Jason Silva is a media personality, documentary filmmaker, futurist and fellow at the Hybrid Reality Institute, where he is looking at human/technology co-evolution. He has been a host and producer for Current TV for the last 4 years, and the focus of his life’s work is to cultivate as deep an understanding of inspiration and awe as humanly possible. The Creators Project recently published an essay by Jason in which he shares some of his musings on the commonality between science, art, and wonder. The following is an excerpt from his essay “The Creating And Sharing Of Awe”:
Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller called themselves “performing philosophers,” using the power of media communication to spread galactic-sized ideas about the state of the species in relation to the wider universe. Leary used to say, “In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today, he’d have a talk show.” Carl Sagan is another example of the philosopher-as-media-personality, effectively hacking pop culture with his iconic Cosmos TV series and sending our collective minds reeling. Today we need philosophy with the same existential urgency that we always have—and to effectively connect with eager audiences, I believe philosophical ideas will benefit from being “packaged” in the most compulsively watchable and infectiously shareable forms of our time. In fact, I would update what Leary said. If Aristotle were alive today, he’d be a digital nomad, spitting heady dialogue into his Flip cam or iPhone, and sharing it on YouTube, all while globetrotting the world to feed his wanderlust.
He goes on to explain his fascination of what is possible when different voices and experiments in art, science, and philosophy converge to open doors of understanding and expand the collective mind of all human beings. To read the entire beautifully-written piece, be sure to visit The Creators Project. You can follow Jason on his Vimeo page, his website MaxAndJason.org, Twitter, as well as his homepage at Current TV. You can also get a great sense of Jason’s exuberance, passion, and intelligence by taking a look at this short interview with him below. I am seriously crushing on this guy right now. Dear Jason, will you marry me?
SEE ALSO: Watch The Trailer For Jason Silva’s Documentary Turning Into Gods”
