 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante and we're live here at IBM IOD, IBM's big data conference, Think Big is the theme of this conference. Play it off of Thomas Watson's Think, the most famous mantra in the history of the computer industry and IBM has taken that to new levels. IBM's great job with branding, it was smarter computing and always really does a good job from the big picture perspective. But this event has really evolved from kind of a boring, stodgy information management perspective really to big data and really instrumenting organizations, industries and bringing in a whole new perspective, IBM showing its innovations, showing off its technology, its people, its visions and IBM this year chose to bring in Jason Silva. Jason Silva is a TV personality, he's a very interesting individual and he is hosting this event and it's our pleasure, Jeff Kelly and myself, my co-host, our pleasure to have Jason on theCUBE, welcome. Thanks for having me guys, it's really nice to be here with you. Yeah, we're humbled, you're a filmmaker, we've got our little cue, so I'm here. Yeah, no, I love the setup you got going on, it's pretty mobile, I love it. But it works and we're streaming live and doing this now for a couple of years. Fabulous. And we were early to the game, so I saw your keynote, it was quite amazing. Oh good, glad you enjoyed it. I was off to the side, the band was playing very, very high energy, I tweeted, I wouldn't want to follow this gentleman. That's funny, I've heard that before actually. I pushed the button on the back and said go, so you had this incredible stream of big data consciousness for the audience, I mean that was your job, it was to pump us up, to set the tone, you covered more ground in that first 20, 30 minutes than I think I've ever seen on the topic, so maybe you could tell us, let me start with, what have you learned this week? Yeah, well it's interesting because there's a great line by Tom Robbins, he says you cannot manufacture imagination or wonderment, but what you can do is pull people out of context in such a dramatic manner that you force them to gawk in amazement that these ubiquitous everyday wonders that were somehow culturally disposed to ignore, and I think that my function in the opening talk was to provide people with that long view, that out of context aerial perspective so that they can see how the world is changing and how big data is a big part of that. I mean some consumers often fear the idea of big data because they're worried that companies are going to know all this information about them and people don't like the idea of being reduced to algorithmic cascades to quote Eric Davis, but I actually think that it's really interesting to be able to understand ourselves as algorithmic cascades, like we can all be translated into algorithms and I think that's fascinating, I think the fact that we have now, we're extending sensors into everything and we can measure more than we've ever been able to measure and we have the computing power to be able to extrapolate meaning from everything that we can measure and provide, turn this data into these rich visualizations that provide intuitive insight into something that's composed of like fast swaths of data. I think it becomes an instrument of mind expansion and so my message, you know, it has this kind of slightly psychedelic perspective because it's trying to give you a phase change in consciousness so it's not just like bottom line, how we can use this to make our businesses run more efficiently, that's also cool but it's more like look at how this like enlarges the way we can understand ourselves and we always need a story. The human technology co-evolving sort of civilization always needs a story to understand itself and I think that what big data does is just it provides better and better context for understanding what it is to be human in the 21st century. What we like, where we go, what we do, where we go, what we, everything that we do is now just being quantified and I don't know, I just find it fascinating. It's interesting to hear you. Sorry to rant. No, it's great. Like I said, I'm going to push the button and you're going to go. So this is great. Exactly. But it's interesting to hear you talk about, basically embracing the algorithmic instrumentation of your life. You think it's a generational divide? Do you think that people of your generation are actually excited about that and people of perhaps my generation are a little fearful of that or no? Well, no, I think that technology, just like language, the emergence of language allowed us to process greater amounts of information and transmit greater amounts of information. And just like when you look through a telescope or through a microscope and you immediately privy to this whole entire universe of stimuli coming into the senses, I think that this is the way we need to see big data. It's like we're putting on a pair of lenses and all of a sudden we're just seeing how everything really works. And what also blows my mind is that even though we're using more and more technology to measure more and more things, what we're learning through these measurements is that these patterns keep recurring and these are patterns that we also find in natural systems. So now man-made systems are closing the loop. We're learning that cities operate like organisms, that alleys are like capillaries, that the information sharing systems that comprise the internet look like neurons in the brain, that forage your ants when they hunt for food mirror the information traffic flows of TCPIP patterns on the internet. So it's like, I'm interested in that because first of all, it elicits a sense of wonder in people and perhaps instead of making them so afraid of what these increasingly powerful tools do to the human civilization, I think it makes people be like, oh wow, this is interesting, how can we do this to make our world run better? Like, you know what I'm saying? So let me ask you a question, when did you start thinking about big data? Was it even called big data when you started thinking about it? I did a video called, well I did, for the last year, I've been doing a series of micro documentaries that I call Shots of Philosophical Espresso because they're meant to, they're using their content that's formatted for an ADD generation, a generation that's saturated in content and attention is the new limited resource and in order to engage people, you can't feel entitled to their time because they got all, you're competing with a thousand other websites that are open and Twitter and Facebook and so I started doing a series of short micro docs, they're two minutes in size that explore a lot of these big ideas and so I did, one of the videos was called to understand is to perceive patterns and that's like my big data video and of course that's aligned by Isaiah Berlin to understand is to perceive patterns so basically it's this notion that the more we can connect the dots, the better tools that we have that allow us to see new patterns, the more understanding we have of the world and of ourselves and of the system of the human machine system, right? And so that video was inspired from an article I read in a website called Reality Sandwich which was the one that looked at this notion of, well first of all they said that Google was the first psychedelically informed superpower and that its vision of superconductivity and superconductivity is reflects or was the hallmark of the whole psychedelic vision that everything is connected and you know Timothy Leary, Marshall McLuhan these guys used to say computers are the LSD of the 90s in the sense that they are instruments of mind expansion and Steve Jobs took that literally and if you ever read the book What the Door Mouse Said by New York Times writer John Markoff this is a book of the real sort of coming together of the counterculture in the 60s and the technology room and movement in Silicon Valley and how Xerox Park and Douglas Engelbart were obsessed with like augmenting human intelligence and a lot of the engineers were given LSD and all of a sudden computers were reconceived as tools for personal liberation and for mind extension and mind expansion and so I sort of take that that angle they call it the cyber-delic perspective which is sees the and so I made this video to understand is to perceive patterns which showcases that you know what they call big data and everything that we're realizing is there's all these like patterns of connection what Gregory Bateson calls the pattern that connects and hopefully the video for people is a mind expanding experience that at the same time they come out of that thinking, wow, technology is interesting and it can lead to a sort of mental transcendence and transcending of our mental limits and decondition our thinking and make us understand things in a new way and so that's like my sort of agenda you might say. Yeah so it's very inspirational talk about some of the things that have really excited you in terms of specifically how this information flow this new vision that you're putting forward is changing people's lives. What excites you? One of the really interesting things there was an article by Bill Clinton in Time Magazine called The Case for Optimism published recently when he did this last to Clinton Global Initiative and the first section of the article was called Phones Equal Freedom and he says forget about this idea of the info habs and the info knots he says that the cell phone according to the 2010 United Nations study was one of the greatest inventions in history to pull people out of poverty so it's this idea that technology yes at first the greatest technology is expensive and yes at first it doesn't work very well but eventually it trickles down at an exponential rate it gets increasingly cheaper more affordable, more ubiquitous and better and we got the penetration of six billion cell phones so now these cell phones are allowing people to have things like mobile banking in places like Africa and Haiti mobile health where they're sending health information through the use of these cell phones a young person in Africa today has better communications technology than the US President had 25 years ago so consider the tools to change the world in everybody's hands, the supercomputers of yesteryear and everybody's hands the futurist Ray Kurzweil likes to say and this is fascinating the cell phone in your pocket the smart phone in your pocket is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller and a thousand times more powerful than a 60 million dollar supercomputer that was half a building in size 40 years ago in Stanford so when you consider the rate of change when you consider the rate of that progress and that's in everybody's hands so now everything that we do is being measured and every action, everything we like, we don't like everything we tweet is being quantified and it's being fed back into the system increasingly, we've always been good human beings have always been good at dovetailing our minds to our tools but when our tools start dovetailing back when that feedback loop when the smart systems just get smarter and smarter all of a sudden the division between user and tool becomes very flimsy Andy Clark from a book called natural born cyborgs he's a cognitive philosopher he says we need to get over our skin bag bias and see these tools for what they are part of the human technology co-evolution part of our extended mind, our outsourced cognition and that out of perspective view of it starts to make us realize that we're all part of this like kind of co-evolving system that feeds on itself so yesterday John Furrier, one of our other guests years ago on theCUBE said that everything that has been invented and technology actually came from Star Trek and then we added to that yesterday to Matrix so he was describing that but what you're saying about the case for optimism and essentially the digital divide was kind of you know I always thought it was going to be asked because it would eventually raise all shifts but how do you feel about privacy? Same thing, there is no privacy on the web and there's more value to get out of sharing where you are, your location, geospatial and the like than there is a threat? Well, look I think that there's always growing pains or as we transition to a very different world because of technology, it's natural for people to have a little bit of resistance there was resistance when we invented writing I think I read that even Socrates used to say that he was opposed to writing things down this technology of writing because we wouldn't have to remember anything if we wrote it down and our brains would atrophy and you know there was fears about the telegraph and the telephone and the radio and so I think that now these concerns that are brought up are good it's part of the system talking to itself it's a self-correcting system, do we want this, do we like this, do we not like this but I think that the exponential progress of technology is inexorable I was actually reading an article today written by Matt Ridley who wrote a book called The Rational Optimist and he was talking about Moore's law and the exponential growth curves of tech and how first of all that's now eating up biology is becoming information technology the actually, I totally blanked out but no, the gene sequencing rate is going three times faster than Moore's law and one of the things that he's saying is that we've had globally this exponential growth curve hasn't been affected by economic slumps, by world wars, by policy changes it doesn't change, so it's kind of reassuring that even though sometimes we're discouraged because our politicians don't seem to be thinking exponentially at all he says that the human technology organism keeps these exponential growth curves no matter what so yes, these privacy concerns we can talk about them, we can address them I think if somebody wants to turn off some function on their phone because they don't want to tell people what website they're browsing that's totally fine but it's not going to stop these growth curves so you know what I mean like these are small concerns along the way I'm more interested again in what does this mean for the future how are we going to enlarge our sphere of possibilities what Scott McGeely said in theCUBE there is no privacy in the internet, get over it right so you know you're talking about bringing kind of man and machine together and that is kind of for a lot of people that's like science fiction and kind of you know it's a scary thought where the machines are going to be making decisions for me and what if they create a mind of their own and we can't control them, that kind of thing so how do we balance that? I mean where does the human element still come in when we've got smart systems telling us what to do, when to do it the best way to do it it's the most efficient way to do it well look I think that everything is changing I think that if you were to talk if you were to try to communicate to early hominids pre the emergence of language what the world post language would have been like it would have been just impossible for them to like fit it in their consciousness you know a world of cathedrals and eventually jet engines and cell phones and minds connecting to other minds transcending the limitations of time, space and distance I mean that sounds godlike even to our ancestors of 200 years ago but imagine to like pre-language I mean trying to teach you know an ape the subtleties of Shakespearean poetry you know you can't really teach that to a chimp or a orangutan or a dog you know so it's like I think that with technology if we keep augmenting our capacities we're already outsourcing our cognition and our memory to these extended minds but in the next 25 years when the cell phone that was 60 million bucks you know became pocket sized in 25 years that'll be blood cell sized when our computers are in our brains the symbiosis will be complete you know and at that point yes it's difficult to consider what that might be like and whether it's more us or more the computer but I think that whole distinction is the cognitive leap that we need to take those computers are us we live inside of condensations of our imagination as Terence McKenna says like we already live in our minds you know everything that we see when we're flying on a plane through the air we're flying inside of an outgrowth of the human brain when you look at the topography of Manhattan that topography is a topography in which the forces of economics and culture and human intent have trumped geology the shape of Manhattan today is no longer shaped by geology is shaped by the decisions of the mind on a day-to-day basis if you could see human progress as if through time lapse you would see that literally our thoughts spill over into the world and erect and shape matter and so you look at exponential growth and you look into the future I mean that's mind over matter but who's not to say that that might not be the fate of the whole universe gravitation and antimatter govern the universe at its earliest and least interesting stages but eventually the whole entire thing will be subject to the intent of substrate independent infinitely more powerful minds computation operate you know trillions of times more powerful computation more concentrated operating maybe at femto scale I mean even today Kevin Kelly says that there's more energy per second program going through a microchip than anything else that we know in the universe in terms of energy per second program so you see this compression of energy happening and this complexification and so where is that going? I don't know but it's fun to think about yeah it hurts sometimes to think about so what do you tell young people? I tell young people to be excited man I think you know I like the term Carl Sagan coined the term wonder junkie in the book contact and I think that wonder and awe is sort of an antidote to existential despair I think experiences that push you beyond your perceptual boundaries rewire your mental maps of what is possible are invigorating and they provide a sort of antidote to existential stupor or to the idea that like everything ends in death and like you know we're only here for a second and everything is defined by impermanence but I think when we can enlarge our view and see the big picture we see this inexorable move towards complexity I don't know where that takes us but hopefully beyond the infinite man as they say in 2001 so what kind of projects are you working on these days? I mean you mentioned your little yeah so I started to I used to work for Al Gore's TV channel Current TV I hosted a show there for four years but then I left and I wanted to create my own content on the web I felt like online video had become ubiquitous enough that people didn't roll their eyes at you if you were making your own content on the web so I started doing a series of short films and I just put them online they're non-commercial kind of mashups like I was saying and they kind of went viral and my Vimeo channel has like 1.5 million views at this point and so I started getting invited to all these cool conferences like I spoke at TED Global and I spoke at the Economist Ideas Conference and DLD and Keynote Events for Microsoft and now this IBM one so it's just I'm being brought in to provide kind of a different take on what is happening you know it's always been the role of the artist to sniff out environmental change to realize that the future is the present and then use his art to prepare the grounds for it this is Marshall McLuhan's words and so I'm that I'm the artist I'm not a scientist or a technologist but I come at this and I'm like this is how I see it from the end part and I'm creating work that hopefully pulls people out of context and makes them look at things in a new way and most recently National Geographic actually approached me to host a show for them about the human brain so it's called Brain Games and we're in production now and that comes out in the spring so look out for that and you know I'm always publishing text articles on blogs and making more videos and I'm on Twitter I'm at Jason Silva if you want to connect and stay in touch and yeah so I've been busy fantastic do that I love the fact that you know IBM companies like IBM Microsoft bring somebody with your vision your energy into their world to share with their customers well this is the thing man it's just like we're so quick to you know there's a great line I think it's Woodsworth channeling Coleridge he says the challenge in life is to awaken the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and the film of familiarity and redirecting it instead to the wonders of existence we already live in a world of wonders we already live in a world where a machine with a million moving parts flies through the air in perfect precision where a device made of plastic and metal and you press a few buttons on glass on a glass surface you know not even buttons you just rub your fingers on a glass surface and send your thoughts traveling through time and space amber case the cyber anthropologist says it's technology enabled telepathy it really is we are telepathic beings in conjunction in our marriage with our technology we can now send our thoughts through time and space electrified thoughts traveling at the speed of light we already live in that world I'm just taking what already is and then I'm looking into the future I'm extrapolating and we know that Moore's law is consistent we know it goes even faster when with gene sequencing and with nanotechnology matter itself it becomes a programmable medium those three overlapping revolutions artificial intelligence the domestication of biotechnology and the domestication of matter with nanotech you put those three things together man and you know having invented the gods we can turn into them and maybe even attack that speed of light problem yeah excellent alright Jason thank you very much thank you guys man really loved having you thank you great talking to you keep the right table right back with our next guest we're live this is The Cube from IOD keep it right there