I just quit my cartooning career after 30 years. In the EG spirit of open intimacy I’m going to review how I got to this place of shame. It was 1973, senior assignment. The only art class I mostly stayed awake in. [image] Worthless in many artistic regards. I have no idea what compelled me to draw it but my father saw it and gave me a title.

Here is what my teacher who hated me wrote about that piece. “Grade D Mr. Breathed. One day you’re going to be very rich.”

So it was then that I discovered the witches brew – the combination of crappy drawings and words.

I got a contract from the Washington Bureau about a comic strip. I named it after a place: Bloom County. I had no idea what characters were going to be in this comic strip. I drew a penguin ordering a Whopper. A few months later I created a cat, to make fun of the Garfield merchandising culture that was vomiting across the country in 1982. We sold millions of merchandise of this comic character. Maybe it was because I did what you weren’t supposed to do, mistreat a comic icon.

As a cartoonist I got into newspapers worldwide and won me a readership of about 70 million people and dinner at the White House with Ronald Reagan. Three months earlier, 7:30 am in Iowa, phone rang, just got out of the shower: Please hold for the President. He got on the line and because that Sunday strip had a Xerox of Nancy Reagan on the back wall of the panel. He was so charmed when he saw Nancy Reagan ‘drawn’ (he did not realize it was a Xerox). And he wanted to tell me he loved the drawing. And it was the golden opportunity that everyone always dreams about and I said: Mr. President I’m not wearing any pants. And he thought that was funny and it got me an invitation to the White House. But in the Blue Room with a cigar in my hand I had a conversation with Nancy about why comics are no good. They gave me a Pulitzer Prize in 1987, which the committed demanded to be canceled and returned to Columbia University. I signed the petition myself.

My confession: I have loved newspapers all my life. Cartooning has been huge fun. I respect the art form. But I’ve never opened a comic book in my life. I have struggled to get beyond the naked inappropriateness of this.

Why do I find them unrewarding? Because they lack something. Just like a television show, they are an endless loop of episodes that do not end but only evolve. It goes off in many directions but has no end. Episodes are not stories. Nothing is ever settled in a Spiderman movie. Give me a story, a begin, a middle and an end.

I’m amazed how the world revolves on stories. In lives, politics, administrations and in wars. I think karma is bullshit. When folks see bad things happen to bad people, they say it’s karma. We know in the movie that the slutty teenager is going to get knifed. It’s karma. No, it’s the story structure we expect to happen.

Guess why today’s crappy big screen epics are all structured in the crappy, same way. Though a structural prisons we try to see that the ‘evil characters’ don’t fit into the template of the story we want to tell.

Stories are the most powerful, creative force on the planet. Cartoons lack them. So finally after 30 years I do what I love, write stories. No episodes, pure stories with a beginning, middle and an end.

Some of my books:

Mars Needs Moms! Being turned into a movie.

Pete & Pickles. All copies were sold out at the bookstore, I’m hoping someone will ask me to sign it afterwards. I’m very proud of it.

Flawed Dogs. A picture book, a collection of portraits of the most desperate, pathetic dogs in the world.The story is about these dogs, my novel is about these dogs, taking over the Westminster Dog Show – and destroying it.

Known as a serial productizer of technology, Ralph Osterhout regularly ricochets between Advanced military Systems, High-tech Toys, Electronic Intelligence and Consumer Products. his major customers: Department of Defense, major Toy Companies and perfromance-oriented product companies, worldwide. The common thread: high performance, low cost and meaningful innovation.

~ ~ ~

I used to be a defense contractor.
What toys & military have in common.
The military poaches from the toy industry and vice versa. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

Ralph is a man who loves toys. He goes to the toy store, collects the best of the best, for example, when looking at robots he’ll dissect R/C trucks to see how they work. What components are they made out of? And then figure out how they can provide value and meaning in a military situation – like robots diffusing bombs.

We need affordable, low cost robots that can be deployed in real life scenarios. This is technology that we’ve already invested in, paid for, via military R&D.

Ralph’s work can be viewed via his company website: The Osterhout Design Group

Here’s our original post:

I’ve been reading his work for years so I’m thrilled to be listening to David Pogue, technology columnist and blogger for the New York Times. Tagged in the Gizmos & Gadgets session I wonder what he’s going to focus his presentation on. Well, we all get pleasantly surprised, and share in immense laughter, as David opens up his presentation with a self-written and piano-played song (sang to the tune of Imagine by the Beatles).

Imagine there’s no Apple. No products that start with I.

Imagine all the people, finding other things to do ~ ~ ~

Imagine there’s no bloggers, it isn’t hard to do. No viruses or spyware, no Windows Vista 2.

Imagine all the people, learning to get a life.

You may save me a nightmare, without Google Mac or Dell.

You might have real conversations. But the world would be dull as hell.

Imagine there’s not cell phones. Kiss console games goodbye.

No David Pogue or Mossberg, to tell you what to buy.

Imagine all those people, getting some exercise.

You may say I’m a looney. But rest assured I’m almost done. I’m pretty sure it’ll never happen.

So we nerds can live as one.

So I’m the weekly tech critic for the NYT. What I’m mostly doing this year is going on cable TV an answering the same question: What are the tech trends for next year.

Trends of 2009: What is most interesting is the combination of the Phone & Internet

We’ve come a long way since VOIP. Like Vonage. Now you hear a dial tone but it’s a fake out, a .wav file of a dial tone. As a result of VOIP, landline home phone service has gone down 30% in the last 3 years. College kids are most likely to have Skype. Free, 250 million downloads, computer-to-computer. The downside is you have to use a headset, like a nerd. Where VOIP gets interesting is when they start putting it on cell phones. Even though the technology for this has been available for 5 years, for some reason, no cell phone carriers offer it. Hmm, wonder why.

Actually there is one company who does it: T-mobile (I’m not paid for plugging them). “T-Mobile Hot Spot @ Home“

We have a choice of phones that have wifi and anytime you’re in a wifi hotspot all your calls are free. How often are you in a hotspot? All the time because they give you a regular router for your house. This in effect becomes a stealth cell phone tower installation program – they give us a $7.99 router that functions as a cell tower, and we’re doing it for them. What’s amazing is that it’s a seamless switch over between wifi and the cellular service.

Another favorite of mine. Grand Central. They give you a new phone number and all your phones get rung at once. All going through the internet so you can set up the features – people get customizable messages and you can limit time intervals where people can or can not get through to you, etc.

Google Cellular: text 46645 – and save the $2 you get charged when dialing 411. The downside is it requires you to know how to text. Google just launched a voice service [800-GOOG-411]. It connects you directly. It’s like having a personal valet.

ChaCha [800-2CHACHA] – this is a service that you can ask anything. How does it work? There is a human being on the other end of the line – 10,000 people who get paid 20 cents per answer.

There are services that transcribe voicemail into text and then email you, and attach the audio file to the end of the message. Services: PhoneTag, Callwave.

PopularityDialer.com. Type in your phone # and the exact minute you want to be called. This is great for blind dates. But since in some instances people can overhear you, they have pre-set voices – check it out, it’s hilarious.

iPhone: The Legacy. The iPhone is a flawed masterpiece – has good and bad things to it. But one thing that is genius is the applications marketplace. It broke the dike. We’ve entered the new world of innovation where your cellphone becomes your laptop and you can do amazing things with it.

~ ~ ~

David Pogue is a riot. Great presenter, like Colbert for technology. On a personal note, thank you for the pre-lunch chuckles.

Netbooks, a new layer of affordable laptops in the $350 price point, by sometime in the next year will represent 50% of the market worldwide. That’s an incredible change. I should feel good about it but I don’t. Because the reason the people who created Netbooks, the people who took our idea – well, they don’t care about the reason why we started this program, and Netbooks don’t satisfy the various elements the XO does (lack of electricity issues, sturdiness, focus on kids & education, the ability to view the screen in the sunlight bc many schools are outside). They copied it but they did not really copy it in its totality.

Half a million laptops are in the hands of kids around the world, in very remote places. Half a million are in transit and half a million are in construction. It’s going all over the place.

Teachers say they have never enjoyed teaching so much. [image: children grouped around a professor]. What types of results are happening? Reading comprehension going through the roof. 100% more kids are going to school. A lot more peer to peer teaching. Now parents are learning from children.

There are parts of this world where we can’t bring them in on our own. Just last week we were in Columbia handing out laptops in the far regions – we went in with the Minister of Defense (not the Minister of Education), so we had a ton of security. Thousands of these laptops are going into a zone that has been isolated for 40 years. Why is the Minister of Defense doing this? It’s a way to bring a window into the rest of the world for a part of the world that has been isolated. (All of the machines are bi-lingual.)

Saturation. Every child in Uruguay is getting a laptop. The numbers are interesteing. 450K kids in Uruguay. 200K have them today. Uruguay is so saturated they are now issuing postage stamps with the laptop image on it.

Give One Get One. The $0 laptop. We’re able to go to places that really do distinguish the mission and the market. We’ve been caught up in this competitive market stuff – Intel, IBM. But this is about kids in the developing world. So this program is starting but given the economy it’s off to a slow start.

Thank you very much. Give one, get one.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

360 degree view of the $100 xo laptop

$25,900 to send a package of 100 laptops anywhere in the world. And you can do this via Amazon.

Dan Ariely is a Professor of Behaviorial Economics at Duke University and author of Predictably Irrational.

Good morning. I’ll tell you a little bit about irrational behavior – not yours, other peoples’.

Writing academic papers are not that exciting. Often not fun to read, and often worse to write. So I tried to write a cook book – Dining Without Crumbs: The art of eating over the sink. MIT Press turned me down by saying, “cute, but not for us.” I was told if I really want to do a creative book like this – free, less constrained – I was advised to first write a book about my actual research and then I’ll get to do my cookbook.

Writing my book about my research turned out to be pretty fun.

I want to tell you a little bit about irrational behavior, and I’ll start with some examples. Our intuition is really fooling us in a predictable way and there’s nothing we can do about it.

“Decision Illusions”

Illusions as a metaphor. In visual illusions, we can easily demonstrate the mistakes. In cognitive illusions it is difficult to do that.

Example: Organ Donations. Certain countries have a higher rate of donations. Why? Turns out it had to do with the DMV form, the person who is designing the form has a big impact on changing behavior.

Opt-in – “Check the box below if you want to participate in the organ donor program.

Opt-out – “Check the box below if you don’t want to participate in the organ donor program.

People tend to NOT check the box, and the statistics change, the decisions change.

What about professionals?

Take a group of physicians and a patient with hip issues. You decided a few weeks ago nothing is working for this patient so you refer the patient to get hip replacement. Yesterday you review the patient’s case and you realized you had not tried Ibuprofen. What do you do? Pull the patient off the line for hip replacement? Yes, most physicians will try the Ibuprofen.

Another group of physicians do some testing and realized that they had not tried Piroxicam or Ibuprofen – now that’s adding another decision factor. Moving forward with hip replacement becomes an easier solution – and many physicians go for hip replacement.

I give you a choice. A trip to Rome, all expenses covered. Or a weekend in Paris. Or having your car stolen. But what if I added a condition. You get a trip to Rome, all expenses paid, but no coffee is included. You have to pay for it. Now Rome with coffee becomes more superior than Rome without coffee.

Example: The Economist subscription offer

Economist.com = $59  ::  Print = $125  ::  Economist.com + Print = $125

I tested this offer with some students and this was the result:

Economist.com = 16%  ::  Print = 0%  ::  Both = 84%

I tested again by taking away the useless option. The numbers changed: Economist.com = 68%  ::  Both = 32%

When the offers are pitted against each other, “Both” seems more superior. When we don’t know our preferences, we are influenced by these types of offers.

The general point: Are we Superman or Homer Simpson?

If we understand our limitations we can build around it. We somehow forget the idea we are limited. If we understand our cognitive limitations, along with our physical limitations, we can build a better world.

Today we have the pleasure of having him on EG’s stage.

I have spent 35 years learning about life. I have hung by my toes in 30 degree weathers on a helicopter. I play 12 different musical instruments and speak 5 different languages. I have practiced and learned weird things. When I was 16 years old I jumped out of a helicopter with a ski rope and barefoot water skied away. I have performed all around the world, done a lot of crazy, weird things. Road a motorcycle on a tightrope, in a steel cage. I have done a lot of crazy, weird things.

But what I get asked most often: Is that your real hair? How do you do that? How do you sleep?

For 7 generations my family has been performing (on both sides of my family). I can date my family as performers back to 1772. I am a circus performer. I am a clown. I want to perform for you.

If you’re not here at EG to appreciate Bello and his great art – catch him on his Bellobration tour!

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The National Portrait Gallery is the place dedicated to presenting great American lives – amazing people. We use portraiter as a way to deliver those lives, and that’s it.

What I want to talk about today is a program I started, the proudest thing I did. I started to worry about the fact that people don’t get their portraits anymore. So I created The Living Self-Portrait Series. It was my being a brush in hand for amazing people who I would interview.

I had two pre-conditions:  They be American. They needed to be people of a certain age: 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s.

Why did I do that? Well, we’re a youth-obsessed culture. So I wanted to sit at the feet of elders, to hear about them. It’s amazing for people to say they know how the story turned out. That’s the one thing they have. They know how the story of our lives turn out. It’s great to have an interviewee that can talk about all of those accidents; that can talk to the life narrative of how we get here.

I wanted interviews that were different. I wanted to be empathic – to feel what they wanted to say. To be an agent of their self-revelation. This was all done in public, 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual and me being the brush in their portrait.

One interview I did with Senator William Fulbright, the first time he’d appeared in public since his stroke, which was not severe but it had affected him. We had an hour-long conversation. Someone came up to me after and asked, “When did you become a doctor?” I wasn’t a doctor so I was confused. Her explanation: When he started the interview he paused mid-sentence, you gave him the bridge to complete his thoughts. And by the end he was speaking in full sentences – I was part of the process of pulling that out of him.

Who made a great interview? It had nothing to do with the quality of their intellect. It’s energy that creates extraordinary interviews and extraordinary lives.

The first person I interviewed was George Abbot, 97 years old and filled with the life force. We filled the room with that energy. He was famous for being silent, but he in fact ended up opening up. He subsequently got married again in 102.

After the interview I got a call from a woman who asked, “Did you really get George Abbot to talk?” Well, yeah, apparently I did. “I’m his old girlfriend and I could never do it.”

You want people to feel like they have a story worth sharing. The worst interview is with someone who is modest. Because all of these people are assembled to listen to them.

The worst: William L. Shirer, the journalist that covered the rise and fall of the Third Richt. He said everything was just coincidence, he happened to be in the right place at the right time. Awful. Interviewees have to think they did something and want to share it with you.

All of us are public and private beings. If all you are going to get is their public selves, it’s an infommercial.

The worst and best moment during this interview series. An extraordinary woman named Claire Booth Luce. She was a playwright, a Congresswoman, editor of Vanity Fair – one of the great phenomenal women of her day. She was not giving me a thing. When we were alone I was her audience. Now I’m her competitor. But eventually she proceeded to deliver the most remarkable performance. Elegant and respected, I’m much attracted to her life force (if not her politics).

Ask people the questions they are waiting their whole lives to be asked.

It was an amazing priviledge to do this series. The key point was empathy. Because everybody in their lives is really waiting to ask them questions so they can be truthful, to tell them about who they are and how they got there.

So I encourage you to be that way – not only for interviews, but for the members of your family and the friends in your lives.

We kick of the Work & Family evening session with the host of Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel.

The castration process of lambs.

The Dirty Jobs crew & I were called into a little town in the Rockies. The job in question was sheep rancher. On the show I’m an apprentice and work with the people who do the jobs in question. My job is to keep up with the daily tasks of one day of their lives.

On this job, I realized that castration will be a part of this job. I rarely do research but this time I did. I called the Humane Society and said I’m going to castrate lambs, please tell me the deal. I was told they use a rubber band, applied to the tail tightly, another to the scrotum, tightly. A week later the blood flow stops and the parts in question fall off. I called the ASPCA to confirm it and they did. I called PETA and they confirmed it (though they didn’t like it).

On the day of, we started with our lead Albert, the crew and I follow. He grabs into his pocket and he pulls out what I thought would be a rubber band but he pulls out a … knife. He cuts the tail, then he cuts the scrotum. And then he puts his head toward the scrotum and I hear a slurping sound.

I’ve done something I’ve never done on a Dirty Job show. I said “CUT. We are not going to do it this way. We can’t do this. I want to do it the rubber band way.”

So I put the band on and it looked like the lamb was in pain. Doing it the PETA way means the lamb is distressed for a week until the balls fall off. Meanwhile the other lamb with the knife procedure is out eating and frolicking. I realized I was wrong. So I decide to do it the Rocky Mountain way. But there are 100 lambs in the barn. I felt like it was turning into a German porno.

Albert says push the scrotum up and the testicles come down, and then: “Bite it. Just bite them off.”

How did I get here?

But I did it.

After that shoot, Dirty Jobs didn’t changed – what the show is – but it changed for me personally.

I not only tell the story you just heard, and 190 like it but I also talk about what I got wrong. Some of the other notions I’d gotten wrong. People with dirty jobs are happier than many people I know. These are balanced people who do unthinkable work – roadkill workers whistle while they work. They have this amazing symmetry to their work.

Follow your passions. Follow your dreams and go for broke.

This is what we’re told growing up to achieve success.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life but apparently if you follow your passions you can’t go wrong.

But that’s not the only way to go. Think of what other people are doing and go the other way. It’s not just following your passions, it’s doing jobs other people aren’t doing.

I started looking at efficiency vs. effectiveness. Teamwork vs. Determination. Platitudes that hang in fancy boardrooms, that stuff has all been turned on its head.

Safety. Safety first – what if OCHA got it wrong? What if it’s Safety third?

I value my safety on these jobs. But the ones who get it done are not out there thinking safety first. They think of the business of getting the job done. When I was working on The Deadliest Catch - most hazardous environment I’d ever seen. I’m 40-feet over the deck. I say with some level of incredulous to the captain and I say OCHA – and he says: Ocean

Captain says: Son, I’m the captain of a crab boat. My responsibility is not to get you home alive, it’s to get you home rich. If you want to get home alive, that’s on you.

What it all comes down to is this. I’ve formed a theory and it’s this: We’ve declared war on work on society. All of us. It’s a civil war, a cold war. We didn’t set out to do it but we’ve done it. We’ve waged this war on at least 4 fronts.

1. Hollywood – the way we portray working people on TV, it’s horrible. Plumbers all have giant butt cracks and weigh 300 pounds. We turn working people into heroes on punchlines.
2. Madison Avenue – what’s that message we put out there? Work 9-5 (or some semblance of that routine)
3. Washington – I can’t even begin to talk about deals and possibilities of the ‘bottom line’ behind working jobs
4. Silicon Valley – how many people have an iPhone, Blackberries. We are plugged in.

But innovation without immitation is a complete waste of time. We’ve got this new tool box. Our tools don’t look like shovels and picks. The collective effective of all of that has been the marginalization of lots and lots of jobs.

I dont know how may more of these [Dirty Jobs shows] we’ll do but we’ll do as many as we can.

I’ve got it wrong about a lot of things – so we’re thinking I’m thinking that the thing to do is a PR campaign for work – manual labor, skilled labor. Somebody needs to be out there about the forgotten benefits – grandfather stuff – the stuff we grew up with but lost.

Barack wants to create 200,000 jobs.

This war on work has impacted our infrastructure but it’s also declining technical schools. Fewer steam fitters, electricians… these guys are in decline.The jobs we hope to make and hope to create are not going to stick unless they are jobs we want.

Clean and Dirty are not opposites, they are two sides of the same coin.

Get back to work.

Technical difficulties made us lose the transcription but you can find the latest details of the consumer mind-control headset in this month’s issue of Inc. magazine.

Definitely something to check out!

Update: We got the video so you can see this demonstration in its full glory.

Through technology you capture those moments and assemble them. We see remarkable photographers doing important things for the world.

I’m not that deep. On a scale of 1-2 I’m a one when it comes to deepness. I just like to make beautiful images I like to make pictures of things that are personal that intersects with other people’s moments in time. That’s the beauty of photography – it can be deep, or just be pretty.

Art has been around me my entire life. I’ve always been good at technical things. Why am I not a painter? Because both my parents are – a pretty good reason not to do something.

They gave me great gifts. They dragged me kicking and screaming around the world when I was young. I got to see the great wonders of the world, most things I did not care about at the time. I was looking at the TV antennas while my dad tried to teach me about world architecture and culture. Why? Because the job of kids is to break their parents heart. And that was me.

The pantheon is a great building. The interesting moment for me was coming into this place, waiting to see something, I looked around a bit at a cylindrical building – big and ugly. But visiting this launched my various careers. It never occurred to me that people were smart 2,000 years ago.

They teach you when you are a kid not wanting to learn about architecture that there’s a concept of the arch. In the cathedral business, size matters. We were only able to build things X wide due to a material issue. Modern engineering helped us create the cathedrals we see today.

The dome of the Pantheon is made with light-weight concrete – 2,000 years ago – who knew to use that?

It’s a beautiful building, a shaft of light – the first time I saw light as sculpture. It hadn’t occurred to me that without light, if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. This is what got me interested in lighting design.

The building is cool – natural air conditioning. The hole in the middle – rain comes in, ok, put in a drain… 2,000 years ago.

You look at this building and one thing after the other, people were smart. Light matters, different colors are illuminated as light comes through – forced perspective.

Innovation is pretty easy, getting things built and done is much harder. Compelling and powerful ideas can reach forward in time … and touch a little kid and get then interested.

With that as background: one of the great things about photography is the ability to reach forward in time. I shoot “timeless images.” They happen not to show the time they were shot. Most of the innovations of photography have been designed to make it cheaper, more portable.

I can care less about digital vs. analogue. I shoot in both. Through the miracle of Photoshop (thank you very much) – This whole concept of is it film, is it this or that? It’s boring. As an artist you use the tools you’ve got. I want transparency, I don’t want technology to put it’s fingerprint on the images I do.

What’s the point of all this?

This is the hardware side of my life. The different between the emotional resolution of an image whereby a cinematographer, taking the performance of a million dollar camera down to the quality of a disposal camera. Seeing all the details isn’t art, and this is all about visual storytelling.

The concept of how you make the technology work for you is, I can take you anywhere – using cameras, projectors, and a dome. I enjoy hardware and technology but it’s just a tool. But my passion is taking pictures. It’s finding places of extraordinary beauty – I love exploring. I love finding places that are hard to find, hard to get to. Taking people who love exploring the human body, what a magnificent thing; putting it together in places.

Technology should be invisible – to me. It’s about intentionality, sculpting with life. It’s about the primal elements, water – what you use.

I use state of the art, high performance lenses, many of them I’ve built. The ability to intersect your lives, intentionality of image, collaborating with a person. The experience of putting it together, how do you make things work for you?

Finding these places, it can be miserable getting to them. One of my basic problems is being a control freak.

[Image] Death Valley – 130 something degrees when we took this image – because things look different when it is hot.

How do you get there? Wait for that moment when the light is perfect. Find the things that other people don’t see. Finding things that have no particular scale to them, you have to reveal it. That experience, that texture of light.

As an artists, the basics you have to do. The challenge to any of this creativity is: can I find a way to capture the essence?

Watching people take in their lives for the collaboration of a project. That’s my work. for me, it’s been great, it’s been a little bit of stepping into my parents footsteps. It’s the ability to show myself that I suck, that I’m no where near as good as where I need to be. But it’s an adventure. To me the specialness of photography is to make the technology disappear, as an artist take control of it. Capture those moments.

If i’m lucky, I’ll get to suck less, and 2000 years later, one of my images will inspire a kid to build a Pantheon.

I thought I was the Incredible Hulk.

When I was 7 I went to summer camp (my parents needed the reprieve). At noon each day we’d go to the docks and jump into the water. I’d been born with lung problems so I always had issues with water. One day I decided to jump through the tube but one of the bully’s grabbed my foot and I got stuck, I thought I was going to drown. After that day, I was terrified of swimming.

My fear of swimming was a weakness and something I did not like. I’m 31 now and in August I decided to conquer this fear.

My art is deconstructing things that scare the hell out of me.

Swimming: First Principles

Here are the new rules of swimming for any of you who are scared of swimming.

Forget about kicking. The problem is hydrodynamics. See this example, he extends the right arm below his head, his entire body is underwater. The arm is etended below the head, in line with the spine, using strategic water pressure. You use small flicks to rotate hips to dive the arm into the other side. Enter the water at a 45 degree angle and propel yourself by streamlining. This is how I was able to go from 21 strokes to 11 strokes in two weeks.

The right position. Bend your arm into the water, not in a straight line.

Breathing. In freestyle, turn your body, roll and look at your recovery hand as it enters the water.

And that’s it. All you need to know.

Languages: Material vs. Method

I was terrible at languages, like many other people. All I knew was Dónde esta el baño? When I started in a new school, most of my freinds were taking Japanese so I decided to take Japanese. 6 months later I had an opportunity to go to Japan. It was my first overseas experience, my parents encouraged me to do it. I arrived in Tokyo, met my host family, was very excited.

To my host mom in Japanese, I asked to be woken up at 8 am. I used the wrong verb and inadvertantly asked: please rape me at 8 am. She was a very confused host mother.

At school, the teacher gave me a piece of paper and it looked like hyroglyphics – it was Kanji, Chinese characters used in the Japanese written language.

I asked what this was and the professor tried to explain (in Japanese) – I was very confused. But that set me on a panic driven search for the perfect language learning method. Finally I found a tablet, determined by the Ministry of Education in 1931. This became my Holy Grail, my Rosetta Stone. As soon as I focused on this material I took off and I was able to read the Asahi Shimbun 6 months later.

I ended up doing translation work at age 16 when I returned to the US.

I’ve been able to apply this to almost a dozen langugaes – someone who was terrible at languages.

It’s oftentimes not just what you do but how you do it. It’s about being effective, efficient, and doing the right things.

Now I love languages.

Ballroom Dancing: Implicit vs. Explicit

I used to be much bigger, not the build for a ballroom dancer. I found myself in Argentina in 2005. Paid 10 pesos to watch a ballroom dance class, had no intention of participating. Due to an uneven gender balance, the instructor told me to particpate.

I immediately broke out in a death sweat.

Then this gorgeous assistant instructor comes to be my partner, I didn’t know where to put my hands. I hold her and she angrily drops her arms, turns around and shouts: this guy is built like a damn mountain of muscle and he’s grabbing me like a Frenchman.

I found that encouraging. [laughter]

I bought a month’s worth of classes.

Then I signed up for a competition, to give myself a timeline for learning. I got a female instructor first because I wanted to understand the sensitivities of following. Then I took an inventory of the characteristics of different dancers who had won championships. Then I interviewed them and compared the answers.

There were external similarities and implicit commonalities.

1 – Long vs. short steps. Longer steps were much more elegant.

2 – Different types of pivots

3 – Different tempos

These were the elements that I needed to compete successfully.

I won that competition. Then went to the semi-finals. And set a world record 2 weeks later.

[shows training footage]

A strong lead matters. I have 100 hours of footage, most categorized.

I used my arch nemesis Spanish, no less, to learn tango

Fear is your friend.

The best results I’ve achieved was by asking: What’s the worst that can happen?

Take the analytic frameworks, apply them to old fears and big dreams.

When I think of what I fear now it’s simple: what my life would have been like without the educational opportunities I have had.

I’ve built half a dozen schools but I know nothing, I’m a beginner and I would love your advice.

Thank you very much.

Happy Birthay Mrs. Wozniak…. Happy Birthday to You.

And congratulations on being a newlywed.

Mt. Everest is 29,035 feet high – the cruising altitude of a jet. At the summit only 1/3 altitude above sea level. The kind of condition you would find on a summer day on Mars. Climbers are exposed to these severe conditions 16-20 hours a day.

On the occasion I’m going to speak about it was so cold when I went to reach for my water bottle, which was near my chest, and it had frozen completely. I set up a medical basecamp. We were one of three expeditions on the mountain, run by the National Geographic but organized by the Explorers Club.

When your climbing the ice floors, it’s like a rat in a maze, you can’t see where you are going. During the night it is the coldest time but also the least likely for ice shifts. We cross cravases, many are ten stories deep or more, on aluminum ladders bolted together, with harnesses on.

Sometimes we say we climb at night so we can’t see how far we could possibly fall.

The winds are constantly scowling the summit of Everest. We climb in the thin air up toward the clouds. On the way up, climbers rest at the camps on oxygen masks, catching up and then evaluating if conditions are good enough to keep going.

What happened that fateful season, the storm picked up. Climbers were already up on near the summit when the storm hit.

[Image] Climbers with face masks and re-breathers, climbers with oxygen tanks.

[Image] Climbers walking on a sheer drop off . 8,000 feet to the left you fall into Nepal. 12,000 feet to the right and you fall to Tibet. No ropes because it’s so sheer, you’ll likely just pull the other climbers down with you. So you’re on your own in these treacherous zones.

When the storm hit 2 climbers were stuck and could not descend. Another climber had collapsed in the snow, others had passed and had left him for dead. There were 18 other climbers that were unaccounted for.

2 basecamp climbers decided to go for a rescue mission. Their first comment was not SHOULD we go but How fast can we get ready?

Rob and Doug were stuck too far up on the mountain for rescue to reach them. Rob was a strong climber but Doug was weak, and rescue informed Rob over radio that he should climb down and leave Doug. That the conditions were so severe if he didn’t they would both die, so he should come down and save himself. Rob replied: “We’re both listening.”

Rob wanted to speak to his wife via radio. She was in New Zealand 7 months pregnant with their baby. They named their child and Rob signed off. That was the last we heard of Rob.

Effects: snowblindness, frost-bitten body parts, hypothermia.

Beth, who we had assumed was dead, eventually stumbled into the medical camp (with some help). He was severely frostbitten and hypothermic. As we nursed him back to humanity, he began to tell us the story of what happened to him. He got disoriented in the storm, lost and then collapsed. He laid in the snow day and night and another day. Other climbers had passed him, he was aware of them, but was powerless to even call for help, motion for help – give any indication that he was still alive. And during that time he realized he did not want to die.And he thought of his family… and powered himself to get up, and stumble down for help.

The human brain is the most complex machine in the universe.

What was the highest helicopter rescue in history – the pilot risked his life to fly above the helicopter cap to reach the camps. When we all reached the bottom, we had a memorial. Many climbers had died and respects were given.

12 climbers died on Everest that year: Scott Fischer was leading the American Expedition. Rob Hall, most experienced mountaineer in history died because he refused to abandon a climber who was weaker than he. I would expect nothing less from him. And others.

The Tibetans feel that the prayer flags (where prayers of safety are written) are carried by the wind to the gods. That year, for those climbers, the conditions were so extreme, the gods were unfortunately not listening.

Thank you.

A day filled with conversation, inspiration, knowledge-sharing and creative showcasing.

Today’s sessions include:

Going to Extremes :: Better Pictures :: Invention & Illusion :: Work & Family

Stay tuned here for speaker presentations.

What are you going to do after that? Outer space? We decided to do something more organic and specific. We focused on one group of 35 chimpanzees: CHIMPS at the edge (co-produced by Christina Egstrom, wife and partner)

We wanted to rethink the boundaries of chimps and apes and humans. Now we can appreciate them as close cousins, with the same kinds of enduring lives and personalities and discerning minds. Except for orangs, all great apes live in great Africa, and co-exist with gorillas.

Only a half dozen community of chimps have been studied in a long-term basis. Every time there’s a new study, we learn how chimps can vary. Their culture is very specific. The new ape lady, Jill Goodall, is studying chimps use of weapons. She’s interested to see how chimps and their habitat affects their behavior. We’re hoping this will give us insight into our own behaviors in the early days. Savanna woodland is where apes became human. and in southeast Senegal we can find the land where this happened.

Our main guide in the field could not read or write or had not met a photographer in his life. But he had an amazing sense of the chimps and where they resided.

Searching for chimps is a hard job – we had one meal a day in the evening. it’s not a 9-5 job, it’s a 5-9 job. But the best time to get close to chimps is when they take their mid-day siesta.

At dusk we hike back to the village and review our work. Chimps eat lots of greens and love fruit. Honey is like their candy, they go termite fishing (it’s a delicacy). When males get wild, females get out of the way.

[this is just a handful of what the presenters shared about chimp insights]

It was discovered that Fongoli chimps not only make tools but create deadly weapons and strategically hunt their prey. This is the first time outside of humans that mammals were seen to create and use weapons.

What else will these chimps show us given time and more space for observation?

Self-recognition is another factor that we thought were unique to humans. But we observe a child chimp testing the water in a watering hole, and then discovering (and playing with) her own reflection.

Whether there is a future for wild chimpanzees will be determined in this lifetime. We find this to be a big moral dilemma. We think we owe it to ourselves, our children … to make the right decision.

The purpose of their presentation is to share with us the idea that the world, made up mostly of water, is not an empty oasis – there are lifeforms we’d expect to find in alien planets that exist in our deep seas. We see fish living in an ocean made of sulfur, 200 degree F.

What’s the message? Life on this planet wants to happen.
Where we expect to find no life at all we’re finding thriving communities, not living off the sun’s energy but from the ecosystem of the ocean.

These scientists are finding terms of diversity and density that rivals the rain forest.

Using technology, where we once left shipwrecked souls to live underwater in eternity, now no shipwrecks are beyond our reach. We can go to the deepest depths – find sunken war tanks, oil ships – and these ships are now being explored, and the truths of their histories uncovered.

Most of this planet, blanketed with water is a totally different world than what we know on land. All these micro-ecosystems prove that we can find life where we never thought we’d find life before.

Consider the implications for us when we consider what lifeforms might exist on other planets.

See some of their images & multimedia here.

Bestselling author and editor, David Elliot Cohen has written or co-authored more than seventy large-format illustrated books — many with Rick Smolan — that have collectively sold more than 5 million copies. Most were in the hugely popular Day in the Life or America 24/7 photography book series co-founded by Cohen and Smolan.

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I’m going to present to you some issues that are really tough to look at. When I was doing the Obama book, I was reading a bunch of his speeches.

My latest book, called What Matters, is about essential issues of our time. with some of the greatest photographers of our time. All of them are masters of their craft and they are deeply passionate about what they shoot.

How passionate are we talking about?

Passionate enough to shoot about water issues for our chapter on thirsty world. About finding an end to malaria. About AIDS ravaged communities.

All of the pictures, the stories you see going on behind me were shot under very difficult situations, with very little pay.

I wanted to explore and understand, and imagine – telling stories that need to be told, regardless of the obstacles. You get to a certain age and you want to work on something worthwhile.

I tried to work on essential issues and then focused on what can or can not be shot.

I asked 25 photo editors from around the country [NYT, Wash Post ...]

What photos have you seen that are really important?

I considered bio-tech but there weren’t enough pictures that could tell that story. But they also brought to my attention other pictures and stories, I didn’t think of: Child Brides – 1 million girls between 10-15 years old are married off each year.

After gathering all the images I went to talk to writers. I tried to talk to writers who were the best in their field who could elucidate these photos.

Then I added the final step. A comprehensive section for the readers who wanted to turn outrage into action – just in case that happened.

What Matters was published in 2008 and I’ve been trying to push it out there as much as possible. I’m trying to tell people why this matters, why they should care. The reason i have to go out there and tell people is because most people wont spend $20 on a book that shoves tough issues in their face.

I’ve done hundreds of interviews (mostly radio) – the question I get most often: Why did you do this book?

You can either give them a sound bite or you can think about the question every time it’s asked. I did my best to consider the answer every time.

Here was my first answer: I walked into the big sprawling Barnes & Noble near my house – all usual suspects, glossy, well-done. and I thought to myself, after 8 years of Bush and Cheney, I gotta do something else, I can’t do another book like that.

[the crowd applauds]

I wanted to talk about how the language of photo-journalism can entice change.

Photo-journalism can capture a decisive moment and make the viewer think about the meaning of that moment. All great photo-journalism is personal and specific and compels you to think of the ramifications of that moment.

We consciously pursued stories that can make a difference. We thought that photos mattered. Photography can change the world.

I believe in my heart one great photograph can change the world.

When one great image resonates with one talented and energized person, and they take action, that can create positive change that can change the course of the world.

I can’t predict which person will connect, which image will resonate, but I completely believe it will happen.

Then the universe gave me proof.

I was introduced to Mark Johnson, an artist who built a music school for kids in a poor township near Capetown in South Africa. It was such a success that he’s now building these schools all over the world.

Why is he doing this?

Well, 6 years ago I was given a  book: A Day in the Life of Africa

The image I saw served as a symbol for me and my crew.

I went to Africa, met a local jazz artist. I asked what can we do to give back to your community?

Answer: the kids here need a music school, need inspiration.

And so we built a school.

Now we’re going to build hundreds of these schools around the world.

One photo :: One inspiration :: One dedicated person :: One change for the better

There are 200 photos in What Matters.

See the book for free: www.whatmattersonline.com

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I’m inspired. Let’s go make change!