I had the pleasure of attending a special TED event in 2014. TEDSalon Berlin was just a one day affair, yet it featured a number of compelling talks that served as examples of impactful stories on global issues. This post is an analysis of a talk given by Simon Anholt.
Watch Simon Anholt’s TED Talk. We all know that some countries are much more concerned with the fate of the entire world, but how can the level of a country’s goodness be measured? It seemed to be an impossible task to me, but Simon describes how it can be done, and it remains one of my favorite TED Talks.
Do you want to live in a powerful country, a rich country, a happy country, or a good country? Regardless of how you answer the question, the underlying point of this talk (in my opinion) is to encourage us to think differently about how we perceive countries around the world. Will your story shift people’s perceptions?
Transcript
(my notes in red)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the world recently and how it’s changed over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Twenty or 30 years ago, if a chicken caught a cold and sneezed and died in a remote village in East Asia, it would have been a tragedy for the chicken and its closest relatives, but I don’t think there was much possibility of us fearing a global pandemic and the deaths of millions. Twenty or 30 years ago, if a bank in North America lent too much money to some people who couldn’t afford to pay it back and the bank went bust, that was bad for the lender and bad for the borrower, but we didn’t imagine it would bring the global economic system to its knees for nearly a decade.
This is globalization. This is the miracle that has enabled us to transship our bodies and our minds and our words and our pictures and our ideas and our teaching and our learning around the planet ever faster and ever cheaper. It’s brought a lot of bad stuff, like the stuff that I just described, but it’s also brought a lot of good stuff. A lot of us are not aware of the extraordinary successes of the Millennium Development Goals, several of which have achieved their targets long before the due date. That proves that this species of humanity is capable of achieving extraordinary progress if it really acts together and it really tries hard.
But if I had to put it in a nutshell these days, I sort of feel that globalization has taken us by surprise, and we’ve been slow to respond to it. If you look at the downside of globalization, it really does seem to be sometimes overwhelming. All of the grand challenges that we face today, like climate change and human rights and demographics and terrorism and pandemics and narco-trafficking and human slavery and species loss, I could go on, we’re not making an awful lot of progress against an awful lot of those challenges.
So in a nutshell, that’s the challenge that we all face today at this interesting point in history. That’s clearly what we’ve got to do next. We’ve somehow got to get our act together and we’ve got to figure out how to globalize the solutions better so that we don’t simply become a species which is the victim of the globalization of problems.
Setting the stage is an important element of any idea-driven story. If the intent of your idea is to make things better, your story needs to describe the current state of affairs with regards to your topic. In this talk, Simon spends two minutes framing the status quo around the notion of globalization. His take is that, while it has brought us many benefits, our global society has struggled to implement solutions to critical issues.
Can you identify a key element that your story revolves around? One that will serve as a launching point for the journey you’ll be taking your audience on?
Why are we so slow at achieving these advances? What’s the reason for it? Well, there are, of course, a number of reasons, but perhaps the primary reason is because we’re still organized as a species in the same way that we were organized 200 or 300 years ago. There’s one superpower left on the planet and that is the seven billion people, the seven billion of us who cause all these problems, the same seven billion, by the way, who will resolve them all. But how are those seven billion organized? They’re still organized in 200 or so nation-states, and the nations have governments that make rules and cause us to behave in certain ways.
And that’s a pretty efficient system, but the problem is that the way that those laws are made and the way those governments think is absolutely wrong for the solution of global problems, because it all looks inwards. The politicians that we elect and the politicians we don’t elect, on the whole, have minds that microscope. They don’t have minds that telescope. They look in. They pretend, they behave, as if they believed that every country was an island that existed quite happily, independently of all the others on its own little planet in its own little solar system.
This is the problem: countries competing against each other, countries fighting against each other. This week, as any week you care to look at, you’ll find people actually trying to kill each other from country to country, but even when that’s not going on, there’s competition between countries, each one trying to shaft the next. This is clearly not a good arrangement. We clearly need to change it. We clearly need to find ways of encouraging countries to start working together a little bit better. And why won’t they do that? Why is it that our leaders still persist in looking inwards?
Simon describes one aspect of how the political systems operate by using a visual metaphor – microscope vs. telescope. The audience easily understands the difference between focusing on a cell vs. seeing the entire universe. Do you need to provide detailed explanation to make your point clear, or is there a metaphor that can accomplish the same thing in a shorter span of time? Also note how he uses questions as a way of transitioning into the next section.
Well, the first and most obvious reason is because that’s what we ask them to do. That’s what we tell them to do. When we elect governments or when we tolerate unelected governments, we’re effectively telling them that what we want is for them to deliver us in our country a certain number of things. We want them to deliver prosperity, growth, competitiveness, transparency, justice and all of those things. So unless we start asking our governments to think outside a little bit, to consider the global problems that will finish us all if we don’t start considering them, then we can hardly blame them if what they carry on doing is looking inwards, if they still have minds that microscope rather than minds that telescope. That’s the first reason why things tend not to change.
The second reason is that these governments, just like all the rest of us, are cultural psychopaths. I don’t mean to be rude, but you know what a psychopath is. A psychopath is a person who, unfortunately for him or her, lacks the ability to really empathize with other human beings. When they look around, they don’t see other human beings with deep, rich, three-dimensional personal lives and aims and ambitions. What they see is cardboard cutouts, and it’s very sad and it’s very lonely, and it’s very rare, fortunately.
But actually, aren’t most of us not really so very good at empathy? Oh sure, we’re very good at empathy when it’s a question of dealing with people who kind of look like us and kind of walk and talk and eat and pray and wear like us, but when it comes to people who don’t do that, who don’t quite dress like us and don’t quite pray like us and don’t quite talk like us, do we not also have a tendency to see them ever so slightly as cardboard cutouts too? And this is a question we need to ask ourselves. I think constantly we have to monitor it. Are we and our politicians to a degree cultural psychopaths?
The third reason is hardly worth mentioning because it’s so silly, but there’s a belief amongst governments that the domestic agenda and the international agenda are incompatible and always will be. This is just nonsense. In my day job, I’m a policy adviser. I’ve spent the last 15 years or so advising governments around the world, and in all of that time I have never once seen a single domestic policy issue that could not be more imaginatively, effectively and rapidly resolved than by treating it as an international problem, looking at the international context, comparing what others have done, bringing in others, working externally instead of working internally.
Simon presents three examples as an answer to the question of why leaders still look inward. Knowing that a problem exists is different from understanding why that problem exists. What’s the narrative behind your problem? What points do you need to share with your audience so that they gain a basic understanding?
Since idea-driven stories need to come from a place of credibility – people are less likely to accept an idea if the person presenting it is not an expert on the subject – Simon also takes this opportunity to begin sharing the fact that he professionally studies this topic by stating, ‘I’ve spent the last 15 years or so advising governments around the world’.
And so you may say, well, given all of that, why then doesn’t it work? Why can we not make our politicians change? Why can’t we demand them? Well I, like a lot of us, spend a lot of time complaining about how hard it is to make people change, and I don’t think we should fuss about it. I think we should just accept that we are an inherently conservative species. We don’t like to change. It exists for very sensible evolutionary reasons. We probably wouldn’t still be here today if we weren’t so resistant to change.
It’s very simple: Many thousands of years ago, we discovered that if we carried on doing the same things, we wouldn’t die, because the things that we’ve done before by definition didn’t kill us, and therefore as long as we carry on doing them, we’ll be okay, and it’s very sensible not to do anything new, because it might kill you. But of course, there are exceptions to that. Otherwise, we’d never get anywhere. And one of the exceptions, the interesting exception, is when you can show to people that there might be some self-interest in them making that leap of faith and changing a little bit.
So I’ve spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years trying to find out what could be that self-interest that would encourage not just politicians but also businesses and general populations, all of us, to start to think a little more outwardly, to think in a bigger picture, not always to look inwards, sometimes to look outwards. And this is where I discovered something quite important.
In 2005, I launched a study called the Nation Brands Index. What it is, it’s a very large-scale study that polls a very large sample of the world’s population, a sample that represents about 70 percent of the planet’s population, and I started asking them a series of questions about how they perceive other countries.
And the Nation Brands Index over the years has grown to be a very, very large database. It’s about 200 billion data points tracking what ordinary people think about other countries and why. Why did I do this? Well, because the governments that I advise are very, very keen on knowing how they are regarded. They’ve known, partly because I’ve encouraged them to realize it, that countries depend enormously on their reputations in order to survive and prosper in the world.
If a country has a great, positive image, like Germany has or Sweden or Switzerland, everything is easy and everything is cheap. You get more tourists. You get more investors. You sell your products more expensively. If, on the other hand, you have a country with a very weak or a very negative image, everything is difficult and everything is expensive. So governments care desperately about the image of their country, because it makes a direct difference to how much money they can make, and that’s what they’ve promised their populations they’re going to deliver.
Simon expands on his expertise in detail by describing a study that he launched, and he also introduces the concept of brand – how people perceive things – in the context of a country’s reputation. As you’ll see, he uses ‘brand’ as a bridge to ‘good’.
So a couple of years ago, I thought I would take some time out and speak to that gigantic database and ask it, why do some people prefer one country more than another? And the answer that the database gave me completely staggered me. It was 6.8. I haven’t got time to explain in detail. Basically what it told me was the kinds of countries we prefer are good countries.
We don’t admire countries primarily because they’re rich, because they’re powerful, because they’re successful, because they’re modern, because they’re technologically advanced. We primarily admire countries that are good. What do we mean by good? We mean countries that seem to contribute something to the world in which we live, countries that actually make the world safer or better or richer or fairer. Those are the countries we like.
This is a discovery of significant importance – you see where I’m going – because it squares the circle. I can now say, and often do, to any government, in order to do well, you need to do good. If you want to sell more products, if you want to get more investment, if you want to become more competitive, then you need to start behaving, because that’s why people will respect you and do business with you, and therefore, the more you collaborate, the more competitive you become.
Now at the midpoint of his talk, Simon summarizes what his study found, that ‘in order to do well, you need to do good’. Ideas come from a combination of personal experience and scientific research. It doesn’t necessarily mean the idea is correct, but in a well told story there exists a logical progression which leads to the idea’s formation in the mind of the speaker.
This is quite an important discovery, and as soon as I discovered this, I felt another index coming on. I swear that as I get older, my ideas become simpler and more and more childish. This one is called the Good Country Index, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It measures, or at least it tries to measure, exactly how much each country on Earth contributes not to its own population but to the rest of humanity.
Bizarrely, nobody had ever thought of measuring this before. So my colleague Dr. Robert Govers and I have spent the best part of the last two years, with the help of a large number of very serious and clever people, cramming together all the reliable data in the world we could find about what countries give to the world.
And you’re waiting for me to tell you which one comes top. And I’m going to tell you, but first of all I want to tell you precisely what I mean when I say a good country. I do not mean morally good. When I say that Country X is the goodest country on Earth, and I mean goodest, I don’t mean best. Best is something different.
When you’re talking about a good country, you can be good, gooder and goodest. It’s not the same thing as good, better and best. This is a country which simply gives more to humanity than any other country. I don’t talk about how they behave at home because that’s measured elsewhere. And the winner is Ireland.
According to the data here, no country on Earth, per head of population, per dollar of GDP, contributes more to the world that we live in than Ireland. What does this mean? This means that as we go to sleep at night, all of us in the last 15 seconds before we drift off to sleep, our final thought should be, godammit, I’m glad that Ireland exists.
And that, in the depths of a very severe economic recession, I think that there’s a really important lesson there, that if you can remember your international obligations whilst you are trying to rebuild your own economy, that’s really something. Finland ranks pretty much the same. The only reason why it’s below Ireland is because its lowest score is lower than Ireland’s lowest score.
About three quarters of the way into his talk Simon reveals the primary point of the story – the Good Country Index – and the results of his study. But results and reasons are different, so he then examines his findings in greater detail. For your story, what did you learn along the way? What did you conclude from your research?
Now the other thing you’ll notice about the top 10 there is, of course, they’re all, apart from New Zealand, Western European nations. They’re also all rich. This depressed me, because one of the things that I did not want to discover with this index is that it’s purely the province of rich countries to help poor countries. This is not what it’s all about.
And indeed, if you look further down the list, I don’t have the slide here, you will see something that made me very happy indeed, that Kenya is in the top 30, and that demonstrates one very, very important thing. This is not about money. This is about attitude. This is about culture. This is about a government and a people that care about the rest of the world and have the imagination and the courage to think outwards instead of only thinking selfishly.
I’m going to whip through the other slides just so you can see some of the lower-lying countries. There’s Germany at 13th, the U.S. comes 21st, Mexico comes 66th, and then we have some of the big developing countries, like Russia at 95th, China at 107th. Countries like China and Russia and India, which is down in the same part of the index, well, in some ways, it’s not surprising. They’ve spent a great deal of time over the last decades building their own economy, building their own society and their own polity, but it is to be hoped that the second phase of their growth will be somewhat more outward-looking than the first phase has been so far.
And then you can break down each country in terms of the actual datasets that build into it. I’ll allow you to do that. From midnight tonight it’s going to be on goodcountry.org, and you can look at the country. You can look right down to the level of the individual datasets.
Simon’s slides are very busy, with more data than can be comprehended in such a short talk, but showing the different categories and rankings provides its own sense of credibility to the conclusions being drawn. Simply showing a list of countries with overall rank would be much easier for the audience to read, but far less effective in making his point.
Striking a balance between presenting too much and too little data is always a challenge when deciding how much to share. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. It’s something you have to determine for yourself. If you have the time, rehearse with different versions of your slides before making a final commitment.
Now that’s the Good Country Index. What’s it there for? Well, it’s there really because I want to try to introduce this word, or reintroduce this word, into the discourse. I’ve had enough hearing about competitive countries. I’ve had enough hearing about prosperous, wealthy, fast-growing countries. I’ve even had enough hearing about happy countries because in the end that’s still selfish. That’s still about us, and if we carry on thinking about us, we are in deep, deep trouble.
I think we all know what it is that we want to hear about. We want to hear about good countries, and so I want to ask you all a favor. I’m not asking a lot. It’s something that you might find easy to do and you might even find enjoyable and even helpful to do, and that’s simply to start using the word “good” in this context. When you think about your own country, when you think about other people’s countries, when you think about companies, when you talk about the world that we live in today, start using that word in the way that I’ve talked about this evening.
Not good, the opposite of bad, because that’s an argument that never finishes. Good, the opposite of selfish, good being a country that thinks about all of us. That’s what I would like you to do, and I’d like you to use it as a stick with which to beat your politicians. When you elect them, when you reelect them, when you vote for them, when you listen to what they’re offering you, use that word, “good,” and ask yourself, “Is that what a good country would do?”
And if the answer is no, be very suspicious. Ask yourself, is that the behavior of my country? Do I want to come from a country where the government, in my name, is doing things like that? Or do I, on the other hand, prefer the idea of walking around the world with my head held high thinking, “Yeah, I’m proud to come from a good country”? And everybody will welcome you. And everybody in the last 15 seconds before they drift off to sleep at night will say, “Gosh, I’m glad that person’s country exists.”
Ultimately, that, I think, is what will make the change. That word, “good,” and the number 6.8 and the discovery that’s behind it have changed my life. I think they can change your life, and I think we can use it to change the way that our politicians and our companies behave, and in doing so, we can change the world. I’ve started thinking very differently about my own country since I’ve been thinking about these things. I used to think that I wanted to live in a rich country, and then I started thinking I wanted to live in a happy country, but I began to realize, it’s not enough. I don’t want to live in a rich country. I don’t want to live in a fast-growing or competitive country. I want to live in a good country, and I so, so hope that you do too.
Simon’s conclusion includes a call to action for the audience – to think differently about their own country from the standpoint of doing good – ‘good being a country that thinks about all of us’. What shift in perception do you want your audience to adopt after hearing your story? When they leave the theatre will they think of the world (and their place in it) differently?
[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]
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Peter Aguero on The Moth at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
/in Family, Humor, Reflection, The Moth/by Mark LovettThe Moth has been hosting storytelling events for 20+ years, and the thousands of storytellers who have graced their stages are proof that every story is unique, and that the best stories come from our personal experiences.
In this story, as told by Peter Aguero, we hear a tail about family, and strife, and redemption, all within the context of a difficult Christmas. Not a classic holiday story that is filled with good times and cheer, but one that involves the heart. And a connection to family. And love at its deepest level.
Many personal stories are told from a similar point of reflection. Remembering a time in the past when life was difficult and their path forward was unknown. And how tapping into love was central to that future path. Such stories can help folks who are currently living in tough circumstances, as well as remind any of us who have come out the other side to reflect on, and thus to appreciate, the love and support that we encountered along the way.
Transcript
(minor edits were made to improve readability)
This is a reading from the book of Peter chapter 19 verse 2. I was nineteen years old and I just finished my first semester at college. And I got home with my bag of laundry, and things weren’t looking too good for me and my mom.
I walked into the house, and she had told me over that semester to expect some changes when I got home, and it didn’t really hit me until I walked in the door and the first thing that I saw was that her upright piano that she had had since she was a kid was gone. She had sold it. And I walked through the foyer into the living room and there was just a broken couch, and a television on top of another television. One had a working picture, and the other had working sound.
And all the other furniture was gone. My dad had taken it four years ago when he had left, and for some reason the impressions from his lazy boy were still there as some kind of reminder of what a dick he is. I walked through the living room and through the dining room, and the beautiful dining room set that had been in her family for generations was gone. It was a dark mahogany set, really ornate, with these beautiful carved chairs and a glass breakfront, and a buffet table, and that was gone.
And I walked upstairs to put my stuff away, and her bedroom door was open, and the only thing left in the room was her bed. Her bedroom set was gone. There’s nothing more depressing than a bedroom with no furniture. You can see all the little dings and mistakes and tears in the wallpaper that are hidden by things.
Then I saw in my sister’s room. It was still a shrine to my sister after I moved in with my dad, with her Pepto-Bismol pink walls and her canopy bed, and her toy box. Like she liked she was gonna move back and become a little child again. But she wasn’t.
My bedroom was just the way it always was. Covered in posters, with broken particle board furniture and water bed, for some reason, with a broken heater, so you had to put quilts on top of it so you wouldn’t get arthritis. She couldn’t sell any of that anyway.
I had told my mother for years after the divorce to just sell the house. It was too big for the two of us after my sister left, and it was especially too big once I was gone, when I went to college. And the bills had to have been killing her. But her stubborn Polish pride kept her in the house.
I guess she wanted to show to the outside world that everything was okay, but on the inside it was just kind of decaying around her. But she wasn’t able to really deal with it in any kind of a real way. There was just selling things and and taking it day by day.
She was a nurse, she still is, and at the time she was working on the weekends doing 24 hour shifts at a dual diagnosis psychiatric drug unit, and during the week she took a job at a perfume counter in the mall to make some extra money. And she doesn’t like people telling her when to take a break, so that wasn’t gonna last long.
This was a strong big-headed pumpkin-headed Polock. She got home that day and she was happy to see me. Not as effusive as usual, but you know, she made dinner. She made a tomato casserole that she always made with canned tomatoes Wonder Bread and American cheese. Like yeah.
And we sat in the kitchen on the two chairs at the kitchen table, because the other chair I broke, and the other chair I also broke. And we ate our food, and we talked about College that semester being over, and she said, “Peter, we can’t really have much of a Christmas this year. There’s not gonna be any presents. I got your sister a little something because she doesn’t live here anymore, but we really can’t afford any presents.”
I said, “Are we gonna have a tree?”
She said, “We really can’t afford a tree. Decorations? I don’t have time to decorate.”
I’m, okay, you know, all right, okay.
So she said, “I got an idea. I thought this would be funny. Why don’t we, over the next two weeks, cut pictures out of catalogs and magazines of things that we would give to each other if we could.”
And we laughed about it, you know, and then we cried about it, and then we laughed about it again. Because if you don’t laugh about it you’re gonna eat a bullet.
So the next morning she went off to work, and I decided I was gonna throw myself into Christmas. And I decided I was gonna go get a tree, and I was gonna make this the best Christmas I possibly could.
So this is down in South Jersey, small town, and this is before Walmart and Home Depot and outlet stores are down there, so there was one Christmas tree farm, the Debolt Christmas Tree Farm. So I went over there figuring they’d give me a deal because I used to date their daughter, but turns out they didn’t give me a deal, because I used to date their daughter.
And a tree was like 60 bucks. Screw that. So I went back home and I got a hacksaw and I cut out a tree from my side yard. And it wasn’t even like a pine tree. It was some kind of stunted maple tree. And I brought it in the house, and I put it in the tree holder, and there it is in the stand.
And I went up in the attic. And I got the box of decorations and ornaments, and I hung about – there were about six branches – I put about 20 ornaments on each branch. And then I just took the tangled lights, and I just threw them on it, and it was beautiful.
It was really kind of nice. She came home, and she was, I guess, happy, and that was how that was. And I just started throwing myself into this project. I’ve given my mother everything I possibly could give her for Christmas.
You know, she always wanted a forest green Jaguar convertible. So I cut out one of those, and then Jacuzzi had a shower called the Jay Dream with about 20 nozzles, and a little dude that made sandwiches. And I cut out one of those, and gold and diamonds and jewelry, and a new vacuum cleaner, and everything she could ever possibly want in the world.
And I really kind of sunk myself into it. I’d go over hang out of my friends houses and take their mom’s Currier and Ives catalogs, and get all these catalogs and magazines, so I could give my mom the best Christmas ever. And I felt like I was in a kind of bizarro O’Henry novel, and one that he never should of written. And that just kind of consumed me over the next couple weeks. And I figured, this is sad, but this is beautiful, and we’re
going to connect over this, and it’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be fine.
It was one night, in between coming home and Christmas, and the two of us were sitting watching the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, and one of the TV’s was on cable and the other was on broadcast, so the video was a little ahead of the audio because the audio was on broadcast, but you know, you just pretend you’re in Japan. It doesn’t matter. So we’re watching that, and my mom was so distracted, she was there, but she wasn’t there.
And you know my mother and I were like partners, when my parents marriage broke up. She still feels guilty to this day about maybe making me grow up sooner than I did as being the man of the house or whatever. We were friends, and roommates, and partners. It was me and her against the world. And she was the one I always loved coming home to, and the one that would let me get away with anything, and the one that would always be proud of me when I did something right, and would take a day off from work and drive to the zoo with me when I did something wrong.
And she was not there anymore. This house was crushing her. Just crushing her. And all because she couldn’t see the option of getting rid of it. And it was killing me man. That’s my road dog, that’s my mom, that’s my girl. And I lost her. She just wasn’t there anymore. And it was just killing me. Her eyes were just empty. She was in another world. And she was worried about things that she couldn’t figure out how to fix.
So on Christmas Eve I went with my buddy Brian. We got drunk on a jug of Livingston Cellars wine and went to midnight mass, because when you’re under 21 and Catholic, that’s where you go to see your friends, because you can’t get into the bars yet.
And it was great, mass was awesome. My mom didn’t go to midnight mass anymore, because four years before, when my dad left us, it was during midnight mass. What a dick. As the priest was walking up, he stood up and walked out in front of everyone that we knew. Everyone she grew up with. Everyone I grew up with. Everyone we went to school with, and went to church with, and hung out with.
They all saw our family crumbling in front of us on it so my mom doesn’t… my dad’s a dick… I mean, is he here tonight? No he’s not, cuz he’s a dick, such a dick. So my mom doesn’t go to midnight mass anymore.
I got home that night, and the next morning I woke up late, and I brought my little bundles of pictures tied up with scraps of ribbon, and I put them under the tree, and I waited for my mama come down. And I heard her stirring upstairs, and heard her come down, and making coffee. And she came downstairs in her big red Sally Jessy Raphael morning glasses.
And she came down with a cup of coffee and she looked at the the things I was offering her, and she just like oh oh oh oh oh wait a minute, and she went back upstairs, and she was up there for a couple of minutes. How long does it take to bring down some papers? I hope she’s okay. She have diarrhea? It’s Christmas, I don’t know, post-traumatic whatever.
But any way, she comes back down, and we start to exchange our gifts, and she’s opening up a car in a vacuum in the shower and gold and a brand new piano and a bedroom set and a beautiful picture of a dining room set that would be at home in the White House. I tried to give her everything that she had had to get rid of to keep this life together.
She wanted there, more than anything in the world, she wanted there to be some stability for her kids to have a place that was always going to be home. The home that we grew up in. And it was killing her. And I was trying to do anything I could that would maybe make that better.
So she’s just looking at these things, and just smiling and laughing, and then I started to open up mine. And there’s three of them, and there’s one, it’s a picture of some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and a picture of some Homer Simpson slippers, and a picture of a karaoke machine. All from the same Rite Aid catalog.
It was up in her bathroom, upstairs, because she completely forgot. This thing that I really thought it was a one sided thing, and she’s laughing about it now, over there, that’s hilarious, yeah wave. So she went upstairs to make breakfast in the kitchen and I sat there and it was just kind of, I don’t know, I don’t want to be too silly about it, was I got a needle piercing me in the heart, thank you Madison, it was it was just this life that we had, that was the two of us was, just gone.
She would have done anything for me, and she still was, but it just wasn’t working anymore. And she forgot this thing, because the house was killing her, money was killing her, and everything was killing her. There’s nothing I could do, just nothing.
So I went upstairs, and she didn’t make pancakes. My mom makes really good pancakes. She fries them up in bacon grease, and they’re all crispy around the edges, and she makes me one that’s as big as the frying pan and cuts it out to look like Pac-Man and puts it on my plate, ever since I was a little boy.
She’ll give me a second one if I wanted. But this day, there was no Pac-Man face. Just silver dollar pancakes. And they were all burnt. And we sat there eating these burnt pancakes, wondering what the hell was going on with our lives. Today, 14 years later, if you go to my mother’s house where she lives with her new husband, you can go down in the basement and you can see a million boxes.
And you walk past the Ark of the Covenant and you go over in the back. And if you were an archaeologist you could look at the strata of our lives and pick out which year these things happened. This is when Peter quit football, and this is when Michelle had epilepsy growing up, and this is when their dad was a dick. That’s all of them.
And then there’s one box, if you look at it, in Christmas in 1995, if you dig into it, you can see a little velvet bag with a bunch of small pictures cut out of catalogs and magazines. And right underneath of that was stuff that took place a couple months later.
I got my belated Christmas present. It was a picture that my mom sent me when I was away at school of her standing in front of the house with a for sale sign in front of it. And she decided to sell the house. And she moved into a small townhouse. And she took a little hit on her pride but I got my girl back.
Thank you.
[Note: all comments are my opinions, not those of the speaker, or The Moth or anyone else on the planet. In my view, every story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these posts is to inspire storytellers to become better storylisteners and to think about how their stories can become more impactful.]
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Phyllis Bowdwin on The Moth Portland Mainstage
/in Career, Emotions, Humor, The Moth/by Mark LovettThe Moth has been hosting storytelling events for 20+ years, and the thousands of storytellers who have graced their stages are proof that every story is unique, and that the best stories come from our personal experiences.
In this story, as told by Phyllis Bowdwin, we hear about a time she encountered an abusive mime, and her decision to then cut this person – so to speak – down to size. In one sense, it’s a strange story, but the underlying theme of someone not being respected, and then discovering a new side of themselves during the experience, is a common one for personal storytelling.
Note the passion in her voice and the vivid descriptions that she offers. You feel as though you were there in the crowd watching the event unfold. Now, think of your own life. Was there a situation or event in which you discovered something different about yourself? Maybe a newfound strength that you could rely upon going forward. Such stories inspire others to ask that question about their life.
Transcript
It’s 1979, and summer in New York City. That was 38 years ago, when I was being interviewed for a promotion from secretary to coordinator of daytime casting at ABC.
I wore my new silk blouse, matching slim skirt, and two-inch yellow sling back heels. I thought I was ready. Although there was some who thought I wasn’t tough enough to hold onto a job like that.
And somewhere in a tiny corner of my mind, there was a part of me that suspected there, that they might be right. I even had a secretary come up to me and say, “Phyllis, you’re too nice.” To which I responded, “Thank you.”
In any case, I was meeting a friend for lunch across the street before my two o’clock interview. And when I got there, I found hordes of people spanning the length and the width of the sidewalk in front of the building, three people deep.
But I found a gap, cut through it, and when I got into the center of this human oval, something came up behind me, grabbed me, prevented me from moving, pinning my arms to my sides. And I looked over both shoulders to see if I could find out what it was, but I didn’t see anything, so I started to struggle.
And the more I struggled, the tighter the grip became. And then I looked to the sea of faces for some clue, some information that would help me to understand what was holding me, what was going on, but they were just placidly chewing and eating their lunch and staring at me.
Suddenly, the pressure was released and a set of rough hands groped me in every part of my body and then pushed me in my lower back. I stumbled forward almost falling, but I regained my balance and I turned around to find a six foot mime leering at me.
He was in full dress with the beret, the face paint, the polar shirt, the suspenders, the black pants, and the very comfortable sneakers. He was beckoning to me and slapping his behind, inviting me to hit him, and I took the bait.
I wrapped the strap of my purse around my hand, and I went after him and I swung, and just as my purse was about to connect, he bounced to another side of the oval and leered at me again, and beckoned me a second time, and padded his behind and wagged it at me as an invitation to come and try again, and I did.
And this time, I swung so hard that when he darted out of the way for the second time, the momentum pulled me forward, and I almost stumbled and fell. And then the people started to laugh,
and I was feeling like a real fool.
So when he beckoned me for the third time, common sense prevailed. Slim skirt, heels, sneakers, I’m outmatched. “You got it,” I said, and I turned and walked away and tried to go up those stairs to get into the building when he rushed up behind me and grabbed my behind and squeezed it, and then darted to safety down further in the oval, and people started to laugh.
And I just stood there as waves of humiliation and rage ran through my body. And I’ve finally got myself together, got up the stairs, got into the building, got to the cafeteria where they was serving my favorite, turkey tetrazzini.
And I went through the motions, paid for my food and sat at the table, but I couldn’t eat or speak, I had just been blindsided, bullied and blatantly violated by a strange man in the street with the approval of hoards of other strangers.
And I was very sure that they had rewarded him handsomely for what he had just done to me. And the thought that I had no way to protect or defend myself, made me feel so powerless that I wanted to cry, so I just sat there.
Then I remembered something that I might have at the bottom of my purse that I bought from a 99 cent store 4 months prior as a joke. And I started digging down into my purse, and the minute my fingers touched that cold, hard canister, I realized that I might have some options after all.
I picked it up, I wrapped my napkin around and then I said, “Got to go,” and turned and got back outside to see if he was still there, and of course he was. And I worked my way to the front of the crowd, because it had swollen to five people deep, to see what he was up to.
And just as I looked up, a beautiful blonde in a pretty, red dress cut through the crap, just as I had, and just as she was about to mount this terrace, he snuck up behind her, and as she raised one foot, he insinuated his way between her legs and stood up, essentially mounting her on his lower back like a rider on a horse.
He reached under her dress, grabbed her legs and proceeded to gallop around the oval with this woman’s hair flying, arms flailing,
holding onto her purse while trying to keep from falling backwards. When he let her down, he promptly lifted her dress up over her head and held it there to the hoots and the whistles of the men.
And when he finally let her go, she staggered into the building and quickly disappeared. And I said to myself, “Is this 1979 in New York City, or have I been dropped into “The Twilight Zone”?
How could this be happening? Where are the police?”
And as I said that, this elderly gentlemen, tall, handsome, distinguished man, stepped into the oval with an old woman in tow, she was holding onto the back of his jacket, and he strolled over to the mime and she peered out at the mime, cringed, and darted back.
And I said to myself, “Now, what did he do to this old woman that would have her cringing at the sight of him?” And sure enough, the old man started shaking his finger in the mime’s face, and the mine feigned innocence. The hands and shoulders went up in the air like he was the victim. And he put on this terrible, sad face and mimed crying and someone in the crowd yelled, “Boo boo, leave the mime alone.”
And the crowd picked up the chant, “Boo boo, leave the mime alone.” And the old man looked up startled into the hostile, menacing eyes of the wolf pack, consisting of executives, clerks, messengers, a UPS driver, a postal employee, even a hot dog vendor selling his food, was enjoying the spectacle.
And the old man shook his head sadly. Gently took the old woman by the hand and led her out of the crowd. And that’s when I got it. This was nothing but a big show. This was theater in the round, and every unsuspecting woman who cut through the crowd became a player, whether she wanted to or not.
She became the catch of the day on the mime’s lunchtime menu,
subject to any form of abuse he chose to cook up to feed vicariously the appetite of his patrons. And so when he started looking around for a new player, I stepped back into the human arena and waited.
He spotted me, he came towards me, and as he got closer, his eyes narrowed, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because of his recognizing me from before, from what he had done to me, or whether he was strategizing how he was going to launch this frontal attack because his MO was to play dirty pool, and sneak up behind the woman and catch her off guard.
But when he got two feet away, I lifted my can of pepper spray and I sprayed him in his face. Yes, yes, and his eyes got wild and he reached for my throat, and I took two steps back, and I sprayed him again and again. I sprayed him like a roach.
And then he began to cough and wheeze and sneeze, and he started staggering towards the street, and his loyal patrons pardon and let him go. He wound up on the hood of a parked car and I stood there and enjoyed watching him wheeze and sneeze.
And I was doing that, something karate-chopped my right hand. It’s another mime.
And this one is twice the size of the other one. And this hulking Goliath of a man is glaring at me like he wants to kill me. And we both hear my canister rolling slowly, but noisily down the sidewalk and he lumbered towards it. And I whirled around, and I went after it. And the two of us scrambled to get to that canister,
and I got there first.
And he moved towards me, and I took a wide stance and I got all the way down and I started rocking and I said, “You want this, motherfucker?” “Come and get it.”
He stopped cold in his tracks and we looked at each other, both knowing that if he ever got his hands on me, he could break me in two. But that day I had had enough and seen enough pushing and grabbing and groping. That day I was prepared to die. And I wasn’t leaving the planet alone, I was taking him with me.
He must have seen it in the rockin’ already in my eyes because they was saying, “Kill the mime.” Because he backed up, turned around, and disappeared back into that crowd. And by now, the spray is starting to spread to his patrons and they are coughing and wheezing and sneezing and quickly disperse without leaving a dime in his beret.
So I dropped my canister back in my purse, and I stood up, only to realize that I had bent the heel on my shoe. And I had split my seam on my skirt all the way up to my behind, and I had an interview at two o’clock. So I hobbled back across the street, and I got on that elevator and got to my office and grabbed my scotch tape and my stapler. I rushed into the ladies’ room, locked the door, took off my skirt, turned it inside out and pinched that seam back together.
I pinched and stapled and pinched and stapled until I got that whole thing closed.Then I taped down one side with the scotch tape, and the other side, and then one going straight down the center in the hopes that no one would ever know what had just happened across the street.
I went to my desk and I reached in my bottom drawer for a pair of flats that I always keep there, and put them on, and waited for that call from personnel. And when they called me, I went upstairs, marched into that office and aced that interview and got the job.
Oh yes.
Oh yes.
And that was the day that I got in touch with my other side. Now, she doesn’t make many appearances, but she’s available on an as need basis. And I call her my quiet fire.
And we both thank you.
[Note: all comments are my opinions, not those of the speaker, or The Moth or anyone else on the planet. In my view, every story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these posts is to inspire storytellers to become better storylisteners and to think about how their stories can become more impactful.]
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Daria van den Bercken: Why I take the piano on the road @ TEDSalon Berlin
/in Music, Personal Stories, TED, TED Talk/by Mark LovettI had the pleasure of attending a special TED event in 2014. TEDSalon Berlin was just a one day affair, yet it featured a number of compelling talks that served as examples of impactful stories on global issues. This post is an analysis of a talk and performance given by Daria van den Bercken.
Her idea is simple and straightforward – to listen to music in a state of wonder, to truly listen, and to listen without prejudice – which is how we tend to listen at a very young age.
Do you have a story to tell that is intended to shift perspectives about how we encounter the arts – music, theatre, art, dance? Can you combine a narrative with a demonstration to make your point?
Transcript
Recently, I flew over a crowd of thousands of people in Brazil playing music by George Frideric Handel. I also drove along the streets of Amsterdam, again playing music by this same composer. Let’s take a look.
(Music: George Frideric Handel, “Allegro.” Performed by Daria van den Bercken.)
(Video) Daria van den Bercken: I live there on the third floor. (In Dutch) I live there on the corner. I actually live there, around the corner. and you’d be really welcome.
Man: (In Dutch) Does that sound like fun? Child: (In Dutch) Yes!
[(In Dutch) “Handel house concert”]
Daria van den Bercken: All this was a real magical experience for hundreds of reasons.
Now you may ask, why have I done these things? They’re not really typical for a musician’s day-to-day life. Well, I did it because I fell in love with the music and I wanted to share it with as many people as possible.
It started a couple of years ago. I was sitting at home on the couch with the flu and browsing the Internet a little, when I found out that Handel had written works for the keyboard. Well, I was surprised. I did not know this. So I downloaded the sheet music and started playing. And what happened next was that I entered this state of pure, unprejudiced amazement. It was an experience of being totally in awe of the music, and I had not felt that in a long time. It might be easier to relate to this when you hear it. The first piece that I played through started like this.
(Music)
Well this sounds very melancholic, doesn’t it? And I turned the page and what came next was this.
(Music)
Well, this sounds very energetic, doesn’t it? So within a couple of minutes, and the piece isn’t even finished yet, I experienced two very contrasting characters: beautiful melancholy and sheer energy. And I consider these two elements to be vital human expressions. And the purity of the music makes you hear it very effectively.
I’ve given a lot of children’s concerts for children of seven and eight years old, and whatever I play, whether it’s Bach, Beethoven, even Stockhausen, or some jazzy music, they are open to hear it, really willing to listen, and they are comfortable doing so.
And when classes come in with children who are just a few years older, 11, 12, I felt that I sometimes already had trouble in reaching them like that. The complexity of the music does become an issue, and actually the opinions of others – parents, friends, media – they start to count.
But the young ones, they don’t question their own opinion. They are in this constant state of wonder, and I do firmly believe that we can keep listening like these seven-year-old children, even when growing up. And that is why I have played not only in the concert hall but also on the street, online, in the air: to feel that state of wonder, to truly listen, and to listen without prejudice. And I would like to invite you to do so now.
(Music: George Frideric Handel, “Chaconne in G Major.” Performed by Daria van den Bercken.)
[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]
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Simon Anholt: Which country does the most good for the world? @ TEDSalon Berlin
/in Humanity, Society, Statistics, TED, TED Talk/by Mark LovettI had the pleasure of attending a special TED event in 2014. TEDSalon Berlin was just a one day affair, yet it featured a number of compelling talks that served as examples of impactful stories on global issues. This post is an analysis of a talk given by Simon Anholt.
Watch Simon Anholt’s TED Talk. We all know that some countries are much more concerned with the fate of the entire world, but how can the level of a country’s goodness be measured? It seemed to be an impossible task to me, but Simon describes how it can be done, and it remains one of my favorite TED Talks.
Do you want to live in a powerful country, a rich country, a happy country, or a good country? Regardless of how you answer the question, the underlying point of this talk (in my opinion) is to encourage us to think differently about how we perceive countries around the world. Will your story shift people’s perceptions?
Transcript
(my notes in red)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the world recently and how it’s changed over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Twenty or 30 years ago, if a chicken caught a cold and sneezed and died in a remote village in East Asia, it would have been a tragedy for the chicken and its closest relatives, but I don’t think there was much possibility of us fearing a global pandemic and the deaths of millions. Twenty or 30 years ago, if a bank in North America lent too much money to some people who couldn’t afford to pay it back and the bank went bust, that was bad for the lender and bad for the borrower, but we didn’t imagine it would bring the global economic system to its knees for nearly a decade.
This is globalization. This is the miracle that has enabled us to transship our bodies and our minds and our words and our pictures and our ideas and our teaching and our learning around the planet ever faster and ever cheaper. It’s brought a lot of bad stuff, like the stuff that I just described, but it’s also brought a lot of good stuff. A lot of us are not aware of the extraordinary successes of the Millennium Development Goals, several of which have achieved their targets long before the due date. That proves that this species of humanity is capable of achieving extraordinary progress if it really acts together and it really tries hard.
But if I had to put it in a nutshell these days, I sort of feel that globalization has taken us by surprise, and we’ve been slow to respond to it. If you look at the downside of globalization, it really does seem to be sometimes overwhelming. All of the grand challenges that we face today, like climate change and human rights and demographics and terrorism and pandemics and narco-trafficking and human slavery and species loss, I could go on, we’re not making an awful lot of progress against an awful lot of those challenges.
So in a nutshell, that’s the challenge that we all face today at this interesting point in history. That’s clearly what we’ve got to do next. We’ve somehow got to get our act together and we’ve got to figure out how to globalize the solutions better so that we don’t simply become a species which is the victim of the globalization of problems.
Setting the stage is an important element of any idea-driven story. If the intent of your idea is to make things better, your story needs to describe the current state of affairs with regards to your topic. In this talk, Simon spends two minutes framing the status quo around the notion of globalization. His take is that, while it has brought us many benefits, our global society has struggled to implement solutions to critical issues.
Can you identify a key element that your story revolves around? One that will serve as a launching point for the journey you’ll be taking your audience on?
Why are we so slow at achieving these advances? What’s the reason for it? Well, there are, of course, a number of reasons, but perhaps the primary reason is because we’re still organized as a species in the same way that we were organized 200 or 300 years ago. There’s one superpower left on the planet and that is the seven billion people, the seven billion of us who cause all these problems, the same seven billion, by the way, who will resolve them all. But how are those seven billion organized? They’re still organized in 200 or so nation-states, and the nations have governments that make rules and cause us to behave in certain ways.
And that’s a pretty efficient system, but the problem is that the way that those laws are made and the way those governments think is absolutely wrong for the solution of global problems, because it all looks inwards. The politicians that we elect and the politicians we don’t elect, on the whole, have minds that microscope. They don’t have minds that telescope. They look in. They pretend, they behave, as if they believed that every country was an island that existed quite happily, independently of all the others on its own little planet in its own little solar system.
This is the problem: countries competing against each other, countries fighting against each other. This week, as any week you care to look at, you’ll find people actually trying to kill each other from country to country, but even when that’s not going on, there’s competition between countries, each one trying to shaft the next. This is clearly not a good arrangement. We clearly need to change it. We clearly need to find ways of encouraging countries to start working together a little bit better. And why won’t they do that? Why is it that our leaders still persist in looking inwards?
Simon describes one aspect of how the political systems operate by using a visual metaphor – microscope vs. telescope. The audience easily understands the difference between focusing on a cell vs. seeing the entire universe. Do you need to provide detailed explanation to make your point clear, or is there a metaphor that can accomplish the same thing in a shorter span of time? Also note how he uses questions as a way of transitioning into the next section.
Well, the first and most obvious reason is because that’s what we ask them to do. That’s what we tell them to do. When we elect governments or when we tolerate unelected governments, we’re effectively telling them that what we want is for them to deliver us in our country a certain number of things. We want them to deliver prosperity, growth, competitiveness, transparency, justice and all of those things. So unless we start asking our governments to think outside a little bit, to consider the global problems that will finish us all if we don’t start considering them, then we can hardly blame them if what they carry on doing is looking inwards, if they still have minds that microscope rather than minds that telescope. That’s the first reason why things tend not to change.
The second reason is that these governments, just like all the rest of us, are cultural psychopaths. I don’t mean to be rude, but you know what a psychopath is. A psychopath is a person who, unfortunately for him or her, lacks the ability to really empathize with other human beings. When they look around, they don’t see other human beings with deep, rich, three-dimensional personal lives and aims and ambitions. What they see is cardboard cutouts, and it’s very sad and it’s very lonely, and it’s very rare, fortunately.
But actually, aren’t most of us not really so very good at empathy? Oh sure, we’re very good at empathy when it’s a question of dealing with people who kind of look like us and kind of walk and talk and eat and pray and wear like us, but when it comes to people who don’t do that, who don’t quite dress like us and don’t quite pray like us and don’t quite talk like us, do we not also have a tendency to see them ever so slightly as cardboard cutouts too? And this is a question we need to ask ourselves. I think constantly we have to monitor it. Are we and our politicians to a degree cultural psychopaths?
The third reason is hardly worth mentioning because it’s so silly, but there’s a belief amongst governments that the domestic agenda and the international agenda are incompatible and always will be. This is just nonsense. In my day job, I’m a policy adviser. I’ve spent the last 15 years or so advising governments around the world, and in all of that time I have never once seen a single domestic policy issue that could not be more imaginatively, effectively and rapidly resolved than by treating it as an international problem, looking at the international context, comparing what others have done, bringing in others, working externally instead of working internally.
Simon presents three examples as an answer to the question of why leaders still look inward. Knowing that a problem exists is different from understanding why that problem exists. What’s the narrative behind your problem? What points do you need to share with your audience so that they gain a basic understanding?
Since idea-driven stories need to come from a place of credibility – people are less likely to accept an idea if the person presenting it is not an expert on the subject – Simon also takes this opportunity to begin sharing the fact that he professionally studies this topic by stating, ‘I’ve spent the last 15 years or so advising governments around the world’.
And so you may say, well, given all of that, why then doesn’t it work? Why can we not make our politicians change? Why can’t we demand them? Well I, like a lot of us, spend a lot of time complaining about how hard it is to make people change, and I don’t think we should fuss about it. I think we should just accept that we are an inherently conservative species. We don’t like to change. It exists for very sensible evolutionary reasons. We probably wouldn’t still be here today if we weren’t so resistant to change.
It’s very simple: Many thousands of years ago, we discovered that if we carried on doing the same things, we wouldn’t die, because the things that we’ve done before by definition didn’t kill us, and therefore as long as we carry on doing them, we’ll be okay, and it’s very sensible not to do anything new, because it might kill you. But of course, there are exceptions to that. Otherwise, we’d never get anywhere. And one of the exceptions, the interesting exception, is when you can show to people that there might be some self-interest in them making that leap of faith and changing a little bit.
So I’ve spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years trying to find out what could be that self-interest that would encourage not just politicians but also businesses and general populations, all of us, to start to think a little more outwardly, to think in a bigger picture, not always to look inwards, sometimes to look outwards. And this is where I discovered something quite important.
In 2005, I launched a study called the Nation Brands Index. What it is, it’s a very large-scale study that polls a very large sample of the world’s population, a sample that represents about 70 percent of the planet’s population, and I started asking them a series of questions about how they perceive other countries.
And the Nation Brands Index over the years has grown to be a very, very large database. It’s about 200 billion data points tracking what ordinary people think about other countries and why. Why did I do this? Well, because the governments that I advise are very, very keen on knowing how they are regarded. They’ve known, partly because I’ve encouraged them to realize it, that countries depend enormously on their reputations in order to survive and prosper in the world.
If a country has a great, positive image, like Germany has or Sweden or Switzerland, everything is easy and everything is cheap. You get more tourists. You get more investors. You sell your products more expensively. If, on the other hand, you have a country with a very weak or a very negative image, everything is difficult and everything is expensive. So governments care desperately about the image of their country, because it makes a direct difference to how much money they can make, and that’s what they’ve promised their populations they’re going to deliver.
Simon expands on his expertise in detail by describing a study that he launched, and he also introduces the concept of brand – how people perceive things – in the context of a country’s reputation. As you’ll see, he uses ‘brand’ as a bridge to ‘good’.
So a couple of years ago, I thought I would take some time out and speak to that gigantic database and ask it, why do some people prefer one country more than another? And the answer that the database gave me completely staggered me. It was 6.8. I haven’t got time to explain in detail. Basically what it told me was the kinds of countries we prefer are good countries.
We don’t admire countries primarily because they’re rich, because they’re powerful, because they’re successful, because they’re modern, because they’re technologically advanced. We primarily admire countries that are good. What do we mean by good? We mean countries that seem to contribute something to the world in which we live, countries that actually make the world safer or better or richer or fairer. Those are the countries we like.
This is a discovery of significant importance – you see where I’m going – because it squares the circle. I can now say, and often do, to any government, in order to do well, you need to do good. If you want to sell more products, if you want to get more investment, if you want to become more competitive, then you need to start behaving, because that’s why people will respect you and do business with you, and therefore, the more you collaborate, the more competitive you become.
Now at the midpoint of his talk, Simon summarizes what his study found, that ‘in order to do well, you need to do good’. Ideas come from a combination of personal experience and scientific research. It doesn’t necessarily mean the idea is correct, but in a well told story there exists a logical progression which leads to the idea’s formation in the mind of the speaker.
This is quite an important discovery, and as soon as I discovered this, I felt another index coming on. I swear that as I get older, my ideas become simpler and more and more childish. This one is called the Good Country Index, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It measures, or at least it tries to measure, exactly how much each country on Earth contributes not to its own population but to the rest of humanity.
Bizarrely, nobody had ever thought of measuring this before. So my colleague Dr. Robert Govers and I have spent the best part of the last two years, with the help of a large number of very serious and clever people, cramming together all the reliable data in the world we could find about what countries give to the world.
And you’re waiting for me to tell you which one comes top. And I’m going to tell you, but first of all I want to tell you precisely what I mean when I say a good country. I do not mean morally good. When I say that Country X is the goodest country on Earth, and I mean goodest, I don’t mean best. Best is something different.
When you’re talking about a good country, you can be good, gooder and goodest. It’s not the same thing as good, better and best. This is a country which simply gives more to humanity than any other country. I don’t talk about how they behave at home because that’s measured elsewhere. And the winner is Ireland.
According to the data here, no country on Earth, per head of population, per dollar of GDP, contributes more to the world that we live in than Ireland. What does this mean? This means that as we go to sleep at night, all of us in the last 15 seconds before we drift off to sleep, our final thought should be, godammit, I’m glad that Ireland exists.
And that, in the depths of a very severe economic recession, I think that there’s a really important lesson there, that if you can remember your international obligations whilst you are trying to rebuild your own economy, that’s really something. Finland ranks pretty much the same. The only reason why it’s below Ireland is because its lowest score is lower than Ireland’s lowest score.
About three quarters of the way into his talk Simon reveals the primary point of the story – the Good Country Index – and the results of his study. But results and reasons are different, so he then examines his findings in greater detail. For your story, what did you learn along the way? What did you conclude from your research?
Now the other thing you’ll notice about the top 10 there is, of course, they’re all, apart from New Zealand, Western European nations. They’re also all rich. This depressed me, because one of the things that I did not want to discover with this index is that it’s purely the province of rich countries to help poor countries. This is not what it’s all about.
And indeed, if you look further down the list, I don’t have the slide here, you will see something that made me very happy indeed, that Kenya is in the top 30, and that demonstrates one very, very important thing. This is not about money. This is about attitude. This is about culture. This is about a government and a people that care about the rest of the world and have the imagination and the courage to think outwards instead of only thinking selfishly.
I’m going to whip through the other slides just so you can see some of the lower-lying countries. There’s Germany at 13th, the U.S. comes 21st, Mexico comes 66th, and then we have some of the big developing countries, like Russia at 95th, China at 107th. Countries like China and Russia and India, which is down in the same part of the index, well, in some ways, it’s not surprising. They’ve spent a great deal of time over the last decades building their own economy, building their own society and their own polity, but it is to be hoped that the second phase of their growth will be somewhat more outward-looking than the first phase has been so far.
And then you can break down each country in terms of the actual datasets that build into it. I’ll allow you to do that. From midnight tonight it’s going to be on goodcountry.org, and you can look at the country. You can look right down to the level of the individual datasets.
Simon’s slides are very busy, with more data than can be comprehended in such a short talk, but showing the different categories and rankings provides its own sense of credibility to the conclusions being drawn. Simply showing a list of countries with overall rank would be much easier for the audience to read, but far less effective in making his point.
Striking a balance between presenting too much and too little data is always a challenge when deciding how much to share. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. It’s something you have to determine for yourself. If you have the time, rehearse with different versions of your slides before making a final commitment.
Now that’s the Good Country Index. What’s it there for? Well, it’s there really because I want to try to introduce this word, or reintroduce this word, into the discourse. I’ve had enough hearing about competitive countries. I’ve had enough hearing about prosperous, wealthy, fast-growing countries. I’ve even had enough hearing about happy countries because in the end that’s still selfish. That’s still about us, and if we carry on thinking about us, we are in deep, deep trouble.
I think we all know what it is that we want to hear about. We want to hear about good countries, and so I want to ask you all a favor. I’m not asking a lot. It’s something that you might find easy to do and you might even find enjoyable and even helpful to do, and that’s simply to start using the word “good” in this context. When you think about your own country, when you think about other people’s countries, when you think about companies, when you talk about the world that we live in today, start using that word in the way that I’ve talked about this evening.
Not good, the opposite of bad, because that’s an argument that never finishes. Good, the opposite of selfish, good being a country that thinks about all of us. That’s what I would like you to do, and I’d like you to use it as a stick with which to beat your politicians. When you elect them, when you reelect them, when you vote for them, when you listen to what they’re offering you, use that word, “good,” and ask yourself, “Is that what a good country would do?”
And if the answer is no, be very suspicious. Ask yourself, is that the behavior of my country? Do I want to come from a country where the government, in my name, is doing things like that? Or do I, on the other hand, prefer the idea of walking around the world with my head held high thinking, “Yeah, I’m proud to come from a good country”? And everybody will welcome you. And everybody in the last 15 seconds before they drift off to sleep at night will say, “Gosh, I’m glad that person’s country exists.”
Ultimately, that, I think, is what will make the change. That word, “good,” and the number 6.8 and the discovery that’s behind it have changed my life. I think they can change your life, and I think we can use it to change the way that our politicians and our companies behave, and in doing so, we can change the world. I’ve started thinking very differently about my own country since I’ve been thinking about these things. I used to think that I wanted to live in a rich country, and then I started thinking I wanted to live in a happy country, but I began to realize, it’s not enough. I don’t want to live in a rich country. I don’t want to live in a fast-growing or competitive country. I want to live in a good country, and I so, so hope that you do too.
Simon’s conclusion includes a call to action for the audience – to think differently about their own country from the standpoint of doing good – ‘good being a country that thinks about all of us’. What shift in perception do you want your audience to adopt after hearing your story? When they leave the theatre will they think of the world (and their place in it) differently?
[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]
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Heather Barnett: What humans can learn from semi-intelligent slime @ TEDSalon Berlin
/in Biology, Science, Society, TED, TED Talk/by Mark LovettI had the pleasure of attending a special TED event in 2014. TEDSalon Berlin was just a one day affair, yet it featured a number of compelling talks that served as examples of impactful stories on global issues. This post is an analysis of a talk given by Heather Barnett on a most unusual character – a slime mold.
Watch Heather Barnett’s TED Talk. From what seems to be an unusual subject we come to see our human experience differently. It’s not easy to take people on a journey from something unfamiliar to something universal, but Heather does so masterfully.
Transcript
(my notes in red)
I’d like to introduce you to an organism: a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum. It’s a mold with an identity crisis, because it’s not a mold, so let’s get that straight to start with. It is one of 700 known slime molds belonging to the kingdom of the amoeba. It is a single-celled organism, a cell, that joins together with other cells to form a mass super-cell to maximize its resources. So within a slime mold you might find thousands or millions of nuclei, all sharing a cell wall, all operating as one entity. In its natural habitat, you might find the slime mold foraging in woodlands, eating rotting vegetation, but you might equally find it in research laboratories, classrooms, and even artists’ studios.
Great opening lines capture the attention of an audience, and one of the most powerful ways to do this is by way of curiosity, which is what occurs when your topic is something that the listener or reader has never heard of. And while using technical jargon can be an impediment to curiosity when left to its own devices, Heather provides us with a vivid description of what ‘Physarum polycephalum’ is all about.
From a physicality standpoint, she holds up pinched fingers when mentioning ‘single-celled organism’, then spreads her arms shoulder width when stating ‘joins together with other cells’ and spreads her arms further when using the term ‘mass super-cell’.
These are subtle gestures, yet they reinforce the visual of how this organism operates. Watch her movements and gestures throughout the telling of this story. There’s much to learn here about stage presence that is both natural and impactful.
I first came across the slime mold about five years ago. A microbiologist friend of mine gave me a petri dish with a little yellow blob in it and told me to go home and play with it. The only instructions I was given, that it likes it dark and damp and its favorite food is porridge oats. I’m an artist who’s worked for many years with biology, with scientific processes, so living material is not uncommon for me.
I’ve worked with plants, bacteria, cuttlefish, fruit flies. So I was keen to get my new collaborator home to see what it could do. So I took it home and I watched. I fed it a varied diet. I observed as it networked. It formed a connection between food sources. I watched it leave a trail behind it, indicating where it had been. And I noticed that when it was fed up with one petri dish, it would escape and find a better home.
While we might have thought that Heather was a scientist – after all, who other than a scientist would talk about slime mold – we learn that she is, in fact, an artist, which tells our brain to shift gears and be ready for a different perspective on the topic.
Audiences want to know who you are, and why you’re so interested in the topic of your story. For experience-driven stories, those answers tend to be more obvious, but for idea-driven stories, you need to weave in those details.
I captured my observations through time-lapse photography. Slime mold grows at about one centimeter an hour, so it’s not really ideal for live viewing unless there’s some form of really extreme meditation, but through the time lapse, I could observe some really interesting behaviors. For instance, having fed on a nice pile of oats, the slime mold goes off to explore new territories in different directions simultaneously. When it meets itself, it knows it’s already there, it recognizes it’s there, and instead retreats back and grows in other directions. I was quite impressed by this feat, at how what was essentially just a bag of cellular slime could somehow map its territory, know itself, and move with seeming intention.
Imagine hearing this story without the benefit of Heather’s time-lapse photography. The story can be told, but the moving images make her description much more dramatic. Her use of images in the balance of her talk serve to increase impact. They say what can’t be easily described in full. Imagine how your words and images will play out in someone’s mind.
I found countless scientific studies, research papers, journal articles, all citing incredible work with this one organism, and I’m going to share a few of those with you.
For example, a team in Hokkaido University in Japan filled a maze with slime mold. It joined together and formed a mass cell. They introduced food at two points, oats of course, and it formed a connection between the food. It retracted from empty areas and dead ends. There are four possible routes through this maze, yet time and time again, the slime mold established the shortest and the most efficient route. Quite clever. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold had a primitive form of intelligence.
Another study exposed cold air at regular intervals to the slime mold. It didn’t like it. It doesn’t like it cold. It doesn’t like it dry. They did this at repeat intervals, and each time, the slime mold slowed down its growth in response. However, at the next interval, the researchers didn’t put the cold air on, yet the slime mold slowed down in anticipation of it happening. It somehow knew that it was about the time for the cold air that it didn’t like. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold was able to learn.
A third experiment: the slime mold was invited to explore a territory covered in oats. It fans out in a branching pattern. As it goes, each food node it finds, it forms a network, a connection to, and keeps foraging. After 26 hours, it established quite a firm network between the different oats. Now there’s nothing remarkable in this until you learn that the center oat that it started from represents the city of Tokyo, and the surrounding oats are suburban railway stations.
The slime mold had replicated the Tokyo transport network – a complex system developed over time by community dwellings, civil engineering, urban planning. What had taken us well over 100 years took the slime mold just over a day. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold can form efficient networks and solve the traveling salesman problem.
It is a biological computer. As such, it has been mathematically modeled, algorithmically analyzed. It’s been sonified, replicated, simulated. World over, teams of researchers are decoding its biological principles to understand its computational rules and applying that learning to the fields of electronics, programming and robotics.
The best way to make a scientific point, especially when you’re not a scientist, is to reference published work from scientists who are subject matter experts in regards to your subject. Not citing bona fide evidence, and simply making claims as though they are facts, will often create doubt in the minds of the audience. You’re not an expert in the field, so why should they believe you? In this case, however, Heather cites three scientific studies that illustrate a central theme of her story – intelligence.
So the question is, how does this thing work? It doesn’t have a central nervous system. It doesn’t have a brain, yet it can perform behaviors that we associate with brain function. It can learn, it can remember, it can solve problems, it can make decisions. So where does that intelligence lie? So this is a microscopy, a video I shot, and it’s about 100 times magnification, sped up about 20 times, and inside the slime mold, there is a rhythmic pulsing flow, a vein-like structure carrying cellular material, nutrients and chemical information through the cell, streaming first in one direction and then back in another. And it is this continuous, synchronous oscillation within the cell that allows it to form quite a complex understanding of its environment, but without any large-scale control center. This is where its intelligence lies.
A classic shift in idea-driven narratives is moving from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ – ‘what happens’ to ‘how it happens’. Other shifts may involve exploring the why, when and where aspects. This process of exploration is about moving the audience to ever deeper levels of their understanding. Taking someone on a journey is often related to space or time, but also applies to knowledge. Think about how you can unfold a complex topic, doing so in such a way that the listener can follow along. Each layer is a foundation for the next.
So it’s not just academic researchers in universities that are interested in this organism. A few years ago, I set up SliMoCo, the Slime Mould Collective. It’s an online, open, democratic network for slime mold researchers and enthusiasts to share knowledge and experimentation across disciplinary divides and across academic divides. The Slime Mould Collective membership is self-selecting. People have found the collective as the slime mold finds the oats. And it comprises of scientists and computer scientists and researchers but also artists like me, architects, designers, writers, activists, you name it. It’s a very interesting, eclectic membership.
Just a few examples: an artist who paints with fluorescent Physarum; a collaborative team who are combining biological and electronic design with 3D printing technologies in a workshop; another artist who is using the slime mold as a way of engaging a community to map their area. Here, the slime mold is being used directly as a biological tool, but metaphorically as a symbol for ways of talking about social cohesion, communication and cooperation.
From talking about the slime mold, the story comes back to Heather, and a collective that she created in order to further the understanding of this subject. The narrative then expands to include other people who are part of the collective and what they’ve done. Stories of other people is a Story Block which broadens the narrative beyond the speaker’s experience.
Other public engagement activities; I run lots of slime mold workshops, a creative way of engaging with the organism. So people are invited to come and learn about what amazing things it can do, and they design their own petri dish experiment, an environment for the slime mold to navigate so they can test its properties. Everybody takes home a new pet and is invited to post their results on the Slime Mould Collective. And the collective has enabled me to form collaborations with a whole array of interesting people. I’ve been working with filmmakers on a feature-length slime mold documentary, and I stress feature-length, which is in the final stages of edit and will be hitting your cinema screens very soon.
It’s also enabled me to conduct what I think is the world’s first human slime mold experiment. This is part of an exhibition in Rotterdam last year. We invited people to become slime mold for half an hour. So we essentially tied people together so they were a giant cell, and invited them to follow slime mold rules. You have to communicate through oscillations, no speaking. You have to operate as one entity, one mass cell, no egos, and the motivation for moving and then exploring the environment is in search of food. So a chaotic shuffle ensued as this bunch of strangers tied together with yellow ropes wearing “Being Slime Mold” t-shirts wandered through the museum park.
When they met trees, they had to reshape their connections and reform as a mass cell through not speaking. This is a ludicrous experiment in many, many ways. This isn’t hypothesis-driven. We’re not trying to prove, demonstrate anything. But what it did provide us was a way of engaging a broad section of the public with ideas of intelligence, agency, autonomy, and provide a playful platform for discussions about the things that ensued.
One of the most exciting things about this experiment was the conversation that happened afterwards. An entirely spontaneous symposium happened in the park. People talked about the human psychology, of how difficult it was to let go of their individual personalities and egos. Other people talked about bacterial communication. Each person brought in their own individual interpretation, and our conclusion from this experiment was that the people of Rotterdam were highly cooperative, especially when given beer. We didn’t just give them oats. We gave them beer as well.
How your idea and passion integrates into society can be an important part of your story. Outside of the laboratory, and beyond art or science, Heather engages people to learn in a very tangible way. They were involved, had to make decisions, but also had fun doing it. Is there a similar set of experiences that you can include in your story to demonstrate how your idea can affect the way people think and act?
But they weren’t as efficient as the slime mold, and the slime mold, for me, is a fascinating subject matter. It’s biologically fascinating, it’s computationally interesting, but it’s also a symbol, a way of engaging with ideas of community, collective behavior, cooperation. A lot of my work draws on the scientific research, so this pays homage to the maze experiment but in a different way. And the slime mold is also my working material. It’s a coproducer of photographs, prints, animations, participatory events.
Whilst the slime mold doesn’t choose to work with me, exactly, it is a collaboration of sorts. I can predict certain behaviors by understanding how it operates, but I can’t control it. The slime mold has the final say in the creative process. And after all, it has its own internal aesthetics. These branching patterns that we see we see across all forms, scales of nature, from river deltas to lightning strikes, from our own blood vessels to neural networks. There’s clearly significant rules at play in this simple yet complex organism, and no matter what our disciplinary perspective or our mode of inquiry, there’s a great deal that we can learn from observing and engaging with this beautiful, brainless blob.
I give you Physarum polycephalum.
It’s a powerful story that can begin with something we feel is insignificant – slime mold – and take us to a place where we are thinking about how humans interact with each other. After seeing this talk I began to view society differently. The chaos that occurs when we act too much as individuals, and the success that we can achieve when we work together.
There’s not any direct calls to action. Instead, this is a thought provoking narrative that offers a new perspective for the audience to do with as they wish.
[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]
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