Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman "One Way": Richard Saul Wurman at TEDxGrandRapids

I sang on the bus to the speakers, they put me on a bus this morning from the hotel and I sang a good morning song, you know, good morning, good morning, you're all in your places with sunny faces, oh, this is it. the way to start each new day good morning that was the delay time was reasonable the half life the half life was okay so my name is Richard Saul Wurman. I'm going to talk about a couple of details to start and then he'll point me to this lovely man Dan Klein everything is a detail like I sat in the middle of a row to make it clear that I didn't sit in a safe seat.

I think speakers should come from all parts of the audience because there shouldn't be a place even if it's convenient it shouldn't be a place and there shouldn't be a play now these seem like funny fools think that everything I say makes sense honestly They seem funny but sometimes some of the most incredible things you learn in a joke because a joke is the construction of the opposite of an expectation or a radical alternative how wonderful a joke is just think about George Carlin when you think about that just think about it but in this audience I'm not going to say all if you could get on stage but you could say there are 25 or 30 people who could get up here and the speakers can come from anywhere and symbolically there should be people we could be sitting in the aisles and come from anywhere because we all What we're doing is talking to each other and the TEDx Ted events that were invented by Laura Stein in Ted is quite surprising, the difficulty is that it's a little bit in Silica.

Most of these are local events so most of you know each other or come from something local where the original TED conference really had people coming from all over and what it did was you met people you never would have met and that changed those circles. in your life now the circles that will change today are people talking about things that you didn't think interested you and you will see a connection to what the topic is, the topic, could you use any word as a topic, you know, I mean, that's just people sitting around and arguing, what should we do? call it this year and you could call it read and then you could have the same conference that we're on a read topic, you could say, if IBM did an exhibition on their work, you could just call it blue and you could connect it. to Gainsborough's Blue Boy or why the sky is bluer this or blue water or I'm blue and music and all kinds of things so that everything connects people fight over topics to call things and you don't have to quote my last book.

I just called it 33. I called it 33 because it was a sequel to a book I had done 33 years before. It didn't mean anything and it doesn't have to mean anything, so in one of my recent things I spoke twice yesterday and some. Of the people here heard me, there are a couple of students, so it's funny. I know I'm going to say some things you might avoid. I mean, one has a limited repertoire, at least what comes to mind and when you're a little older, but one thing I talked about yesterday was already read, I don't think I've been thinking much lately and it's not like You know, the stars won't explode nor the lightning, and it will be a wonderful breakthrough for you, but if you do it, it might happen.

I later told you this while having

conversation

s. I've been thinking in the most basic way. One question: what are the most basic things you ask? Well, one of the most basic things you ask from a child onwards is what is life, what is life and if. in this front row I had the Pope and I had the president and I had a microbiologist and I had my mother she's dead well the Pope is dead well there's a live poll and then I could have a convicted serial killer in which we see them television, so there are a lot of them out there and so on, a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief, things like that and I asked each of them very seriously and not as a joke, that question: what is life? , everyone would answer are really very different and simple questions.

I mean, there's nothing more basic than that: what life is and the answers would be tied to what they think they should say, what's the way we respond to things. I mean, the Pope could believe one thing and say another, the murderer could believe something like that. It's convenient and sufficient his imminent death if I mean saying they're going to fry him or something, so part of their response will be what they think they should say and part will be what they believe, but everyone would be different in this simple case. The questions and many of the questions you ask each other every day are more complex than that, so how do we have a

conversation

?

How do we have a conversation where there is meaning back and forth? I have a badge that I won't wear because what's on the badge is my real name I don't know you guys I don't want you to say hello Richard It's this fake friendship that we know I want There's a last name that could represent someone I'd like to meet I don't know their name name, if I'm at a conference, I was talking to the person sitting next to me back there and I told him that if I was at a shipping conference, I wouldn't come up and say, "Hey Fred, I'd like to see your name Smith, owner of FedEx , every little detail that you see, the house lights are on because I want to see you.

I had to ask for the house lights to be turned on because the nature of having a conversation on stage is to see people and I really see people here. Even you wouldn't think you could, but you really can, you really can see faces and you get a sense of whether they're listening to you or not, and these lights that are somewhere there, they're usually so bright that the person on stage is blinded because that's the standard way of illuminating things, everything is standard and I like the question, the details to try to find a direction, a clear way of how to subtract things to get to the essence of things.

I did a conference. For a year and a half I've still been making things that I sold. I rented it for 18 years. I'm not going to tell you the whole story, but I ran it for 18 years and Chris Anderson is running it now for the last 12 years and Laura Stein, who's not here today, is the person in her organization who recently left who started all the TEDx stuff and I think his extruder didn't think I thought it was Ted Light I thought it was a stupid idea. because I'm not very compassionate and I think it turned out that, you know, someone who becomes something really becomes a conduit and I think the TEDx thing is really wonderful, really wonderful and much better than I thought.

It would be that it really surprised me and when something is really better than you think, you think you have it, you carry it because you question your stupidity and you question your own inabilities, it makes you feel, it makes me feel that there is so much. There's a lot of stupidity in my life to fix and it gives me something to do every day and my power and the reason I'm more powerful than anyone in this room is because I'm more accepting of my ignorance and you're more accepting of your ignorance. I know how profoundly ignorant I am and I know it in every moment of every day in every conversation in every exchange in every face I see I know how ignorant I am and I kinda know it and that stupidity that amazingly wonderful blank slate with which I getting up every morning is actually very exciting, go ahead, I'm delighted to have you as a teacher and this is not something you signed up for.

I've just asked you to interact with me over the years and you've been very kind and I've talked to you many times about your Professor Leucon and one of the things that you and Lou would do and I think it relates to what you just said is that instead of moving forward from the problem that the client brings in architecture when you were Working in architecture, you talked about moving back from the problem to innocence and being foolish and, typically, a relationship with a teacher is often based on become more expert and I love the idea that one of the ways Lou taught you was by delighting in being silly together I think I don't think he taught me I thought it allowed me to learn, it allowed me to be more of myself I don't think Don't teach anyone if you can give people permission to be more of themselves.

I gave the commencement speech last year at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and my speech was a simple speech. I just thought about five four five of my friends who were involved in architecture and the room where the parents and the teachers, the parents and their students were there. There are your kids, I'm sorry and I knew they just didn't want to be there anyway they wanted to go out. I mean, no one wants to go to a commencement speech and then the next day see another commencement speech. They just went through a pretty arduous, very expensive, few years of their life at Harvard and they want to get out of there and I mean, but that's all reasonable, it makes sense, there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm going to give a commencement speech and weeks. at another university and I know the same thing who the hell wants to see someone in black ropes standing in front of us say you are the great generation I mean it's bullshit I mean you every every every generation is just a generation it's not a great generation, it just happens that way because God invented time, so it didn't all happen at the same time, think about how complicated it is, so I picked these five people and nine and none of them beat them, more or less, none .

None of them had a silo, they went from private to general and many of you still have most of you in this room or if you do something pretty well you want to keep doing it and do it better and repeat it and do it better if I do something it turns out well why? do it again why would you want to do with what you already did I'm going to die soon that's just the fact why would you want to do it again and your silo can tip over you can find something else that interests you and do it and accept that terror the terror of not I know what the hell I was going to say, going up on stage here, that's kind of terrifying, but it's delicious.

I would have liked to have gotten up this morning and not had that terror. No, I would like to have that advantage in my day of not knowing why it makes you feel things. I've always had that advantage. My father went through depression and he was totally risk-averse and that seemed like it to me. It's strange because he was very charismatic but risk averse. I'm quite charming. I'm pretty charismatic myself, but I'm much more abrasive than him and I'm really willing to be the moth that catches the flames on a daily basis. I'm unemployed I'm unemployed and that's I don't like for ticket a paycheck wouldn't do it I am very much I'm very envious of people who are asked to do things I've done eighty-three books I'm working on two more now no one has asked me to do a book no one is I have attended about 40 conferences no one has ever asked me to do a conference They ask me to talk about places that is the only thing they ask of me so I do it because it is a great seduction for Me and I We can be, you know, paralyzed by seduction, you know, I mean, Wow, someone wants me, you know, that speech at the Academy Awards, they like me, they really like me, so talking somewhere if I'd like a private plane to bring me here. so I'm mad about that because it was hard to get here and yesterday I missed a whole conference because the plane broke down.

Traveling is not fun, but the idea of ​​chatting with people and trying to improve your game and that's what I'm doing. trying to do and every once in a while you know yesterday in the speech every once in a while I'll say geez, I never said that before and you can say things that you've never said before and that's all you can see what kind of jobs or what it is that It's interesting, a lot of people show slides most of the time. I don't show anything because I realized that when you show slides, what you become as a title, the next person will show slides, a lot of slides, so he just thinks of it as a caption under the slide.

I've never met him, so he doesn't, I have nothing personal in it and I sit somewhere else so he doesn't have the opportunity to not talk to me if I tell you a story about things, you decide to take that story home in your head and then you won't, but you don't own my story because I've already worked it out for you. Me too. The students who were with me yesterday know that I actually asked people to never take notes but to just listen and I think by taking notes you tell your brain that you don't have to remember that because it's done it's a crutch a strange crutch all that said I have three or four words on this, but to be fair, I wrote them, although you didn't, he wrote to him because he wanted me to cover things here.

Gutenberg, okay, yes, we are supposed to talk about technology, oh yes, tecna's technology. yeah, okay, I'll talk first before the technology. I'm going to talk about no, no, it's about technology, but I'm going to talk about a theory that I have about innovation because we went where the word innovation is used, you know absolutely, I mean you. I'll hear it all day today that it will slip out even when I warn you not to talk about innovation, it will just slip out because we're using that word, it's one of those buzzwords that we use all the time and innovation. for most things that are called innovation or incremental change or just an improvement of something in innovation, I recently tried to come up with some of you, I foundThere was a theory about how to organize information called a latch that seems to be of established origin. theory by location outside of that category of time and hierarchy, there are only five ways to organize information, so I tried to come up with a theory of innovation and I just have to delve into this.

Several people asked me, well, what did you do before you did Ted? I didn't do Ted, it was an elaborate hobby. What I do was an elaborate hobby, it's not what I did, it's not what I do, it's never what I did or did. I get up in the morning and have an interesting day consisting of a lot of unplanned things and phone calls, but that's not what I do. I don't know, if you sat next to me on a plane your ear would fall off because I would talk so much or I would just say I'm gainfully unemployed anyway, so innovation, so I thought. from an idea of ​​how to code innovation I came up with an acronym called nose a and OS e because I realized I think this is right because no one said it's not and someone says it's not right.

I will change my speech next time I have no deep investment in anything I do I have a deep investment in doing a good job so I will change it in a minute the next lecture I'm going to do is called five five five originally it was called prophecy 2025 Someone says you can't do prophecy 2025 in Emmerich you can't use the word prophecy. I instantly changed it to five five five, which is finding the future first. I just changed it. I changed it about five minutes after the person told me. I called my office and changed the website.

I will change anything if I can do a better job. I have no personal interest in anything other than trying to see something that is clear, so in those positions for addition you need opposites, subtraction and epiphany, and I think those are the ways you innovate the car or I guess my iPhone It's in my pocket. I called twice during a speech yesterday, but it's an addition, it's innovation by adding a lot of things together, there are some special technologies within that, but basically it was the combination. of all these things in the thin hand the whole package that innovation is innovation is that it is the combination of these things the car there are wagons with four wheels around no one sat down in Germany or France and invented a car there were several engines that had been invented a long time ago a steam engine and an internal combustion engine an electric Stirling engine they put them on a four-wheeled thing and connected it to some wheels, they're still adding things to the car, you know, the camera they put on the back so that you can see who you run over they're still adding things to the car you know it's easy you know that's why innovation happens a lot of medical things are thanks to me there's a palpable need for a malaria vaccine there's a device when they rip your head off knee or they do something to your hip there are many medications many things there is anesthesia there are things that people think are really innovative there are live vaccines and dead vaccines socks the big breakthrough was just making a dead vaccine so where did you take the Salk vaccine that was not in the United States because it was more expensive than the Sabin vaccine but in other places you really got rid of the disease that's why there is still some polio around the world because they use the Sabin vaccine in those countries or no vaccine at all so we have the nose , you scratch your nose when you think about something, that's why I thought it was funny, oh, their opposites, so many things are the opposite of preconception, we already talked about jokes being the opposite of The rich Niels Bohr talked about his great Nobel Prize of Physics, talked about their great advances in observing the opposites of things.

Many of you google opposites and you will see a staggering number of advancements that are the opposite of the preconception engine in the front of the car engine in the back of the car engine in the middle of the car the opposite real radical changes subtract radical alternative the TED conference I got rid of the fat white men in big seats that our CEOs and politicians I don't know if any speakers or CEOs or politicians, but I never had a CEO or politician at my conferences. I can't quite tell the truth, but legally they can't get a receipt.

I cannot legally tell the truth about your company because if it is a public company, I am not allowed to tell the truth and the politician does not have to explain that, but that is not a pejorative, that is now. I had politicians like John Warnock, who was the head of Adobe, and he will come into In the next story, Adobe writes a lot of typography and collects first edition scientific books, so he brought those books worth a couple of million dollars to the stage and we had a table and a camera and we could look at those books and he could say. he told us about those books he never talked about, the only time he talked about Adobe was when he came to the Gutenberg Bible and said we can't set up a book that well now, even with computer time typing on a computer, no you can do it as well as the The first book is fascinating, it is really interesting and now we will talk about Gutenberg, who was born in 1297 and made his book in the book that we know he made the Gutenberg Bible about the search for a tea oven and 1340 and composed it of furniture. -typography was the most important thing we know and the printing press the printing press was a stupid thing the printing press was like a wine press, that was not a great advance he and his brother took a wine press and discovered that instead of crushing grapes , pumped and hit a plate but hit a piece of paper on some type and that was no big deal the printing press was no big deal setting the type and carving the type and making a 126 letter alphabet was the Big Deal, it did 126 letters in his alphabet, so he had in his letters the combination of the spacing between all the letters so that each letter is perfectly spaced.

Now you can't choose anything where the letters are perfectly spaced anywhere. It is not done in any. computer program and it is not made in the expectation type of notebook configured and written better than the first Gutenberg Bible and we think about the Gutenberg Bible that brought, brought books to the world yes, made about a hundred ATMs and they were very expensive and They didn't have page numbers so you couldn't find anything in them find non-trivial things all people are buying companies for billions of dollars it's about how to find something Google it's about how to find something how to find images how to organize pictures how to do this how to get rid of things just organize everything finding things the yellow pages were a very successful business for years and years and years was finding things how to find them were in the business of finding them a guide is finding something and the index is about about finding and finding things is this one of the great topics in life you know, you know how to find things and you know and burgers are big business, so I subtracted the reserved seats, a speaker just came from anywhere if the room was full, They sat in the aisles, if you had a physical problem you could sit in the front row if you were over 90, overall it's good and my wife had a seat in the middle of the front row, it was safe for her. that was it, no one else, no one was a VIP, no one got special treatment except me, but I mean I was running that, that was understandable, well this is understandable, I mean why wouldn't I write that it was my party and I would think of this as a dinner that It was my welcome everyone, welcome to the dinner that I always went to.

I couldn't think about what that means: you're going to a dinner party because you trust the host or hostess, that they're going to invite people who they think have selected the fact that they think you'll like them, and they're going to put you next to someone. who they think you'd like to talk to, okay, this isn't curated that way, it's created based on you sitting next to them. someone you will meet, which is fine, but you trust that you are all kindred spirits because there has been a filtering system to bring you here because you choose to come here, you choose to spend the time, therefore it is money and your time is valuable even If you don't get paid like me, it's valuable because you die so every time you pass in your life it's valuable to you and that's why you come here, that's your investment here and you'll probably meet some people that you'll meet again. talk and those you wouldn't talk to. you have met and when you do this on a global level and people come in then you have the opportunity to completely change these circles these connections in your life had to invent ink because there was only water-based ink had to invent an ink that stuck had an event paper because they only had development and sheepskins or whatever they had and he really invented all the paper the press the ink the typography the way to make time to create a 42 line Bible and he printed just a couple hundred and now we come the second theme unintended unintended consequences ninety-nine years later they used it to find things and they realized that in books they could find things and the church saw it as a way to print something over and over and over and over again.

They once called indulgences so that rich people could buy these pieces of paper and not confess and they made a lot of money with that and Martin Luther, one of the things he put in the church was a diatribe against the indulgences that came from Gutenberg who with his brother he died in 1368 bankrupt he didn't even make any money from it for the next two hours I'm going to talk about some other things Do you want to talk about the urban observatory? I'll talk about the urban observatory. You better put up with that because they'll talk to you for a long time.

I'm out of time and they're going to get squeamish there and I've got a little movie to show and that'll make them leave. a little crazy but it's okay, you'll have lunch a little later and the next speaker is furious, you only understand something relative to something you understand, that sounds in the clip, it's not a joke, some of you who learned in school and then a acre. It's 43,560 square feet and if most of you forget that when you buy land, you care, but now I'm going to tell you it's an anchor and you can't forget it because I'm telling you how it's relative. to something you understand, it's a little bit smaller than a football field without the end zones, that's an acre, you'll never forget that I have to get through everything quickly because I'm not going to be really horrible here, you'll know that the blue whales We are a large whale, it is the largest of all animals, diffusely replaced between animal and plant, we know that, but we will abandon it for the moment, so I am referring to this plant life, fungi and algae that is larger than anything else except us.

Let's forget that for the moment, animal life and fungi are closer to us than many animals, by the way, genetically, but that's a whole other story and, by the way, it's correct, so the whale is 90 feet long. long, they don't know much about her. It's bigger than any dinosaur they've found so far and you'll forget it, but I'm going to tell you something you can talk about in a bar tomorrow night. Its tongue is as big as a bus. It's as hard as it is. It's as big as a Volkswagen. It's as big as a Volkswagen. order that reaches the heart, you can swim through the Volkswagen was the first person.

Hitler's people's car first came out in 1935, the year I was born, so did the Toyota, and he also invented 35 was nylon, the first asset. The thing with the radar happened in 1935 Carlos Gardel, the leader, anyone from a large part of Argentina, here you know who Carlos Gardel is, eh, I said, you know who the Carlos cartel is, how is it possible that you don't know who Carlos Gardel is? He invented the tango, well, okay, you see, everything connects, I mean. I could go on now with that whole flow of World War II and the tango and that dance and what that dance in the architecture of that dance is and connected with other dances and connected with things for several hours, everything connects and it would be perfectly listenable .

That little trip would seem interesting to you, so there are no two cities in the world that have maps of the same scale or with the same legends. Now I know you don't think you think about Google Maps. I'll just say you want to Google it. Earth Google Maps featured three cities and shows a comparison of their land use. Well, you can't, you can't show a comparison of things and the only way to understand something is relative or something you understand, the only way you should take policy on this. city ​​is to understand other cities and what they have done that was successful and Itzik was not successful in a similar way in similar population or land use patterns or other things so that you can understand learn from that, not necessarily copy it sometimes it is to avoid it we speak a language we have similar we should have similar languages ​​I just showed you that we don't we can't say what life is like if I ask those people to write on a little piece of paper what is comfortable being rich rich is that everyone would have a different answer and yet you use that word every day so my time is really up.

I'm going to go over this now very quickly. This is an ex concept where we have in this first we have 13 cities. you can choose any three cities, you can make their scales go up and down, there are a lot of categories that are all the sameof these 13 cities, we're going to have 50 cities up to 51 cities in a remake of this in July and then it will open as a big exhibit on electronic panels with a search panel at the Smithsonian in the mall that they're redoing as quite an exhibit elegant that will be exportable and will live on the cloud and will be ready next On February 10, come to the inauguration in Washington.

I'm going to finish this, the first full set of slides tomorrow. I thought it would end on a high note. This was for my 75th birthday, I'm 79 now, but there's no sound he wants you to understand. I think we should, I was very sure. I'm sorry, but he has written over 80 books. There are more than 80 books on 60 unexplored topics, without understanding any of them. now Isaac Abraham and Jacob how much I loved Richie what do you love most what do we love most when he gives us food he meets a lot of famous people and lives in the mansion he uses a lot this car is my how they make him look handsome he He found Ted and he found a dead man.

His activity never ceases inside his head. He writes his emails in all caps. He cries on cheesy television and doesn't have a suit. He is known for cursing on stage and loves maps. He is vain with his ears and feet they are very cute he cuts his hair and is addicted to chicken soup 575 new good he only dances when he is drunk thank you every phone call will change his life he is very, very proud of his children he is a great painter and Loves his wife is wrong 87% of the time, but that's okay, there's no question, he accepts his own ignorance like a little boy just starting out.