Tag: ted talk notes

Why do happy people cheat? Esther Perel’s powerful TED talk: “Affairs in the digital age are death by a thousand cuts”

Alongside Gary Wilson’s presentation on porn, this was one of those talks that really stayed with me and had me mulling over its conclusions.

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Why Happy Couples Cheat | Esther Perel

  • adultery has existed as long as marriage, and so too the taboo
  • adultery is the only commandment repeated twice in Bible (once for doing it, once just for thinking about it!)
  • “monogamy used to be one person for life, today it’s one person at a time”
  • “we used to marry and have sex for the first time, now we marry and stop having sex with others”
  • infidelity estimates vary widely, from 26 to 75%
  • we are walking contradictions: 95% say it’s terribly wrong for our partner to lie about an affair, but same % say that’s what we would do if we were having one
  • infidelity used to threaten our economic arrangement, now it threatens our emotional arrangement
  • core problem: we believe one person can fulfill every need, thus infidelity threatens everything
  • “affairs in the digital age are death by a thousand cuts”
  • today we’re more inclined to stray than ever; we feel right to pursue our desires; we believe we deserve to be happy
  • “staying is the new shame” (after discovering an affair)
  • affairs — even by couples married and faithful for decades — are often a yearning for our old selves, for strength after loss (a parent dies, or you lose your job)
  • “not so much that we are looking for another person, but we are looking for another self”
  • one word unfaithful spouses use: ALIVE, they feel ALIVE
  • it’s not about sex but DESIRE
  • majority of experienced couples stay together, and can turn an affair into opportunity to grow
  • avoid mining for sordid details — better to move on, figure out meaning and motives, not logistics
  • “your first marriage is over, would you like to create a second one, together”

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Here’s my complete list of TED notes!

TED talk notes: Chris Urmson on Google’s driverless cars and Graham Hancock on ayahuasca

Every week, I share my notes from great TED talks. Here’s the complete list (it takes awhile to load).

This week we have Chris Urmson on Google’s driverless cars and Graham Hancock on ayahuasca and psychedelics.

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Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road

  • first car ever was driven by Benz and it crashed into a wall
  • 1M people die of car accidents every year, 30K of those in the US (equivalent to a 747 crash EVERY DAY! me: not sure how they did this math…)
  • billions of minutes are spent each day in commute
  • driving is not egalitarian (e.g., it’s harder for blind, deaf, handicapped, underage, overage)
  • growth in car usage far outpaces growth in roads. in other words it’s not just your imagination: traffic is getting worse
  • humans make roughly one mistake that leads to an accident every 100K miles
  • there are important differences between “driver-assisted” and true driverless cars
  • driverless cars take data and predict behaviors, and even respond to unexpected ones (for example, a Google driverless car encountered a woman in an electric-powered wheelchair chasing ducks in a circle!)
  • driverless cars can see things humans can’t (e.g., using lasers, it can detect a cyclist out of a human driver’s field of view)
  • Google’s cars do 3M miles in simulators every day (me: what a great way to improve AI)
  • parking lots are “urban craters”

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Graham Hancock – The War on Consciousness (a banned TED talk)

  • some academics now believe our consciousness was triggered by experiences with psychedelic plants
  • what evidence do we have? cave art and the rise of shamanism
  • DMT compound in ayahuasca plant is closely related to psilocybin
  • he drank an ayahuasca brew
  • was a 4-hour journey
  • “foul taste, dreadful smell”
  • often have vomiting and diarrhea, “you’re not doing this for recreation”
  • a universal experience is encounters with intelligent entities
  • ayahuasca is very successful at breaking addictions to cocaine, heroin
  • “for 24 years I was pretty much permanently stoned”
  • ayahuasca means “vine of souls” or “vine of the dead” — related to why people often have visions of their own death, near-death experiences (NDE), hell
  • Egyptians believe your soul survives death. They highly valued dream states and used hallucinogenic plants
  • “if we want to insult someone, we call them a dreamer, could not be more different from Egyptians where dream states were praised”
  • “our love affair with alcohol, glorify this terrible drug”
  • default state of (Western) society: “alert, problem-solving state of consciousness”
  • Shamans believe the West has severed its connection with spirit

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Here’s the full list of TED notes!

TED talk notes: Bill Gross on the #1 reason why startups succeed, and Leslie Chang on China’s factory workers

Every week, I share my notes from great TED talks. Here’s the complete list (it takes awhile to load).

Here are brief notes from talks by Bill Gross (Idealab founder) and Leslie Chang (author).

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Leslie T. Chang: The voices of China’s workers

  • spent 2 years in Dongguan studying female Chinese factory workers
  • motivation: better lives, help their family, curiosity, see the world
  • they didn’t care that much about their own living conditions or creature comforts, but wanted upward mobility
  • there’s decent upward mobility, some of these factory workers can become urban middle class (although she didn’t share #s in the talk)
  • what they wanted most: education; for example on weekends they’d take computer skills and English language classes

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Bill Gross: the single biggest reason why startups succeed

  • most important qualities (ranked)
    1. timing
    2. team execution
    3. idea (he thought this would be #1, but it wasn’t)
    4. business model
    5. funding
  • cites the following as examples of great timing: AirBnb (timing: there was a recession, people needed to earn and save money), Citysearch, Uber

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Here’s the full list of TED notes!