Author: Fabio Fiss

Would they hide me?

Watching and collecting YouTube videos is one of my main “hobbies”, time-killers or diversions after a long day of work.

I store many playlists and many videos there. I have a special private playlist named “gems”, in which I store my most favorite videos. Videos I often watch multiple times.

One of the things I love about YouTube is how pervasive it it. Everyone all over the world is watching things on YouTube. Sometimes you find a video with someone talking about something they watched on the Internet. Sure enough, they probably mean YouTube. The cool thing is that you can just go and search for that video and find it yourself to watch in it’s original version.

Another playlist I keep in there is simply called “warren”. In this playlist I keep my ongoing list of Warren Buffett content. I’m a huge admirer of Buffett’s work and life teachings.

My favorite Warren Buffett video actually surfaced after discovering it from another video. On the TODAY show, out of nowhere, I watched Hoda Kotb talking about this Warren Buffett story and video…

Then I went looking for it. This is the original video from Buffett himself:

On the Internet the full source and context of video content is often lost. So I want to add as much information as possible of when and where this happened — in case you find this post out of nowhere, and want to research more yourself in the future; or who knows, if YouTube disappears one day.

The video excerpt is from an interview/event organized by Fortune Magazine in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2013.

Buffett sat down with Pattie Sellers to discuss the changing landscape for women in business on that event. He also published an essay for Fortune about being bullish on women. He also Tweeted for the first time (and probably his last time on Twitter).

Pattie Sellers then published an article highlighting her favorite moment from the event. You guest it right. It’s the same moment Hoda Kotb watched on YouTube several years later. The same video I’m sharing with you now in this post.

In this video Warren Buffett is giving his advise on how to measure success in life.

He answered this question from a University of Nebraska student:

How do you define success?

“You will measure your success in life by how many [..] whether it’s the people you want at 70 or whatever the age may be [..], you’ll measure by how many of them really love you, you know, in the end. You can’t buy love.

Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO.

In the interview, Buffett went on to explain that he learned the meaning of success from a friend, a polish jew, and Auschwitz survivor.

She once told Buffett that when she looks at people, the question she asks herself when determining who she trusts as friends.. the one question in her mind is: “Would they hide me?”

Buffett goes on… “Now, when you get to be 70, if you got a lot of people who would hide you, you’ve had a successful life”

A powerful and simple image, message and reminder for how to look at life; and what really matters in the end.

I thought it was worth sharing.

If you want to see Hoda’s version, you can watch it here as well:

Ted Nelson – an experience of water and interconnection

An excerpt with Ted Nelson explaining his work, in Werner Herzog’s documentary Lo and Behold.

Back to the very early times, times of speculative concepts of a connected world… in the early 60s, many years before the first Apple personal computer, a young thinker, Ted Nelson, had his own ideas about creating a computer network.

The web as we know it took a different route, but Nelson’s ideas are still dormant.

It was an experience of water and interconnection.

I was with my grandparents in a rowboat in Chicago, so I must have been five years old and I was trailing my hand in the water.

And I thought about how the water was moving around my fingers, opening on one side and closing on the other, and that changing system of relationships where everything was kind of similar, kind of the same and yet different.

That was so difficult to visualize and express,

and just generalizing that to the entire universe that the world is a system of ever changing relationships and structures struck me as… a vast truth… which it is!

And… so interconnection and expressing that interconnection has been the center of all my thinking, and all my computer work has been about expressing and representing and showing interconnection among writings especially.

And writing is the process of reducing a tapestry of interconnection to a narrow sequence.

And this is in a sense illicit.

This is a wrongful compression of what should spread out.

And today’s computers they’ve betrayed that because there’s no system for decent cut and paste and they’ve changed the meaning of the words “cut and paste” and pretended it was the same thing.

So a guy named Larry Tesler, whom I consider to be a good friend, nevertheless changed those words and I consider that to be a crime against humanity and he doesn’t understand why.

Because humanity has no decent writing tools.

In any case, this is the problem: interconnection and representation and sequentialization all… similar to the issue of water.

So here we have a parallel presentation that shows the quotation connected to its original context.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” and where is that from? That is from the King James Bible.

So we can step down to the next quotation.

“Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight” and that is from the Alphabet of ben Sira.

And so as we pull back we can see successive pages coming up to connect with their sources or with their linked contents.

His vision of links never materialized.

By some he was labeled insane for clinging on.

There are two contradictory slogans.

One is that continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

On the other hand, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

I prefer the latter because I don’t want to be remembered as the guy who didn’t.

No, to us you appear to be the only one around who is clinically sane.

No one has ever said that before.

Usually I hear the opposite.

Thank you very much for talking with us.

It was wonderful.

Marvelous.

What a team.

Yes, now it’s your turn.

The Magic of Writing

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first film in the epic eight-part Harry Potter series, is reaching its 20th anniversary this year.

The Wizarding World and all its fans are celebrating. There is a new HBO Max special reunion released; there is a new Fantastics Beasts movie coming out later in the year; and there are millions of articles, podcasts and videos with people talking about Harry Potter once again.

Yesterday, while I was thinking about how writing is really hard to do, I started reflecting about one of the most successful partnerships between writers of all time (in my humble opinion).

The Harry Potter movies achieved the massive amounts of popularity, profit and success because of a masterful collaboration effort that many people don’t know or talk about. This “artistic duet” is the enduring professional partnership between J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves.

Writers J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves talk about the Harry Potter books, movies and characters

Billions of people around the world obviously know J.K. Rowling for writing the Harry Potter book series. However I don’t think many people know about the other genius behind the movie scenes. Hardcore Harry Potter fans are quite aware of Steve Kloves, the screenwriter wizard that J.K. Rowling trusted with her life’s work.

It’s funny how gigantically successful partnerships develop sometimes. In many cases, people end up knowing about one person, but not the other. However, it was the duo’s genius and their close collaboration that made everything possible. It’s true in so many stories: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, Walt Disney and Roy Disney. I could go on and on.

I strongly believe the J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves’ partnership is one of the most underrated writing phenomena of our time. I truly wish more people knew about it by reading or watching them talk about their work.

When we think of movies, generally speaking, I feel most people are more interested in actors or directors when compared to screenwriters for some reason. If you go deeper, and think about screenwriters as more public figures, unless you are part of the movie industry there’s very little awareness of who they are, or meaningful names to the craft (that’s just my opinion – I could be completely wrong). I mean, there are so many screenwriters in the world. Why don’t we know their names? Even among writers, I feel we give way more weight and attention to book writers than movie writers. I’m not sure why.

Most of the famous screenwriters such as Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and other big names are quite often known more as directors first, then screenwriters second. I’m sure some of them would think it’s the other way around. They would probably rather be known as screenwriters first.

When it comes to J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves, I think the trouble with level of recognition also stems from the fact that is hard to find them together in video format, so making the connection between writers in this case is not an easy task for the general public. There are bits and pieces of both of them in many documentaries, speaking separately, but I could only find two video interviews / conversations with both of them in the same room. Maybe Steve Kloves just doesn’t like the spotlight, and that’s perfectly acceptable.

One of my all time favorite videos in all the Wizarding World throve of web content is an in-depth conversation between them. It was one of these DVD extras from a massive book+disc collectors boxes made for Harry Potter fans. Thankfully, the (almost) hour-long video conversation is available on YouTube for anyone to watch.

In this video they speak deeply about the Harry Potter characters, the experience of writing together, the issues in adapting book scenes to movie scenes, their own personalities, and much more. It’s a fascinating conversation that leaves me always wanting to hear more (and I’ve watched it many times). It’s easy to see from this conversation why the movies became so successful, even with all the challenges of adapting the long and detailed Harry Potter books to the big screen.

It’s also easy to forget now, but when the first movies were released, the entire book series was not yet fully published. Therefore, Steve Kloves didn’t have the full plot and details of the storyline to work with. He had to “follow the characters” and trust that it would all fit together with the guidance of J.K. Rowling.

In a 2019 magazine article simply called “Kloves & Rowling” the magic is described further:

[…] Steve Kloves is also the mastermind that adapted most of the difficult-to-explain parts of the Wizarding World in a simple and comprehensible visual language. Kloves accomplished such feats as a clear portrait of the Time Turner behavior on The Prisoner of Azkaban (a task half of the time-traveling movies fail to do so) and condensing the thick Goblet of Fire book into a standard Hollywood movie runtime (an assignment so overwhelming that, at the time of pre-production of the fourth Harry Potter movie, hardcore fans petitioned to avoid by dividing Goblet into two different movies). Kloves knows how to turn the ultra-detailed plots created by Rowling into “small” two hours and a half long movies.

What made everything work for the movies was the deep collaboration and trust between J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves.

The other fascinating aspect they talk about in this conversation is how a lot of their interactions were done over email. They were writing these movies together, but physically apart, and collaborating through the medium of writing as well.

One thing you realize by watching them talk is that Kloves is just as inventive and brilliant as J.K. Rowling. He added his own ideas and twists to the vast world she created; and she trusted him enough to do so. He didn’t just mirror or copied over her writings. It was quite the contrary… and even more after the Prisoner of Azkaban movie. The two mediums (book and movies) started to split and create their own paths, but at the same time remained consistent in the core story thread.

Some of Kloves’ ideas got into the movies, other didn’t. In the video conversation, Kloves talks about a scene from the first movie (that didn’t make the cut) in which Harry played with broken toy soldiers in The Cupboard Under the Stairs. Harry also spoke to a spider named Alastair. It’s a fascinating scene completely invented for the movie by him.

Then there’s another one of Steve’s invention, which happens to be my favorite scene of the entire saga, and one of the most controversial scenes in the Wizarding World movie franchise. The dance scene between Harry and Hermione.

JKR: Speaking about something that I never wrote, but I thought it was perfect and I loved… you know what I’m going to say..

SK: Yeah, the dance.

JKR: The dance.

J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves

I think this scene speaks volumes about how this writing collaboration evolved over time. Steve Kloves was so deep in this world and he knew these characters so well, that he had the insight and freedom to build this out in so many layers. The layers of emotion, friendship, love, desperation, sadness and awkwardness. But in the end it moves you. It’s a perfect scene, if you really understand all the intentions and dynamics that he was bringing to the table. Plus a great song on top of everything else. No wonder J.K. Rowling loved it.

There’s so much to reflect and “speak” when it comes to these two writers and their work. I feel I could continue writing this post for the entire night and I wouldn’t be done. That’s a good outcome. Interesting writers encouraging their “readers” to be involved in their world and maybe even write too. What more can you ask for?

Their relationship continues. The dynamic duo will be back again this year with Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. As Ollivander would say: I think we must expect great things from you, Mr. Potter.

All I could do to end this post is encourage you to learn more and watch them talk.. or write.

More content

The Rowling Library Magazine – Issue #36 – December 2019
A Conversation with JK Rowling and Steve Kloves | Harry Potter Behind the Scenes

Writing is hard work

Maintaining a personal website or daily blog is not an easy task. People always say: “just start”. I think starting is definitely important, but it’s the easy part. The tricky part few people talk about is how hard it is to maintain something going.

My second boss in life was (and still is) a fascinating woman called Marcia Zoladz. She was an editor for many years for a large content portal in Brazil called Universo Online (UOL). It is still the largest content portal in Brazil today, and she was really a pioneer in digital content at that time.

She started her career working in editorial in print and magazines and eventually, in the early 90’s, she made the transition to online portals. Her main area of expertise was culinary. Aside from her full time job as a content editor for the online portal, she constantly wrote and maintained a blog and brand about food and recipes (for decades and till this day). If you visit Cozinha da Marcia there’s a post already published today (Jan 3rd, 2022).

Back in 2007 I worked within her team as an intern web designer. Even back then she was already encouraging all of us in the team to start a blog. It didn’t matter if you were a content creator, a designer or a web developer. She wanted all of us to start a blog and feed it every day. Blogging was at its peak at the time and she wanted all of us to be part of it, just as she was with her culinary site. It was also a time when social media was starting to take over blogs, and it was important to her for all of us to be part of this “content creation movement”.

Looking back now, I really wish I had listened to her advice and did more with the blog we all started at the company, or even a personal one. She used to say: “A blog is like a small plant. You have to water it and feed it every day to make it grow. If you don’t do it, it will die really quickly”.

She said that fifteen years ago, but I remember like it was yesterday. That internal blog did die and disappeared in the ether of space and time on the web… which is a very fragile place, if you don’t constantly keep it alive.

Blogs do die and disappear really quickly if you don’t take real good care of them. My boss was totally right. It seems rather obvious these days with all the content that’s created all over the place, but I never really thought about it in the extent that she was thinking. She knew writing was hard work, and she was showing us that any good work required dedication.

I think she also knew more about it because she was doing it. The act of consistently producing content changes everything. There is a lot of value in the act of doing something in a consistent manner for a long period of time. That is true with anything in life, for good and for bad. But if you do something good consistently it seems to pay off and it usually compounds really quickly. Sometimes the payment is not monetary or financial. It could be just something pleasurable to do, and that’s all it should be – and that’s a good outcome too.

The hardest part of it all is how to maintain that consistency. I don’t think it is a problem of lack of time. It is creating the time for it, prioritizing as something important in life, and building a habit over time. I guess it’s never too late to learn from previous life lessons and do something meaningful about it.

You just have to start. But not just start.. You have to keep working on it.

Related:

Celebrate by Writing
The Intrinsic Value of Blogging
Reflecting!

A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society

Back in 2009 Jaron Lanier spoke about the idea of a different system for the fabric of the “social web”, and a different business model to support it. He connected this notion to the original ideas of Ted Nelson, which have never been tried. He spoke about the ideas of micro-payments and a web that’s not free, but affordable. In 2018 I posted a short video here with the excerpt from that conversation.

Since that time, Jaron Lanier continued to expand on these ideas. In 2018 he published “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now“, which got a lot of attention from the general media at the time and a couple years after it.

I think the best example of how much attention he got on the book was his appearance on The View. It was a year of a lot of scrutiny of social media platforms – 2018 was the same year in which Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called for a Senate hearing on the repercussions and missteps on elections, misinformation and Cambridge Analytica.

Later in that same year, Jaron Lanier published with E. Glen Weyl an 18 page article on Harvard Business Review called “A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society“. In this article they articulate the concepts of Data Dignity and MIDs. They also go over some ideas for regulations and the underling principles to support this system.

The year after that, in 2019, the New York Times published a series with three video episodes in which Lanier describes these ideas and concepts with compelling visual interpretations.

In 2020 Netflix launched a documentary called “The Social Dilemma“. Once again, in this documentary Jaron Lanier (along with many others) described in more detail some of the ideas he’s been thinking for decades. The documentary received a lot of attention and appraisal.

Big ideas take time to develop.

I’m particularly interested in hearing more from Jaron Lanier about these ideas on digital society when they start to intersect with virtual reality. Lanier has a lot of experience and context on VR and it will be interesting to see how the growing notions of the “Metaverse” will work from his perspective.

Although big ideas are essential, on the digital world implementation is everything. If we don’t get to a point where people start building new and engaging platforms from these ideas, they will continue to live in the realm of ideas, and we will continue to wonder (like Ted Nelson) how the world could be if we moved in another path.

The real question to me is who has the influence and the resources to move us in that direction?

Resolute

HMS Resolute – a British ship that got lost in the Arctic in the 1800s. It was salvaged by American whalers, then Congress sent it back to England. When the ship finally retired, Queen Victoria had two desks made from its timbers. Voila… resolute twins.

Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) – National Treasure: Book of Secrets

The movie scene happens in Paris. In National Treasure: Book of Secrets”, the main character discovers a new clue in the “French Statue of Liberty”. It is an inscription (made up for the movie) by Édouard de Laboulaye.

Laboulaye was the French genius that proposed creating a monument for the United States to honor the ideals of freedom and democracy.

The scene itself is a screenwriting treasure. It also brings the fact that the US Constitution is inspired by the ideas of French philosopher Montesquieu. That single line connects the French police character and Ben Gates together.

As the scene goes on, the monument’s inscription would lead the movie characters to the “twin resolute desks” (one in the US, and the other in the UK). These “resolute” desks do exist in real life and were in fact made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute, a lost Royal Navy ship found by an American whaler and then returned to the British Queen Victoria in 1856.

There were three desks made from those timbers (although they were not real twins).

The US Resolute desk has been used by American Presidents in the Oval Office since 1961.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Scene: “These twins stand resolute”

Every year lots of people in the world have New Year Resolutions. Funnily enough, when I looked at the definition for the word “resolute” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, here’s what I found:

“Resolute comes from the same Latin verb as resolved, and the two words are often synonyms. So how did it get this meaning from the Latin? Essentially, when you resolve a question or problem, you come to a conclusion, and once you’ve reached a conclusion you can proceed to act. So in your New Year’s resolutions, you resolve—or make up your mind—to do something. Unfortunately, New Year’s resolutions aren’t a good illustration of the meaning of resolute, since only about one in ten actually seems to succeed.“

The dictionary says that Resolute means: “admirably purposeful, determined, and unwavering”.

New Year Resolutions are hard, but these are inspiring words to contemplate, think and act, with courage.

What a beautiful (and much better) way to start a new year.