Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Howdy.
You know, over the course of time,
I have probably done about 20 or 25 TED Talks and TEDx Talks.
And during that time,
I've watched them go from being something where each one seemed a revelation
to - and present company excepted, please -
where the form had become as rigid as the sonnet
and the likelihood of anything spontaneous happening
was about as great as it was at the Republican National Convention
until -
(Laughter)
until Clint Eastwood brought in a chair.
(Laughter) (Applause)
This is actually in case I want to sit down, though.
I don't have anybody in that chair, you'll be pleased to know.
But in thinking about "open"
and thinking about the way in which TED Talks have become so stylized,
it occurred to me that an adventuresome thing for me to do
would be to come out here
with as little knowledge of what I was about to say as I could possibly.
Now, that's hard to do, you know.
(Applause)
You really got to work at it,
and right at sort of the last moment, I gave myself an out.
But this is actually kind of a cheap-trick out,
but I -
I want you to listen very carefully to this quote by Franz Kafka.
"You need not leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
You need not even listen.
Simply wait.
You need not even wait.
Just learn to become quiet
and still
and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you,
unmasked.
It has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
(Laughter)
That's a cheap trick, though.
You know, but it would be interesting to see
what would happen over the course of 15 minutes and 35 seconds.
I'd have to make people put away their cellphones,
I'll tell you that.
No, so what I think I'll do is tell a story,
and I'm actually just going to grab one -
this is also risky -
I'm going to grab the first one that comes into my head.
Ah. That's interesting.
(Laughter)
Okay.
Back when I was in the process of giving up what I'd been doing,
which was being a cattle rancher in Wyoming,
and becoming what I became,
which was - I don't know what to call it yet -
an internet guru, I guess -
but they don't call it that anymore -
I was driving back and forth between Wyoming and California
maybe 20 times a year.
My wife called it, "The memorized Nevada project."
(Laughter)
And I kept trying to find other ways to cross the Great Divide Basin.
And I was exploring one of those other ways
on a September night, a September evening,
late in the afternoon, late in September,
and it was cold,
and I was driving through a place called Fallon, Nevada.
And Fallon, Nevada, is notable, mostly, for being the place
where the Miramar Naval Air Station kids do their top-gun training
because they can rage around at very high rates of speed
and not do much except break jackrabbit eardrums.
And there was a guy who looked like hell sitting on the edge of town.
Had a sign that said, "Anywhere but here."
(Laughter)
And I'm thinking, well, you know,
he probably doesn't mean Eureka, Austin or Ely.
(Laughter)
He probably means Salt Lake City, which is about 700 miles away,
so if I take this fellow on, I'm going to have him all night.
But I take him on.
And he gets into the car,
and he looks even worse than he did by the road,
and he smells a lot worse.
But a weird feeling of peace comes over me as soon as he gets in the car,
and I feel perfectly okay about having him there.
And we start talking,
and it turns out that he was born the day before I was -
literally, the day before I was -
in kind of a tough part of Queens,
and he'd gone off to Vietnam,
and he'd been shot up and messed up,
and had come back
with a psychological disability and a physical disability
and had been, more or less, making it in New York City.
He had a cab driver's license.
And he actually was a good enough saxophone player
so that he played session gigs.
And he had an apartment, a girlfriend and a functional life.
He was a little odd, but things had been working for him.
And at one point, his landlord quit giving him hot water -
to his apartment.
And since he was a little bit sideways,
he quit paying rent,
thinking that would -
that was not the right thing to do.
So he comes home one night,
and his door has been padlocked three different ways.
All of his stuff is gone.
His girlfriend is nowhere to be found.
His hack license was inside; his saxophone was inside.
And, moreover, the landlord -
in a particular fit of ugliness -
has informed the Veteran's Administration that he's dead.
And he has no identification.
And in that moment, he falls down through the cracks.
And this had happened a couple of years before I met him.
And I said, "So, you're homeless?"
And he said, "Yeah."
And I said, "Well, what are you doing out here?"
And he said, "Just 'cause I'm homeless, doesn't mean I can't take a vacation."
(Laughter)
Solid point.
I said, "Well, why didn't you just stay in San Francisco?"
And he said, "I don't know how to be homeless in San Francisco.
I know how to be homeless in New York."
Again, it was hard to argue.
And we talked about things.
I found him to be lucid and interesting.
In Austin, Nevada, I stopped for gas.
It was one of those sort of Baghdad Cafe kind of gas stations,
with the tumbleweeds and everything.
And I got out of the car, went in to pay for the gas,
and I saw my passenger get out of the car
and scribble something on a piece of paper
and put in the coin-return slot
of what was - they still had phone booths in those days, kind of quaint now -
but put it in the coin-return slot of the phone booth
out on the corner of the lot.
So I took a pass by there, and I grabbed it up.
And it was a little note that said,
"Love forgives everything."
When I got back in the car and drove for a while, I said,
"Why did you put that note in the coin-return slot there?"
And he said, "Well, I figured somebody would be looking for money
and get my note instead."
And I said, "Yeah, right.
But what motivated you to write 'Love forgives everything'?"
And he said, "Well, it does."
(Laughter)
And I said, "Well, that's a tall bar for it,
but, yeah, I guess so.
I mean - but this means, you know, this seems like a prayer or something.
Did you have a very religious sense of things?"
And he said, "Oh, yeah."
And I said, "So you have a very personal god?"
And he said, "Yep."
And I said, "Well, if you'll pardon me,
your personal god that you're serving in this very humble way
seems to be treating you like shit.
(Laughter)
Whereas I am doing okay, and I don't have this."
Then he said, "Well, you know,
every soul comes into the world to take a curriculum,
and some of us are taking Basket Weaving
and some of us are taking Astrophysics 406.
And I'm pleased to be taking the harder courses."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Which next time you find yourself in trouble is something to think about
because there's this weird notion of karma that is precisely the opposite of that.
And I think he's actually closer to being onto something.
But I didn't think about it a lot until some years later,
and I'll cut quickly.
Some years later, I fell in love like they do in the movies or operas.
And I was deliriously, insanely, dangerously in love
for a year.
Until one night, two days before her 30th birthday,
I put her on an airplane in LA,
and she died on the way to New York.
Just dropped dead.
Completely surprisingly.
She'd been having premonitions that I was going to die,
so she was sort of right.
And suddenly I felt like I was taking harder courses.
Much harder courses.
And I had to go through this period of thinking that this was just like
a harsh, meaningless, horrible manifestation
of all the rattling and banging of senseless chaos,
or it actually meant something and it happened to me for a reason.
And I decided that it had happened to me for a reason - What was that?
And I thought, "Well, if it happens to me for a reason,
it means that there is a soul, maybe.
That the soul comes into the world.
That the hitchhiker was right: that I had one, that she had one.
Why would the soul come into the world?
What would be the point of that?
And suddenly it became very clear to me
that the reason the soul comes into the world
is so that love will make sense,
so that love will have a context,
so that love will have the frame
of fear and doubt and decay
and the Republican Party
(Laughter)
and nuclear weapons and, you know,
the terrible inner self-loathing
that each of us carries around for no good reason,
which is my idea of original sin.
And
that we are all volunteers here.
That we come into the world from the other side,
which is entirely made of love,
where it's all open and couldn't be opener,
into this place of constricture and containment
and closure and dogma and terror.
And we fight with our hearts -
in the high mountains of the Afghanistan of the soul -
in order for love to make sense.
And by not giving up
and by not thinking the worst of ourselves or others,
and mostly, to the extent that we're capable of doing it,
by learning how to actually accept love from other people,
we win that battle
for every soul born and unborn.
And that is why we were here.
Now, I've met one person in my whole life
who I really think is fluidly capable of accepting love.
He is Gilberto Gil,
and this is handy for him
because he's the most beloved person in the most loving country on the planet.
He's a singer from Brazil,
and I spent a lot of time with him,
and everybody -
I've probably taken 3,000 photographs with other people's cameras
of him hugging some person in Brazil
and meaning it.
But meaning it mostly be receiving it.
And so, I guess, the thing that I have to say about openness -
and I honestly did not know,
truthfully did not know that this was the story I was going to tell you.
I'm glad I didn't find myself talking about the end of monotheism,
(Laughter)
which was what I was thinking I was going to talk about.
That was the dying dinosaur.
I mean, monotheism is on its last legs and is behaving very badly as it dies.
These things, these things do not go down slow,
and we are in a contained space.
(Laughter)
It will take a lot of love to get through this -
truly -
and much better filmmaking.
No, I think what it will take
to get through this dark time in human history
is really for us to become very, very focused
on allowing ourselves
to find ourselves worthy,
to make ourselves open
to the love
that all of us actually deserves.
(Applause)