Three nights ago, I saw Dead and Company (featuring John Mayer) at the Sphere. We—Dad, older brother, and I—had arrived two hours before in a dusty coffee-colored Toyota Highlander, the breeze that makes it 70 degrees all around in Santa Monica substituted for the oppressive, sticky heat of Vegas. The city brimmed with promises of hedonistic and ephemeral pleasures: girls, drinks, money…it was all here in Vegas. Amidst the setting, I found myself at a Dead concert that became one of the most spiritual experiences of my life.
As we settled into our seats for the band’s second song, the sheer power and scope of the Sphere’s visuals hit us. We started at the house where the Dead began in Haight-Ashbury and then kept going up. Up, up, fucking up. We climbed to a view of the whole Golden State in its shining dusty deserts and lapis lazuli waters. The whole crowd went completely silent, awestruck by the miraculousness of it all. In that moment, I thought that we had done it, we had experienced a true pinnacle of what modern-day technology could accomplish. It was the Overview Effect at its finest, a psychological phenomenon astronauts experience when they see our tiny blue dot from outer space. We had left the Earth behind, with nothing but space and the Dead.
The next three hours were full of mind-melting hallucinogenic visuals dished at us song after song. There were near 360-degree views of snowy mountains, dancing teddy bears that spiraled into infinity, trees bending shapes in a kaleidoscope of life. The magnitude of it all was unreal. As Dead and Company closed out the show and we descended back down to Earth, I felt the connection to the thousands around me. We were all on the same wavelength—sad that the journey had ended, realizing we were back in the miniscule bubbles of our lives, concerned with such little things in the grand scheme of things. It was truly humbling.
We then exited towards the escalators, still a bit sad, but as we all amassed into the halls, we collectively reflected on the experience and the togetherness we felt. We sang the same tunes (You know my love will not fade away), we cheered the same cheers. Some were hugging. It was the most significant dissolution of the separation between self and others that I had ever seen in a public space. I thought of the line in “Scarlet Begonias”: Strangers stopping strangers, just to shake their hand. My journey to explore the ineffable and the mysteries of the brain had naturally drawn me to ‘60s culture (what I would give to be at Woodstock ‘69…), and I had always been disappointed that I would never be able to experience what Jerry Garcia sang about in his songs. But when we were all expressing our love and gratitude for each other, I wished the opposite: not to go back in time, but to stay in the present as long as possible. Tremendous feats of technology had brought us the Sphere. It was a sensory experience rivaled only by psychedelics. With technology, we were creating the visuals of the ‘60s without (some of) the drugs. The future is endless, and I believe we can continue to create truly ego-dissolving, transcendental technologies that are not only available to the millions attending this tour, but will be democratized for all. Let us seek these non-ordinary experiences to bring more value and love to our lives, to appreciate the beauty of the world and each other.
So grateful we got to spend the evening together, you captured it perfectly!