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Kmele Foster
Kmele Foster is a media entrepreneur, commentator, and regular contributor to various national publications. He is the co-founder and co-host of The Fifth Column, a popular media criticism podcast. He is the[…]
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Brandon Stewart
Brandon Stewart is a content strategist living in Los Angeles. He specializes in storytelling, creative strategy, and building exceptional teams that deliver amazing creative results. He currently serves as the[…]
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Complexity arises in any system in which multiple agents interact and adapt to one another and their environments. Examples of these complex systems include the nervous system, the Internet, ecosystems, economies, cities, and civilizations.

Complexity science explores all of those systems, and more. And at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, the globe’s smartest minds are researching across disciplines, cultures, and schools of thought to answer the biggest questions in science and philosophy.

Our host Kmele Foster stepped into the Santa Fe Institute — renowned for its collaborative environment of vast disciplines and schools of thought — to speak with some of the most eccentric and genius minds in our world today.

Dispatches from The Well, Episode 3:

- The basic premise of this rocket is: Child, last remaining human on the planet, wants to get into the stars, escape from the Earth, which is plagued or something, and doesn't understand that a rocket that has no engine will not fly. So this is a rocket with no engine. And so it's a symbol of the striving to succeed.

- Yeah.

- But doomed failure. And I like that poetic idea that the whole enterprise has a bit of that character.

- Yeah.

- You know, scientific institutions, especially mathematical ones can feel a little bit forbidding, and many people's experience have has been traumatic. But I think if you drive up to SFI and you see this absurd rocket that could never fly- I think it just, it makes you feel slightly more at ease.

- Yeah.

- It is a signal to people that we are trying to enjoy what we do.

- And that there are mysteries here that are confounding even to the brightest minds who show up and have no idea what the backstory is.

- Exactly. Yes, if you came onto the campus and saw this, you'd think, "What the fuck?"

- I've come to the Santa Fe Institute because I'm hoping to make some progress in my journey to try and get closer to some answers to life's big questions. I've already visited with a bunch of different scientists and a number of different contexts, and I've learned a lot about astronomy and particle physics, but I haven't figured out how to integrate that into some sort of big picture. The Santa Fe Institute is a place that was born out of a desire to break down the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Founded in 1984 by an august group of scholars who wanted to look at how things like physics, biology and computer science might be able to help us better understand the messy stuff of life. They wanted to create an environment where experts in their respective fields had the opportunity to engage in a kind of freeform transdisciplinary collaboration. Considering the incentives in scientific research for staying in one's lane, it's not the sort of endeavor that seemed likely to succeed, but the credentials of its founders, Nobel laureates among them, combined with their conviction, brought SFI into existence. So a lot of things about the Santa Fe Institute that I find really interesting, it has a kind of monastery vibe to it here in the high desert, up on a hill, got these buildings crammed with really thoughtful people doing interesting work, thinking novel thoughts. But these are people who are contemplating some of the deepest questions about existence and consciousness and the meaning of life. Why things are the way they are. There's something really inspiring about that. And in that respect, well, yeah, I guess it is not like a monastery, it's just a monastery. 'Cause that's what you do at a monastery, right? The focus here is on studying complex systems ant colonies, market economies, cities. The dizzying complexity found in all of these self-organizing systems emerges through the interaction between smaller constituent parts. The folks here at SFI are looking for the underlying rules that make all of these systems behave the way they do. And they're driven by the expectation that some of these rules may actually be applicable to any number of different systems- perhaps unlocking answers to some of life's biggest questions. In this episode, we journey to New Mexico, diving deep with the brilliant minds at the Santa Fe Institute.

- Don't tell anyone.

- To uncover how their boundary-pushing insights might shed light on humanity's eternal search for meaning and purpose, in our vast, miraculously complicated, rapidly expanding and incomparably mysterious cosmos. This is "Dispatches from the Well."

- And this of course is the inscription of the doors of Plato's Academy. And this is essentially say, "Anyone ignorant of geometry shall not enter," which is a bit harsh.

- David Krakauer's head of the Santa Fe Institute, this charismatic, Oxford-trained evolutionary biologist is a true polymath with an astonishing range of interest in the sciences and beyond. These are helpful attributes to have since David is leading what is perhaps one of the most intellectually diverse and genuinely interdisciplinary institutes of scientific research on the planet. David is responsible for so many things. He's corralling all of these diverse intellects, trying to keep his finger on the pulse of what's happening in all of these various interdisciplinary studies, and also handling all the minutia that goes along with just running an institution like SFI. But while he's doing all of that, he's constantly on the hunt for new talent to bring into the milieu at SFI so that they can help inspire great thinking and do even more interesting work. So how long have you been at SFI?

- Too long.

- Can you put a number on it, can you recall?

- Just over 20 years.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- In terms of the architecture of the building, was it largely as we see it when you came?

- No, what this was, is this part of the building was a house. Yeah, so the basic premise was no corridors and the ratio of open space to individual office space inverted.

- Okay.

- And, so yeah, the so we have an archeologist with the quantum field theorist, there's no departments, there's no divisions, there's no labs. None of that nonsense. You look like you're being very thoughtful over there on the board.

- Yeah, I'm taking advantage of the office space we have.

- Yeah, did you see us coming before you started performing?

- I did, yeah. But I was also working on this one.

- You reminded me of something that you've shared with me before. These three M's: it's the mountain monastery metropolis.

- Yes.

- Could you put that into context for me?

- Yeah, I'm very interested in this idea of what makes for a creative environment that's hospitable and stimulating. So this led to this tripartite creative workflow, which is, if you want to be really original and challenge convention, you better be on your own- it's a solitary pursuit. That's the mountain. You go into the mountain, but at a certain point, you've drunk a little bit too much of your own Kool-Aid. And you need a community that is congenial and understands you to give you honest feedback. That's the monastery. Your, your Benedictines, you're distortions, you are the same order, same values, but you're still competitive. And that's, that's where you take the idea next to really cultivate it in community. And then when you are pretty certain that it's robust and correct, you take it to the metropolis where everyone is out to kill you and trade it with the world. I view SFI, right, as the monastery in the mountains.

- Your role here at SFI is one in which I imagine you're curious about all of these topics, but you're also helping to, are you adjudicating disputes?

- No.

- Are you facilitating just creating an environment for them to unfold in?

- I think a lot of people feel uncomfortable with the unknown, the uncertain, the noisy, the unresolvable. But I don't, so here, for me it's people first, I'm very interested in quality of mind and then quality of mind in community that you don't feel aggrieved or put upon when someone doesn't agree with you. And none of us here agree with anybody. I mean, you know, that's the game. Uncertainty and debate are not negative. I mean, not knowing and discussing and arguing to come to knowledge is what's desired. Right, so in that sense of embryonic idea of what the scientific method is, this sort of like harmonics. There's a resonance of approximate truth. And then it goes out of tune and you fight again, and then it comes back into tune. And so I think my role is partly to just make it a very comfortable environment for people to feel they can do that.

- That uniquely collaborative environment is part of what drew theoretical physicist Geoffrey West here decades ago.

- They said, "Look, you should come here and do whatever you like, 'cause you could do whatever you like here- that's the whole point of this place." And I thought, "Great, no administration, no bureaucracy and so on, sounded perfect."

- Geoffrey would eventually end up running the place, serving as SFI's president in the mid-2000s. He left and then came back again. And what I noticed is that there seems to be a real gravity about the place. SFI draws people back to it over and over again. So, while Geoffrey helped shape the culture at SFI, seems obvious that he benefited from it in tangible ways too. I wanna just talk about your career.

- Yeah, okay.

- And your life as a scientist, how did you arrive here?

- I've always been fascinated by the usual kind of childhood sophomoric questions about what is it all about? What's the meaning of life?

- Those sophomore questions are the questions that brought me here.

- Which never end, which never end. And I was attracted to science and I was very good at mathematics. So it was a good combination that led me to getting my doctorate in physics. I was recruited to build up a high-energy physics group at Los Alamos across the valley. But meantime, this place sort of started to evolve in the '80s by a group of very distinguished scientists. And their concern was much more that there were these big questions to do with the, so to speak, the messiness of the planet. And these are really important questions, and they cross disciplines and they felt that there should be a place that brings them all together. But I, to be honest, and I probably get killed for this, I didn't think it was serious.

- Why not?

- Well, I just felt that it was kind of a retreat. They weren't gonna do serious science, but I was completely wrong because by that time in the intervening years from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, I began to appreciate that there were equally fundamental questions that were to do with what's on this planet, maybe life.

- I'm wondering if you feel as though you have sufficient answers to those big questions now?

- The meaning of life. Why are we here, why do I care?

- So how do you sneak up on those in a way that doesn't just leave you exhausted?

- It does leave me exhausted. Well, it leaves me, well, puzzled of course. First of all, let's say, I'm gonna back off a second.

- Okay.

- Of course, one of the great puzzles which people have asked is the role of mathematics, the generality of it. And that in some very simple, trivial way, it was saying something powerful about the Universe. And that led me much later in life, in fact, much more recently to realize, in my own formulation of what the whole point of this is, what the whole point of everything is. There are only two points as far as I can tell.

- Okay.

- One is to love and to care, love meaning in its general sense. Because as far as I can tell, nothing else on this planet and nothing else in the Universe caress about anything. Those trees or the little animals running around, they don't care. But we do terrible things, and we've done terrible things. We on this planet, but we are the only part that actually caress, has morals and ethics, and I think that's extraordinary. So love, I consider that. So that's one thing, but something supersedes all that. The point of it is to understand, the whole point, this whole exercise, the whole thing of whole society and of having evolved consciousness to whatever, the whole point of all of that was for us to understand because we are the thoughts of the Universe so that the Universe can understand itself, otherwise it's meaningless. And walking through the forest when I see all these trees and I admire them, and then suddenly I realized, "My God, I know there's order, those trees don't even know it, but somehow I've been blessed with this, whatever that I know this, there's something kind of platonic about it." It was wonderful, and that was a kind of spiritual experience, I would say. And some of the work that I do has brought me to that. And I think that's why we're here.

- It's hardly surprising to hear a decorated scientist talk about understanding as one of the reasons for our being here. But to have him pair that with something as universal as love is a bit surprising. And while it's not necessarily what I expected to hear him say, it's a response that resonated with me in a really profound way. It also seems to be a real indication of just the kind of unique place the Santa Fe Institute happens to be, where researchers can go from discussing the intricacies of quantum mechanics to talking openly about these universal human values and feelings, and to connect those things with the work that they're doing here. So there are a few things I wanted to ask about- but one in particular was the iconography that I see above these doors. Can you tell me what's going on?

- Yes, we have a press, SFI press. So I thought we need to design our own book with our own SFI font.

- Okay.

- And the idea was, is a font that no one can read.

- Okay.

- And I was particularly interested in this in a bloody minded way, because people will often go to bookshelves and they'll just look at the spines. They won't even bother pulling the book out. So what I want you to do is all our books have unreadable spines, which is silly and childish. And so, you can't be in the Library of Congress if that's the case. So we had to capitulate and give in. And so, but anyway, so you'll see all of our literature and these are number systems and alphabets have our SFI font glyph.

- Okay.

- And so what these are in fact numbers, what you're looking at.

- Okay, I've come to understand that there is a method to David's mischievous, freewheeling approach to scientific research. It reflects the intellectual culture at Santa Fe Institute. It's a place that allows its researchers the freedom to think about things that they aren't expert in, in unique, interesting, out of the box ways. It encourages this kind of cross pollination in a way that other places simply don't. I think it might be essential to the work that's being done at Santa Fe Institute. See, the core of what they do here is complexity science, an inherently interdisciplinary field of study exploring the many adaptive and emergent systems that make our lives possible with the specific goal of providing a clearer picture of the world than any one research discipline could. Now that's a mouthful, so we'll try to drill down here: Think living organisms, financial markets, climate systems or even pop culture. You could, for example, have a sophisticated understanding of how human cellular biology works. But would that really give you a better understanding of why Pokemon is popular? To understand that you actually need to understand culture and economics, trade flows, the science of color, the history of video games, child psychology, even intellectual property law, and plenty of other things. That is a complex system. And what has emerged from the interaction of all those component parts is the highest grossing media franchise of all time. One of the daunting things about trying to get to the bottom of complex systems is that you need to understand extraordinarily different disciplines of scientific research. And the reality is that for people who spend all of their time studying one field, specialization, they can often have a very difficult time having conversations across fields.

- If you look at the way that we come to understand the world, there are poets, there are musicians, there are high-energy physicists, there are mathematicians. What is it about the Universe, living and non-living, that that seems to require very different forms of expertise? Now, there are people who say, "We don't, in the end it's just quantum field theory, all that stuff, it's just noise. If we really understood the Universe deeply, we'd just all be physicists." And of course, many of us consider that very muddle headed. So how do you explain the need for new ideas, new disciplines, at different scales of organization? And that's where emergence comes in. And it turns out that one of the interesting properties of the Universe and the world is that it can be understood as a set of hierarchies, each of which becomes somewhat independent of the levels below. Right, and understanding how that comes about is the 'emergence problem.' Right, and the way I often say this is that if you go to a new city and you need to get around and you go to rent a car, what you need to understand is the map of the city, not the physics of the engine. And COVID for me was the "come to Jesus moment" of reckoning with excessive specialization. Because what happened with COVID, it was a virus, right? It becomes an immunological problem that becomes an epidemiological problem, which becomes a transport problem, which becomes an economic problem, which becomes a human well-being and professions problem, which becomes a school problem, etc. So what happened during the course of the pandemic is that our sensibilities matured in understanding that what we are dealing with here was a complex system. There were other dimensions to this problem that were being neglected precisely because we were not reckoning with the interconnectedness of the system. So it's not just that it's the neglect, it's actually pathologically dangerous for the well-being of the planet that we do this kind of atomization all the time at the level of the disciplines.

- For David and his colleagues at SFI, grappling with complexity in an interdisciplinary way is a matter of urgent importance. They can't presume that people who are outsiders in a particular field don't have anything to offer when it comes to understanding some important question that they've been wrestling with, or perhaps even shed new light on an urgent concern that we're struggling to put into words. It's the Cormac McCarthy reading room. So it should be no surprise that perhaps one of the greatest wordsmiths of the English language, the late Cormac McCarthy, found a home at the Santa Fe Institute.

- 'Yeah, I don't know, people ask me why I'm here, I'm here because, Brian Arthur likes to say that the best thing about the Santa Fe Institute is they really have good "craic." Well craic is a Gaelic world. C-R-A-I-C, it means chat. And and that's what you have here. You have really good chat.

- Yeah.

- And any given day you may learn something just astonishing. But that's why I'm here. I wouldn't normally live in Santa Fe. It's a little artsy from my taste, but I tried to get them to move the institute to Texas, but they said-

- Thank God that didn't happen.

- They didn't think that was a good idea.'

- Yeah, so this: Cormac McCarthy desk, and he just colonized any available space and he liked this. It was quiet, it was in an environment of books. He would work anywhere, it's funny. I mean, one of the places that he really loved working, I'd see him is in Baskin Robbins- and he loved coffee ice cream.

- But he would take the typewriter over to Baskin Robbins?

- Take the typewriter, take his pen.

- And can you tell me what he worked on at this desk?

- "Starts with the Road", "No Country for Old Men", "Stella Maris", "The Passenger". Yeah.

- Wow.

- And right next door, which is so funny, was Sam Shepard working at the same time on his version of "Oedipus: A Particle of Dread".

- Wow.

- Wow, whereas we here, worked on "Galactus."

- Well that works too.

- Yeah, this is yours, I assume.

- This project of kind of reconciling the humanities and the sciences, what is it that inspires that specific project?

- My litmus test, my Turing test of people is that is just this restless, curious mind that doesn't second-guess the kind of ideas that are gonna make their work better. Artists, scientists, painter, composer, doesn't matter. We had to transcend the boundaries of the natural and the social sciences- that distinction couldn't hold. And so we just got rid of it day one. I remember when I was first talking to Sam Shepard, he came in, he doesn't like science, he never liked scientists. He thought scientists were hubristic. They thought they understood everything. Whereas his world is a world of enormous doubt and strife. But very quickly he found himself in a community that actually resembled his own. So there was him finding that cultural affinity. Now look at someone like Cormac McCarthy- the fuel, the coal in his fire was always intellectual, philosophical, scientific, mathematical concepts. So for him to be a writer of the kind of writer he was and became increasingly towards the end of his career, he couldn't be anywhere else.

- Just curious about obviously this extraordinary literary legacy.

- Yeah.

- But the very particular kind of legacy here at SFI.

- Of Cormack McCarthy.

- Yeah.

- That's a very raw question to ask in a way now 'cause it's so recent, but important. And there are just lots of dimensions to him in this contribution. And one was his surly iconoclasm, right. But as a model for what it means to kind of go solo, there's that- there is the work ethic all day long, I'd hear him typing on his Olivetti, the 22 typewriter, all day long. It's like, and I go to tea and I come back and he's still typing. I think, "What am I doing?" So there was this other side, which was great work requires a lot of work. And the other side- was that synthesis, that distillation of ideas into representations, in his case, aesthetic, that process of distillation and abstraction, either into aesthetics or into testable models and theories, that we have in common. And I actually consider that the hallmark of a really great mind, which is the extent to which you can own something. I mean, we don't really invent anything out of whole cloth. Right, but we synthesize if we're fortunate and we make it our own. And I think that seeing how that's done, you know, daily for over 20 years, that was really illuminating.

- Wandering the halls, it still feels like there's something of Cormac in the place. And I'm beginning to understand why he fit in so well here, contributing to the conversations, the good craic that you find in places throughout the institute, but especially here at the lunch table. So wait, is there a finite amount of energy in the Universe?

- You would know most.

- If you take the total energy of the Universe today compared to when it was very close to the Big Bang-

- Every day at noon, most of the people here at the institute gather in the atrium for lunch. And they often wind up in these heady conversations that will last until the late afternoon. It was genuinely inspiring to be able to sit down with them and leap into their conversations, to eavesdrop on them, talking openly about their uncertainty, wrestling with ideas that they were currently considering, and oftentimes discussing ideas that they perhaps only recently had set aside because they realized there was no, there, there. All the answers beget more questions. At some point you gotta hit a wall. Is there frustration when you reach a point like that? You recognize all of these nested questions?

- I don't know, you just paint the picture and you leave things out and you put things in. Yes, but the process is the fun part.

- The process, is the important thing. And you know, if we recognize that as human beings, we are just in some intermediate step in evolution. Right, I think I find it easier to come to terms with the fact that we are not going to solve all the problems. Why should we be able to solve all the problems, right? Because after all, there's nothing ultimate about us. Right, it's just.

- There's something ultimate about 'me.'

- Sorry?

- There's something ultimate about me.

- Why?

- I am.

- I see myself sometimes, you know, like as a mushroom. So you know how when you see a mushroom, it's like the fruiting body of a huge organism underground. There's like all the threads of information that led to me, which is DNA that I got from my parents, that they got from their grandparents and so on. Information that I got now from you, all the bacteria that I have in my body, all of these things came together in me. And I'm now this individual, but this is not actually the individual. It's like the mushroom, the individual is the whole organism underground.

- But that gives a sense of purpose, right?

- Sure.

- I mean, there is, there is a sense of agency, there is a sense of being part of perhaps some larger project, which is unfolding. It doesn't have to have anybody's purpose in it. But to be able to do ones bit, to add to the complexity, to add to the intertwining, to the creation of new structures, right, is a purpose.

- The average person goes about their day. They go to work, they go shop at Costco, keep their fridge full, pick up the kids and bring them home. They don't have this other aspect of the conversation that perhaps allows them to imagine themselves as this mushroom that is producing information contributing to the something.

- I don't know, I think that if you think about all the people who just at home, sit and write poems that they don't show anyone or take pictures because they want to do like art or read books and read books to their kids. Or I think like other than all the authors we know and all the artists we know and all the scientists we know, it's nothing compared to the vast Universe of the real artists and real scientists that are kind of underground. So I don't know if we're allowed to say that there's like these people that just go to work and come back and go to sleep and never think about anything. I don't think they exist or I don't know. I mean, I don't know them.

- But I've read a lot of popular science books and listened to a number of public intellectuals, and I'll often hear descriptions of the Universe who say it is purposeless.

- Obviously the Universe generated purpose, right? I mean, that's obvious, right? I mean, I have a purpose. You have a purpose. Like every time you go to eat something, you have a purpose.

- Sure.

- So the Universe obviously generated that.

- You will find a whole spectrum of people who will think more about these things or less about these things. So there's no establishment of view on these.

- If there is, if any, the only view is that these are difficult questions.

- Thank you all for indulging me. I imagine your conversation is usually a lot more enlightening than what I brought to bear, but I enjoyed it.

- Thanks for coming in, yeah. And asking your question.

- Okay. Is this the best way to get to the monoliths?

- Yeah, let's go this way.

- So we've arrived at one of the monoliths here on the property.

- Walking up to it and touching it is part of the ritual.

- Okay.

- Yeah, it has its origins in the film "2001," and this is the Arthur C. Clark Kubrick singularity technology. So yeah, so it's a blackboard. It's also over 1,000 pounds of slate. So it's an artwork and it's functional and you know, I don't know, it was a symbolic of this utopian idea that humans in conjunction, almost in a symbiotic relationship with primitive technologies could do incredible things. Slate and chalk. It's almost like a cave wall, right?

- Yeah.

- I love that idea of, "I'm writing this thing on a 2001 monolith." It just add that little edge of humility actually a kind of playfulness that, most of this is gonna be garbage, most of this is gonna be wrong. And just, that's okay. And I think if you know that, it's not about taking the pressure off, it's just giving you a better sense of what you really are going to do here.

- Among the many things David has been working on here is developing a theory of life. In 2021, he co-authored a paper on the topic with astrobiologist Chris Kempes. Now astrobiology is a curious field to even imagine existing, but it totally does. I wanted to talk about you personally, and how you developed an interest in this particular area of science, and go back as as far as you can.

- Yeah, so as a kid, I had a dual interest in dinosaurs and stars.

- It's always the dinosaurs.

- It's always the dinosaurs. And I think for me the key kind of interest for both fossils and outer space was sort of an indescribable sense of vastness. Right, so just how big time can be. You know, how distant these very radically bizarre creatures in the past could be, and then how just vast space was. And so I would go around telling people, "I wanna be an astronomer and a paleontologist." And I think in a weird way that's an astrobiologist because we use the principles of the history of life to try and look for life in space.

- What is it you all do to explain to someone? Do you work directly with Mulder and Scully or how does this work exactly?

- So we're thinking about looking for life in the Universe, but a lot of what we're trying to do is develop general theories of life that even tell us how to search for life. So part of what we can do is look at the huge diversity of life we have on our planet and use that diversity to try and extract some general principles.

- Do you give much thought to the probability that life on other planets is going to be like life here?

- So my answer to your question is sort of yes and no. I think there's a whole bunch of features of life that are absolutely contingent to our own evolutionary history here. So I don't think life elsewhere uses exactly the same molecules that we use. For example, I think DNA as a genetic code or even as a genetic molecule, is unlikely to be preserved across the Universe. But the idea of storing information is very general. And I think that's always beneficial to life to be able to store information and propagate it into the next generation. So I'd be willing to bet on genetics, but I wouldn't be willing to bet on DNA as the molecule that does genetics.

- You did something really sneaky there a moment ago, when I think biology, I think about cells and stuff. But when you were talking about life, you described it in this broader way, like the preservation of information, the transmission of knowledge. Could you talk a little bit about what life actually is, how that's different from biology and if that's a distinction that we need to be more aware of.

- Okay, we don't fully have a theory of life yet, but what it may start to look like is a bunch of traits, all of which live on a spectrum. So you could think about intelligence as a certain sort of trait that lives on a spectrum. You could think about individuality as a trait that lives on a spectrum and some combination of that equals life. And so we think that once we start to expand the perspective of life, we may realize, "Oh, there have actually been other origins of life after the initial one where most of the processes of life are present."

- I'm wondering if finding these parallels between different fields and obviously we're kind of limiting ourselves to Earth for the moment. Knowing that there are these laws that seem to govern like evolutionary biology and the development and emergence in the cosmos broadly, if that makes you more or less optimistic that there is other life, even if it is very much not necessarily like ours?

- Realizing that there are these general processes that show up over and over again should give us hope for finding life elsewhere. I mean, it should make the likelihood maybe seem higher than we would expect because you could say, "Well, there's lots of types of processes that could lead to this sort of runaway evolutionary trajectory where things get more complicated." You know, I'm sort of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I think life is everywhere.

- Yeah.

- And the rest of the week I think it's super rare.

- Are you sadder on the rest of the week or?

- Well I think it implies different things.

- Okay.

- So if life is incredibly rare, it makes us think about human culture and our own planet in a much different light, right? Because it tells us just how rare and special this planet is. And many of our challenges become about preserving life, not just preserving humanity, but it's nice to think about life everywhere in the Universe to think about it being a general process of the Universe rather than a specific process of our planet.

- At the sunset, I broke out the Unistellar telescope that I've been traveling with for a few weeks now. This my third child. Hoping that the dark skies in New Mexico would finally give us an opportunity to do some serious stargazing. This would be the first real stargazing experience.

- We can help you.

- Please.

- Okay, right now we're shooting a dark frame and calibrating.

- Okay.

- Ready to go, so you're tuned in. You want go to a galaxy or someplace?

- What do we got?

- Sombrero.

- Sombrero's really nice.

- Sombrero's beautiful.

- Okay.

- That's pretty cool for tonight.

- Wow.

- So you're talking about Santa Fe Institute? I am currently a friend of the institute.

- Okay.

- At points in time I've been artist- and naturalist-in-residence. But right now I'm a radio astronomer and the last 10 years I've been working with transient luminous events.

- And what are they exactly?

- Well, they're optical flashes of light generated by a super strong lightning stroke and they look like big kachinas in the sky. They're psychedelic and they're incredible.

- If it's okay with everyone, I'd like to invite other people to come see what you guys are seeing.

- Sure, yeah.

- Hey, Chris.

- One of the first times we went out together, he said "Do you wanna see the moon of Jupiter?" There's a good line for you.

- Chris, what is it, how would you define Nebula?

- Yeah, free-floating gas in space, yeah.

- Gas and dust, gas and dust.

- There's a perception of science as rigid and closed, but to really make any headway in trying to understand this strange and mysterious world that we all live in, you have to be open and creative.

- Wow, that's incredible.

- I'm thankful that there are places like this, monasteries of the mind where thoughtful people can come together, forge community, and explore questions about the nature of reality. While the work here is rigorous and driven by data, it'ss unconstrained by orthodoxy or the boundaries erected between disciplines, you have these people who are contributing to the community, who are primarily artists, spinning narratives about the world around them in whatever medium they work in, invested in the same big questions and bold insights. What I'm perhaps most moved by is the culture of generosity and humility that exists here. As David said to me, "It's precisely those who choose not to learn who are confident."

- Let's see where M13 is.

- At the moment, the only thing I am really confident of is that I still have a great deal to learn. And so, our journey continues. It's the end of the evening and we've done a bit of stargazing. We looked at some nebula, some galaxies, and everyone is listening to me waiting to see if I'm going to say something really profound and I'm going to disappoint them. I wasn't sure if anyone was gonna come, but then we got a nice cross-section of folks and yeah, good company is fine company. I made that up this afternoon. I think it makes sense.

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