Our Guest today is Tom Guarriello who aptly is deeply involved in the YouTube world. Here are a remarkable trio of clips showing the power of Video as realized by YouTube to build community. We start with YouTube's senior member who is 80 making his first video - over 2,700,000 views! We see how this novel event is taken up by a star of the YouTube system and then how it builds further.
Tom's selection has been a revelation for Johnnie and I - we had no idea how powerful video can be - Johnnie described the power as being "Human Bandwidth". Tom's selection and Podcast tells me that personal video may become the most powerful influence on the web.
All these clips tell me something about how work is in the Free Agent or Natural world.
Good work often starts by accident as a situation attracts strangers. As in the Magnificent 7, the money is often derisory - what brings the team together is personal attachment and the need to find meaning. Good work also has the power to make good people out of us.
The Barn building scene (watch for Viggo Mortenson in his first role) is for me an example of a much older "Economy" than the one that we live in today. Here the implicit payment is that every member of the community can expect help, if they in turn offer help. Is this not Open Source? See also how everyone is a participant - especially the children. As with the 7, differences are resolved by people here who do good work with each other.
Finally, the clip form the 13th Warrior, reminds me that we all die "Paupers". The only riches that extend after death are our name. To have a name, we have to have had a life so that there are worthy stories to be told about us.
The Phoric* is an idea Rob Paterson and I have hatched. We plan to do a series of podcast interviews with people who interest us. We'll ask each of them to choose three video clips (YouTubes or whatever) that in some way excite and please them, and tell us what they mean to them.
So we thought we'd start with each other's selection, and then take it from there.
And here are the three clips that I chose, all of them from Monty Python... I'd love to run a management course based around lessons from Monty Python. Python captures the absurd in how we humans organise ourselves. The first clip, from Life of Brian, mocks those conversations about the importance of action which remain mired in abstraction and inaction.
In the second, we see Michael Palin as an apparently archetypal army seargent-major, proposing some meaningless "marching hup and down the square" to some squaddies. For me, this is about us not really wanting to do many of the things we pretend to.
Finally, I choose the "follow the gourd" scene, also from Life of Brian.
This captures how easy it is to mistakenly read deep significance into
accidental events and how we create leaders in our imaginations, where
in reality there is only chaos.
*The idea for 'phoric is as in metaphoric, and euphoric... or maybe another phoric you might think of.
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