TED2008 Day One

Hi, it's Tom Guarriello here at the end of day 1 of TED, an amazing, amazing kickoff to what is always a great event. Let me see, let me get right to it and give you a quick recap of my day. First of all, this year for the second time, I was selected to participate in TED University. TED University is a pre-conference event where 50 different people get to present 9-minute presentations for small groups of people who sign up for classes. It's a relatively chaotic phenomenon, but it's a lot of fun. So this last year I did a presentation on video blogging on YouTube, and this year I did a more general presentation on what's going on, what the heck is going on in social media. It was a lot of fun, and I got some terrific feedback and really great reactions from people. And actually, I'll put here a link to someone who wrote a blog in an online San Francisco newspaper about my presentation. So that'll be over there. But the actual conference kicked off with Louise Leakey, who is a member of the famous uh, archaeological Leakey family. She was terrific talking about her experiences excavating for fossils in Kenya and growing up in East Africa. Really a terrific presentation. For details, remember, go over here. I'll point you to the blogs that are going to give you all the real content stuff besides my overview. Second up was Wade Davis, who's an anthropologist who simply a terrific, terrific speaker. I'd seen him once before here at TED. His talks about culture are absolutely poetic and filled with ideas that are going to keep me looking for insights in them for a long time coming. I can't wait till this talk comes back online, is posted up online in the TED Talks, because he talks about how all cultures are basically answers to two questions: how and why. And that there is no such thing as cultural progress, there's no such thing as, as progress period. All there are are different ways of answering the questions how and why. And his most powerful line for me is that every culture is not simply a deficient version of us. You know, we always look at ourselves as the center of the world, and in fact we are not. Followed up by Reeves, who's a terrific performance artist, comic, poet, excellent guy. You just have to see Reeves' work. There's probably video of Reeves up on the TED site. You should check him out. Chris Jordan came next. Chris Jordan is a very provocative photographer. He does work where he photographs large numbers of objects in order to portray the impact that those objects are having on the world. So for example, he has a photograph of a million paper cups, which is 6 hours of paper— I'm sorry, plastic cup usage on airlines, on US airlines. And the pattern, the artistic pattern in which he photographs these cups is, it's beautiful, and yet it's also very powerful from an environmental impact standpoint. And that's what his work is really about. He has a piece of 400, he had a piece of a photograph of 400,000 cigarette packages, which if you looked at them very closely were individual cigarette packages, but when he showed you the picture, the overall picture was a reproduction of the Van Gogh painting of a skull smoking a cigarette. Quite something. And many others like that. Again, I think there's probably some If you're interested in Chris Jordan, I'm sure you can find his work up online. The next piece was, the next presentation was really the most powerful of the day. Woman's name is Jill, I wanna get her name correct here. Jill Taylor, she has another name, another middle name, but Jill Taylor. Jill Taylor is, a neuroscientist from Harvard, studies the brain, told the story of experiencing a stroke on December 10th, 1996. Now, the, the way she told this story about the experience of having a stroke was by— first of all, she had a real human brain on stage that she was holding with rubber gloves on. Pretty powerful image with the spinal cord actually hanging down from the brain. The way she told the story was to show that in fact, you know, the brain really is hemispheric, two halves connected by the corpus callosum, you know, the thing that connects the two sides of the brain. And unlike some of the kind of pop psychology sort of talk about left brain, right brain, she really went into detail about the function of the various hemispheres and what it was like for her to have a left hemispheric stroke and to lose functionality in her left hemisphere. All I can say is that when this talk was over, not only did 800 people spring to their feet to give her a standing ovation, about 700 of us had tears streaming down our cheeks because what she had done was to talk about how experiencing life with only the right hemisphere of her brain gave her a perspective on life that gave her the will to go on and to survive. I would encourage anybody who cares to go check out her work. It's really quite something. As we were walking out of that session— there are a lot of very interesting people here at TED, excuse me, a lot of celebrities, a lot of famous people, a lot of interesting people. As we were walking out of that session, I found myself walking out next to Matt Groening, you know, the creator of The Simpsons. And I'd seen him do this before, and I said to him, Hey Matt, would it be too much of a pain in the ass if I asked you to doodle something for me? He said, well, you know, we gotta be careful. We don't start, he said, you know, as soon as I start doing that, there's gonna be a line. And we said, let's find it. So anyway, we walked out and as we walked out, he said, okay, let's go over here. And I got a little treasure. I got a drawing. I don't know if you can see that. I hope you can see that. A drawing of Homer Simpson. See that there? "Yello, Tom! Your Ted pal, Matt Groening." And with today's date, February 27, 2008. So there's a really cool souvenir for me of Ted. And that was just session 1. Session 2, we saw a preview of the new Microsoft Worldwide Telescope. Which is an incredible, uh, experience in itself, really going to change the way people think about, um, uh, astronomy and studying the stars. Uh, that was followed up by Pat, Pat Burkett, who is a, um, a physicist who talks about dark matter and dark energy, the stuff that makes up the, like, 96% of the universe is stuff that we can't ever see and can only infer its existence. She's brilliant. Excuse me, there's my dinner. Okay, um, after, uh, Pat Birkett was, uh, John Hodgman. We all know John Hodgman as the PC guy in the Mac PC commercials from Apple, also known from the Jon Stewart Daily Show. And he did a nice little bit on extraterrestrial life, aliens, and so on. He was very, uh, he was very entertaining. Followed up by John— by Peter Ward, who, um, Peter Ward, you know, kind of was a, uh, a bit of a down because, you know, he was here saying, you know, our planet has not been habitable for much of its, uh, history, and it's only habitable now. The, the, the phrase he used that stuck out to me was that right now we're living kind of in the Oreo center of our planet's history, when all the conditions are just right for our kind of life here, and that on either side of this Oreo center, by billions of years, you know, I'm not talking weeks, but, um, it's not so good for us. But more interestingly was the, the number of times, and I think he put it at, at least 5, that there have been mass extinctions on this planet caused by collisions with very large objects, asteroids, Mars-planet-sized things that have hit All very scary. Thanks very much. Thanks very much, Peter. Then Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, who is not the musician, or no, no relationship to the musician, a meditational leader who focuses on breath and the way in which we breathe and the implications of the way in which we breathe for our whole well-being. One of those talks that, you know, was interesting and certainly I know is very relevant and powerful, but not, you know, maybe not quite what all the other TED Talks have been over time. And then we finished up with Kaki King. Kaki King is a woman who Rolling Stone called a guitar god, and she's absolutely incredible. So that was— I mean, she's incredible. I can't say any more except she's incredible. She's a wonderful guitar player. After that, that was the last regularly scheduled session. Then there was a BBC World Debate that was kind of an extra thing. BBC There were two things that were extra today. One was an extraordinary appearance by Stephen Hawking on being interviewed by Chris Anderson, who's the curator of TED. And, you know, Stephen Hawking sitting there in his chair answering questions about, you know, what, what What were the 3 questions? Let's see. Where did life come from? Are we alone? And what's the future for humanity? You know, extraordinary stuff. Basically, that the, the conditions for existence are you know, not rare, but I mean, not unique here, but rare. Are we alone? Probably not, but nowhere in the neighborhood, he thinks. And the future of humanity is that probably 100 years from now— here's another hopeful note— probably 100 years or so from now, we should be thinking about maybe finding space, somewhere in space, to live instead of here. But the second extra event that we weren't expecting was an interview that was being recorded live here at TED for BBC that'll be, I think, on BBC on Friday. An interview about the media. And on this panel that was being interviewed was Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, Carl Bernstein of Woodward and Bernstein, Watergate, Washington Post fame. Andrew, I hope I'm saying this right, Mawende from Uganda, a journalist. Dan Gilbert, a psychologist from Harvard who has written extensively on happiness. And Queen Noor of Jordan. And this was a very lively panel about old media and new media. Carl Bernstein's a bit of a windbag, so he kind of took over things a lot. It was an interesting discussion, but it was late, late in the day, and I'd pretty much had enough by that time. So that's about it for tonight. And I did have an interesting conversation early this afternoon. You know, it's the kind of thing that happens at TED. I'm standing there with Robin Williams Larry Page, co-founder, other co-founder of Google, Lawrence Bender, the producer of Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, and we're talking about Stephen Hawking. And I won't, I won't go into detail about Robin Williams's impressions of Stephen Hawking, but they were hilarious. Anyway, see you soon with tomorrow's reportage from here at the TED Conference in Monterey, California. Take care, bye-bye. Oh, and one more thing. There was one more thing. During that BBC thing I was telling you about, there was a technical glitch and they had to kind of stop the taping. And during the period in which they stopped the taping, Robin Williams just started shouting out from the audience, kind of filling in for this poor not poor, I mean, he's a British BBC America news anchor, and he's very good, very professional, but Robin Williams started kind of helping him to fill time, and next thing you know, got invited down onto the stage, and the crowd went crazy, and he did about, I don't know, 6 or 7 minutes, which I have on video, but it's not really very good, so I won't post it, but it was hilarious, and If you think Robin Williams is talented, watching him in a live improvisational situation will knock you out. I mean, the guy is just amazing. I wanted to finish with that just so you know how incredible today was. Take it easy. Bye-bye.