Stolen Goods

I spent the weekend under a tent in Nantucket with about 450 cheerfully curious people trying to figure out what matters. Here’s what I took home from 40 TNP talks given by scientists, tech heads, artists, producers and business folk. First, the video they made with an excerpt of my wrap up. Then, for the more curious, a complete transcript with related links.

Let’s start with a dozen facts:

There is a race in Queens where people run 60 miles a day for 52 days in a row around a quarter0mile track.

98% of maternal deaths in childbirth are preventable.

Food is medicine.

Our brains have shrunk 10% in the last 20,000 years.

Some days, growing up, Harvard graduate Liz Murray and her family got by on ice cubes and toothpaste.

Aging is a consequence of physics, not biology.

100 million sharks are killed a year for soup and we really need sharks. No sharks no fish, no fish no ocean, no ocean no planet.

The laws about what cosmetics industry can put in our make up are 78 years old and 85,000 chemicals ago.

Teddy Pendergast was the most sexual animal on the planet and Charles Bronson was an ass.

Billy Corgan saves kittens.

Larry Gordon was a penis extra in Boogie Nights.

Children, not minerals, not oil, are a country’s greatest natural resource.

Addiction is a disease.

Great lines from the stage:

“Self righteousness feels good for a minute, like pee in your pants feels warm for a minute.”

“Given the choice between butter and a bagel? Eat the butter.”

“God’s language is silence; everything else is a poor translation.”

“Preach from your scars not your wounds.”

“When an old person dies it’s like a library burning.”

“Adversity isn’t all bad; there are gifts to where we come from.”

“Women aren’t immune to misogyny.”

“Anchor up.”

“Incentives define the world: we get whatever we pay for.”

Few handy definitions:

Cynicism is atrophied imagination and morality is jealousy with a halo and art is the reconciling of opposites to make a 3rd more beautiful thing.

(Wayne White also defined the 70s as a “Cocaine fueled cluster fuck,” which, I submit to Professor Pedant, has a certain poetic ring)

Things I learned during the breaks:

When Monica Lewinsky checked in she started spelling her last name…

When you sneeze at The Nantucket Project, at least 5 people say God Bless You.

There are people working so hard to accept unthinkable situations:

A mother’s murder

A husband’s incurable cancer

A suicide

Observations

The Age diversity here is awesome, even if it meant that when I met a woman who went to my high school and said I graduated in ‘85 “when she was probably in diapers” she smiled in the damnedest way until I grocked that she had not yet been born…

Whistling, like music, is therapeutic.

If you want to make yourself interesting to your teenagers, you have to run marathons and go to Navajo reservations to save mothers’ lives.

Our physical health, the health of the planet and the health of the economy all benefit from the same food choices.

Within 30 years, we might all be living a lot longer with a higher quality of life, assuming we maintain our bodies like some British people do their cars but taking care of ourselves will be way easier because if we’re worried theres something weird going on, instead of making an appointment to slid into a $2 million MRI machine, we will put on a ski cap. Also we will be communicating with animals, 3D printing our furniture and participating in salons all the time. SO that’s awesome. But, then, we’ll also be ants under the indifferent foot of artificial super intelligence so…

Between now and then, we need contemplative routines to think more deeply.

Discovery and progress go much faster when we collaborate.

Humility is required. So is candor.

Vegan food well prepared is crazy good.

It’s super hard and often career-endangering to ask your employer a lot of questions and every person in here who is a woman or loves a woman is very lucky that Hope Solo will not be rolled.

A lot of cool things would not exist if people like Billy Corgan and Wayne White listened to the people who told them to “stay in their lane” and “not be too much trouble.”

Tom Scott doesn’t have a button on his shirt. He has a safety pin. The whole year, he works on this weekend and then he packs a shirt with no button…

Natural selection has a lot to teach us about perception, and reality, and conscious experience.

People from Chatanooga says Chatanugga and people from Mississippi say Miss-sippi and also there might be a creative advantage being from remote places like Maine and Kentucky.

If Norman Lear calls you a mensch, Mike Myers will make a movie about you.

I’m never making a landscape video again and I’m going to night school to get my MFA in Latte Art.

Retired guys with great names you don’t hear much anymore, like Shep and Bernie, managed world-class careers on handshakes.

When pulling a name out of the hat to make a point, Shirley is a funny one.

The father son thing, the idea of having a catch and all that implies, just cannot be overstated.

Shame is life threatening. For wayward sons. For 22 year old white house interns.

There’s nothing hotter than brains. Behold the sex symbol that is Norman Lear.

A lot of roads lead to professional wrestling.

Gordon Gund can see. He can see a lot.

Conclusions

We’re going to forget all but a couple facts, maybe one or two specifics . But we will remember how we feel.

If a girl can swallow and metabolize the disgust of the entire world and become a woman who can use that for good…If Nicholas Negroponte can get 3 million laptops into the hands of children in 8 months…If Wayne White can get from the viewfinder in his backyard to Pee Wee’s playhouse in Manhattan…what is possible that we are pretending is not?

Feeling — feeling mad, moved, mystified — is the engine of all good work.

We are not here to absorb each other stories and witness each others’ passions and go home unchanged. We’re here to do things together; when people tell the story of their life, and it’s a happy story, it’s because they were lighted upon by a mentor, an angel investor, a wife that said: you could end your life … or we could find a cure.

Let’s be in touch. Let’s do the next right thing. Let’s fix shit.