TED recap, volume 4

FRIDAY.

Session 7: HOW DO WE CREATE?
I was all excited to hear John Knoll speak. I mean, I had interviewed him briefly for my book Droidmaker, I’m a fellow Lucasfilm dude and I continue to marvel that he also co-invented Photoshop. Still, while I LOVED the visual presentations of what he has done in movie special effects, I was neither impressed with his talk nor with my interactions with him following it. I will say: the examples from Saving Private Ryan and Pirates of the Caribbean still make my brain reel. (The storming of the beach at Normandy – with the thousands of soldiers and everything – was done with a few guys on the beach. You HAVE to see the process shots of these sequences!)
I also had mixed feelings about author Amy Tan’s presentation. It was good, but not great. She had some cool points. (“Making something out of nothing” and “Uncertainty is a good thing.”) I need to think about hers more. It was one of few where I took notes. Yves Behar I liked. An entrepreneurial industrial designer – good looking and innovative – I still have never been a huge fan of his “Jawbone” earpiece, and I hadn’t used his other products, but it was cool to hear him present his works. His most memorable quote: “Advertising is the price companies pay to be unoriginal.” \
Robert Lang – I kid you not – is a genius of world-changing proportions, who has applied mathematics to origami. I could barely follow some of his explanations – harder for me than the particle physics for some reason. But the application of his origami goes from vein stints to solar sails. Stunning stuff. Tod Machover was impressive and inspiring. He’s a leader at the MIT Media Lab – a composer and inventor, and you’d really need to see his presentation to appreciate his work. Of all the people I met at TED, my son was most thrilled that I met the inventor of Guitar Hero. For Machover, it pretty much felt like an epiphenomena of his other important work. The first thing he said stuck with me. “Music is better if you MAKE it.”

Session 8: WHAT IS OUT THERE?
Brian Cox is the particle physicist that you’d love if you didn’t love Garrett. He is one of the young minds building that massive particle accelerator at CERN, but I wasn’t that moved by his talk. I think my favorite talk of this part of the show was Robert Ballard. He’s famous for finding the Titanic and the Bismarck, but he pretty much lives under water and is a passionate scientist and advocate for oceanic research. I remembered being a kid and putting a map of the world on my wall, one with all the water out of the oceans so you could see the midatlantic ridge and all those undersea mountain ranges. He had it too. I was disappointed to learn, however, that the majority of the feature on this map were completely fictional – just ‘suggestions’ of what is down there. With all the talk about space exploration, he made a great case for a better spending of money on the undersea world right here. I’m a believer.
Paul Stamets was next. I had never heard of him, nor do I expect to any time soon. He’s a mycologist – he studies mushrooms and fungi. I think he has a chip on his shoulder because he was anxious to prove he was important (very uncool at TED to show slides of your patents), and yet I was stunned by his talk – on the power of mushrooms to change the planet, to fix things, to rid us of viruses, to clean up oil spills, and on and on. People either loved or hated his presentation. I loved it. I’m ready to plant mushrooms everywhere and save the world. Folks I was with preferred Joshua Klein. Innovative, curious. Can-do. For me he’s like Kaki King – gave me a bit of a kick to think differently.. where everyone sees a problem try seeing the opportunity, the positive in it. I’ll just say this: Crows.

Session 9: WHAT WILL TOMORROW BRING?
This was perhaps the weakest of the whole TED. Maybe it was the time of day (2-4pm on Friday, the third day), but it was the hump, and I had a hard time staying awake. Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote The Black Swan, a book I thought was interesting. But I think he’s a lousy writer, and a lousy presenter. He is not a good communicator, but unfortunately, he has great things to communicate. If you can tease that stuff out from the matrix in which it lies, you’ll be changed by his message. That’s all I’ll say about Taleb. Read Fooled By Randomness, if you can. I could hardly concentrate through the rest of this session. Even TED needs a weak link.

Session 10: WHAT STIRS US?
Ahhhh… If Session 9 was the bottom, Session 10 was the top.
Helen Fisher studies romantic love. How can that not be interesting. She was asked at one point if her scientific reductionism of love and romance took anything about it away from her. “I know what goes into a chocolate cake,” she said, “but it tastes just as good to eat.” I went and bought one of her books after this. David Griffin, the director of photography at National Geographic – I expected to be dull. It was not. He was not. He took us through the photographer’s assignments and provided a new appreciation for their photography (and I already have a real appreciation for photography). Chris Abani made me cry. That’s all I’ll say. His poignant tale of being imprisoned left me shocked and moved. Chris is a big guy, a really big guy, but he’s like a little boy in this enormous body. I put my hand on his shoulder later that evening, to thank him for sharing his story. He smiled so sweetly. I felt like I was touching this gentle wild animal, an elephant perhaps, with no evil in him – just enduring the winds of misfortune as best he could. And he did so beautifully. And finally, Ben Zander.

Let me say this about Zander. Only once before when I was heading to TED did my sister ever send me a note that a “friend” of hers was presenting and that I should introduce myself. It was three years ago and her friend was a leading theoretical physicist. I didn’t understand too much of what he said about the space-time continuum… so when she sent me another similar email a week ago that said I “just had to introduce myself to Ben Zander” I was unsure what to expect. I only knew she and her husband were having dinner with him next month and that he was “energetic”. I forgot his name even, but when Ben Zander took the stage on Friday night, the last presenter of day, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, I calculated that this must be the guy she said to meet. So this is what I will now say: of all the presentations I’d seen at TED over the past years, few if any had the excitement and wonder as this man – who’s enthusiasm for classical music was narcotic, and his ability to transfer that to a crowd, remarkable. He said that many would be happy to see interest in classical music go from 3% to 4% of the population. He wanted to see it go to 100%. He had us weeping to Chopin, laughing at his "one-cheek" piano playing, and then a thousand of us standing and singing Ode To Joy in German at the top of our lungs. Now, to be fair, I had heard that he has delivered this exact presentation before, and not only before, but for a decade – and all over the world. But it doesn’t’ take anything away from it, and I guess I’d say that if you ever have a chance to see this, please do.

At the party later that evening, I introduced myself, and he was warm and engaging. But as soon as we connected, he was pulled off in a dozen directions – everyone wanted to hug or kiss or be photographed with the maestro. And they did.