and life you love. So if you're anything like me, you love subjects like technology and

creativity and spirituality and thinking about how all of these incredible universes are

coming together in miraculous ways. Well, my guest today is one of the leading thinkers,

speakers, and philosophers on this topic and so much more.

Called the Timothy Leary of the viral video age by The Atlantic, Jason Silva delivers

philosophical shots of espresso which unravel the incredible possibilities the future has

to offer the human race. Host of National Geographic's hit show Brain Games, Jason Silva

is an extraordinary new breed of philosopher who meshes philosophical wisdom of the ages

with an infectious optimism for the future. Using his series of short videos, which play

as movie trailers for ideas, Jason explores the coevolution of humans and technology and

have garnered over 2 million views. Jason has been featured in CBS News, The Atlantic,

The Economist, Vanity Fair, Forbes, Wired, TED.com, among others, and he was also featured

as part of The Gap Icons campaign. An idea DJ and visual poet, Jason Silva is above all

an optimist and curator of ideas, inspiration, and all.

Jason, thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you so much for having me.

So I know we're gonna talk about a lot of really cool things, creativity, futurism,

all kinds of stuff. But I actually wanna start off going back to the past. So I know that

often times we can see the seeds of who someone is to become, what they're meant to do in

this world when we look in the past. And I know that you actually started doing these

salons in your house. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes. I grew up in Venezuela and I used to go to an international school, so my friends

were from all over the world and all the time we had new kids coming into the school because

their parents were working for multinational companies, so they'd be stationed there. So

people were new all the time in the school. And one of the ways that we made people feel

at home right away was I used to kinda organize them and bring them, invite them, to my crew.

And I used to organize these salons in my house. And basically they were idea jams.

We would share books and scenes from movies that we loved and we drank wine and we hung

out and... in Venezuela you can buy alcohol at a pretty young age. But yeah, I just kinda

was always... I always loved ideas and I always loved recording ideas because one of the things

that sort of haunted me from a very young age was that inspiration was really fleeting.

Inspiration was sort of defined by its impermanence. And so my way of, like, arresting that, of

capturing these inspired exchanges with my friends was through the camera. So I've pretty

much had a video camera since I was 12 and have been documenting my mind jams ever since

then.

That's incredible. Do you ever look back on those?

Yes. Yes. As a matter of fact, I could even show you a little clip if you want.

Oh, definitely. Ok, we're gonna make that... ok, you're gonna see it. Ok, cool. Is that

where you started thinking to yourself, "Ok, I wanna do this for my life."

I think so. Yeah, I always loved movies and I always loved getting kind of immersed in

cinema and I thought that cinema was the best way to mediate encounters with transcendence

and inspiration. You know, I didn't grow up religious at all, so I didn't get that from

traditional religious spaces, but to me cinema is the last altar left. Cinema was the place

where I felt like I transcended the ego and I connected with something larger than myself.

Whether it was the characters or their mythic journey or their transformation or whatever

it was, to me cinema was cathartic. So there was no doubt that I was gonna go to film school

and get involved in making content in some capacity, but because I was kind of a child

of the digital revolution, I was responding to the restrictions and liberations that came

with that. So rather than going the route of trying to make feature length films or

docs, I fell in love with the short form in college. And the fact that I had a video camera

since I was 12 has shown me that I could have really quick turnaround. See, that's the thing

about digital video. It's like you could just shoot it. If it looked cool in the little

viewfinder, then you could hit record and you could really capture the moment, and you

could very quickly turn that around. And so after that there was just no way that I could

go to the more slow production vibe, you know? I just had to keep it at that speed and that

has... that's been my journey.

That's incredible. And so were you both behind the camera and in front of the camera?

I... originally was all about directing. So when I was like 12, 13, 14 I would direct

my little brother and we'd do these spoof short films and so on and so forth and have

a blast. And at the time I had no editing equipment, so I had to edit in real time in

my head. And so we shot in sequence and the cuts were in my head and I'd start and stop

and do the next shot and so on and so forth. And... but it was really in, like, later in

high school with those salon sessions that I was videotaping that I started to turn the

camera on myself. So not only was I videotaping my friends and sort of the mind jamming conversations

that were happening, but at some point I sort of felt like if I wanted to narrate or say

something I was like, "Ok, just hold the camera." And I'd just hand the camera to my friend,

I'd start, like, yapping about something, and then later on I was surprised that my

rantings were actually somewhat lucid. You know? Because at the time I had no real experience.

The minute you put the camera on me I would get self-conscious. But... but in those instances

I was able to be in the no mind state and actually get in the zone and get in the flow

and that's where the best stuff seemed to emerge. So then at that point it became I

still wanted to control the creative, but I was like, "You know what? I can narrate

my own stuff."

Yeah, I mean, and you're... you're absolutely stunning at it and that's what actually, I

was so excited when I came across, you know, one of your most popular videos I was like,

"I have got to get in touch with Jason. I need him on MarieTV," because you were absolutely...

you were born to do this and you're brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

You're welcome. So let's talk more about creativity.

Yeah.

Creativity, it's just one of those... it's just such a fascinating subject. I mean, MarieTV,

we're always coming up with ideas and everything else we do in the business. For you, when

it comes to creativity, do you think that there's ever a new idea or is everything an

iteration or a version of something that's come before?

Yeah, that's... that's... I kinda fall in line with that notion that everything is kind

of a remix and everything builds on preexisting knowledge base. And creative people are people

that are able to connect the dots in a new way, arrange the Legos in a different order

but using the same building blocks. There's actually a series on the web that's really

popular called Everything is a Remix that's genius and it just shows how a lot of things

that we consider original are actually, again, remixes of what came before. And so that's

where I think that whole notion about steal like an artist or, you know, good artists

borrow, great artists steal. Because the truth of the matter is everything builds on what

came before, so as long as you cite where your inspiration comes from or you give credit

to where you're connecting the dots from, beyond that I think, you know, we all kind

of share in that space in which ideas can have sex and they should all belong to all

of us.

Yes. Exactly. Actually, that's what I wanted to talk about next because I thought it was

such an interesting turn of phrase. Obviously it's like a little bit saucy, a little bit

sassy.

Sure.

Talk to me about ideas having sex and why you're so passionate about bringing these

very interesting, amazing, philosophical... philosophical concepts and packaging them

in a mainstream way that everybody can get.

Yeah. Well, that term, ideas having sex, I think it came after I read Stephen Johnson's

book, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Natural History of Innovation, which is a dazzling

book about the origin of ideas. And he writes a lot there about how we need to create ecologies

of thought, and he talks about how cities are fertile spaces for ideas to have sex because

of the density of the way people are arranged near each other. People from different backgrounds

comingling together sprouts new recombinations of ideas. He talks about the rise of the coffee

shop as the... another instance in history that led to a lot of ideas because you put

a lot of people in a small space, you give them lots of caffeine, and ideas intermingle,

mutate, and sprout. And in the age of the internet all of a sudden even the city, even

though it's still a very creative place, it's not a necessary precursor anymore because

in the age of the internet we transcend distance and time and space and so on. And so now anybody

who is interested in anything can coalesce around someone else who's interested in the

same thing and they can have that kind of idea sex. But I love just the metaphor of

talking about an ecology or a space where ideas, which are like organisms, can have

sex, which is the whole... the whole notion of we went from a world of genes to a world

of memes. So ideas, these memes, are these living things. Ideas leap from brain to brain,

they compete for the resources of our attention, they have infectivity, they have spreading

power. This notion that ideas are alive is a wonderful idea.

Yeah. And actually, I remember in one of your videos you talked about how they retain some

of the characteristics of organisms, and that just kind of blew my mind and I was like,

"I wanna hear Jason talk about that."

Yeah. Well, that was Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, I believe. In the 70s he wrote

this book where he introduced the term meme. And of course meme rhymes with genes, and

he says, you know, "We used to live in a world where information was only exchanged through

sex." Sexual reproduction. That's how genetic information mixed with other genetic information.

But with culture, with language, all of a sudden we had this new information technology

that allowed us to encode information in vocal patterns and transmitted through time and

space outside of DNA. That was the new replicator. Writing allowed us to encode information,

take it outside of the mind and put over there and let it spread, let other people read it.

So it was the... it's this notion that at that point we went from a world of genes to

a world of memes and that this new replicator accelerated our capacity to transform the

world. Because it just... it started building and building and building and building and

building and now, you know, we live in that... we have a global nervous system where information

is traveling faster than ever. I mean, it's... it's... it's a wild space. Right?

Yeah, it's...

Electrified thoughts traveling at the speed of light.

It's so exciting to me and often times I just really stop and think about how much I love

the internet.

Yeah.

I talk about it. I'm like, it... I remember getting online for the first time and going,

"I can reach people in another part of the world that I would never have a chance to

connect with on a spiritual level, on any level, and it literally makes me wanna jump

out of my skin. I think it's so cool."

Oh, yeah. There was a famous Jesuit priest called Teilhard de Chardin and he talked about

the omega point of the acceleration of technology is leading towards this apex where we all

kind of merge into this super meta organism. He referred to it as the noosphere that rises

above the biosphere. So it's this membrane that's gonna surround the earth that's all

mind. It's all thought. It's all the thoughts of billions of people finally becoming this

sort of meta organism. And it's a wild idea, but think about it. I mean, you create a piece

of content that doesn't just inspire the people in this room, but that inspires somebody in

South Korea or in Berlin and it might change the book that they decide to read that day,

which might change the major that they go for in college, which might then change the

course of human evolution because they might invent something. So it's like we do now...

ideas are our force of evolution and the fact that our ideas are unbounded by normal Euclidean,

meet space limitations of distance and time means that we're in this world where thought

travels at the speed of light and thought evolves and thought mutates and wow. Who knows

where that's gonna go? But it's an exciting time.

Yeah.

If used wisely.

How much do you love that we're alive right now and how much do you love, especially given

what you do and your skillset and your passion...?

Yeah. 100%. I mean, look, technology gets a lot of criticism and that's because technology

has always been a double edged sword and I understand that. I mean, when we discovered

fire, it's been famously said, you could use fire to cook your food and that led to this

acceleration and our capacity to absorb nutrients and it freed us to have all this time to think

and so on and so forth. But you can also use fire to burn your enemies. You can use the

alphabet to write Shakespearean sonnets that enrich the imagination or you can use the

alphabet to compose hate speech and lead people to kill each other. So technology extends,

but it can extend in any direction. And it's how we use these tools ultimately that determines

if they're good or bad. But I have an unwavering belief that if you look at the macro trends

overall, we tend to use these things for good. Steven Johnson wrote a whole other book about