sound more like myself, I'll end up using a studio to create a rap voice that more closely mirrors my own voice.So here's an example of a song that I made using that type of workflow where I used my own voice to do the wraps and used a studio to create a different version of my voice for the chorus.So look, while the sound of my voice on the track may. Not be as conventionally good as what you get with the Suno autogenerated voice. I still feel like that's a much more accurate expression of my own musical inspiration than what Suno generated, and I think that that's gonna become more and more important as we move forward.Because as you can see, it's now easy to generate any kind of typical music with Suno and other AI audio tools. And so what's gonna really set pieces apart, I think, is going to be how much self-expression there is in that piece. And I think we're gonna see a world where more and more people are generating what feels true to them, and more people are expressing themselves musically than ever before.And in ways you probably won't expect, maybe a little bit like this.So this one I generated the beat using Wandera, which is another one of our portfolio companies. That's. Portfolio of music that their model is trained on is all completely copyright free. The thing about generating music with Suno is that they've actually used a bunch of copyrighted music to train their models.So the music that you generated with it, you can't really use as professional music that you would publish. Wandera on the other hand, has a completely clean data set, but it's all from karaoke music. So honestly, the outputs still aren't quite as good. But there's still interesting things that you can do with it.For example, in that song that I just played for you, which was admittedly quite bizarre, I kept pushing the Wandera model to generate weirder and weirder songs and patterns of notes that had never been played before in the history of music. So let's take a look at another song that I made this time. I wanted to create a dance track that I could play on the playa at Burning Man.So here's the little Diddy that I sang into my microphone to get it started.Beautiful. I know, but check out what it generated.Pretty epic, right? The inspiration for the song actually came from another one of our portfolio companies, generation lab. They're working on a longevity diagnostic that has given me the belief that we are going to have the. Choice of how long we want to live when we are older. The only limitation might end up being the size of our pocketbooks.But here's the thing, this first version of the song that I generated, I didn't really like the style of the electronic music. It's not very modern. It's not the kind of melodic house that you hear on the playa these days. So I did another remix and got this result.Now that has Mayan Warrior Sunset set, written all over it. It. And speaking of Burning Man, I wanted to create some custom theme music for our camp. It's called Celestial Tea Garden, and it's gonna be located at six 15 and D. So if you'll be there at the burn this year, definitely come see us. And if you do, you might just hear our special theme song.And now I have to give a special shout out because that camp was started by two of our other portfolio founders at HF zero o, Shannon and Jesse from Open Home. Open Home is a smart speaker operating system that you can also use as a developer to develop. Smart voice apps and I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future there will be an open home app where you can just hum the song that you want to hear and get back the fully rendered version of it right there on your smart speaker.So look, you might've thought that you knew a thing or two about music production.And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Dream Labs.