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Inside a real genius club: the Santa Fe Institute

Big Think | September 22, 2025



This building in New Mexico welcomes some of the world’s most prestigious minds to work together on life’s biggest questions. Step inside the Sante Fe Institute.

This video is an episode from @The-Well, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the @JohnTempletonFoundation.

Subscribe to The Well on YouTube ► https://bit.ly/thewell-youtube
Watch the full podcast now ► https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_B7bI1QVmJBz9-5hI4sihQbxgcShW77l&si=yX6F_3lbdjrHA5do

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.

Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/the-well/dispatches-podcast-episode-3/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description

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About 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 head of content at Founders Fund, a San Francisco based venture capital firm investing in companies building revolutionary technologies, and a partner at Freethink, a digital media company focused on the people and ideas changing our world.

Kmele also serves on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

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Read more from The Well:
Actually, neuroscience suggests “the self” is real
► https://bigthink.com/the-well/actually-neuroscience-suggests-self-real/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can illuminate the debate over generative AI
► https://bigthink.com/the-well/mary-shelley-lessons-frankenstein-ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
Few of us desire true equality. It’s time to own up to it
► https://bigthink.com/the-well/few-desire-true-equality-own-up/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description

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About The Well
Do we inhabit a multiverse? Do we have free will? What is love? Is evolution directional? There are no simple answers to life’s biggest questions, and that’s why they’re the questions occupying the world’s brightest minds.

Together, let’s learn from them.

Subscribe to the weekly newsletter ► https://bit.ly/thewellemailsignup

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Written by Big Think

Comments

This post currently has 43 comments.

  3. @markcollins1577

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    We used to enjoy Krakauer's presence in Madison, Wisconsin at the Discovery Center as he brought in lecturer after lecturer across broad fields in his 'DaVinci' Lecture series. He truly is an entrepreneur of simplifying into value this confused glob of gnarled lines and bleeding colors known as Earth and bringing beauty out of it and into focus by stepping back and seeing it from different perspectives and trying to share his ways of seeking with us.

  4. @chipdamage9374

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    I could listen to this little community talk all day long. If only there were room for the kind of playful interdisciplinary debate for those of us who aren't at the sharp end of the intellectual spectrum. What i wouldn't give to discuss philosophy and physics with like-minded laymen without the toxicity of social media and the internet.

  6. @sashag6771

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    Do you really need so many ads breaking up the video?? Completely disrupts the flow and kept making me lose my train of thought. A 40 minute video with 8 ad breaks sometimes with multiple ads in each is such overkill and I think really takes away from the video itself

  10. @peterorthmann5612

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    The second gentleman said the "we (humans) that the only ones that care." Presuming that animals and even trees don't care about one another. Sorry Professor, you should get a dog. It will embarrass your understanding of love and appreciation. Even trees communicate with each other when sick or under attack.

  11. @Patrick-yq4gp

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    FYI the symbols you see at 15:20 are that of Occult intent. These guys have no other intentions but to fuel their research by any means. They also work with the administraiton in return for donation from various government sectors. These people are crimlans just on another scheme level. WAKE UP PEOPLE

  17. @p1zd3c

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    I had wanted to be part of this institute for decades, but a deep personal tragedy radically altered my course, just when it was within reach.

    I'm content with accepting that I'm now a 'lost polymath'. Life goes on.

    I wish those of you who are able to be present in this amazing place all my best.

  22. @websurfer352

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    If you have a system however complex, if the system works together coherently then we know A-Priori that each of the disparate parts work via a singular relation which allows all its parts to work together!! And the relation I believe is consequence which is what the causal order relies on!! That relation is also the conservation of symmetry which is what logical consequence is, which is the singular principle on which all of mathematics is built on!! Take special relativity, in spite on time being relative we can determine each relative value via equations which would not work could not work without the principle symmetry or logical consequence acting as a thread running through every equation, it is what glues every part together!! We know there is a relation running through and which is applies to all parts A-Priori as we know when we see a coffee mug that there must be a single force or factor keeping all those atoms of the mug together, so it is an A-Priori knowing!!

  25. @calebplumleeoutdoors

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    Seems more like a hugh functioning rich guy club… apparently these folks have the free time to spend there without running the rat race? If anything is certain, being genius alone doesn't secure wealth enough to retire and spend your days like this.

  27. @Danielle_1234

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    Complex Systems Theory is one of my favorite topics. This video is awesome. It's so cool seeing people with a similar passion. For anyone who is curious, you don't need to be a genius to understand this stuff. There are some decent books out there that cover the ABCs of complex systems theory in an easy to digest way. Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows is pretty good and the audiobook is on Audible is great for listening to while exercising. It's not such a heavy lift you have to sit down and think about hard about it.

    The cool thing about complex systems is it opens ones consciousness up to perspectives larger than one self — how we fit into the world, and how to make clear sense of difficult problems. It imo is a topic I wish politicians were familiar with, because it would aid in finding verifiable solutions to difficult problems, instead of squabbling about proposed solutions.

  28. @deborahw.a.foulkes6059

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    I'm a fan of SFI and have done several courses with them. This film, however, is sexist because it does not show any of the women working there in any meaningful way nor does the filmmaker engage them in conversation. With the silent collusion of SFI, he misogynistically promulgates the tired old myth that all geniuses are male. Which of course is not true. He even calls SFI a monastery, even though a monastery by definition is an all-male institution, which SFI is not. Shame on the SFI leadership for giving their ok for such a backward, deeply misogynist project. It is a betrayal of all the women scientists who have ever worked there and contributed to it.

  31. @Orbis_Tertius

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    At 19:34, why does he liken our understanding of the universe to a hierarchy, specifically? Why a hierarchy?

    We generally conceptualize the world through metaphors that resonate with us. If we were all egalitarian hunter-gatherers, we might not order our epistemology/epistemologies into a hierarchy. In the same vein, my rejection of this idea did not come out of the blue.

    I believe scientists have so much to gain from investigating the historical contingencies of their way of conceptualizing the world.

    That is, if they were open to admitting the degree to which science is laden with all sorts of non-epistemic values, which a lot of them are not.

  34. @mackieincsouthsea

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    Mccarthy had such an astonishing imagination. Doing Blood Meridian audio book at the moment and his ability to tell a complex, thought provoking story, to create immersive atmosphere and build believable, memorable characters is truly staggering. Genuinely like no other!

  35. @chickenwing5863

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    Sadly, this institution is funded by criminal contractors these people put in place, with the policies they created aka ACA and student loan reform. They are ruining the next generations for research funds. Helping the wealthy for money. Disgusting

  36. @bkbland1626

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    Yeah, don't break your arm patting yourselves on the back. I am skeptical because y'all don't seem very interested in OUR problems. Have a nice fricking day, Jeniuses.

  40. @GarysnewYT

    September 22, 2025 at 5:56 am

    Those scientists talk a lot but don’t say much. They didn’t really talk about real issues with the human race. They didn’t talk about what they accomplished or solved.

Comments are closed.

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