World-renowned archaeologist Zahi Hawass currently serves as Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and Director of Excavations at Giza, Saqqara, and the Bahariya Oasis. Dr. Hawass is responsible for many exciting recent discoveries, including the Tombs of the Pyramid Builders at Giza and the Valley of the Golden Mummies at Bahariya. He supervised a major conservation project on the Great Sphinx and developed site management plans, including the Unfinished Obelist Quarry in Aswan and the temples of Kom Ombo, Edfu, and Dendera.

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.

My latest CD is Areana, if you like raging guitars and a guy screaming like he has his nuts caught in a belgian waffle maker you may like it.

What is your most memorable moment? What are you most proud of? That just tells you they never listened to the CD. You predicted everything that has happened in the music industry, what is going to happen next? I didn’t predict, I mostly precursed it. I’ve been in it 40 years. I went to the the Wikipedias. The music industry is only a bit more than 100 years old. [showed video of first phonograph playing Mary had a Little Lamb.] This was the first time that music, which had been a service, became a product. Beatles, jazz, Elvis, Elvis… And then in 1979 Sony came out with the Walkman. Previous to that the music that you wanted to hear rarely left the home. this allowed you to make music part of your lifestyle, and adapt it.

I began to deduce things about how this had changed people’s music listening habits. How the impression of what them usic industry was started to change, and it was in control of the audience. People started taking the music where they were and it became background to their lives. The music was returning to their original purpose which was a service, it was doing something for you, you weren’t a slave to it.

I began to deduce that music was beginning to break down in terms of its originality, recycling was starting to happen. Most significant example of this was M.C. Hammer’s Can’t Touch This, which was actually a James Brown song. They were such a hit with this song “Relax” that every two weeks they would release a remix and it would go to the top of the charts. Got a concept, No World Order, because I was into music and computers and programming I moved to CA in the mid-80s began going to MacWorld conferences, it was technically possible for us to create a system that would allow users to completely tailor music to whatever they were doing at the time and even do it in real-time, to change it in real-time.

Philips decided to experiment with it, Andy Levine a friend of mine and anti-social, they had something called a CDI box, made music to be adaptable. I changed my ideas of composition, it was still songs, but they had to have discrete entrances and exits within it. The idea was to give people control over the music in a number of vectors, took the 1000 music bits and gave it to 4 other record producers, they all did their own version, each came up wih radically different ideas conceptually. One liked the instrumental way more than the vocals, another tried to make songs out of the pieces even though they weren’t in song form. So those were the preset mixes, but all of the rest were customizable. Program (presets), direction, form, tempo, mood, mix (take instruments in and out), and video (screensaver). Core piece is a continuously variable random generator, you have all the numbers in a hat, and you pick more and more than they’re all gone. If you want ot have something less than random but still kinda random you apply a Gallsian (bell-shaped) filter to those numbers.

Were approached by Time-Warner for full-scale experiment in interactive television, put fiber to the curb. Used a SGI Envy, almost crushed half the TVs they put it on. ’94, designed a system to have on-demand music into people’s homes, needed to get the content though. Went to 6 remaining record labels, at least half wouldn’t take a meeting, of the ones that did they were polite but nobody could wrap their minds around it, one was getting licensing from each of the artists, and second that they depended on retail. They would piss off Walmart and they would shelve their records. We couldn’t even get Warner Brothers to license a single artist, and it was owned by the same company. They decided the internet was a great way to get exposure for unsigned bands, it was an evolutionary concept. IUMA existed until just about a year or two ago.

Then came Napster. Suddenly the record industry is having their lunch eating right in front of them, 3-4 years after they tried to do the experiment. Who gets involved but the RIAA? Napster fended them off for a pretty long time. iTunes was the first program I had that allowed me to just take my entire CD collection and just automatically capture everything. My first MP3 was the Neo Jukebox, for hackers it’s great, got a regular laptop-sized hard drive, no DRM crap, about the size of a paperback book and carried it around for years and used it in live performance often. Along came the iPod, he managed to accomplish was to get the numbskulls to put their music on a server. Interesting lexographic point – server, service, music is turning back to its original purpose, which is a service not a product. A CD is a license to listen to the music, not even the industry undestands that which is why they’re so f-ed up.

RIAA started suing their customers. Is there another industry that sues their own customers? Record industry kept looking for ways to make up their money, it never occured to them that they were making crappy music and charging to much for it. They started licensing ringtone stuff. Wasn’t long before people figured out a way to take songs you had already paid for and turn it into ringtones. Here’s where it’s going. “Warner Music pushes for mandatory music tax on your internet bill.” There’s a model for the music industry, it’s the cable industry. Once you get a cable account, nobody keeps track of what you watch anymore, you can watch hundreds of hours per month, you can go on vacation and watch nothing, but you wouldn’t cancel your cable bill just because you went on vacation. It’s a great mode, which is why they come up with great programming with like Deadwood. People are still buying songs at 99 cents a pop. Music is never worth 99 cents a song, there are hundreds of thousands of songsn thta are worthless, there are hundreds of thousands of songs that are priceless. If I were to sit down the four major labels, why don’t you tell Steve Jobs where to go, get together and set up a subscription service, we’re willing to pay $10 a month to listen to anything anywhere anytime.

Music is supposed to be a service, not a product. The last 110 years of the music business has been an abberation, and it’s time for everybody to get over 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.

I was a med student the topic was chaos theory and smooth tissue in the male urethra. I learned about the idea of algorithmic art. Started computing my own Mandelbrot sets. Then and even today I don’t get that jazzed looking at at computer screen. I happened upon a stepper motor, stepper motorslet you create motion pixels. Maybe by using a computer program and messing with motion pixels you could create cool things. It took me a couple of months to really understand how to make a stepper motor run, then how to hook it up, then how to program it.

Brought the whole family together to see, they weren’t impressed. If I want to communicate how cool motion control is, I need to have a compelling demo. My kids came to the rescue, it was a week before Easter, and created a simple easter egg colorer. If you can control the position of two motors you can draw pictures, and etch-a-sketch is an excellent tool for that.

At a 3M auction I was able to get equipment that was really high-end, spent several years building my own CNC, built a plasma cutting rig. I’m passionate about using motion control for education, not just art. Was science in resident at Minneapolis science museum, from bits to bytes to bots. We used lightbulbs in class because learned painful lesson with eggs, and you can erase lightbulbs. Been really impressed to see the number of girls increase. Also got a chance tohave a more prolonged experience with math crew a middle school.

Art machines. I got better at building my CNC machines, then eBay happened making it easier even if you don’t live next to 3M making it easier to get access to this stuff. Pipedream I had 16 pixels with bubbles going through pipes. Pipedream III was trying to capture visitors faces in bubbles. Sisyphus I is a CNC machine where a magnetically controlled ball creates really interesting patterns in sand.

This may seem unrelated, inspired by ribbon dance. Created a ribbon dance CNC in Iowa. Now going to show Undula prototype. 5 years ago I got to be a visiting artist at the exploratorium, a good friend and exhibit designer had created a table-top exhibit called rope-shooter and visitors play with it. It’s like water but it’s not wet.

We want specific solutions to easily resolvable problems. When it comes to dog trainers owners don’t just make mistakes, they just get it all wrong. For example, let’s say someone has taken their dog to the park, the dog goes crazy, they put it on a leash, rewarding the dog for going crazy, they get pulled to the park and they keep walking rewarding the dog, and then they take it off the leash the biggest reward in urban dogdom, and then they call the dog over and when he comes they punish him by putting on the leash and wonder why he doesn’t come when called the next day.

Dog feedback is binary. Differential reinforcement. Punishment is the most misunderstood tool, doesn’t have to be painful or fearful to work, all we have to do is be calm and consistent. It’s not about dogs though, it’s about people. If you can’t house-train a puppy, how are you going to potty-train a child?

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.

Hirshberg: With Crossing Georgia you tried to do new media?

Kring: It jsut didn’t feel like it was an authentic extension of what the show was. It’s a quest to stay relevant as your audience is going away. So it was built-in from the beginning with Heroes, and that’s the whole idea behind transmedia storytelling.

Hirshberg: Compare the Heroes poster vs website. The birth was Star Wars Holiday Special.

[rolls clip]

Kring: So in the middle of this thing they run this cartoon, with Han Solo and R2, C3PO, they start to interact with Boba Fett, at that point there were probably several million 13-17 boys who is this guy and why is he talking to these characters I love? Next they started pushing the action figure, and it becomes the most fascinating thing for all these people, this strange character from outside the Lucas canon. 3 years later when he shows up in the sequel, millions of people had a personal experience with his appearance.

Kring: About three months before the show launched on TV we launched it at ComicCon, and from that an incredible viral movement launched and the early adopters went on the website, it became a phenom even before it launched.

Hirshberg: 30 years later history repeats itself, there’s a character that you built offline and then shows up on the show one day.

Kring: Hannah Gilman, the basic transmedia idea, to run concurrently with the show a series of online comic books that would carry on from where the show leaves off. And the she shows up in the show. For the fans who had been accessing the online content it was an incredible easter egg to have found. it gets to the psychology of transmedia, you get more social currency as a fan of the show, you dig deeper into the canon and mythology of the show.

Hirshberg: The NBC ad folks put together a promo of everything that was going on off-TV to say we’ve got you covered like with the Olympics. [video from the ad department] With so much canon, how do you balance people who are really into it and not confusing casual viewers.

Kring: It’s always been a challenge, we’ve tried to keep everything as additive. We want to use every part of the buffalo, in a way, nothing is wasted. If a character disappears on the show, he or she can live online, and vice versa.

Hirshberg: Part of the idea behind the show is that we’re all connected.

Kring: I started to realize how vast this online community was. The real underlying message of the show was interconnectivity and global conciousness, the fascination for many people was this connection to the message, it would be criminal not to use this tech-savvy and connected audience

Hirshberg: Here’s how a car company worked themselves into a show.

Kring: In the first season we were looking for a sponsor for the pilot and we got Nissan to do it, we came up with the idea of weaving it into the show. Our show is fairly expensive, and we need help, it’s our way of supplementing the budget of the show, and if the conversation happens early enough and we can start to weave it in like with the Nissan Versa.

Hirshberg: Shows Pinehearst commercial.

Kring: The idea of authenticity is very important, we’re connected to our fanbase by a very thin thread. Everything that is put out to the fans has to come from the writing room, during the strike there were some things put out like A Benjamin Franklin hero that electrocutes people.

I acquired the rights for a Broadway revival and began the task of getting it started, which meant we needed a director. If you have a good director, you can get the stars, and the stars make the show happen. They also had to be African American. The problem is there were only two people in the world that fit this, first is George Wolf and the second was Mariam Clinton. We had, as they say, artistic differences. Being a producer is like being a magician, you have to create the illusion for everyone that everything is moving forward all the time. White people told me it’s a black play and black people won’t come to broadway, and black people tell me the play is dated.

There was not one other African American director who had major Broadway experience. Raisin not a performance piece, it’s very well laid out by Lorraine. Isn’t the theater where men potrayed women 400 years ago, or the color-blind casting of the 70s. At the core was that story. Wilson said, “I’m not carrying a banner for black directors, I decline a white director not on the basis of race, but on the basis of culture.” We’ve heard this story before when Spielberg directed A Color Purple. We’re seeing the same story played out in the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington D.C. Back to Raisin. It’s now four years: no star, no director, there’s a possibility I’ll lose the rights.

I took a risk on a regional director, who had exactly one minor New York credit. Sean P. Diddy Combs would be making his Broadway debut with us. Kenny led the cast both onstage and off, and sure enough the scenes that usually put audiences to sleep, were riveting. Each night when they got to those scenes got an ovation. Raisin would succeed in drawing huge numbers of African Americans to the theater, most performances wer 80% black.

Most memorable night for me was when Mohammad Ali came. I’ve never seen famous people get so excited about seeing another famous people. P. Diddy grabs a picture of him he had on his dresser to get him to sign it. I think about it and I try to figure out where that leaves us, I feel a great love for this play and a deep connection to it, and I think many do, when I was watching Milk last week I was so happy gay people had made that movie. But should only women direct movies about women, or Muslim people direct plays about Muslims? It was Kenny’s culture, not his race, that contributed to the success of the production amoung many other factors. If there was a black director that grew up in Beverly Hills, would he be as qualified as one from Chicago?

Lincoln theater will be doing the first major rivival of August Wilson’s play since his death. Ultimately in this age of ubercommunications, the theater somehow survives. The reason is that theater, like this, is ultimately about community. I want the communities to grow and evolve, and to this I think we have to tell each other stories, but sometimes to grow we need to really sit back and listen.

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!

Not going to talk about Pixar.I’d like to pay homage to the theory of computability. It’s the theory of how computers work and one of the great inventions of humankind. The Turing and post research invented this theory of computation and it underlies our entire world today. But it’s recent. What I like about computability because it’s tied to what makes life tick, and what makes art tick. Everything I’ve done is tied together with living things, art, and computation.

I learned about computation theory as a graduate student at Stanford and learned it through the form of celluer atonoma theory. It turns out you can do anything in computing with it. I wrote my thesis on self-reproducing machines. These organizations of patterns, each its own computer, would over time build a copy of themselves ad infinitum. Even though I had these theories, my biggest thrill was to get the cover of Scientific American. The game of life had just come out, and it was the most popular topic that Scientific American had ever published.

I had a whole career in celluer atomona theory that most people don’t know about. I broke my leg skiing and decided I wasn’t doing anything with my art and it was time to move on. I went to Xerox PARC and talked my way into its halls at its apex, to help out with Paint. Not going to talk about it because two great books are out: Droidmaker and The Pixar Touch. Decided to go to my “old man stack” where I would put all the ideas I had but that I was too busy doing movies or starting companies. One of these was to do a mathmatical theory and have it published in a mathmatical journal. It’s a complete generation of Napoleon’s therom. It took a year.

Second thing on the stack was digital photography, spent a  year, went to Africa.

Third thing, do my Mom’s genealogy. This is a picture of New Mexico. Our version of US History was Spanish, didn’t care about back east. Our heroes were Coronado, Devargas, then there were the Pueblos along the Rio Grande. One remnant of this time is the name Pixar which is a Spanish verb meaning to make pictures, of course it’s made up. Mom was turning 80 and I decided I wanted to do something really special for her, she had given me an old notebook from a great-Aunt from New Jersrey, I deciphered it and found that it mentioned the Revolutionary War in there. I wrote up a short book and gave it to my Mom for her 80th. I sent it off to a place in Boston called the New England Genealogy Society. Lucky for me the woman who read it, one of the fellows, I wrote her saying she made a mistake, she said I didn’t make a mistake but I have a theory or your problem, and wrote it up in the scholarly way. I got a free tutorial on how to do it right. The theory is wrong, their families didn’t intersect, but you can have my Word document.

Took the 8-page document and blew it out to 583 pages. Three mentors there, one in the Great Migration which is everybody who came from England to New England between 1620 and 1640. He’s 9 volumes into what he thinks will be a 20 volume series about that period. Long story short I wrote a book for Mom, and then I noticed Dad was a little jealous so I did a book for him, over 800 pages. Now have published over 3200 pages of scholarly genealogy. Each is a footnote in each book. As one of my mentors said, “You’ll get over it, it’s not really about you.”

The Y chromosone is passed down the male chain unchanged, mitocondria is passed down the female chain unchanged. Did a DNA-enhanced descent chart, I was able to derived what the DNA of the ancestor had to be. Next thing I’m doing is going back to a paper I wrote in 1984, I generate things you can think of as genes and turn into plants, they grow, flower. That was four or five orders of computation magnitude ago, now want to see what I can do.

~ ~ ~

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.

Scott Kim’s website is at shufflebrain.com.

For the last 20 years I’ve been designing puzzles. Have done them for books, toys, computer games, puzzle column for Discover magazine.

A puzzle is a problem that is fun to solve (as opposed to everyday problems) and has a right answer (as opposed to a toy or game).

Puzzles are an art form. It’s a small form like a joke, poem, trick, or song, and the best ones are memorable. Shows the Vase/Profile.

Ambigram, going to feature heavily in next Dan Brown movie.

Rush Hour by Nob Yoshigahara, it’s a sliding block puzzle. I saw this idea and I wanted to make a sequel, it should have its own identity. Railroad Rush Hour, new square piece that can move both ways.

Dominate form of electronic gaming is casual (Bejeweled) and interactive (Rock Band). Second trend is mental fitness, games like Brain Age, Soduku. Third trend is social media, Facebook and Youtube.

First game is called Photograb. Next game will be called Wordstream.

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.

Second illusion shows the A and B squares are actually the same color:

Personal question, to find the best visual illusion. They run a contest every year.

These help reveal how our sensory systems work. Magicians use their intuitions to create the same things, and we can learn from them. Article in Scientific American this month.

How do magicians fool us? They use special effects, optical illusions, the most powerful weapon is the cognitive illusions, the manipulation, the channeling, the misdirection of attention and even memory.

[Watch it! That one blew me away.] A driver will be driving down the road looking for cars, not noticing cyclists and such. Now a Whodunnit video:

Is everything an illusion? The answer is yes. And no one has put this better than the famous philosopher, Keanu Reeves. Even after Neo picks the red pill, everything is still the result of electric impulses being transmitted and perceived by the brain. Our perception of the world is entirely illusion, everything we see is often very far from its reality.

Before you can call yourself an artist you have to cover a football field with your work. The shortcut I took was to become an illustrator. Many of the book covers he’s done are through Simon and Schuster, they were very open to allowing him to try different styles and approaches. Editorial is another huge place you see illustration work, I had a knack for doing likenesses, so I fell into Entertainment Weekly. Ended up with Mad Magazine.

Advertising was where I began in illustration, worked for ad agencies because it was a job as a staff illustrator, the work becomes very repetitive and is very deadline-driven. I enjoy it a lot more freelance because you get a variety of clients and directions. Size limitation on stamps is 5×7, the first assignment was the Elvis stamp. They do have to be incredibly simple, where my work was often referred to as “fussy” by the art director that hired me.

Posters are probably my favorite because they feel more like you’re doing a piece of artwork, sometimes people collect it, sometimes ends up framed on a wall. Got into doing posters for David Blaine for his very first stunt, a lot of times there’s hidden imagery or things that happen when the poster is rotated or turned, latest one was Dive of Death. When you turn it upside down you see his face. Did a big mural but hated working outdoors, doubt I would do it again. To me superheroes echo that dynanism that comes from the Renaissance period.

I’ve learned so much about illustration along the way, it’s important to enjoy the journey. Did the poster for Annie Get Your Gun, biggest break in New York.

First assignment for Mad Magazine was the Starr Wars on the Starr report.

First assignment from the Postal Service was Count Basie, art director called him up said “send me your best Elvis” they ended up with 60 Elvises and narrowed it down to two, and went up for public vote and sent out ballots across the US and you could vote for young or old Elvis. Mine run 3 to 1 margin, printing over 500 million in the end, equivilent of 289 football fields with just the Elvis stamp alone. In the end I may have earned my title… of “Illustrator.”

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, not despair convincing.” — Raymond Williams

“Everything works out alright in the end, if it’s not going right then it’s not the end yet.” — ?

Some of the largest companies in the world — IBM, GE, BP, Dow — have been saving huge amounts of money by accelerating their investment in energy efficiency. If we could save 3-4% a year in energy per $GDP we’d stabilize the climate, and it’s profitable! Focus on oil and electricity which are responsible for 4/5ths of the carbon emission in our country.

OilEndGame.com is how to get the US completely off oil by 2040. In the 8 years between 77 and 85 economy grew by 27% and oil consumption went down 15%. Each day your car uses 100x your car’s weight in ancient plants into your car. 87% of the fuel you use is wasted, 6% is used to heat the tires and the road, 0.3% of the energy is actually moving the driver. Toyota went out a 1/X concept car, it has the same interior area of the Prius but with 1/2 the fuel use and 1/3 the weight.

It took the auto industries 6 months to switch from making cars to making the stuff that won the war. Boeing was in deep trouble 11 years ago and their response was the Dreamliner, they’re sold out into 2018, just took 1000th order. It’s made half out of fiber. Rocky Mountain Institute is all about institutional acupuncture. The Pentagon is now the leader in the US government in getting the US not dependent on oil.

Think of it like a Saudi Arabia just found under Detroit when we switch cars to these new materials, and it’s 12x more crash-resistant to steel. It was change the managers or their minds, whichever comes first. 70% of our electricity goes to buildings, 30% to energy. Houses comfortable at 115 degrees outside due to super-insulation, better comfort, normal construction costs. Integrative design yielding multiple benefits from single expenditures, making big savings cheaper. Now designing new chip fabs, data centers, mines. Hatching a plot for the non-violent overthrow of bad engineering.

There is not a nuclear revival because there’s no investors. It saves carbon but much slower and more expensive than efficiency and micropower. If we set a good example in our own energy policy of reducing or eliminating nuclear we could take away the cover of proliferation that countries like Iran can use to start to develop and acquire the ingredients for nuclear bombs. Micropower is beating central plants wherever it’s allowed to compete. Profitable solutions exist for a richer, fairer, cooler, safer world, allow or require all ways to save energy to compete at fair prices regardless of their type, location, or size.

Applied Hope is the latest report they’ve released.

“Only puny secrets need protection, big discoveories are protected by public incredulity.” — Marshall McLuhan

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.

Jack McCornack. This thing is called a low-cost, it’s a high school auto version of a Lotus 7. It weighs about half as much out of a Miata, we thought it through as something that gets high performance and mediocre milage. What if we switched it around? I’m a big fan of minimalist design; optimist things the glass is half full, pessimist thinks it’s half empty, minimalist thinks we’re using twice as much glass as we need. Escape from Berkeley – year is 2020, petroleum is a controlled substance. There was a New York Times article about it. After we won it we headed back north, we had a 32 horsepower engine. It gets 70 MPG right now, more streamlined will take us to about 90 MPG.

Jim Stansbury. This is a topic about extremes, we’re addressing the opposite end, the SUV. Transformed the “Green Giant” a 1985 Blazer, turned it into an electric vehicle. Two big electric motors, battery packs, replaced shock absorbers with hydrolic pump. Take our big heavy goliath and exploit that, the pumps add power to the battery pack. [He's now explaining how the different systems feed electricity to each other.] Channels heat into a WHE, waste heat engine, like a steam engine. Put a solar collector on top of the roop, and add that heat to the waste heat engine.

In China bicycles are the #1 mode of transportation. One of the first products at Zap was an electric bikee, the law decided it was illegal because it was a motor on a bike, as long as it’s under 20 miles it’s still a bike, now have sold 100,000 of them. We made a 3-wheel electric vehicle, had to pass laws in 7 states to make it legal.  I did my first electric vehicle in 1973, because my professor said it was impossible. What about flying cars? THe Alias, wanted to create something that’s sexy, looks fast standing still, and that people actually want.

Airship Ventures. Story of bringing zeppelins back to the US. A shared dream with my wife, Alexander, and myself, we approached Zeppelin corporation, discovered they were still around. This is not your grandfather’s zeppelin. The ship contains the latest advancements over the past 70 years, rigid internal frame of carbon fiber, helium filled. How is the Zeppelin different? It’s much bigger. It’s about 246 feet long. The engines mounted on a blimp gondola are like a puffer fish, they’re small and not very efficient. Zeppelins have an aft engine, can take off at a 80 degree angle, more like a helicopter than anything else. Took about 18 months to build, finished May of this year, flew around Europe for a few months, and then had to get it here. Range of about 500 nautical miles, and only one month of the year it could do a crossing. Put it on a dock ship, to Beaumont, Texas. Reassembled it, and then we flew it here to California. The things we saw across the US were amazing, wild horses followed the shadow of the ship, it really gave you perspective of how darn big this country is. Eventually we reached California, went through Long Beach, came up the coast to CA, made a grand entrance over the Golden Gate Bridge, hovered, spun in place, flies at 1000 feet. Home is hanger 2 at Moffett field. Three models: flight-seeing, science missions, and advertising.

The things we need to expand the human race are in abundant supply in space.

Let me speak about what drives us to make those things happen. Eugene Cernan, the last human on the moon as he’s jumping three feet up in the air, he said “Nothing… NOTHING is impossible” if we can do that.

Gene Cerman on the moon

Everything can be done by bringing together the right people, the right capital, and the right technology. To do something fundamentally different is very risky. Society as a whole holds us back, because the goal is to maintain the status quo. If anything can go wrong, fix it! When given a choice, take both! Start at the top and work your way up. When forced to compromise ask for more. No simply means try harder. Best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.

In 1993 I walked into the offices of the FAA and they said it will never happen. Got approval 11 years later: gozerog.com. The person I enjoyed flying the most was Stephen Hawking, it was actually against the rules to fly him, the rules said they needed able-bodied people. We got permission to fly him the day before we took off, which was very convenient. Had 4 ER docs and full emergency room set up. He holds the same chair at as Isaac Newton at Cambridge. They had planned on doing one dive, maybe two if things went really well — they ended up doing 8 parabolas. They’ve been able to change the rules and have taken up a number of wheelchair bound children since then.

Next impossible thing, met Richard Garriot, said I’d love to fly into space. Went and negotiated with the Russians to fly private citizens into the space station. To date there have been 6 customers, started at 20 million, up to 35 million dollars a pop. Sergey Brin put down a deposit on an orbital flight. The idea to create a new generation of private spaceships. I had no idea that Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic to win a price.  Offered 25k to the first person to fly from New York to Paris, 9 teams spent 400k. Lindbergh was 25 years old, within 18 months of his flight passengers increased 30x, number of aircraft increased 4x, aviation stocks soar.

Aviation didn’t get easier, but that event changed what people believed was possible, it was a paradigm change. Could that bring along a new generation of private spaceships to take us into space? The X was going to be the name of the person who put up the money, eventually kept the X and called it the Ansari X Prize. 10 million dollar prize purse, privately funded teams, 3 person reusable spaceship, 100km altitude. Announced in May of 96, 26 teams spent 100 million to win the prize.

Decided to create a prize organization, the leverage of 10-40x above the prize size, and the efficiency of only paying the winners, to affect change. 10 million dollar prize ofor the first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. 30 million Lunar X prize, private robot to land on the moon. Will probably beat governments back to the surface of the moon. Progressive Automotive X Prize – to inspire a new generation of vehicles, clean production-capable vehicles that achieve at least 100 MPG. Will do races in 5-10 of the top US cities.

The X Prize Foundation has built and organized to identify the grand problems of our time. We’re looking forward to launching a couple of prizes a year. We’re focused underwater, energy and environment, life sciences “bionic human”, health care, global development and education, clean water, power, hunger. Every problem on this planet is solvable, and somewhere on this planet of 6 billion people there are folks who can make magic happen.

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.

When I started out from zero, it was a pretty steep learning curve, gathered the books and DVDs and videos, dissections, but still after sketching had some leftover organs. I bought a skeleton, statred to try and understand the backbone a little bit, this magnificant column. The parts of each vertabae, nice place to attach all those tendons and ligaments. The discs, are very squishy in the middle and firm on the outside. Also trying to think of ways to present this information to everybody else after I’ve learned enough. Wanted to find a good way to explain the heart. Made something that looked like something you could make from Ace Hardware. [Shows picture of three digestive systems at happy hour.]

I would come back at the end of the day either in the hospital or with medical student and try to make drawings to see if I really was getting a sense of what was happening inside. Photographers don’t have the luxury of ignoring gravity, illustrators do. Another way to lay this out I thought about was to create a campus, a sort of world’s fair of the body. It’s really as story about cells, and I didn’t realize that when I started. I was trying to draw a double-helix in a way it’d never been drawn before, a pretty useless exercise since it’s been drawn in every conceivable way.

Whenever I got despondent about this book being too much for me I’d discover something like the eye and how the cells bend and stretch in the lens. [He's now going all the way through cells, RNA, DNA replication, the nervous system, a fast-paced serious of illustrations. This is one to wait for the video for!]

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.

Tempo. Some towns people walk around slow and easy, in NYC it’s a race. Same thing with ants. Slowest ant is the mud ant, it chases snails in super slow-motion. You speed up things as they get bigger. We go faster in bigger cities because we learn more, same thing with ants, they learn from the streams as they go through. You look at a big society, you see ants going the wrong direction sometimes. Error in big societies can lead to innovation.

Communications. Smaller societies are simpler communications, one ant will lead another to the food. The army ants of Africa, had swarms of these coming at me that are 100 feet wide with millions of ants. In these situations there’s a huge amount of redundancy. They don’t tie up cows in Africa because the army ants can kill them, they wander around with good reasons. There are beetles that pretend to be ants.

Specialization. Bigger socities get a lot more division of labor. They send the “cheap” ants first, the bigger ants come later, they’re 500x the size of the smaller ones. Lake Tahoe is the center for ant slaver in the US.

Assembly lines & teamwork. A big one starts dragging a piece of food, and a smaller one comes under it and picks up the end. There are other ants that serve as living roadfill, they lie down in the holes along the way. Ultimate assembly line is leaf-cutter ants, they take the leaves back to the nest and then grow fungus. They mash it up and different sized ants do different duties until it gets reduced to a pulp and they plant. They do everything human farmers do, including antibiotics, pesticides, fertalizer. Leaf-cutter ants will bury their garbage in a container the size of a human casket 20 feet down, they also put diseased organisms down there, the workers that do that are the old ones that are going to die soon anyway. They used to grow fungus on stones, about 10 million years ago they figured out to grow it on leaves and now the fungus is no longer biodiverse so it’s vulnerable to disease just like we have.

Infrastructure. They have nests 40 feet wide, underground beltways between the nests.

Warfare. Ants and humans are the only species with long-term warfare. You work out things with your neighbor until you have a no-ant-zone between you where no ant will tread. This is the terrorist ant from ??? it literal blows up when another ant approaches it, explodes and exudes this poisonous liquid. Army ants are so good at killing they have a sort of detente, but they’re civilized in that they won’t kill each other. Honey ants in American Southwest checking out each other’s size out, they look at each other and whoever is bigger wins.

The Argentine ant extends from San Francisco all the way down to Mexico. It’s a single social unit. If you go to the right suburb of San Diego, this is a pile of ants going on continously, million of ants are dying every day there are no truces, they just keep killing each other in the backyards of these houses and appear to have been doing so for about 100 years.