-
I have Stage IV lung cancer.
-
Oh, I know, "poor me."
-
I don't feel that way.
-
I'm so OK with it.
-
And granted, I have certain advantages.
-
Not everybody can take
so cavalier an attitude.
-
I don't have young children.
-
I have a grown daughter who's
brilliant and happy and wonderful.
-
I don't have huge financial stress.
-
My cancer isn't that aggressive.
-
It's kind of like
the Democratic leadership --
-
(Laughter)
-
not concinved it can win.
-
It's basically just sitting there,
-
waiting for Goldman Sachs
to give it some money.
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
Oh!
-
And the best thing of all --
-
I have a major accomplishment
under my belt.
-
Yes.
-
I didn't even know it until someone
tweeted me a year ago.
-
And here's what they said:
-
"You are responsible
-
for the pussification
of the American male."
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
Not that I can take
all the credit, but ...
-
(Laughter)
-
But what if you don't have my advantages?
-
The only advice I can give you
is to do what I did:
-
make friends with reality.
-
You couldn't have a worse relationship
with reality than I did.
-
From the get-go,
-
I wasn't even attracted to reality.
-
If they'd had Tinder when I met reality,
-
I would have swiped left
-
and the whole thing would have been over.
-
(Laughter)
-
And reality and I --
-
we don't share the same values,
-
the same goals --
-
(Laughter)
-
To be honest,
-
I don't have goals;
-
I have fantasies.
-
They're exactly like goals
but without the hard work.
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
I'm not a big fan of hard work,
-
but you know reality --
-
it's either push, push, push, push, push
-
through its agent,
-
the executive brain function --
-
one of the [yoys] of dying:
-
my executive brain function
won't have me to kick around anymore.
-
(Laughter)
-
But something happened
-
that made me realize
-
that reality may not be reality.
-
Though it happened [was]
because I basically wanted reality
-
to leave me alone,
-
but I wanted to be left alone
in a nice house
-
with a Wolf range
-
and Sub-Zero refrigerator ...
-
private yoga lessons.
-
I ended up with
a development deal at Disney,
-
and one day I found myself
in my new office
-
on Two Dopey Drive --
-
(Laughter)
-
which reality thought
I should be proud of ...
-
(Laughter)
-
And I'm staring at the present
they sent me to celebrate my arrival --
-
not the Lalique vase or the grand piano
I've heard of other people getting,
-
but a three-foot-tall,
stuffed Mickey Mouse
-
with a catalog in case I wanted
to order some more stuff
-
that didn't jive with my aesthetic.
-
(Laughter)
-
And when I looked up in the catalog
-
to see how much
this three-foot-high mouse cost,
-
here's how it was described ...
-
"Life-sized."
-
(Laughter)
-
And that's when I knew.
-
Reality wasn't "reality."
-
Reality was an imposter.
-
So I dived into quantum physics
and chaos theory
-
to try to find Actual Reality,
-
and I've just finished a movie --
-
yes, finally finished --
-
about all that,
-
so I won't go into it here,
-
and anyway it wasn't until
after we shot the movie,
-
when I broke my leg
-
and then it didn't heal,
-
so then they had to do
another surgery a year later,
-
and then that took a year --
-
two years in a wheelchair,
-
and that's when I came
into contact with Actual Reality:
-
limits.
-
Those very limits I'd spent
my whole life denying
-
and pushing past
-
and ignoring
-
were real,
-
and I had to deal with them,
-
and they took imagination,
creativity and my entire skillset.
-
It turned out I was great
at Actual Reality.
-
I didn't just come to terms with it,
-
I fell in love.
-
And I should've known,
-
given my equally shaky
relationship with the zeitgeist --
-
I'll just say if anyone
is in the market for a Betamax --
-
(Laughter)
-
I should have known that the moment
I fell in love with reality,
-
the rest of the country would decide
to go in the opposite direction.
-
(Laughter)
-
But I'm not here to talk about Trump
or the alt-right or climate change deniers
-
or even the makers of this thing,
-
which I would have called a box,
-
except that right here it says,
-
"This is not a box."
-
(Laughter)
-
They're gaslighting me.
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
But what I do want to talk about
-
is a personal challenge to reality
-
that I take personally,
-
and I want to preface it
-
by saying that I absolutely love science.
-
I have this --
-
not a scientist myself --
-
but an uncanny ability to understand
everything about science,
-
except the actual science --
-
(Laughter)
-
which is math.
-
But the most outlandish concepts
make sense to me.
-
The string theory;
-
the idea that all of reality emanates
from the vibrations of these tiny --
-
I call it "The Big Twang" --
-
(Laughter)
-
Wave-particle duality:
-
the idea that one thing
can manifest as two things ...
-
you know?
-
That a photon can manifest
as a wave and a particle
-
coincided with my deepest intuitions
-
that people are good and bad,
-
ideas are right and wrong.
-
Freud was right about penis envy
-
and he was wrong about who has it.
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
Thank you.
-
And then there's this slight
variation on that,
-
which is reality looks like two things,
-
but it turns out to be the interaction
of those two things,
-
like [space/time,]
-
[mass/energy]
-
and life and death.
-
So I don't I understand --
-
I simply just don't understand
-
the mindset of people who are out
to "defeat death" and "overcome death."
-
How do you do that?
-
How do you defeat death
without killing off life?
-
It doesn't make sense to me.
-
I also have to say,
-
I find it incredibly ungrateful.
-
I mean, you're given
this extraordinary gift --
-
life --
-
but it's as if you had asked Santa
for a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow
-
and you had gotten
a salad spinner instead.
-
You know, it's the beef --
-
the beef with it is that it comes
with an expiration date.
-
Death is the dealbreaker.
-
I don't get that.
-
I don't understand --
-
To me it's disrespectful.
-
It's disrespectful to nature.
-
The idea that we're going
to dominate nature,
-
we're going to master nature,
-
nature is too weak
to withstand our intellect --
-
no, I don't think so.
-
I think if you've actually read
quantum physics as I have --
-
well, I read an email
from someone who'd read it, but --
-
(Laughter)
-
You have to understand
-
that we don't live in Newton's
clockwork universe anymore.
-
We live in a banana peel universe,
-
and we won't ever be able
to know everything
-
or control everything
-
or predict everything.
-
Nature is like a self-driving car.
-
The best we can be is like
the old woman in that joke --
-
I don't know if you've heard it.
-
An old woman is driving
-
with her middle-aged daughter
in the passenger seat,
-
and the mother goes
right through a red light,
-
and the daughter doesn't want to say
anything that makes it sound like,
-
"You're too old to drive,"
-
so she didn't say anything.
-
And then the mother
goes through a second red light,
-
and the daughter,
-
as tactfully as possible,
-
says, "Mom, are you aware
-
that you just went through
two red lights?"
-
And the mother says, "Oh, am I driving?"
-
(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
-
So ...
-
and now I'm going to take a mental leap,
-
which is easy for me because
I'm the Evel Knievel of mental leaps;
-
my license plate says,
-
"Cogito, ergo zoom."
-
I hope you're willing
to come with me on this,
-
but my real problem with the mindset
that is so out to defeat death
-
is if you're anti-death,
-
which to me translates as anti-life,
-
which to me translates as anti-nature,
-
it also translates to me as anti-woman,
-
because women have long been
identified with nature.
-
And my source on this is Hannah Arendt,
-
the German philosopher who wrote
a book called "The Human Condition."
-
And in it she says that classically,
-
work is associated with men.
-
Work is what comes out of the head;
-
it's what we invent,
-
it's what we create,
-
it's how we leave our mark upon the world.
-
Whereas labor is associated with the body.
-
It's associated with the people
who perform labor
-
or undergo labor.
-
So to me,
-
the mindset that denies that --
-
that denies that we're in sync
with the biorhythms,
-
the cyclical rhythms of the universe,
-
does not create a hospitable
environment for women
-
or for people associated with labor,
-
which is to say,
-
people that we associate
as descendants of slaves,
-
or people who perform manual labor.
-
So here's how it looks
-
from a banana-peel-universe point of view,
-
from my mindset which I call,
"Emily's universe."
-
First of all,
-
I am incredibly grateful for life,
-
but I don't want to be immortal.
-
I have no interest in having
my name live on after me.
-
In fact, I don't want it to
-
because it's been my observation
-
that no matter how nice
and how brilliant
-
or how talented you are,
-
50 years after you die,
-
they turn on you.
-
(Laughter)
-
And I have actual proof of that.
-
A headline from the Los Angeles Times:
-
"Anne Frank; Not So Nice Afterall."
-
(Laughter)
-
Plus, I love being in sync
-
with the cyclical rhythms of the universe.
-
That's what's so extraordinary about life:
-
it's a cycle of generation,
-
degeneration,
-
regeneration.
-
"I" am just a collection of particles
-
that is arranged into this pattern,
-
then will decompose and be available,
-
all of its constituent parts,
-
to nature to reorganize
into another pattern.
-
To me, that is so exciting,
-
and it makes me even more grateful
to be part of that process.
-
You know,
-
I look at death now from the point of view
of a German biologist,
-
Andreas Weber,
-
who looks at it as
part of the gift economy.
-
You're given this enormous gift --
-
life --
-
you enrich it as best you can,
-
and then you give it back.
-
And, you know, Auntie Mame
said, "Life is a banquet,"
-
well, I've eaten my fill.
-
I have had an enormous appetite for life,
-
I've consumed life,
-
but in death,
-
I'm going to be consumed.
-
I'm going into the ground
just the way I am,
-
and there I invite every microbe
-
and a [...]
-
and a composer
-
to have their fill --
-
I think they'll find me delicious.
-
(Laughter)
-
I do.
-
So the best thing about my attitude
I think is that it's real.
-
You can see it.
-
You can observe it.
-
It actually happens.
-
It's not a --
-
well, maybe not my enriching the gift,
-
I don't know about that --
-
but my life has certainly
been enriched by other people.
-
By TED,
-
which introduced me to
a whole network of people
-
who have enriched my life,
-
including Tricia McGillis,
-
my website designer,
-
who's working with my wonderful daughter
-
to take my website
and turn it into something
-
where all I have to do is write a blog.
-
I don't have to use
the executive brain function --
-
ha, ha, ha, I win!
-
And I am so grateful to you.
-
I don't want to say, "the audience,"
-
because I don't really see it
as we're two separate things.
-
I think of it in terms
of quantum physics again.
-
And, you know, quantum physicists
are not exactly sure what happens
-
when the wave becomes a particle.
-
There are different theories --
-
the collapse of the wave function,
-
decoherence --
-
but they're all agreed on one thing:
-
that reality comes into being
through an interaction.
-
So do you.
-
And every audience I've ever had,
-
past and present.
-
Thank you so much
for making my life real.
-
(Applause)
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)
-
Thank you.