Daniel Lubetzky

Often in life I am sure you wonder if you had met a person before. Have our lives crossed paths before a more recent episode? When was the first time we met? Where we together in a particular place – whether at school, or at a conference, or talk, or during our childhoods? Could you even rewind a part of your brain and see what you said to that person when you first met them? I daydreamed about a sci-fi future where the “grid” could keep all your information about every place you’ve been, and what your thoughts and experiences and interactions were like.

Then I realized that a lot of this could already be done rather easily NOW.

All you need is a GPS mapping device with a time-mapping database. Your iphone or blackberry could have an application that every 5 minutes or every hour or every day (depending on your preferred settings and subscription/storage capacity) could store your GPS location at that particular time.

Three or thirty years later, you could wonder openly with your date, or an employee or a colleague if you had met before, or where your lives had intersected before, and you’d just sync your databases to find the crossing points, if any, that exist. You could make some pieces private or public, open or closed. But you’d have the ability to trace back steps at important points, quite simply.

At a formative moment, you could even connect a blog journal or video entry to your geo-time-map.

This would not only be fun and functional, but also existentially transformative.

We always are “surprised” at how small this world is, and how enormous a coincidence it is that you find a friend in a far away random place.

In fact, I have always thought that the laws of numbers make these encounters quite probable, and most likely there are many more opportunities for interactions among people you know, whose paths you cross by milliseconds without knowing it. If you could look at your grid and compare it with a friend’s, or with all your universe of friends, how many amazing “coincidences” wouldn’t you find – when you opted to?

Perhaps Doppler or GoogleMaps or Facebook or a new web/business platform you have could take advantage of this idea.

It’s rare, but once in a while you feel vindicated for the bad habit of keeping old newspapers around to catch up. This very good piece by Lee Siegel was worth it. It weaves economic, political and social theories to provide a 30,000 foot view of the sense and senselessness of unifying and decoding humankind’s journey.

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On the subway this morning, a homeless man sat in a corner quietly scribbling notes on a newspaper, with all his belongings next to him.

No one else sat in that section of the subway.

The rest of the subway car was reasonably full. But there was an invisible line that kept newcomers from seating near the homeless man.

Was it out of respect that people gave him his space, recognizing this was his temporary home?

Or was it out of fear, repulsion or alienation?

How would you have approached it?

Sent from my iPhone – pardon typos

A very neat experiment I read about from my sister…

A Violinist in the Metro


A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousand of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.
Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.
A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.
A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.
The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.
In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.
No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.
Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.
This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of an social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?
One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:
If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

Here and here are a couple of examples of Joshua Bell’s work…

I just learned from Daniel Sachs about this think tank – the Glasshouse Forum – to encourage serious thinking towards a more enlightened version of capitalism, one that reflects on the dangers of rampant consumerism (same which we can now witness more clearly with the current financial crisis, not to mention related environmental consequences from consumerism) and related problems like short-term financial objectives and behavior, as well as the impact of globalization on the middle class.

A couple of provocative thoughts about the studies they are setting out on:

…the fact that capitalism is a necessary basis for a free society does not mean that it is a sufficient basis.

…There are tendencies within capitalism itself which cause it to saw off the branch on which it itself is sitting. (ie, the reduction of the Middle class and its buying power)

Capitalism has constantly to stimulate our desires and encourage us to want to satisfy them immediately. This stimulates an infantile character, whose attitude to life can be summed up in three words: I. Everything. Immediately.

[Under unfettered capitalism], Is it our duty to consume more and more in order to keep the economy going, even if we then as households live above our means? While we are focusing on the bubbles in the financial markets – sub-prime, asset-backed securities and others – the largest bubble in terms of long-term impact is the consumption bubble. At some point, the Western world will come into a period of considerably lower consumption levels. This is a structural change that will obviously have a dramatic impact on retail and consumer goods companies as well as on advertising, media and ultimately on our standard of living. Can we cope with such a development?

Has the time come for not-Only-for-Profit models like PeaceWorks to become the rule rather than the exception not just in business but in our economic structures and frameworks?

From a lunch meeting with my friend Frederic Brenner, the photographer, philosopher and social anthropologist, he shared this powerful quote:

Nous sommes tous de lopins et d une texture si informe et diverse, que chaque pièce, chaque moment fait son jeu. Et se trouve autant de différence de nous a nous mêmes que de nous a autruy.

Michel de Montaigne. Essais

Rough translation: we each have within ourselves so much diversity and texture, so many pieces with their own role to play, that the differences we house within ourselves are greater than those between us and other people.

Frederic, who nobody will accuse of being shy, quiet or boring, just completed a 10-day meditation during which he could not speak or write – no interaction or expression with others, for 10 full days, each day with 11 hours of meditation.  Imagine.

Another insight I enjoyed him sharing was about how the three great monotheistic religions have defined much of our world and ourselves into Dualities – Mind vs. Spirit, You vs. The Other – separating in strict binary constructs things that are often far harder to separate in real life.  In the world we live in, he feels we need to better recognize the ambivalence, paradox, and complexity within each of us, within our narratives, and our traditions.

This is not just arm-chair philosophy. It has very practical applications in the work of co-existence, from OneVoice to fostering Universal Values, and simple Kindness to each other.  If we are trained to recognize ourselves in the other, if we are trained to recognize the other within us, we are far more likely to disavow absolutist visions and work harder towards achieving shared human values.

From germination of sperm & ovary, to a living being with thought & conscience…

From one cell to diverse organs.

From living organs to self.

When & how does baby acquire thought?

And self-awareness?

And soul?

It’s such an interesting and powerful feeling that I can be so excited and anxious to meet my baby, and can love someone so much, before having met him.

My wife and I are 6 months pregnant and the incubation process is so wondrous physically but also in terms of the emotional bonds it creates.

Consider our beloved young people… They walk in rows of three, each on a cellphone, not even talking to the people next to her.

I keep thinking of my happiest moments of youth, walking along… coming home from [s]chool. I could smell the leaves burning in the late fall, think the long thoughts that young people are supposed to have, and dream of my adult life, when I would have the love of a great woman and a Corvette. Those were moments of power.

Now, there is no thought or reverie. There is nothing but gossip and making plans to shop or watch television. The cellphone and the P.D.A. have basically replaced thought.

From Ben Stein, Everybody’s Business, New York Times

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Here is a great blog piece on the psychology of magic – how Magicians manipulate the mind in ways that psychologists can borrow/learn from.

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