I am very happy to be here today.
More than an enormous pleasure to be here speaking with you and sharing this stage with
so many interesting people, I am realizing one more life dream.
I have accompanied TED for a long time, as part of the audience, and now I am here, speaking
from the stage.
I am from Rio, born and raised here in Copacabana, I am 27 years old, a doctor, specializing
at the moment in clinical oncology and have come here today to talk to you about an incredible
project: Sargent Pepper’s carnival band.
Sargent Pepper’s carnival band is a street carnival band from here in Rio de Janeiro
that mixed Beatle’s music with various different kinds of Brazilian rhythms and inspired by
the most carnival-like cd of the Fab Four, Sargent Peppers, and so was born with a first
and last name.
The first question that you are probably asking yourself is, am I in the wrong lecture?
What is a doctor, future oncologist, doing here talking about samba, carnival, music
and the Beatles?
But it’s just that.
My real specialty is human beings and my involvement in carnival is down to my last strand of hair.
My friends and I, we have accompanied and lived carnival in a very intense way for a
long time.
Instead of traveling, we always stay here and take advantage of the best of the city
during this time.
Being able to interact with an unending number of people, people that you have never seen
in your life but who seem like your friends for centuries.
Being able to listen to any kind of music and play as you wish.
And we like carnival so much, that in the middle of carnival of 2010, between one carnival
band and another, we ended up asking ourselves two extremely simple questions, totally unpretentious,
but that changed our lives forever.
The first was: “Lets make our own carnival band?
We go to so many other people’s bands, lets make one that is more like us, for our friends,
for us to be able to live this energy the whole year instead of just during one month?
Come on, let’s do it.”
And the second question of these fools was: “What kind of band is it going to be?”
And that’s when tons of ridiculous ideas came up that I will save you from, and then
finally someone said, “Beatles!”
And it is amazing how at that moment everything changed.
I would like to open a parenthesis to talk a bit about ideas in general.
Well, actually, good ideas.
It is amazing how they share a series of characteristics.
The first one is that it is impossible to be immune to a good idea.
When you tell it to someone or when you try it out, your face changes, your look changes.
Its as if you have just told someone some great news.
But you only told them about your idea.
The second interesting characteristic of a good idea is that it doesn’t need to be
explained.
That group, of which I am so proud to be a part of, that had other doctors, engineers,
lawyers and not one musician, a journalist too (he will be mad at me if I don’t mention
him), but still not one musician, we had never done anything like this, but we have saw that
almost instantly we had a great idea in front of us, that we had a goal, a path to follow.
In third place, and not less important, at some moment when you are telling someone about
your good idea, the following expression will arise: “Man, why didn’t I think of that
before?”
And this is where I can’t agree more.
Everything was happening.
The Beatles are the greatest band of all time, no one doubts that.
Carnival has been growing astronomically.
The thematic bands have been arising consistently and with more force.
The real merit of this group wasn’t in having this idea.
Maybe others had it before and if we hadn’t, others would have come up with it.
The real merit of this group was transforming this potential, this whole dream, into reality.
And how did we do this?
I prefer to think that it was magic, but I like to share this magic in two stages.
The first is believing in our idea.
We, in general, put up many barriers to be able to do something.
“I don’t have money, I don’t know anyone, I have never done this before, I am not a
specialist.”
But this is where I purposely left the fourth and last characteristic of a good idea.
When you have a good idea, the idea transforms you, you are not the same anymore.
That’s it.
We don’t have this option of, we didn’t have the option of not going forward.
We knew that if we watered it, our little seed, our little seed would turn into a pepper.
The round of applause messed me up a bit.
Next, the second phase of the magic was the execution itself.
It doesn’t help to have a good idea, believe in it and not execute it in a good way.
Everyone knows that no one does anything alone.
We knew this.
We knew that we needed to establish a series of partnerships to be able to go forward.
But what not everyone knows is that you don’t necessarily need money, contracts and promises
to be able to establish the right partnerships.
We used another way.
We bet that our idea would catch on and showed people that we didn’t want personal gain.
We were up against a greater project that if they could give their energy, they would
leave their mark on this story.
And that is how we were able to catch four musicians, that worked so much and so hard,
in such a short time, just two or three months, gave our idea voice, a wind section, drum
arrangements, guitar solos, and we already had a ready musical base.
But we knew that it isn’t just music that makes a carnival band happen.
We understood that carnival bands have always been the interaction with the crowd as well.
We understood that a carnival band is costumes and accessories.
And we filled this band, we put it on the street with a unitary solid visual identity,
with a facebook account to contact our public and also, always basing our presentations
on things that make the public construct the story with us in some way.
Our viralization did not just happen with musicians.
We won over other musicians, we won over designers, publicists, our families, our friends.
In very little time, our pepper army was formed.
In less than two years this group was able to do incredible things.
In less than two years, we were able to put on our first performance.
Even today, I still get emotional when I talk about it because we had never done anything
like that.
It was our oppening.
But our carnival was elected the best carnival band of that year by the popular vote of the
O Globo newspaper and we were among the most talked about subjects on Twitter during that
day.
We started doing shows outside of carnival as well, one of which was here in Copacabana,
during New Year’s, and we talked to Prince Harry, etc.
And then our second carnival arrived, this year in February.
And this second year, we knew that Botafogo was too small.
But that Aterro do Flamengo was going to be too small, that we didn’t know.
And then we received two other invitations when we weren’t able to take anymore, thinking
that we had already realized all of our dreams, which left us really excited.
The first was to talk to you here today and I am still getting used to this idea and the
second was, the second was the invitation to play in London, at the Olympics.
This invitation really moved us for three main reasons.
The first, artistic.
What artist wouldn’t be moved being able to play at an event the size of the Olympics,
not only because of the size but also because of the concept.
Of being able to play to people from across the world.
Only music and sports can do this.
The second large potential of this invitation was, that feeling that always moved us in
relation to carnival, was it just good for us?
What if this thing, this freeing yourself of the problems you have, of who you are,
of the bill you have to pay, this thing about “One day, at last, I have the right to a
fleeting joy, an overwhelming epidemic,” is something that is only good for those from
Rio?
That is only good for Brazilians?
We are sure that this isn’t true.
We think that a world with more Carnival, a carnivalized world, is also one of the values
that a person from Rio can teach the world.
And lastly, and maybe most importantly: it is because this invitation closes our greatest
message.
Who could believe that that group of friends, who are not professionals in the subject,
where there were no musicians, but in less than two years, were able to put on two carnival
performances of that size, were able to participate in presentations of that magnitude, and will
now be playing at an Olympic event?
We can never doubt our dreams.
And I believe so much in this that I want to do an exercise with you.
I would like to turn down the lights, please, the most that you can, the most that you can
lower the lights.
And I would like for everyone to close their eyes and think about a dream that you have
let go of, of a project that you thought that you wouldn’t be able to realize, something
that you thought you didn’t know how to do.
I want you to know that even without being specialists in any subject, even without us
having control over everything, even when we haven’t done it before, we can go really
far.
You should think: “I can do it.”
This dream that you had today, that you had last week, that dream.
You can carry it out.
I would like you to use Sargent Pepper’s carnival band not only to enjoy yourselves.
Of course that is one of our greatest goals.
But I want you to use it as an example of the message that we would really like to pass
on.
We want you to use Sargent Pepper’s carnival band, we want you to see our submarine, not
only as a form of transportation.
It is mainly a form of transformation.
And I want to tell Jacó, Elaine, Renata, Ilana, Bruninho, Laurinha, Xande, Leo, Stul,
Fernandes, Lipe, Leandro and Matheus that they are all my motivation to be talking here
to you.
With the most pride in the world, I present to you, Sargent Pepper’s carnival band.
Good night, everyone.
Lets do more?
Good night, everyone.
Thank you.
And this is just the first day!