Jason Silva

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In today’s podcast episode, I had the privilege of interviewing Jason Silva. I enjoyed talking to Jason immensely and have to admit that I was fascinated by his impassioned, enthusiastic, and poetic take on the singularity and our reach for immortality.

If there is one thing, however, that I will personally keep from this first conversation with Silva, it will be the following long but absolutely profound quote from the Imaginary Foundation that he shared with me during the interview:

We live in a society in which spurious realities are constructed by the media, by governments, and by big corporations. We are bombarded with pseudo realities fabricated by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated mechanisms. Perhaps for many designers, irony is the only possible response to a media space where it’s impossible to distinguish reality from manipulation.

Yet the imaginary foundation is future-focused, and always has been, so we’re exploring what comes after we push through the darkness; we’re already revelling in the beauty on the other side of the looking glass. And believe me, it’s wonderful. Living creatively and joyfully requires dismissing gloom, defeatism, and negativism. We acknowledge problems, but we do not allow them to dominate our thinking and our direction. So we prefer to be for rather than against, to create solutions rather than to protest against what exists. There are things worth believing in; there are things worth being passionate about; and so our action must not be a reaction but a creation. For ideas catch the dewdrops and reflect the cosmos, so let those ideas be noble, let them be poetic and let them be beautiful.

Who is Jason Silva?

You might recognize Venezuela-born Jason Silva from his work hosting shows for Al Gore’s Emmy-winning Current TV network—and from his Gap’s Icon campaign billboards. What you probably don’t know, however, is that he is also a documentarian obsessed with the intersection of science, technology, and art, and is working on a new film called Turning Into Gods.

Check out the concept teaser trailer edited by Jason Silva and Sean Puglisi and follow Jason on Twitter to find out when the movie comes out:

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