Talks at Google

Author Michael Lent visits Google to discuss his book "Christmas Letters from Hell: All The News We Hate from the People We Love." Who doesn't love to open the mailbox during the holidays and find a newsletter? Whether it's a letter from an old college roommate inadvertently revealing her husband's wandering eye, a self-congratulatory account of a cousin's rise to power at the local fast-food joint, or a mind-numbingly detailed account of a year's medical ailments from a coworker, they're always entertaining. "Christmas Letters from Hell" skewers holiday letters of all shapes and sizes, from the ones that come crammed with cheesy graphics or written from the perspective of the recently neutered family dog to those filled with stories of "perfect" family vacations that were clearly anything but. Here Santa uses his holiday letter to let the elves know that he'll be outsourcing their roles overseas…effective immediately; a bipolar mom tells two very different versions of the year's events; and Osama bin Laden touches base with his high school host family in Minneapolis. "Christmas Letters from Hell" serves up a steaming, savory blend of the holiday cheer, humor, and twisted truth in our well-intended attempts to stay in touch gone horribly, horribly wrong. Originally published in December of 2007. Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.

Aliza Knox visits Google to discuss her book "Don't Quit Your Day Job: The 6 Mindshifts You Need to Rise and Thrive at Work." The book presents six empowering, essential mindshifts necessary to rise and thrive in your career – and to love your life at the same time. Driven by Aliza's four decades working in and leading some of the world's most celebrated firms, and featuring candid accounts of other people's successes and missteps in industries such as global tech and consumer goods, this book is an essential guide to integrating your professional and personal goals to build a fulfilling, complete life. "Don't Quit Your Day Job" provides a global outlook that reveals how to excel in today's hybrid, often dispersed world of work. Whether you're just starting your first job or you're ready to rise to the C-suite, it will help you advance and flourish in the workplace. Aliza Knox built and led Asia-Pacific businesses for three of the world's top technology firms—Google, Twitter and Cloudflare. Named 2020 APAC IT Woman of The Year, she spent decades as a global finance and consulting executive, and is currently a non-executive board director and a senior advisor for Boston Consulting Group. Aliza now shares her passion and lessons learned with the next generation of business leaders, guiding companies across new frontiers while building and maintaining strong connections between teams around the world. Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.

Jake Dell and Evan Bloom visit Google to discuss what makes a Jewish Deli, the role delis play in American culture, and how Evan and Jake maintain the food traditions of their ancestors while operating modern businesses. Will Katz Deli ever give up their ticket system? Can there be more than one great Jewish Deli per city? Does the future of Jewish cuisine have room for vegan Rubens? These questions and many more are addressed in this talk. Many people know Katz's deli as the setting for the famous "I'll have what she's having" scene starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in "When Harry Met Sally." But despite being a popular film location, Katz's was famous long before Hollywood came knocking. Its enduring slogan, "Send a salami to your boy in the Army," dates back to World War II. Katz's is likely the most famous remaining Jewish-style deli in the nation, and has been dispensing its famous pastrami and corned beef on Manhattan's Lower East Side for more than 130 years. Originally published in July of 2013. Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.

Kathy Rastle, a leading expert on skilled reading and learning to read, visits Google to discuss how her lab's research has had a major influence on how children around the world are taught to read. Learning to read is the most important milestone of a child's education. Yet, reading is not a universal part of the human experience. Writing is a recent cultural invention and reading is a learned skill whose mastery requires years of instruction, dedication, and practice. Kathy will walk us through what psychological science has discovered about this fascinating process, and share her reflections on how we can use this knowledge to improve literacy for children around the world. Kathy's research is focused on reading acquisition, skilled reading, and the relationship between reading and spoken language. She has a particular interest in characterizing the information that is present in written languages, and in understanding how this information is learned through instruction and text experience. Recently, she conducted a number of artificial language learning experiments investigating how acquired knowledge is influenced by properties of languages and writing systems, the quality of prior knowledge, and the nature of instruction. Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.

Mary Bond is a former dancer, a Structural Integration practitioner and former Chair of the Rolf Movement® faculty of the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration. In addition to running movement workshops, she has authored many articles and two books: "The New Rules Of Posture" and "Your Body Mandala: Posture as a Path to Presence". Drawing on current anatomy research and neuroscience, Mary discusses how her work empowers people to change the way they inhabit their body. She shares foundational sensory perceptions that, when practiced mindfully, can radically change how you sit, stand and move. Originally published in September of 2017. Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.

From the bestselling authors and hosts of "The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe" podcast, Steven Novella, Jay Novella & Bob Novella visit Google to discuss their book "The Skeptics' Guide to the Future: What Yesterday's Science and Science Fiction Tell Us About the World of Tomorrow." The book is a high-tech roadmap of the future, cracking open the follies of futurists' past and how technology will profoundly change our world, redefining what it means to be human. Our predictions of the future are a wild fantasy, inextricably linked to our present hopes and fears, biases and ignorance. Whether they be the outlandish leaps predicted in the 1920s, like multi-purpose utility belts with climate control capabilities and planes the size of luxury cruise ships, or the forecasts of the '60s, which didn't anticipate the sexual revolution or women's liberation, the path to the present is littered with failed predictions and incorrect estimations. The best we can do is try to absorb the lessons from futurism's checkered past, perhaps learning to do a little better. In the book, Steven Novella and his co-authors build upon the work of futurists of the past by examining what they got right, what they got wrong, and how they came to those conclusions. By exploring the pitfalls of each era, they give their own speculations about the distant future, transformed by unbelievable technology ranging from genetic manipulation to artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Applying their trademark skepticism, they carefully extrapolate upon each scientific development, leaving no stone unturned as they lay out a vision for the future. Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.

In "How to Create a Mind, The Secret of Human Thought Revealed," futurist and author Ray Kurzweil explores the limitless potential of reverse engineering the human brain. Ray Kurzweil is arguably today's most influential—and often controversial—futurist. In "How to Create a Mind," Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization—reverse engineering the human brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines. Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world's problems. He thoughtfully examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness while envisioning the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating. A prolific inventor, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition software, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Originally published in November of 2012. Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.

Astrophysicist and folklorist Dr. Moiya McTier visits Google to discuss her book "The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy." This approachable and fascinating autobiography of our galaxy details what humans have discovered about everything from its formation to its eventual death, and what more there is to learn about this galaxy we call home. After a few billion years of bearing witness to life on Earth, of watching one hundred billion humans go about their day-to-day lives, and of hearing its own story told by others, The Milky Way would like a chance to speak for itself. All one hundred billion stars and fifty undecillion gaseous tons of it. It all began some thirteen billion years ago, when clouds of gas scattered through the universe's primordial plasma could not keep their metaphorical hands off each other. They succumbed to their gravitational attraction, and the galaxy we know as the Milky Way was born. Since then, the galaxy has watched as dark energy pushed away its first friends, as humans mythologized its name and purpose, and as galactic archaeologists have worked to determine its true age. The Milky Way has absorbed supermassive black holes, made enemies of a few galactic neighbors, and mourned the deaths of countless stars. This fascinating autobiography recounts the history and future of the universe in accessible but scientific detail, presenting a summary of human astronomical knowledge thus far that is unquestionably out of this world. Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.

Weird Al Yankovic visits Google to discuss his new album "Mandatory Fun." He is best known for creating comedy songs that make light of pop culture and often parody specific songs by world-renown artists such as Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Queen, and many more. Since having a comedy song aired on The Dr. Demento Radio Show in 1976 at age 16, Yankovic has sold more than 12 million albums, recorded more than 150 parodies and original songs, and performed more than 1,000 live shows. His work has earned him five Grammy Awards and a further 11 nominations, four gold records, and six platinum records in the U.S.. His first top ten Billboard album "Straight Outta Lynwood" and single "White & Nerdy" were both released in 2006, nearly three decades into his career. His latest album, "Mandatory Fun," became his first number-one album during its debut week. Yankovic's success comes in part from his effective use of music videos to parody pop culture, which are sometimes shot-for-shot recreations of the original. With the decline of music television and the onset of social media, he used YouTube and other video sites to publish his videos; this strategy has boosted sales of his later albums and returned him to the eye of popular culture. Most recently, his life and career were celebrated by the release of the semi-biographical parody film "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story", starring Daniel Radcliffe as Weird Al. Originally published in July of 2014. Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.

Dandapani visits Google to discuss his book "The Power of Unwavering Focus." Anxiety, stress, worry, and fear—these mental maladies are making us increasingly unhappy and unhealthy. Dandapani—argues that learning how to concentrate is the cure. "The Power of Unwavering Focus" distills his wisdom and learnings into a step-by-step guide to taking charge of your life by understanding the mind, harnessing awareness, and cultivating a concentration practice. Dandapani is a Hindu priest, entrepreneur, and former monk of ten years. After graduating university with a degree in Electrical Engineering, he left it all behind to become a Hindu monk under the guidance of one of Hinduism's foremost spiritual leaders of our time, Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. For 10 years he lived a life of serious personal discipline and training at his guru's cloistered monastery in Hawaii. When his vows expired, he chose to venture out into the world making New York City his home. He now works with entrepreneurs and some of the top athletes in the world in helping them understand and leverage their mind so that they can be the best at what they do. He does this by empowering them with tools and teachings that have been used by Hindu monks of his tradition for thousands of years. An internationally renowned speaker and world-leading expert on leveraging the human mind to create a life of purpose and joy, Dandapani has shared the stage with world-renowned leaders, companies and many individuals. Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.