1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]
Build a new, replicable model for funding/incubating startups based on community, deep collaboration, shared value creation and incentive alignment.
2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]
…
Let the quotes begin:
I’m here to give you your recommended dietary requirements for poetry. I’m going to do it with animation.
“Bugs Bunny is my muse.”
I’m all for poetry in public places. I created a poetry channel on Delta airlines.
Start a meeting with a poem?
Put it on a cereal box.
You’ll have a poem so suddenly that you won’t have time to put up your anti-poetry protector shield.
He showed the animation of the poem Budapest.
Quoting a student “poetry is harder than writing”
which i found erroneous and profound.
Animation: “Somedays”
Essay on mental slippage - literary amnesia.
Animation: “Forgetfulness”
A college classmate and old friend who is a country guy and Collins is a city guy and they trade teaching each other about their ways of life.
Animation: “The Country”
I think witnessing your own funeral from above sounds like a bad way to start out the afterlife.
Animation: “The Dead”
Read aloud: “To My Favorite 17 Year Old High School Girl”
Standing ovation.
PS there’s something about this: you can pretend to be serious, but it’s hard to pretend to be funny.
Welcome, Jimmy Guterman!
Everyone of a certain age has felt washed up. old tricks.
recently i was in a situation where i needed a comeback. so i studied many comebacks.
1 comebacks take a long time.
2 comebacks don’t come all at once.
3 you can’t do it all by yourself
4 be yourself but be current
Follow him here @jimmyguterman
Welcome, Reuben Margolin!
This is going to be hard to explain, since he’s a sculptor. His work moves mechanically but with a beautiful fluidity. Everyone here is watching so carefully and quietly. I’m sorry, but I’m just not going to be able to do it justice.
Welcome, Andrew Stanton!
Andrew starts out with a Irish bar joke. With an F bomb. Nice.
Story telling is joke telling including the punchline
confirming a truth we understand deeply as human beings
it’s validation.
story commandment: make me care.
what is it that makes us care?
“my history is story. i was born for it.”
shows us a clip from the new movie
the scene makes a promise
that it leads somewhere and will be worth your time
it’s the same thing as “once upon a time”
a well told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot and propels you to the ending.
the audience wants tow ork for teir meal, they just don’t want to know they’re doing that.
we’re born problem solvers
we want to figure it out
the unifying theory of 2+2
don’t give them 4
make the audience put it together
now it’s not an exact science
stories inevitable but not predictable.
a key insight to character:
every one has an itch they can’t scratch.
if theings go static, stories die.
william archer: “drama is anticipation migled with uncertainty”
before a greater education in storytelling, pixar was going by their gut.
it went against the grain of
storytelling has guidelines not hard fast rules
what opened my eyes about story: in 1986 i understood ‘theme’
lawrence of arabia was possessing him. after watching it so many times he had a revelation that the theme was “who are you?”
strong themes run through a well told story.
the secret sauce: can you invoke wonder—
that’s a beautiful gift to give someone
when an artist passes to another they feel compelled to pass it on
when he was little his father told him he was special for surviving being born premature. and he’s wanted to live up to that ever since.
Welcome, Susan Cain!
When she went to summer camp, she thought it would be like home but better. And home was full of people who read all the time.
It was not.
But the cheers they we taught by counselors emphasized forced her to be outgoing - unhappily.
Thus began a life of forcing herself into places and situations that were extroverted when it was opposite to her nature.
And the world is missing out when introverts can’t do what they do so beautiful. They are not shy. They get their energy and inspiration when they spend time alone.
It’s out job to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that works best for each of us. Unfortunately, social pressures value the extrovert.
Susan is listing off myriad examples of introvert success stories - and how science supports that they are supremely successful.
There’s no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert, and it’s a spectrum.
Culturally we need a much better balance between these two types.
When psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people they enjoy solitude.
Dr. Seuss, Gandhi, Darwin… there’s a transcendant power of solitude.
Epiphanies come in the wilderness.
She asserts that the best way to solve problems is to send a group of individuals off on their own to work on it, and then come back together.
The loudest or most articulate person in the room isn’t necessarily the one with the best ideas.
We will need people coming together to solve problems. But we need to allow people their space so they can bring their best to the conversations.
Three calls for action:
Stop the madness for constant group-work. (Cafe style conversations are better for all kinds of people.)
Go to the wilderness. Be like Buddha and go find your revelation.
Look at what’s in your suitcase and why you put it there. When you take these things out share what you enjoy.
Even if you speak softly.
Starting with a few short clips of disasters from the last six months of news. The news feeds us negative stories because that’s what we listen to. Our ancient brain, the amygdala, scans for safety, thus seeking out the information of danger.
It’s no wonder we’re pessimistic. Perhaps that’s not the case. Perhaps it’s a distortion.
Let’s look at the last 100 years. Lifespan x2, food -10x, we’re it the most peaceful era in history. Our definition of poverty keeps shifting: the poor still have cell phones etc.
Any tool that becomes an information technology falls into Moore’s law - it always goes upward, exponentially.
Singularity University: Democratizing the power to change the world.
We’re looking at a Pyramid of Abundance, for a life of possibility.
Energy is in abundance: it’s not about scarcity it’s about accessibility. Solar power becomes more affordable over time.
If we have abundant energy, we have abundant water.
The technology to access this isn’t far down the road, it’s growing now. Coke is making use of this in the immediate future.
There’s an abundance of communication with improved mobile communication.
Abundance of health and education: there’s an x prize for a small device could act as a mobile doctor and do better than a team of doctors.
The arrival of more humans means the arrival of more people to solve problems, new ideas, new help to act, new contributions can’t be predicted.
There’s a game called “Fold It”, which employs “players” to do what super computers are failing to do in understanding proteins.
We have passion, human capital, we have challenges, we’re looking into extraordinary decades ahead.
Welcome, Paul Gilding!
4 words for context:
the earth is full.
it’s full of us, stuff, waste… our economy is now bigger than its host, the planet.
we are living beyond our means as a planet.
our approach to the world isn’t sustainable, it will cease to work.
our entire economy faces the possibility of stopping??
surely we must be able to sort this out with creativity and technology, but he doubts we’re moving fast enough to do that.
not only are we beyond our means, we’re not slowing down.
so if the breakdown is coming, how’s that going to happen?
in pieces, little individual problems that are actually all part of the system.
the science is all around us to explain that.
paul wants to talk to us about fear: if the crisis is inevitable, how will we react?
he describes a dystopian future of climate changed, wars waged, natural resources used up?
how do we feel when we image that? anger? fear? we’ve evolved as beings to react to fear with action. now is a good time to plan our reaction so that fear doesn’t make us run and hide from a situation that needs to be dealt with.
wouldn’t it be great that we could tell our grandchildren that we averted the crisis?
we need to act like the future depends on it.
we can build a society that’s stronger and happier. we can do this, but it will take every entrepreneur, artist, scientist, child, parent…
this could be our finest hour.
Welcome, Sarah Parcak.
Brief talk by Sarah, here are some notes:
90 years ago Howard Carter looked into a tomb no one has seen into in thousands of years. He saw wonderful things: inspiration.
Space archeology finds ancient cities on earth using satellite imagery. Within a few years we’ll have a resolution of about one foot and a few years later, within 1 inch.
We’re going to be able to map ancient places lost to us now.
Welcome, Brian Greene.
[personal note: he made this very understandable… but i could record every part without taking some liberties… which is dangerous when it comes to science]
We were raised to believe that “universe” means everything, but now there’s the idea of a multi-verse.
His aim is to convince us that the multiverse could be right.
The most recent Nobel Prize ties into this explanation.
In 1929, Ed Hubbel identified that space was expanding.
Then everyone was certain that must be slowing down.
In the 1990’s two teams of scientists wanted to measure that expansion rate.
The surprise: it’s not slowing down, it’s speeding up.
This raised the question: what force is driving this?
Einstein explained that gravity doesn’t just attract, it can repulse.
Now, repulsive gravity could cause galaxies to push off of each other.
There’s a mystery which arises.
This could be explained using string theory.
Deep within the smallest part of the smallest part of everything, the theory poses the idea that a vibrating filament exists and effects everything.
String theory has a few problems, and there’s an issue of additional dimensions. We need to know the shape of these dimensions, but if we did, we could calculate energy measurements.
Possible shapes of additional dimensions we so many, what can be done?
What if each shape is as real as the other? They’d each be in their own universe. So we’ve arrived at the idea of the multiverse.
Why do we find ourselves in this universe instead of the other possibilities out there?
We’ve got the right conditions hospitable to our form of life.
Every other version that exists or has existed, if it didn’t work, it went away.
This brings us to the big bang theory of inflationary cosmology. The big bang gave so much fuel it could generate other big bangs, each giving rise to its own separate universe.
Hello Friends that I know and Friends that I don’t know yet…
We’re about to start a wild ride this week. I’m making my annual pilgrimage to TED and it’s game on! What can you expect from me? Well, I’m live-blogging. I did this in 2009 and it was exhausting, edifying, edit-less, terrifying, and fun.
How does this work? The talks are 18 minutes long. 60+ speakers, 4 days— plus interstitial speakers giving additional shorter talks. And I will start typing notes and quotes from their talks as they speak and hit “post” by the time the applause begins… rinse, wash, repeat. It goes pretty fast. Think of this as “old school tweeting”: more than 140 characters, without the hashtags.
So you can follow along at this very place: http://curiousoptimist.tumblr.com.
Some things to look forward to:
I’ll be honest up front:
Fasten your seat belts folks. Let’s go for a ride.
Cheers,
Chel
PS I’m going to be a little difficult to get in touch with this week. Email chel@curiousoptimist.com, text, FB message, tweet @cheloreilly [in that order] but definitely don’t IM. I can’t promise replies but I will try and read what I can, when I can. Thanks!
Somebody That I Used to Know - Walk off the Earth (Gotye - Cover) (by walkofftheearth) (thank you @niamhhughes)
