Some superheros can move faster than the wind.
The men in Apollo 10 reached a record-breaking speed of around 25,000 miles per hour when the shuttle re-entered the Earth's atmosphere in 1969.
Wouldn't we save a lot of time to be able to move that fast?
But what's the catch?
Air is not empty.
Elements like oxygen and nitrogen, even countless dust particles, make up the air around us.
When we move past these things in the air, we're rubbing against them and creating a lot of friction, which results in heat.
Just like rubbing your hands together warms them up or rubbing two sticks together makes fire, the faster objects rub together, the more heat is generated.
So, if we're running at 25,000 miles per hour, the heat from friction would burn our faces off.
Even if we somehow withstood the heat, the sand and dirt in the air would still scrape us up with millions of tiny cuts all happening at the same time.
Ever seen the front bumper or grill of a truck?
What do you think all the birds and bugs would do to your open eyes or exposed skin?
Okay, so you'll wear a mask to avoid destroying your face.
But what about people in buildings between you and your destination?
It takes us approximately one-fifth of a second to react to what we see.
By the time we see what is ahead of us and react to it - time times velocity equals distance equals one-fifth of a second times 25,000 miles per hour equals 1.4 miles - we would have gone past it or through it by over a mile.
We're either going to kill ourselves by crashing into the nearest wall at super speed or, worse, if we're indestructible, we've essentially turned our bodies into missiles that destroy everything in our path.
So, long distance travel at 25,000 miles per hour would leave us burning up, covered in bugs, and leaves no time to react.
What about short bursts to a location we can see with no obstacles in between?
Okay, let's say a bullet is about to hit a beautiful damsel in distress.
So, our hero swoops in at super speed, grabs her, and carries her to safety.
That sounds very romantic, but, in reality, that girl will probably suffer more damage from the hero than the bullet if he moved her at super speed.
Newton's First Law of Motion deals with inertia, which is the resistance to a change in its state of motion.
So, an object will continue moving or staying at the same place unless something changes it.
Acceleration is the rate the velocity changes over time.
When the girl at rest, velocity equals zero miles per hour, begins accelerating to reach the speed within seconds, velocity increases rapidly to 25,000 miles per hour, her brain would crash into the side of her skull.
And, when she stops suddenly, velocity decreases rapidly back to zero miles per hour, her brain would crash into the other side of her skull, turning her brain into mush.
The brain is too fragile to handle the sudden movement.
So is every part of her body, for that matter.
Remember, it's not the speed that causes the damage because the astronauts survived Apollo 10, it's the acceleration or sudden stop that causes our internal organs to crash into the front of our bodies the way we move forward in a bus when the driver slams on the brakes.
What the hero did to the girl is mathematically the same as running her over with a space shuttle at maximum speed.
She probably died instantly at the point of impact.
He's going to owe this poor girl's family an apology and a big fat compensation check.
Oh, and possibly face jail time.
Doctors have to carry liability insurance just in case they make a mistake and hurt their patients.
I wonder how much superhero insurance policy would cost.
Now, which superpower physics lesson will you explore next?
Shifting body size and content, super speed, flight, super strength, immortality, and invisibility.
For some time I have been interested in the placebo effect, which might seem like an odd thing for a magician to be interested in, unless you think of it in the terms that I do, which is, "Something fake is believed in enough by somebody that it becomes something real."
In other words, sugar pills have a measurable effect in certain kinds of studies, the placebo effect, just because the person thinks that what's happening to them is a pharmaceutical or some sort of a -- for pain management, for example, if they believe it enough there is a measurable effect in the body called the placebo effect.
Something fake becomes something real because of someone's perception of it.
In order for us to understand each other, I want to start by showing you a rudimentary, very simple magic trick.
And I'm going to show you how it works.
This is a trick that's been in every children's magic book since at least the 1950s.
I learned it myself from Cub Scout Magic in the 1970s.
I'll do it for you, and then I'll explain it.
And then I'll explain why I explained it.
So, here's what happens.
The knife, which you can examine; my hand, which you could examine.
I'm just going to hold the knife in my fist like this.
I'll get my sleeve back.
And to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve I'm just going to squeeze my wrist right here.
That way you can see that at no time can anything travel, as long as I'm squeezing there nothing can go up or down my sleeve.
And the object of this is quite simple.
I'm going to open my hand, and hopefully, if all is well, my pure animal magnetism will hold the knife.
In fact it's held so tightly in place that I can shake it, and the knife does not come off.
Nothing goes up or down my sleeve, no trickery.
And you can examine everything.
Ta-da!
(Applause) So, this is a trick that I often teach to young children that are interested in magic, because you can learn a great deal about deception by studying this very -- even though it's a very simple trick methodologically.
Probably many of you in the room know this trick.
What happens is this.
I hold the knife in my hand.
I say I'm going to grab hold of my wrist to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve, that is a lie.
The reason I'm holding onto my wrist is because that's actually the secret of the illusion.
In a moment when my hand moves from facing you to being away from you, this finger right here, my index finger is just going to shift from where it is, to a position pointing out like this.
Nice one.
Someone who didn't have a childhood is out there.
(Laughter) So, it goes like this, from here, right.
And as I move around my finger shifts.
And we could talk about why this is deceptive, why you don't notice there are only three fingers down here, because the mind, and the way it processes information, it doesn't count, one, two, three.
It groups them.
But that's not really what this is about.
Right?
And then I open my hand up.
Obviously it's clinging there, not by animal magnetism, but by chicanery, my index finger being there.
And then when I close my finger, same thing, as I move back, this motion kind of covers the moving back of my finger.
I take this hand away.
You give the knife out.
There is a trick you can do for your friends and neighbors.
Thanks.
Now, (Laughter) what does that have to do with the placebo effect?
I read a study a year or so ago that really blew my mind wide open.
I'm not a doctor or a researcher, so this, to me, was an astonishing thing.
It turns out that if you administer a placebo in the form of a white pill, that's like aspirin shaped -- it's just a round white pill -- it has some certain measurable effect.
But if you change the form that you give the placebo in, like you make a smaller pill, and color it blue, and stamp a letter into it, it is actually measurably more effective.
Even though neither one of these things has any pharmaceutical -- they're sugar pills.
But a white pill is not as good as a blue pill.
What?
(Laughter) That really flipped me out.
Turns out though, that that's not even where it stops.
If you have capsules, they're more effective than tablets in any form.
A colored capsule, that's yellow on one end and red on the other is better than a white capsule.
Dosage has something to do with this.
One pill twice a day is not as good at three pills -- I don't remember the statistic now.
Sorry.
But the point is ...
(Laughter) ... these dosages have something to do with it.
And the form has something to do with it.
And if you want the ultimate in placebo, you've go to the needle.
Right?
A syringe with some inert -- a couple CCs of some inert something, and you inject this into a patient ...
Well this is such a powerful image in their mind, it's so much stronger than the white pill.
It's a really, this graph, well I'll show it to you some other time when we have slides.
The point is the white pill is not as good as the blue pill is not as good as the capsule is not as good as the needle.
And none of it has any real pharmaceutical quality, it's only your belief that makes it real in your body and makes a stronger effect.
I wanted to see if I could take that idea and apply it to a magic trick.
And take something that is obviously a fake trick and make it seem real.
And we know from that study that when you want reality, you go to the needle.
This is a seven-inch hatpin.
It's very, very sharp, and I'm going to just sterilize it a tiny bit.
This is really my flesh.
This is not Damian's special-grown flesh.
That's my skin right there.
This is not a Hollywood special effect.
I'm going to pierce my skin and run this needle through to the other side.
If you're queasy -- (Laughs) if you faint easily -- I was doing this for some friends in the hotel room last night, and some people that I didn't know, and one woman almost passed out.
So, I suggest if you get queasy easy that you look away for about the next 30 -- in fact, you know what, I'll do the first bad part behind it.
You'll get to see, you can look away too if you'd like to.
So, here is what happens, right here, the beginning of my flesh at the lower part of my arm I just make a little pierce.
I'm sorry, man.
Am I freaking you out?
OK, and then just through my skin a tiny bit, and then out the other side like this.
Now, essentially we're in the same position we were in with the knife trick.
(Laughter) Sort of.
But you can't count my fingers right now can you?
So, let me show them to you.
That's one, two three, four, five.
Yes, well...
I know what people think when they see this.
They go, "Well, he's certainly not dumb enough to stab himself through the skin to entertain us for a few minutes.
So, let me give you a little peek.
How's that look out there?
Pretty good.
(Laughs) Yeah, I know.
(Laughs) And the people in the back go, "OK, I didn't really see that."
People in the satellite room are starting to move in now.
Let me give you good close perezdonald@example.net.
That really is my skin.
That is not a Hollywood special effect.
That's my flesh, and I can twist that around.
I'm sorry.
If you're getting queasy, look away, don't look at the thing.
People in the back or people on video years from now watching this will go, "Well yeah, that looks kind of neat in some sort of effect there, but if it were real he would be -- see there's a hole there and a hole there, if it were real he would be bleeding.
Well let me work up some blood for you.
(Laughter) Yes, there it is.
(Applause) (Laughter) Normally now, I would take the needle out.
I would clean off my arm, and I would show you that there are no wounds.
But I think in this context and with the idea of taking something fake and making it into something real, I'm just going to leave it there, and walk off the stage.
(Laughter) I will be seeing you several times over the next few days.
I hope you're looking forward to that.
Thank you very much.
(Laughter) (Applause)
I worked on a film called "Apollo 13," and when I worked on this film, I discovered something about how our brains work, and how our brains work is that, when we're sort of infused with either enthusiasm or awe or fondness or whatever, it changes and alters our perception of things.
It changes what we see.
It changes what we remember.
And as an experiment, because I dauntingly create a task for myself of recreating a Saturn V launch for this particular movie, because I put it out there, I felt a little nervous about it, so I need to do an experiment and bring a group of people like this in a projection room and play this stock footage, and when I played this stock footage, I simply wanted to find out what people remembered, what was memorable about it?
What should I actually try to replicate?
What should I try to emulate to some degree?
So this is the footage that I was showing everybody.
And what I discovered is, because of the nature of the footage and the fact that we're doing this film, there was an emotion that was built into it and our collective memories of what this launch meant to us and all these various things.
When I showed it, and I asked, immediately after the screening was over, what they thought of it, what was your memorable shots, they changed them.
They were -- had camera moves on them.
They had all kinds of things.
Shots were combined, and I was just really curious, I mean, what the hell were you looking at just a few minutes ago and how come, how'd you come up with this sort of description?
And what I discovered is, what I should do is not actually replicate what they saw, is replicate what they remembered.
So this is our footage of the launch, based on, basically, taking notes, asking people what they thought, and then the combination of all the different shots and all the different things put together created their sort of collective consciousness of what they remembered it looked like, but not what it really looked like.
So this is what we created for "Apollo 13."
(Launch noises) So literally what you're seeing now is the confluence of a bunch of different people, a bunch of different memories, including my own, of taking a little bit of liberty with the subject matter.
I basically shot everything with short lenses, which means that you're very close to the action, but framed it very similarly to the long lens shots which gives you a sense of distance, so I was basically was setting up something that would remind you of something you haven't really quite seen before.
(Music) And then I'm going to show you exactly what it is that you were reacting to when you were reacting to it.
(Music) Tom Hanks: Hello, Houston, this is Odyssey.
It's good to see you again.
(Cheers) (Music) Rob Legato: I pretend they're clapping for me.
(Laughter) So now I'm in a parking lot.
Basically it's a tin can, and I'm basically recreating the launch with fire extinguishers, fire, I have wax that I threw in front of the lens to look like ice, and so basically if you believed any of the stuff that I just showed you, what you were reacting to, what you're emoting to, is something that's a total falsehood, and I found that really kind of fascinating.
And in this particular case, this is the climax of the movie, and, you know, the weight of achieving it was simply take a model, throw it out of a helicopter, and shoot it.
And that's simply what I did.
That's me shooting, and I'm a fairly mediocre operator, so I got that nice sense of verisimilitude, of a kind of, you know, following the rocket all the way down, and giving that little sort of edge, I was desperately trying to keep it in frame.
So then I come up to the next thing.
We had a NASA consultant who was actually an astronaut, who was actually on some of the missions, of Apollo 15, and he was there to basically double check my science.
And, I guess somebody thought they needed to do that.
(Laughter) I don't know why, but they thought they did.
So we were, he's a hero, he's an astronaut, and we're all sort of excited, and, you know, I gave myself the liberty of saying, you know, some of the shots I did didn't really suck that bad.
And so maybe, you know, we were feeling kind of a little good about it, so I brought him in here, and he needed to really check and see what we were doing, and basically give us our A plus report card, and so I showed him some shots we were working on, and waiting for the reaction that you hope for, which is what I got.
(Music) (Launch noises) So I showed him these two shots, and then he basically told me what he thought.
("That's wrong") (Laughter) Okay.
(Laughter) It's what you dream about.
(Laughter) So what I got from him is, he turned to me and said, "You would never, ever design a rocket like that.
You would never have a rocket go up while the gantry arms are going out.
Can you imagine the tragedy that could possibly happen with that?
You would never, ever design a rocket like that."
And he was perezdonald@example.net.
It's like, Yeah, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm the guy out in the parking lot recreating one of America's finest moments with fire extinguishers.
(Laughter) And I'm not going to argue with you.
You're an astronaut, a hero, and I'm from New Jersey, so -- (Laughter) I'm just going to show you some footage.
I'm just going to show you some footage, and tell me what you think.
And then I did kind of get the reaction I was hoping for.
So I showed him this, and this is actual footage that he was on.
This is Apollo 15.
This was his mission.
So I showed him this, and the reaction I got was interesting.
("That's wrong too.")
(Laughter) So, and what happened was, I mean, what I sort of intuned in that is that he remembered it differently.
He remembered that was a perfectly safe sort of gantry system, perfectly safe rocket launch, because he's sitting in a rocket that has, like, a hundred thousand pounds of thrust, built by the lowest bidder.
He was hoping it was going to work out okay.
(Laughter) (Applause) So he twisted his memory around.
Now, Ron Howard ran into Buzz Aldrin, who was not on the movie, so he had no idea that we were faking any of this footage, and he just responded as he would respond, and I'll run this.
Ron Howard: Buzz Aldrin came up to me and said, "Hey, that launch footage, I saw some shots I'd never seen before.
Did you guys, what vault did you find that stuff in?"
And I said, "Well, no vault, Buzz, we generated all that from scratch."
And he said, "Huh, that's pretty good.
Can we use it?"
(Explosion) ("Sure") (Laughter) RL: I think he's a great American.
(Laughter) So, "Titanic" was, if you don't know the story, doesn't end well.
(Laughter) Jim Cameron actually photographed the real Titanic.
So he basically set up, or basically shattered the suspension of disbelief, because what he photographed was the real thing, a Mir sub going down, or actually two Mir subs going down to the real wreck, and he created this very haunting footage.
It's really beautiful, and it conjures up all these various different emotions, but he couldn't photograph everything, and to tell the story, I had to fill in the gaps, which is now rather daunting, because now I have to recreate back to back what really happened and I had, I'm the only one who could really blow it at that point.
So this is the footage he photographed, and it was pretty moving and pretty awe-inspiring.
So I'm going to just let it run, so you kind of absorb this sort of thing, and I'll describe my sort of reactions when I was looking at it for the very first time.
I got the feeling that my brain wanted to basically see it come back to life.
I automatically wanted to see this ship, this magnificent ship, basically in all its glory, and conversely, I wanted to see it not in all its glory, basically go back to what it looks like.
So I conjured up an effect that I'm later going to show you what I tried to do, which is kind of the heart of the movie, for me, and so that's why I wanted to do the movie, that's why I wanted to create the sort of things I created.
And I'll show you, you know, another thing that I found interesting is what we really were emoting to when you take a perezdonald@example.net.
So here's the behind the scenes, a couple of little shots here.
So, when you saw my footage, you were seeing this: basically, a bunch of guys flipping a ship upside down, and the little Mir subs are actually about the size of small footballs, and shot in smoke.
Jim went three miles went down, and I went about three miles away from the studio and photographed this in a garage.
And so, but what you're emoting to, or what you're looking at, had the same feeling, the same haunting quality, that Jim's footage had, so I found it so fascinating that our brains sort of, once you believe something's real, you transfer everything that you feel about it, this quality you have, and it's totally artificial.
It's totally make-believe, yet it's not to you, and I found that that was a very interesting thing to explore and use, and it caused me to create the next effect that I'll show you, which is this sort of magic transition, and all I was really attempting to do is basically have the audience cue the effect, so it became a seamless experience for them, that I wasn't showing you my sort of interpretation, I was showing you what you wanted to see.
And the very next shot, right after this -- So you can see what I was doing.
So basically, if there's two subs in the same shot, I shot it, because where's the camera coming from?
And when Jim shot it, it was only one sub, because he was photographing from the other, and I don't remember if I did this or Jim did this.
I'll give it to Jim, because he could use the pat on the back.
(Laughter) Okay.
So now the Titanic transition.
So this is what I was referring to where I wanted to basically magically transplant from one state of the Titanic to the other.
So I'll just play the shot once.
(Music) (Music) And what I was hoping for is that it just melts in front of you.
Gloria Stuart: That was the last time Titanic ever saw daylight.
RL: So, what I did is basically I had another screening room experience where I was basically tracking where I was looking, or where we were looking, and of course you're looking at the two people on the bow of the ship, and then at some point, I'm changing the periphery of the shot, I'm changing, it's becoming the rusted wreck, and then I would run it every day, and then I would find exactly the moment that I stopped looking at them and start noticing the rest of it, and the moment my eye shifted, we just marked it to the frame.
The moment my eye shifted, I immediately started to change them, so now somehow you missed where it started and where it stopped.
And so I'll just show it one more time.
(Music) And it's literally done by using what our brains naturally do for us, which is, as soon as you shift your attention, something changes, and then I left the little scarf going, because it really wanted to be a ghostly shot, really wanted to feel like they were still on the wreck, essentially.
That's where they were buried forever.
Or something like that.
I just made that up.
(Laughter) It was, incidentally, the last time I ever saw daylight.
It was a long film to work on.
(Laughter) Now, "Hugo" was another interesting movie, because the movie itself is about film illusions.
It's about how our brain is tricked into seeing a persistence of vision that creates a motion picture, and one of the things I had to do is, we — Sasha Baron Cohen is a very clever, very smart guy, comedian, wanted to basically do an homage to the kind of the Buster Keaton sort of slapstick things, and he wanted his leg brace to get caught on a moving train.
Very dangerous, very impossible to do, and particularly on our stage, because there literally is no way to actually move this train, because it fits so snugly into our set.
So let me show you the scene, and then I basically used the trick that was identified by Sergei Eisenstein, which is, if you have a camera that's moving with a moving object, what is not moving appears to be moving, and what is moving appears to be stopped, so what you're actually seeing now is the train is not moving at all, and what is actually moving is the floor.
So this is the shot.
That's a little video of what you're looking at there, which is our little test, so that's actually what you're seeing, and I thought it was sort of an interesting thing, because it was, part of the homage of the movie itself is coming up with this sort of genius trick which I can't take credit for.
I'd love to but I can't, because it was invented like in 1910 or something like that, is I told Marty, and it's kind of one of those mind things that it's really hard to really get until you actually see it work, and I said, you know, what I was going to do, and he said, "So, let me see if I can get this straight.
The thing with the wheels?
That doesn't move."
(Laughter) (Applause) "And the thing without the wheels, that moves."
Precisely.
(Laughter) Brings me to the next, and final -- Marty's not going to see this, is he?
(Laughter) This isn't viewed outside of -- (Laughter) The next illustration is something that, there's like all one shot theory.
It's a very elegant way of telling a story, especially if you're following somebody on a journey, and that journey basically tells something about their personality in a very concise way, and what we wanted to do based on the shot in "Goodfellas," which is one of the great shots ever, a Martin Scorsese film, of basically following Henry Hill through what it feels like to be a gangster walk going through the Copacabana and being treated in a special way.
He was the master of his universe, and we wanted Hugo to feel the same way, so we created this shot.
(Music) That's Hugo.
(Music) And we felt that if we could basically move the camera with him, we would feel what it feels like to be this boy who is basically the master of his universe, and his universe is, you know, behind the scenes in the bowels of this particular train station that only he can actually navigate through and do it this way, and we had to make it feel that this is his normal, everyday sort of life, so the idea of doing it as one shot was very important, and of course, in shooting in 3D, which is basically it's a huge camera that's hanging off of a giant stick, so to recreate a steadycam shot was the task, and make it feel kind of like what the reaction you got when you saw the "Goodfellas" shot.
So what you're now going to see is how we actually did it.
It's actually five separate sets shot at five different times with two different boys.
The one on the left is where the shot ends, and the shot on the right is where it takes over, and now we switch boys, so it went from Asa Butterfield, who's the star of the show, to his stand-in.
(Music) I wouldn't say his stunt double.
There's a crazy rig that we built for this.
(Music) And so this is, and now this is set number three we're into, and then we're going to go into, basically the very last moment of the shot is actually the steadycam shot.
Everything else was shot on cranes and various things like that, and it literally was done over five different sets, two different boys, different times, and it all had to feel like it was all one shot, and what was sort of great for me was it was probably the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on, and, you know, I was kind of proud of it when I was done, which is, you should never really be proud of stuff, I guess.
So I was kind of proud of it, and I went to a friend of mine, and said, "You know, this is, you know, kind of the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on.
What do you think was the reason?"
And he said, "Because no one knows you had anything to do with it."
(Laughter) So, all I can say is, thank you, and that's my presentation for you.
(Applause) (Applause)
So it's 1969, New York City, third grade music class, and our teacher brings us into a room with nothing but a piano and chairs.
And one by one, he calls us up, and he plays middle C, and he asks us to sing it.
(Singing) And you're either instructed to go to the right of the room or the left side of the room.
(Laughter) And when all 35 kids are done, the left side of the room, which I was a part of, was told to stand up and go back to home room.
(Laughter) And none of us ever received another music class again in elementary school.
An in club and an out club was established, and I didn't even know what the gating test was in the moment.
A few years later, English class ...
(Laughter) first paper of a new semester, and I get the paper back, and it's C+, with the comment, "Good as can be expected."
(Laughter) Now, honestly, I didn't mind a C+.
I was just happy it wasn't a C- or a D.
But the "good as can be expected" comment ...
even at that young age, it didn't seem right.
It seemed somehow limiting.
Now, how many people here have had an experience similar to that, either at school or the workplace?
We're not alone.
So I guess it might be ironic that my life path would lead me to a career of making music and writing for Blue Man Group (Laughter) and starting a school.
(Laughter) But school was torture for me.
As someone who didn't have a natural proclivity for academics, and my teachers never seemed to understand me, I didn't know how to navigate schools and schools didn't know what to do with me.
So I started to ask the question, even back then, if these environments didn't know what to do with people who didn't fit a standard mold, why weren't we reshaping the environments to take advantage of people's strengths?
What I've come to believe is that we need to cultivate safe and conducive conditions for new and innovative ideas to evolve and thrive.
We know that humans are innately innovative, because if we weren't, we'd all be using the same arrowheads that we were using 10,000 years ago.
So one of the things that I started to question is, are there ways to make innovation easier and happen more frequently?
Is there a way to take those aha moments, those breakthroughs that seem to happen randomly and occasionally, and have them happen intentionally and frequently?
When we started Blue Man Group in 1988, we had never done an off-Broadway show before.
We'd actually done almost no theater.
But we knew what we were passionate about, and it was a whole series of things that we had never seen onstage before, things like art and pop culture and technology and sociology and anthropology and percussion and comedy and following your bliss.
We established a rule that nothing made it onstage if we had seen it before, and we wanted to inspire creativity and connectedness in ourselves and our audiences; we wanted to do a little bit of social good, and we wanted to have fun doing it.
And in the office, we wanted to create an environment where people treated each other just a little bit better, just a little bit more respect and consideration than in the outside world.
And we continued to iterate and collaborate and find solutions to create things that hadn't been seen.
Over time, I've come to identify the optimal conditions for these types of creative and innovative environments are clear intent, purpose and passion: this is working on something bigger than ourselves.
Personal integrity: it's doing what we say we're going to do.
It's being our authentic self in all interactions.
Direct communication and clear expectations, even when the subject matter is difficult.
Grit and perseverance: iteration, iteration, iteration.
Establish collaborative teams.
Instill deep trust and mutual respect.
Everyone on your team is in.
There is no out club.
We rise as a team, we fall as a team, and decisions are decisions until they're not.
Embrace multiple perspectives.
This means all voices matter, all emotions matter.
Address disagreements head-on.
People should feel seen and heard.
Take risks and celebrate mistakes.
A commitment to being a learning organization, always trying to spiral upwards the innovation and learning curves.
And speak in one voice.
This is perhaps the glue that holds all these conditions together.
The concept is that we speak in the exact same manner about someone who's not in the room as if they are in the room.
Now this seems basic, but it's an aspirational practice that helps deal with difficult situations in a more respectful way.
Sewing this practice in can have a profound effect on raising the bar, on mutual respect, trust, reducing gossip and politics in the office and the classroom, and thus reducing the noise that gets in the way of the innovative process.
At Blue Man Group, iteration was essential for our creative process.
We were writing a piece where we were trying to illustrate the consumption / waste loop in a funny and creative and surprising way for our audiences.
Now, if you have yourselves thought about trying to do the same endeavor, I can save you a lot of time right here and now.
I can definitively tell you that oatmeal, Jell-O, Cream of Wheat, Gak, pudding, clay, tapioca, Silly Putty and tomato paste do not slide through a tube that's coiled up under your costumes that's meant to come out an orifice in your chest and spray towards the audience.
It won't happen.
(Laughter) After months of iteration, we finally happened upon bananas.
(Laughter) Who knew that bananas would have the exact right properties to stay solid even when pushed through a tube with forced air, yet slippery enough to have the dramatic oozing effect that we were looking for.
(Laughter) This piece became a signature of the Blue Man show.
But we didn't throw out all the rules of theater altogether.
We had set designs.
We had lighting designs.
We had a stage manager calling the shows.
But I'm fairly sure we were one of the very first shows that was connecting with our audience in a respectful way, by hanging them upside down, (Laughter) dipping them in paint, slamming them against a canvas, (Laughter) putting their heads in 70 pounds of Jell-O, and then making them one of the heroes of the show.
(Laughter) Besides that, we didn't reinvent what didn't need to be reinvented.
(Laughter) Years later, we took all this learning and we created a school -- a school for our children that we wish we had gone to, a school where it was just as important what happened in the hallways between classes as what happened in the classes; a place where you got music class even when you couldn't sing middle C.
At Blue School, teachers and parents and students are equal collaborators at the table, intentionally creating a safe space where they can develop a lifelong, joyful passion for learning.
Again, we didn't try to reinvent the wheel when it didn't need to be reinvented.
We don't shy away from the more traditional methods like direct instruction, when it's the best way into a lesson.
But we balance it with an integrated learning across all subjects approach, and balance is the key.
In fact, Blue School was founded on a balance between academic mastery, creative thinking, and self and social intelligence.
I realize that this might sound like common sense, but in some circles, this is radical.
(Laughter) And these qualities have brought a lot of attention to Blue School as a truly innovative school.
Nearly 10 years in, we announced the expansion of the middle school.
Our faculty asked our sixth graders to participate in the development of middle school values.
Their process began with a question: What do you need from our community to be happy and productive at school?
Students moved through a six-week process of individual work, collaborative work, refinement, and consensus, and the list they came up with is really extraordinary.
Be engaged and present with each other.
Respect and support what others need in order to learn.
Be inclusive of our diversity -- the way we look, think and act.
Cultivate the practice of self-awareness and awareness of others.
Honor and make time for fun and joy.
And challenge ourselves, practice being OK, making mistakes, and support each other through them.
Remember, these kids were 11 years old when they came up with this.
They articulated what took us 20 years to identify.
One of the great by-products of creating these vibrant communities is that we become attractors for people who want to prioritize these values.
They want to prioritize it above things like money and prestige and tradition.
We can all be on this road together, you at your own values in your own companies, in your own communities and families.
For us, for me, it was about prioritizing children's voices to give them the tools to help build a harmonious and sustainable world.
I invite you to be on this exciting, passionate, joyful journey together.
And together, good as can be expected is limitless when the expectation is that by reshaping our environments, we can change the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)