For centuries we defined intelligence in our own image: a brain, a language, a single self. The evidence now says we were wrong. That’s the question the John Templeton Foundation chose to open Templeton Futures, a new initiative within its annual grantmaking. Alongside its broader giving, the Foundation now commits a significant portion of its grants to one big question at a time and backs it over several years, with scientists, scholars, and storytellers working on it together. The first question is the future of intelligence: what it is, where it shows up, and how we should live alongside the new kinds we’re building.

Together with Big Think, we built a live night to launch it. My job was to make that audience feel the idea, not just hear about it.

I built the program as a widening circle. It began with single animals, Diana Reiss’s elephant and Felicity Muth’s bumblebee queens, then moved to minds that live between individuals: Dora Biro’s pigeon flocks and Athena Aktipis’s cooperating cells. After a musician’s duet with living plants, Blaise Agüera y Arcas asked what we owe to the minds we’re building, and Tim Dalrymple turned the room toward what comes next. Screenwriter Jon Spaihts closed as a time traveler from a hundred years out. After a night of expanding what counts as intelligent, I wanted a storyteller to help the audience work out what it all means. Andrew Garber and I developed the key art and talk slides together.

The experience started before the first talk. In the lobby, three glowing sculptures by Mark Lyon of Harbinger 3D, a human, a stag, and an octopus, each carried a question I wrote, like “Are we the pinnacle of intelligence, or just the ones who wrote the test?” Past them, we transformed the terrace into an elegant outdoor cocktail space, with DJ Michael Donte of Black House Radio setting the tempo. Off to one side was the listening lounge, a lush corner of couches and plants where each station was wired through PlantWave to a different plant, turning its tiny electrical signals into music in real time.

Several hundred guests came out, from filmmakers behind award-winning Hollywood blockbusters to researchers at UCLA, USC, and UC San Diego.

The part I’m happiest about is the one you can’t fully program: when the talks ended, nobody left. People lingered long after the program ended talking about big ideas — that's the highest compliment I can imagine.