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A Timothy Leary for the Viral Video Age

If you ever wondered what would happen if a young Timothy Leary was wormholed into 2012, complete with a film degree and a Vimeo account, you have your answer: Jason Silva. If Silva, who was born in Venezuela, seems to have natural screen presence, it’s because he’s no stranger to media; he worked for six years as a host at Current TV before leaving the network last year to become a part-time filmmaker and full-time walking, talking TEDTalk.

Like Leary, Silva is an unabashed optimist; he sees humankind as a species on the brink of technology-enabled transcendence. Silva is an avid evangelist for the technological singularity—-the idea that technology will soon bring about a greater-than-human intelligence. It’s an idea that Ray Kurzweil has worked hard to popularize in tech circles, but Silva wants to push it out into the mainstream, and he wants to do it with the slickest, most efficient idea vehicle of our time: the viral video. He has spent the last three years making (really) short films that play like movie trailers for ideas; he compares them to shots of “philosophical espresso.” 

Silva’s work is starting to get some traction; his short films have been viewed over half a millon times, and in just the past year he has been invited to speak at Google, the Singularity Summit, and The Economist’s Ideas Festival. Talking to him it’s easy to see why. He has a singular conversational style, marked by a virtuosic ability to quote his favorite thinkers verbatim, and a rhetorical endurance that allows him to riff long and deep on an impressive range of topics.

Read Silva’s interview.