My Big Five from SXSW24

It’s Wednesday night and I’m loitering at LAX, trying to work out exactly how much food I need to bring on board to prevent myself from starving on United’s overnight flight back to Melbourne. The intensity of SXSW is now officially behind me for another year and my brain is swimming in a soup of new ideas, experiences and people. As has become my tradition over the years, I like to take a moment to capture the handful of ideas still tugging at me for attention before BAU kicks back in.?

1. Less mid

This week has been anything but mid. While I spend most of my life thinking about what’s directly in front of me, Austin provides a forced, annual circuit breaker to explore the high and low. Over the last five days I’ve zoomed all the way in to deep introspection courtesy of Esther Perel, Brene Brown and Jay Shetty. At the same time, I’ve zoomed further out than I could have imagined, contemplating the connection between poetry and space travel and exploring what local teams can learn from those working together on the International Space Station. It’s easy to forget, but the world is filled with some very big ideas.

2. One person. One business. One billion dollars.

The conversation with Peter Deng (OpenAI’s head of ChatGT) had so many interesting tangents it’s hard to pin down just one. That said, there was a throw away line in one of the videos they screened in which somebody pondered out loud how soon we would see the first one person company purchased for one billion dollars. For all of the talk of AI making us infinitely more efficient, intelligent and scalable, nothing captured the promise and hype better than this. For what it’s worth, my guess is November 2025.

3. Are we living beyond human scale?

This was the provocation that kicked off the enlightening conversation between Esther Perel and Brene Brown on day three. Despite the 58 minutes of brilliant content that followed, this first question is still the one ringing in my ears. I guess the easy answer is ‘yes, we absolutely are’. Every one of us is scrambling to be across, if not deeply invested in more areas than our predecessors ever could have contemplated. All of which brings us to the much harder question of what we’re meant to do about it, be that mitigation, moderation or management.

4. Accounting for beauty?

One of the things I find most irksome about our post COVID reality is the number of conversations about ‘productivity’. Somehow, somewhere, someone decided that this was the measure to judge ourselves by, especially when it comes to deciding where we work.

As far as I know, productivity and creativity have very little in common. Some might even say that their natural starting points are in complete opposition. Which is why it was so inspiring to learn that even on spacecrafts, perhaps the most ‘effiency lead’ things us humans design, there is always room for art. NASA’s Europa Clipper, a spacecraft that will be visiting the second moon of Jupiter, will carry a panel with a poem written by Poet Laureate Ada Limon engraved on the front. This is just the latest chapter in NASA’s long history of making room for ‘unprodiuctive art’ in a world of ‘hyper productive science’.

5. What are we chasing?

One of the more random sessions I went to was a live recording of the ‘Good One’ podcast, a show about jokes and the comedians behind them. This episode featured an interview with Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, The King of Staten Island, The Big Sick, Bridesmaids, Superbad, Pineapple Express, Anchorman etc) who evidently knows a bit about comedy. Right at the end of the interview, the conversation turned to award shows and the constant snubbing of ‘real comedies’ (as well as the double snubbing of not even having an article written about your movie being snubbed).

It was about this point that Apatow said: “In comedies, we dont need awards. People keep watching our movies over and over again. The films that win Academy Awards, nobody ever watches these again. If we get to make a movie with our friends and have fun and get paid that’s a pretty good reward.”. Honestly, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Well that’s me officially signing off for SXSW24. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the updates. I’ve certainly enjoyed writing them.

Until next year!

D