Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest Richard Saul Wurman
Unknown Speaker 0:02
Hey. Hey everyone. Welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard and audio podcast, we’ve got a real legend on today, not just in the design world, but in a bigger sense. And I’ll describe him briefly. He’s an American architect and graphic designer who’s written, designed and published 90 books and created the TED conferences, the EG, conference, Ted, med and www, conference, please join me in welcoming, celebrating. Richard Saul Werman, welcome.
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It’s nice to be here and you you catch me just before I get really old, because Sunday is my birthday. That’s funny. Um, so I want to start off with a question that’s a relatable one, and that is about the future. So with climate more than human worlds, AI, what are we looking at when we’re looking at the future?
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It’s a
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good question, but it’s an overwhelming question, because there’s so many slices. And if you just ask me, What about today,
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which is one teeny part of tomorrow,
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anticipatory to tomorrow,
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I would need some bounds to pick out the slice in which to respond, because I suspect some places and some nows, if tomorrow is next, some nows are
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without flaws, and others are terribly flawed, going from The agonies of starvation, wars and crap in the oceans, to people who are having probably a very pleasant, interesting, thoughtful day and thinking up some new ideas. So the extremes exist in the most dismal times. Now, the extremes can be
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disastrous, but some extremes, like even cutting yourself, can be interesting. I don’t mean who self cutting yourself just an accident of cutting yourself could be painful. You don’t want it to happen. You don’t want it to happen again. But in that, in that moment, in what you see, your body does what a doctor might do, or putting in one kind of Stitcher, or just taping it or or how it heals, there’s a whole world of interest for me.
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And now that’s a radical thing to say, because it sounds violent, but I don’t mean the violence of the cut. I mean that
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interest dominates tomorrow for me, and it’s I’m not looking for a happy tomorrow.
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My anticipation is
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because, as I mentioned, I was I am present for my 88th birthday is Sunday, so I am thinking about more, more today than yesterday, even my mortality,
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that short lens,
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makes my answers just different.
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I don’t think we’ll have
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a disastrous climate change of a catastrophic nature, except the ordinary catastrophes that occur with with weather catastrophes and the flooding and hurricanes in her and
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earthquakes, etc, before I die, assuming I’ll live maybe two to Four years from now.
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However, I would think unless there’s some radical breakthrough,
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the Earth is due for
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a shit show,
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there is nothing
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being done that will change the course
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that we’re on to make our place
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change radically, particularly
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if the oceans change in by the Two major currents inverting because of
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the as you know, the Gulf Stream goes out and then turns under itself. And it’s like a an escalator turning around on itself. And that which they don’t talk about that much, that radical change affects the whole earth, and it can just happen from a cascade of
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of Greenland melting. Now I’m picking at one point, and you know, the people who are talking about climate change and and the filth in the earth and waste are talking about another now you can take a different whole.
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Subject, and today, there was a robust
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dance of friendship going on between two large nations in the world that clearly you can see a path that they both could take that seems logical, that would put a shift in all over the whole world, and the alliances and wars and conquests and the endless desire to have more land,
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the land greed that nations have had since
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jagus Khan and Alexander the Great always has had that
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that’s another slice of looking dim about things. And then you can I pick up a marvelous article on Facebook today by Wolfram about his explanation of AI and
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the clarity that the first few pages showed in him trying to explain something that for people like myself are quite quite difficulty and under understanding. I’m not a very smart person. I’m a curious person, and but my lack of intellect hinders my lack of understanding in some subjects like that.
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That wasn’t a terribly good answer, but it’s such a big question.
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There’s a question you ask when you meet somebody, or I’m asked when you meet somebody in the lobby of a conference, and they say, How is everything going? And it’s a question that you can’t answer,
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and it’s a sort of, I don’t mean your question was insulting, but it’s a question of such breath that it can’t be answered.
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I could. I could sit to you, sit next to you, and have a conversation about one teeny aspect of one pattern for maybe the next three years,
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but with no time limit
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on how are things going? Basically,
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10 years, 20 years, 100 years, five years.
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The future is the the the the expectation for the near future is, is terribly difficult. Three years is about the limit of having some coherence in certain subjects five years. It gets quite vague and past that. If you go back and look at what people write about as futures in 1950 and 1960 1970 1980 they’re
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extraordinary, extraordinarily off the mark, except those
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who predicted that about Big Brother and sort of
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predictions you can’t go wrong about throughout history.
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Sorry for going on there, but no, that’s fantastic. The next one’s a bit more specific, and is kind of in service of our audience, who I imagine is seeing this scrolling through social media, or even on a more immediate level, and the topic is the big tech layoffs. Do you think that these are kind of a sign post or something to be alerted by? Hmm?
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The
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the fear is that news begets news,
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and one bank failure makes the next one fail.
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And the rapid expansion of our
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the availability of
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correct information and pseudo information,
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faux information, I guess they call it
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to so many people, so quickly,
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that the information itself makes news,
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and it’s like the organization of how you organize the same information, if you organize it in different ways, it changes the information, and the information stays The same, but the organization of it changes the availability of it changes what will happen. So when the newspapers write a great deal, or the newspapers, I mean television, social media, I’m just using newspapers as a metaphor for news,
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how they write about it, and how frequently it’s written about, and how people get that news changes the news. So if you have many stories about layoffs,
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it somehow gives permission, it loses its strength as a story. If somebody.
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Day lays off 1000 people, another one, and that seems huge. And the next day 5000 and that seems huge, but it gives permission that the next story of 6000 or 10,000 doesn’t seem so big. And then it becomes what happens, and
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it feeds on itself, giving people permission to cut back and permission to change how they run their company and
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what patterns they see in running a business, so that the information itself I was presented gives people permission to make have ideas.
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There’s a lot of
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I had a, I had a
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a Bentley Continental a few years ago. I used one,
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and
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was a wonderful car seats just two and two squashed in the back. And I opened the booklet up and it said the car goes 200 and it was an old one, but it said the car goes 206 miles an hour.
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So there was a piece of information that they were bragging about, and they would write up that it’s the fastest production car in the world. And yet it’s meaningless
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when people are laid off, the 10,000 people who are laid off in some company or predicted in some company, we don’t know who those people are
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and
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any plans for
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their replacement or a change in their business. We don’t know enough about those 10,000 people to make it an interesting enough story to ask the follow up question, which isn’t written, and whether they’re slimming down or moving their offices or letting off 10,000 and hiring 10,000 the next week in a different location, because they’re opening a different office.
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Anytime people are laid off, it is
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a very disturbing thing to me, because I certainly identify
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with being out of work, being fired. I’ve been fired a number of times in my life.
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I was, I was only, I only had two jobs that I wasn’t fired from.
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And
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I think this the the news begets the news. I think the banks, the worthlessness of the money,
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the bankruptcy of companies.
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The decision about what money is, bitcoins and all those,
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all those monies things, which I never quite understand is quite it’s no bigger illusion than our dollar, which is not backed by anything anyway, but we have an agreement that it’s worth something, and there never was that agreement about
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the other kinds of money. There’s not a there’s not is
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we? We disagreement allows things to go on, and we’re losing
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the agreement to tell the truth,
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and we’re losing
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the sensitivity to other people. So I think,
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I think these large layoffs and the large largeness of certain corporations
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is it desensitizing? It just desensitizes us to the news. That was not a good answer to your question, no, that was great. No, it wasn’t great. Don’t say it was great because I didn’t like it. Okay?
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So the next one is, I would like, I would like a smaller question. That is, that isn’t so. So
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yeah, beyond anybody’s ability to understand and just broke on here’s one you might like, which is specifically for you. I think so some of my students complain about having the big guests on the show because they can’t relate to them. However, we had John Maeda on the show, and he confessed that it wasn’t until his 40s that he started eating protein for breakfast. He says he was a carbs guy on his day to day, and then started eating in protein. And after that, after I heard that, I went out and bought some protein foods. Do you have any kind of day to day advice that people, ordinary people, can maybe use in their lives.
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Yes, I will say that by I will tell you that I will i am not proselytizing,
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but I am saying that
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that.
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There’s certain words,
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keywords
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to who all your audience? If I ask your audience, let’s say your audience has 100 people, and I What’s the first thing that the couple things that they were trying to do, or what their parents wanted or teachers wanted, or what were they trying and they what are the key words in their life? And they would say comfort, they would say success,
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uh, perfectly understandable. And they want to do something and do it very well and do it better and better and better.
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The opposite of that
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is, is the way I’ve tried to lead my life. So the if the opposite has any sense,
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then it might question those being acceptable words. I think comfort is your enemy. It’s the edge, the existence of terror, the existence of not knowing,
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the edge of not knowing
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the potential failure of everything you’re working on that allows me to think up new ideas success is not interesting to me, which is success is made up of three words, money power and fame in the general public and and doing something better and better. And I would rather do projects that I start because I don’t know anything about the project, and the project, for me, is learning about the answer to my
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discomfort in the question about some subject. So the books that I’ve done and conferences that I’ve run have been based on my understanding of what it’s like not to understand and not knowing what the person is going to talk about, or not knowing about the subject that I’m going to write about. It was the journey that I write about, and it was the failures in my lack of understanding, the discomforts and things that allowed me to have a an interesting life. So if you say, are you happy, or you want to or I would say, No, I’m not particularly happy. But today has been very interesting,
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and I hope tomorrow is interesting too. So the answer to your your question, or is that,
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if I look at a table and I sit down at restaurant, I look at the space between things rather than the dishes themselves. I look at the silence rather than the noise. And the things that interest me are things that I don’t understand and that are left out. Now I’m not proselytizing that people should have that edgier life or just or they might find it too terrifying.
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I don’t like to be terrified by accepted as my way of moving on. It’s when you learn to walk as a small child,
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your parents or whoever is taking care of you, you, you hang on to their fingers. You’ve seen this with a child. They lift you up, and they hang on to your fingers. One finger they put wrap their whole hand around it, and you give them the comfort to throw out a leg and go through the terror of losing their equilibrium. That’s a failure. You’re failing your equilibrium. Your natural thing is that you want to be you want to be plopped on the floor. You don’t want to stand up to begin with. But what occurs is you go through this a number of times. You lose your equilibrium, then you gain by throwing the other leg out, and the the net sum is that you’re moving forward.
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That’s a metaphor that by the failure of losing your your equilibrium, putting another foot out and then another, the other foot out and the other foot out, you go through that that terror and confidence and terror and confidence. So
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it shows you that the discomfort is also your friend, because it helps you move forward. And so metaphorically,
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I tend to look at the opposites of things as a means of having interesting days.
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Great the next question that was a better answer to my than my other question. So whoever’s listening discount the shit I said before.
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Okay,
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the next one. Don’t really want to ask, but I will ask it, the relationship between work and life. I think a lot of our audience probably assumes that you’re operating at 110% all the time. Is this the case? I well, I there’s a there’s two words that are implied or explicit in your your question, which is the idea of of work. Of course, the opposite of that is play in people’s minds or work.
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Vacation,
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and I don’t feel like I’ve had a day at work in
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4050, years.
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I don’t, nobody asks me to do anything. I’ve written, you said 90, it’s probably closer to 100
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but I’ve never been asked to do a book. I have never been asked. I’ve never had a client, never had a publisher, asked me to do a book. I’ve never had a client.
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Asked me to do a project.
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If I’m if I got anything done is because I, I was, I wanted to do it very badly.
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I so I don’t work and today to my tomorrow. And really, in the last 20 years, I’ve lost track of what day it is, whether it’s Saturday, Sunday or Monday or Tuesday.
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I knew it better before computers, but I tend not to look at the calendar. I missed this meeting, but it wasn’t even on my calendar.
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I
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don’t work. I don’t feel I work at 100% of the time,
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but I’m thinking about things
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300% of the time,
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I
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decided
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to write some fables. I’m in the process of writing a whole series of fables right now, and that’s what I was doing when you called me
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and I was, I was writing a fable today about
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I was thinking of a time this is all made up, of course, when all the smartest people in the whole world, the 25 or 30 of them, got together
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and they were inventing what came out as being words. They were inventing the word,
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and they were inventing how they could use the word
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put together with other words
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to explain things. And then eventually they realized they could record those by either a little triangular piece of wood and they called it cuneiform, or some oil mixed with some charcoal and wrote it down, or had some strikes for numbers, or they could record these and the story goes on. I won’t tell you the whole story, but they they develop papers and books and things of that sort. Then they had to have a place to put these, and they had to organize them. And they realized
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that this, that all the words they wrote
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came in just two varieties,
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and people came in two varieties,
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and most of everything was made up.
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But nothing was for sure. Nothing was the truth. Everything was fantasy.
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And so they first,
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all the work that they produced was called fiction,
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and much later, they had a small shelf
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which was, which was called non fiction.
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Now that I explain it much in a longer way in the fable, but it was a the idea, if we look at our society, that if you go to a bookstore or the best sellers, you have a non fiction and a fiction. And isn’t it strange that it isn’t the reverse, that you start off with the truth, which is what non fiction is, but the basis of it is saying it’s not fiction, it’s this is really the truth, instead of being the truth and fiction,
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or actuality and fiction,
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but even the way we think is not dominated by clarity, how we divide our our work together. So when you go in a bookstore, or you look at the New York Times bestseller list, I think you’ll find it. I find it very odd that the word fiction dominates literature.
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Did I make my point? Did you understand what I’m saying? I think so. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 24:30
Nice, nice elaboration, actually. Okay, so this next one, you and I chatted briefly about this, but
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we had Timothy Goodman on the show, who’s, who’s kind of a trending designer all over New York City designed these NBA basketball shoes. And you and I spoke about trends briefly. I was wondering what you think about this idea of a trending topic. I.
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Oh, my goodness.
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When you say somebody designing basketball shoes, I find that
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or the trending thing is like influencers.
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I
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gosh, I think he chose the wrong person to talk to. I just am, I am off the grid, sir.
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I just think up
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ways of explaining,
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explaining things that I’m interested in, and some people have found that interesting themselves,
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but I don’t, by not having a publisher or a publicist
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or
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or a Job,
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trends have little interest to me.
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I
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I travel well, and so I get pajamas in first class when I go across the ocean. And so I have lots of pajamas, and I only wear pajamas,
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and I don’t go to dinner parties or openings
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or events. I go out with my wife once a week for dinner. We don’t go to people’s houses for dinner. We don’t have people over here for dinner. I
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just I think about things, and I love television.
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So I’m not into trends. Now that people do things, trending to me is somebody doing something where is like fashion. It’s purposely doing something that’s different to get attention, and by doing it, it can be beautiful, but in fact, some fashion is absolutely gorgeous to me. It’s not
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something that I focus upon, but I like the fact that it gives people permission that every trend or anything you do gives people permission
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behind you or beside you. I was going to do another conference, and it was going to be called shoulders, and it was going to be
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about the people’s shoulders we stand on, and the people’s shoulders we rub.
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And I know that
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my friends all fit into that category. They all have somebody’s shoulders they stood on, and they all have people’s shoulders that they rub, younger, older, male, female.
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I’m not saying copy, I’m saying rub,
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and I’m not saying replace. But that that to me,
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is human,
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the acknowledgement
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of
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of rubbing shoulders and and by rubbing shoulders, you’re given permission to do things you might not have thought of without that, that existence, that physical existence. So somebody who does tennis shoes, if that’s what they decided to do. And
Unknown Speaker 28:23
I think that’s fascinating. I just watched a show on television which I didn’t think I would like at all, or a documentary series, I think, six parts on pizza, six different people making pizza in the world. And in each show, it was somebody who, in a zen like way, became the pizza, and I was fascinated with the depth to what I thought I would be bored out of my head, the depth at which they focused on doing something extraordinarily well that I would never have thought of
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but made me go out the next day for lunch and Order pizza because it was still in my mouth
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and my head and my mouth.
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I fashion the part of fashion in design is not interesting to me.
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I think I rubbed leucon shoulders, and I stood on his shoulders and a number of other people,
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but it was not copying a style, and it wasn’t fashion, and it wasn’t a following.
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Now there’s always been those things. I think there probably always will be those things. It’s just not the sandbox I play in.
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I think by doing Ted, I gave other people permission to do Ted, like conferences, not copy me, but permission as a person, just to do your something that appealed to you as an individual, and make the changes. Make it better, make it worse, the person who bought it changed it radically.
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Yeah, but he’s done some amazingly wonderful things with it, and I applaud him and
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other people. Once that
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the gate was down, that a single individual, without a company behind them, without a sponsor, without money, could just say, I’m going to do a conference and do it, I think that took away the boundaries. So that has that has an influence, and that has a trend that when people see something being done, and it was interesting to see people talk about different things, except instead of a medical conference, which was only about eye, ears, nose and throat, people, and they all did the same thing, and all talk to each other, to have some group of people where you didn’t know what the person did sitting next to you,
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and that that trend of of the confluence of nouns, kissing nouns, the different different disciplines, kissed each other,
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that permission that was, I think, given by some of the conferences to others, people have gone and run with that. Now is that, is that an influencer? Is that a trend, or is that just opening up and giving somebody permission to do what they was something that appealed to them in a basic
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of having a big, big
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pile of rocks in a circle to sit around and sit next to somebody in front of a fire and share that everybody did something that the other people didn’t do, and you could learn from everybody.
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So is it a trend? Does Facebook make us more human or less human?
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I find part of it humanizing, and part of it not.
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I know the trend is that that’s old fashioned and old people, I guess, use Facebook, and it’s not a young person’s thing, but one I would just,
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just go ahead to your next question. Okay, the next one is
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in service of podcasters, people who want to be podcasters. You and I chatted briefly about Debbie Millman, who we had on the show and and we took a critical angle, talking about what it means to have a set list of questions and kind of the problems with that. Did you want to? Can you maybe share something about that?
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Well, Debbie Melman is one of the star people in for in the design world for
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cherry picking
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the people on the a list and interviewing them. And I think she’s interviewed some amazing, amazing people.
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When I went in to be interviewed with her, I didn’t know who she was, because you see that I’m
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I walked down a slightly different path, and so she asked me to do to come in and be interviewed, and I was in New York at that time. I’m in Florida now, and I was in Newport then, and I came in to be interviewed, and I didn’t know who she was and didn’t know the situation. I was just being agreeable to talk to somebody and have a conversation much like today, slightly incoherent,
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and the conversation she felt didn’t go well, because I didn’t want to answer some of the questions, because they were family questions, and there were a set list that she was reading off of.
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So I think she thought the interview was terrible. Actually,
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I didn’t think my interview was much better then than today. Today’s interview is terrible. I’m doing a bad job today. I know that,
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and I’ll have an extra drink of Saki tonight after this.
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But
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whatever first question you ask, so you have a set list of questions
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I would ask. I don’t even know if I’d ask somebody a question first, I
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would just start talking to them and see where it led, but not
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not
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have an idea of where it’s going, and not try to have people answer the same set of questions so you can compare them.
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And I think that’s what some interviews. Interviewers do have these weighty questions about some subject, and they have comfort in having those set of questions answered by various people in their own ways, and you then can compare their answers. And it’s much more it’s much easier than to write an article or do a comparison of people’s data.
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Different people’s answering the same question. And
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I don’t say that’s a wrong thing to do, but it’s not the nature of free conversation.
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Your questions to me were, I was
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finished one, then you went to another thing instead of going on from the question,
Unknown Speaker 35:27
yeah, definitely I would, I would have, I, I remember now the conversation we had together, but I remember that earlier conversation where it started and we went on and and and trusted the flow of where it was going.
Unknown Speaker 35:44
You’re asking me a question and then going on to another whole change is not going on from the last question. It’s not a conversation, and I’m having difficulty in relating to it. This seems more like an interview, more like a an audition
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or a test than a conversation.
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Hopefully this, hopefully this last note improves on that, would you understand? What do you understand what I’m saying? I’m not I do. I’m going to try to be a bad boy. I’m just telling you what I think. So the last piece around closing remarks, I’ve added this word B roll, which I think takes on new meaning these days. But, you know, I I offer this kind of last part for us to expand a bit and and talk more if we want to. You know, often I use this for a call to action, but I imagine you don’t necessarily want to do that. Are there things that you know need to be said that that we can talk about here as the closing remarks?
Unknown Speaker 36:50
Well, I will tell you, I have a request to make of you. Absolutely. My request is get it on my calendar, and let’s do this again.
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Absolutely.
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And just burn this, this whole half an hour, or whatever it is,
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and just let us talk.
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And I would be happy to answer that question in full, and you answer back, and we have a conversation.
Unknown Speaker 37:21
Now you I’m not telling you how to run your business or your podcast or whatever it is. I’m just suggesting that I would feel more comfortable having a conversation of equals than answering a question like I am giving a speech in front of an audience.
Unknown Speaker 37:41
I like the flow of conversation. I adore the conversation. The last conference that I did had the subtitle of intellectual jazz, because it was just conversation, unplanned, an agenda between two people who didn’t know who they were going to talk to.
Unknown Speaker 37:59
Sometimes they something similar. Sometimes they did something different. Sometimes they were had met each other, or knew of each other, and sometimes they were strangers.
Unknown Speaker 38:10
And they were some of the, you know, the people I get to talk with me, they were absolutely the top notch people in medicine, science, Nobel Prize winners, music,
Unknown Speaker 38:23
the arts, education, the brain, different things, cartography,
Unknown Speaker 38:30
biology,
Unknown Speaker 38:35
And I enjoyed that very much. This I felt uncomfortable with being asked a question, and then after was over, not getting a response of saying, Well, that was a stupid answer, or I lost you on that. Like people do, like I do.
Unknown Speaker 38:57
Do you understand what I’m saying? I do. I’m just I’m just appreciative, and don’t want to overstep
Unknown Speaker 39:05
appreciative of what of you being here and sharing your ideas. Oh, I’ll be appreciative. I’m just, I feel like I’m just a schlepper that just just as interested in things, and I’ve had the privilege of being able to be tolerated enough to get some things done that allowed me to have an interesting, interesting days.
Unknown Speaker 39:34
And my interesting days are made up of conversation. I’ve had several wonderful conversations. People called me.
Unknown Speaker 39:42
I have so many contacts from the life I’ve had, and my phone rings constantly, but we then have a conversation, and I don’t know where it’s going, and they don’t call me with an agenda,
Unknown Speaker 39:56
and I don’t have anything to ask them
Unknown Speaker 39:59
during.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
COVID
Unknown Speaker 40:02
When I couldn’t, didn’t leave the house at all. I called some people and said, Do they know some interesting people that I don’t know. And then I thought of some people I always wanted to talk to and never met. So I placed a whole series of calls to about 10 people
Unknown Speaker 40:18
who answered my call. And I said, what I would like to do is talk to you. Have a zoom call with you.
Unknown Speaker 40:25
We’ll have one for an hour, and if you like it
Unknown Speaker 40:30
or enjoy it, a week and a half later, call me back, and they’re still going on for years now, wow. And I still have not met the people except on Zoom
Unknown Speaker 40:40
and one’s a geriatric psychiatrist. Now there’s a publisher someplace I always admired. Another is a musician someplace, just people,
Unknown Speaker 40:52
and we just chat about things. And I’ve learned once a small particle physicist professor in in Texas,
Unknown Speaker 41:02
and I enjoy just the conversation,
Unknown Speaker 41:08
and I don’t know where it’s going, and I call them back, and they call me back,
Unknown Speaker 41:14
and
Unknown Speaker 41:15
that’s those are really unexpectedly interesting for me.
Unknown Speaker 41:21
I don’t record anything. I just have conversations, and I don’t have a following,
Unknown Speaker 41:30
and I’m not a very public person,
Unknown Speaker 41:34
but I say yes to everybody like like yourself,
Unknown Speaker 41:39
on the on the chance that it’ll be a conversation that I’ll walk away from with some some new thought, some new thread that I hadn’t thought of, they sure, or I say something that I hadn’t thought of before. And I believe that only comes when you have a conversation, not to not not have
Unknown Speaker 42:00
set questions to answer.
Unknown Speaker 42:03
So I’m sorry I wasn’t better for you, or do do it the way you want. I’m not trying to change the way you live your life. I’m not proselytizing. I’m just, I it’s just the best of my opinion. I’m giving you.
Unknown Speaker 42:15
I love it. I trust it fully.
Unknown Speaker 42:19
It’s It’s such a pleasure to to have you here. So just to wrap up, you know, so much gratitude, I think our audience is the same. And, oh, I think I disappointed your audience, and I apologize, and if you do it again with me, I would do it under the those other kind of not rules, but, yeah, a suggestion. We just, we just kind of talk to each other. Fantastic. You some questions, and you ask me some just how it comes. What I think of when you say something, and what do you think of when I say something? Fantastic. I love it. Thank you for that invitation, and thank you for sharing your time today. Thanks. Okay, bye, bye, bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai