 So, you are in tent B if you're expecting tent A or tent C, now is the time to run away very quickly. And we are here to have an amazing talk from an amazing speaker. This is John Furlens, a fear enthusiast. John has flown in all the way from Houston, Texas, and boy, are his arms tired. So, will you...? No, that was a good joke. Yeah, yeah, just get them booing at me and then they'll appreciate you more. So, will you please give a very big E and a welcome to John. Good morning, everybody. I hardly need a microphone with a big booing voice, but I'll use it anyway. I am really grateful that all of you are here. He stole blows of my lines, including some bad jokes. But I'm here from Houston, Texas, and that's Houston, not Houston. Say it, everybody. It's great to be here at Electro-Wingdon Field. It's fantastic. I wanted to come here for a really long time, and I'm really thankful for the people who encouraged me to come here. And I thought it was worth giving a talk, and I'm going to talk about my favorite subject, which is failure, which makes me a failure enthusiast. What I love to do more than anything, and probably what most of you love to do more than anything because you're here, is to learn how to do new things. And I love learning new things so much that I started learning how to learn, and how to learn better and better and better. And what I realize in the process of that is a big part of that is failure. And this isn't really a new topic. Lots of people talk about failure. TJ Watson is the very famous industrialist who is CEO of IBM for a very, very long time, who says, if you want to succeed, double your failure rate. And I think he's actually underestimating it. You need to fail much, much, much more to succeed. And so the question is, how do we know how to fail? How do we learn how to fail? How do we encourage failure? And you can encourage it through quotes like this, but as it turns out, even people who make famous quotes sometimes make other famous quotes that are less accurate. So TJ Watson said, I think there's a global market for maybe five computers. If we added per person, then I think we're about in the right space for this audience, right? So, you know, it's an interesting topic failure. And it's one that's more talking about and exploring. And so I actually need a little bit of audience participation here. So if you want to bear with me for just a minute and follow my instructions, if you could take a moment and stare deeply in the eyes to the person immediately to your left right now. Go. Your left, not my left. How'd that work out for you? Right? So now that we've all kind of failed together, let's talk about failure, because we failed and we've learned from it and we've laughed. And some of you will walk away from this and take that learning and apply it to the next time you get to talk. I promise somebody will go and do that. It's a great trick. And so, but normally when we fail and we think about failure, we don't like to fail in public. We like to fail in private. We like to keep our failures secret. But there are problems with that because it's such a bad example. We all know we learned from failure, but you keep it secret. How does anybody learn? How does anybody know that failure is good and failure is important? It's really tough, right? And so, you know, I started thinking about this and I have two children. They're 12 and 13, which we all know is a difficult age where you go from the fearlessness of being a child to the abject terror of being a free teen. And you're fearful of doing wrong and stepping out of bounds and all these things so it's such a way your friends will make fun of you. And like all kids, my kids spend way too much time watching YouTube videos and educational ones that I would like them to watch, but all kinds of stuff. And what I notice is there's really kind of two kinds of videos on YouTube. So there's this time, I'll show you very briefly. This is, you know, there's no audio but it's no problem, right? This is fails, right? You know, there's all kinds of YouTube videos on fails. These get millions of views, right? So there's that kind of video because fails are meant to be left out, right? Fails are bad and there's something to be made fun of. And if you're 12 or 13 years old, this is a terrible, terrible thing to be made fun of, right? And if you fail, somehow that's going to be made fun of. The other kind of video is this, where people do all kinds of amazing tricks. Sorry, I hope there's no epileptics in the crowd. But this kind of video where they do amazing trick shots and we all know, at least as adults, there's like a thousand attempts to get this one take that they put in the video, right? But they only show you the last one and there's a lot of videos like that. They get millions of views on YouTube as well. And so the problem is there's almost nothing in between showing you going from learning something and failing to doing the amazing thing. There's no examples, very few examples. So I did come across this one video, which is actually one of my favorite ones. Oh, no, let me start with something first. Let's do that one first. So there's this video, which is this guy who taught himself the back flip. And what he did was he set himself a goal of spending six straight hours to try to back flip. Because he was going to learn back flip, and somebody told him, it's only in your head, it's not really a physical thing, you have to train your muscles, but it's really getting over the fact that you're doing the back flip. And he did it. In the end, he actually manages the back flip. And so this middle ground in talking about failure is really important. I'm a scientist, I'm a geologist by training out a PhD in geology. As it turns out, if you fail a lot and then finally succeed, they can be a PhD for that. And so don't worry about the title of the paper unless you want to blast from the past in virtual reality market language. But this paper comes as documenting a success after many years of failing, failing, failing, failing. But in the scientific world, this is what we do. We publish our successes. We learn from our failures. We publish our successes. And we don't talk about the failures. So this is a common thing across many communities. Definitely not unique. So makers are a great audience to this because we are really good at failing. And I mean that as a high compliment to all of you. Because as a failure enthusiast, this is what we need more of. We're pretty good at failing and learning from those failures. We probably have lots of thoughts and lots of workshops that result from people doing catastrophically bad things and then learning from it and then passing it along to you. The problem is we are perhaps not very good at teaching it. We still like to fail in private, in general. And all of these workshops here, you're going to go make a widget. And you're going to do it. If 80% of the people fail in that process, you have a problem, right? People wouldn't like the workshop. They want to succeed. If you go into a school and teach something about making, you teach it in such a way that every student is going to manage to make their thing. Constructing environments where it's okay to fail and it's okay to learn from failure isn't what we really do in general. So my question is how do you do that? How do you make an environment where it's okay to fail? And then most importantly, how good are we at doing it in public? How good are we at going out in front of everybody and failing? If we said we only have the beginning part where we make fun of fails and we have the end part where we have the amazing product and you never document the middle, who learns from it and what kind of example are we setting? So there are a few steps to learning absolutely anything. And for people like me who like to learn how to learn, this is important. We all do these steps over and over again. First you study, you read some book knowledge, you watch a YouTube video, you do whatever it is to give you that initial starting point to understand it. But we all know if you're going to learn to do something like ride a unicycle, you can read all the books you want, you have not learned it, right? You have to go put it into practice. So then you have to try it and you fail. You try it and you fail and you try it and you fail over and over and over again until eventually you have enough regular practice that you can then succeed. And it's that regular practice that's really hard. And what we see happen with kids over and over again is they try something once, or let's say pre-games or adults, we see this over and over again. You try it once and it wasn't really very good at it. So that's tough, right? We've probably all been guilty of that ourselves. So it's tough to set up an environment where you want to try and fail and try and fail and try and fail. And a part of that is studying good examples. So what I decided to do was to teach myself something. So when this talk was accepted, I thought, okay, what can I learn to do that I don't know how to do? And physical things are nice because you have to have that regular practice. So I decided to learn to slack line. Is it possible to get audio on this? We don't have to. It's okay, don't worry about it. We'll do it. I'll just call, I'll voice over my words on the next part. So this is me trying to learn to slack line for the first time. I'm going to get up and stand on slack line. I see wobbles all around like crazy. Any of you tried yesterday out here, you've tried experiences. And so, you know, I'm trying to learn to do it. Oh, hold on just a second. Always good to fail and we'll talk about that later. There we go. There I am trying to slack line and trying to do it. You got to stand up and you got to balance and you get to learn. I had enough book learning at this point to really know what I was supposed to do. So I'm kind of standing up and practicing a little bit. But I don't know what I'm going to do. So that's what it looks like. So I've just lied to you completely. That was not my first time slacklining. This is the first time when I set the slackline up in my front garden in order to try to slackline. So what happens is, I put my foot on it and it starts wobbling around like crazy. And I tell my wife who's very patient with me and all my neighbors, hold on, stop filming. I was going to come and document all of my progress, a failure to get to the point of learning to slackline. And I wasn't willing myself to be filmed the first time I tried it. I wanted to fail in private, not in public. Certainly not on something that can be distributed on YouTube. But as it turns out, she kept filming and I'm very grateful for that fact that she did. And so this really started me thinking. So in this book called Adapt, this guy says the best values are private ones. You can end up with confines of your room alone and no strangers watching. And this is what we're very familiar with. It goes on to say the next step is finding whatever possible a relatively safe space in which to fail. And this really got me thinking about being out in the front of my garden and failing and not wanting it filmed. So I started thinking about what if we can turn this around? What if we can make an environment that's safe to fail up front and make sure people are okay to fail? And so I'm reading about this and learning about it. This is actually pretty easy. You make failure survivable. You don't learn. You type out a book with no safe throat the first time you try it. This is not very good. And this is true right now to students so learning how to do things. You make failure fun. You make failure part of the process. It's okay. It's great to laugh at the failure. It's fantastic. You have to be a good role model. You have to be the person who knows everything. You're inviting people along on a journey with you to learn. You encourage people and you celebrate success. Even though you celebrate failure, you also need to celebrate success. So I did this in front of my house. I made this environment. I decided, okay, I learned my lesson. I'm going to get other people to come and fail. So my neighbors started showing up and they tried it. The more neighbors started showing up, they tried it. I started live streaming on Facebook. And even though I told my neighbors I had live streaming, maybe they didn't know what live streaming was, they were still willing to come up and fail in front of the camera and try this for the first time. And this was really an inspiration and it really made me think, okay, we're on to something here. If you show up, make an environment safe to fail in, encourage people, then they want to learn. So most importantly was this. And this is my 13-year-old boy who is trying to slack line out in the front yard, a typical 13-year-old, very free to fail in the public, who is failing and smiling about it. And I thought, okay, now I'm on to something. And I'll tell you, this is my entire goal. Forget to talk, forget everything else. If I can make my own child smile about failure, I've gotten something right. And so what I decided to do is replicate this environment here. I have set up a slack line just behind here, very conveniently located right between the bar and the first aid station. There is great wisdom in this location for a variety of reasons. You can actually see the ambulance there in the background. It's very handy. And what I want you to do is I want you to come here. I want you to try it out. I want you to try it for the first time. My challenge to you is this. Don't be like me. Don't be afraid to video your first time failing. I want you to live stream this on Twitter. To stand up and try slacklining for the first time. It's not that hard. You will probably not hurt yourself. And if you do, there's a conveniently located first aid station. But it's nice soft grass around. You're going to step off of it. It's not really any more dangerous than walking around. And this is showing everybody what this community is all about. It's about learning things. It's about showing that we are willing to learn. If you want help with this, feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter. And if you would like me to come and fail at something that you're good at, I am more than happy to do that. And I'm more than happy to live stream it. So I've gotten over this. I'm going to live stream my federations now on to be a better role model both for my kids and for everybody else. So a special thanks yesterday to Sally. I don't know if she's here right now. She was going to try to talk. She was one of the first people, little girl, who had the courage to come up and try this online yesterday. Most people sit around and watch it and say, oh yeah, that's very nice. But she came up and really started this process of people coming and trying it. We had a bunch of people live streaming it yesterday. And I want to see a lot more today. So a special thanks to any of you who actually did live streaming yesterday. It takes great courage. This is a bit of a social experiment. My expectation was that zero people would be willing to come and live stream their own failure. But with this environment where it's safe to fail, they're encouraging people along for giving them positive feedback, receiving results. They're failing. And they have a smile on their face every time they fail. If you go and watch the slack line out there, every time somebody steps off in the field, they have a smile on their face. So we've done it. We've replicated the environment. And what I ask you to do is to try to figure out how to replicate this environment in your own lives. Be a good role model. Go out there. Fail in public. Show people that failure is okay. Encourage failure. And encourage people to learn from it. And so I'll leave it with this quote. And I think this is true probably for everybody in the room. We are all failures, at least the best of us. Thank you very much. And I hopefully have a little bit of time for questions. So if you have a question, I will want to use it. I don't think we've got the bolts over there. Right. Here we go. Hi, yeah. For me, it's kind of a mix of just saying something and questions. Sorry. First of all, I definitely connect with what you said. When I was a teenager, stupid and silly and young. No, I'm just not young anymore. I decided that I would have fun in a slight, you know, a long escalator. And my friend was following it. And my face planted really hard. He put it on the internet. Probably your best video ever, right? And it was my best video. When I was a teacher, all my students saw it. My co-teachers made sure that all my students saw what I did. And actually, if for and kind of present it where you said, when you have a video on the internet that everyone has seen of you where you Facebook yourself doing something, there's nothing you can do much to make yourself look more stupid. So you can try anything. It doesn't matter. You will never look as stupid as that one video that everyone has seen. And I think these days everybody has that video. Yes. I mean, probably. It must be quite a bit, but yeah. You may not be aware of it. If somebody else has it. It's always with everybody with phones and cameras and social media. Everybody's got that video. What do you have to lose? You probably have something dumber out there or already anything you've done on the internet. Yeah. So you have a safety net. Yeah, exactly. But the main thing, other thing that I'm going to say, which is going to be a follow-up question, is I'm also now a part of the safety organization where I'm an assessor. And at the end of the assessment, a lot of people don't do exactly what is required to do exactly the right way. But sometimes I will still pass them with a kind of like 20-minute session of here's what you didn't do or what you did but should have done differently and here's how to do it better. And the main thing is about the reason why I do that is because I believe that they didn't do the wrong way because they failed but because there were, you know, there's the stress, there's the, you're being watched by someone who's judging you. And I think that's the judging that is really important in people that when you feel you've been judged, then you really don't want to fail. And for me, it's more judging, are you capable of this in general? Do I have the feeling that, yes, right now you can do that big rail basically because of the stress and because, you know, in the end, did my, well, how'd that be my mom? That's what she's like. No, she wouldn't have. So that's one environment where I'm capable of trying to encourage failure in a way. Like I say, you felt, but that didn't mean you felt, like you felt that you're still passing. And we need to figure that out, right? Yeah. And the more of a, and the question is on a day-to-day basis, obviously this is not a makers' fight, like maker thing. But on a more outside of making even because I think we should be able to fail at anything in life in general, not just trying to build things. What would you, your recommendations be for anyone in your daily life, how to create that safe space in people, like encouraging them at being okay at feeling that something, et cetera? I think you did on exactly the point which is don't judge them for failing to do something. Encourage them to continue even though they fail, right? And that's really what makes the difference in these environments is you have to make it safe and okay to fail in whatever endeavor you do. And do we have any teachers here today? A few. This is a really hard environment to engineer in the classroom, really hard because the whole classroom environment is around passing and failing. And here in the UK you go through these pretty horrific exams that everybody goes through at the end where you either pass or you fail, basically. Right? And so there is no learning from failure. Well, maybe there is learning from failure there, but it's a very harsh study environment, right, in the classroom in general. How can we do that? Any more questions that go hand up or challenge in the camera, all right? I'd just like to extend a number of comments there. I just wonder whether you've sort of reflected in your experience as a junior doctorate and taking this attitude towards failing and looking back at that in this family. For example, I have to do in mind there's a lot of pressure to get results. Dealing with a lot of the gnomes. I'm affectionate to myself. I don't want things to be wrong, especially when there's lead times to get things made. You might not have thought about everything in that process. How embarrassing it is to come back and start changing your mind. There's the whole, probably the biggest thing is when you get to the end, what is the, you know, lots of people are asking, what's the chance of failing a revival? How white is that? Here, have you thought about this sort of process in retrospect? I think in all, probably all of the sort of there shouldn't be a teaching environment, a learning environment. Perhaps the problem with the toughness is it's really not really engineered to be an enjoyable learning experience. You learn by failures, but it's hard graphically, I guess you're there. I was wondering if you've really thought about this. No, you're absolutely right. And it's taken me to get to a fairly advanced state in my academic career before I was willing to talk about failure. And I do this in scientific talks. Now I talk about failure and I would say when I came out of my PhD, I was probably swung somewhere on the opposite end of the spectrum. When you're trying to get a job and all of these things when you finish and you've been in this environment where failure is, is okay as long as you get to, you know, some success. It's really hard to get yourself in the mindset that failure is okay. And so I would argue that people at PhDs tend to get pushed very far in the other direction. Now, like you said, talking about this and really encouraging people and doing it myself. I talk about my failures so that other people can learn from them. And then if I can snatch them to the success from that, I will talk about that as well. Okay, time for one very, very quick question. I was just going to ask about Ben Goldacre, who's on a campaign to get drug companies to publish their failed things at the real world consequences of that. But, you know, multiple attempts to prove something works and that, you know, they don't publish their failures, then that's a real world consequence for medical research. Yeah, I think that's an excellent example because what do they have to lose from doing that? Not very much, maybe some idea of procedure or the way people view them or something, but we all know drug companies best things that don't work and it's mostly what they do. And if there's a database of things that didn't work and why they didn't work and how they didn't work, this only helps people develop better drugs. And this is really important and maybe there are secrecy reasons to keep some of that in, but I think there's a huge opportunity to learn in those kinds of spaces if we're willing to talk about it. Okay, a huge PMF round of applause for President Biden.