Getting less sleep lately, and it’s not a bad thing. Here’s why. Thanks to the folks at Zipcar, who picked up half the cost, I was able to drive out to meet architectural pioneer Michelle Kaufmann and interview her for an upcoming SHELTER blog. Michelle has not only explored new ways of creating sustainable housing, but she is also fixing our buildings so they aren’t killing us. (“Officer, I’d like you to arrest that building for murder.”) I also met Nipun Mehta of Charity Focus, KarmaTube, and Karma Kitchen — all projects that are world-changers. Nipun makes awesome chai without needing to measure any of his ingredients. He also knows how to make social change by measuring social capital. I’m up nightly thinking about how I might make films that way, using creative people paid in karma bucks. More on that soon – and more about KarmaTube coming soon as I discuss a project with Birju Pandya, one of the guys behind it.

For now, let’s look at this staying up at night business. Actually, it starts in the morning when I am busy walking into walls. By ten I am able to form sentences, at least in my head. By six in the evening I am fully on, and by midnight ready to create great meaning. One in the morning – pure genius. Surrendering to sleep seems like defeat.

As Lisa Russ Spaar wrote in the New York Times recently, “For the insomniac Vladimir Nabokov, I think that sleep, which he called ‘the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals,’ meant turning off, even for a few hours, his quicksilver, voracious consciousness.”

Um, I don’t know if I have a quicksilver consciousness, but voracious works for me, and once I start the big thinking machine it’s really hard to turn off. As a result, we’ve instituted a few rules. No computers after 10 pm. No media unless it’s Sesame Street or Shirley Temple films. My wife likes to welcome sleep by reading in bed. Not me, so I spend many minutes flossing to give her time to concentrate on a few pages. Then the sleep boat leaves the dock.

Well, nighttime isn’t what it used to be, anyway. Way back when, night was dead calm if you wanted it that way. No emails, no phones. Your timekeeper was the groan of a garbage truck signaling 5 am; time to hug your pillow for an hour or two before work. Now, always, there’s Somebody Out There. Somebody’s Twitter feed to check, or Facebook statuses to poke through like dirty laundry on a dorm room floor.

Staying up all night doesn’t guarantee solitude, but it’s worth it if  you like to chase words across a screen or make a jumble of video clips sing their song. For that, I’ll skip a few Z’s.

photo credit: j.reed via Flickr Creative Commons

You’re out for a walk one day. Your phone buzzes. It’s an automatically generated text: “Go home and take your blood pressure medication.” Just wait until you have a doctor in your pocket or one on your screen.

According to a recent article in GIGAOM, researchers are working on making your smart phone really smart. Like save-your-life smart. UCLA scientists have a phone prototype that can monitor HIV and malaria and test water quality. The phone can light up a sample of blood, saliva or water and capture an image to help a doctor analyze the bad stuff in the sample. Epidemiologists in remote places could use their phones to monitor the spread of disease and alert public health authorities to direct resources where they’re needed.

Then there’s Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at UCLA. He’s created an attachment for a cell phone that transforms it into a microscope. Ready for a diagnosis on the road? “We convert cellphones into devices that diagnose diseases,” he explains, quoted in the New York Times. He’s formed a company called Microskia to bring the technology to market.

“This is an inexpensive way to eliminate a microscope and sample biological images with a basic cellphone camera instead,” Dr. Ozcan says. “If you are in a place where getting to a microscope or medical facility is not straightforward, this is a really smart solution.”

People are also getting medical advice from their computer screens. Google Insights for Search tells me that searches for “webmd.com” are up 800 percent. Of course, if WebMD.com recommends brain surgery I might seek out the opinion of a real doctor.

(“Look honey, here’s a YouTube video showing how to do that surgery yourself – you could save a bundle.”)

WebMD.com and Drweil.com can be useful, but they are one-way and not personal. That will change with on-line health management systems like DPS Health. (Disclosure: The founder of DPS Health is a friend of mine.) DPS Health is an on-line system allowing health care providers to interact with their patients remotely, but personally. Patients can track their patterns of exercise and diet choices. Their health care professional can monitor what’s happening and make recommendations. A site called Get Fit Get Right, run by the Starlight Children’s Foundation, is using this interactive feature provided by DPS Health – they’re calling it COACH. Kids can use it to get inspired about exercise and get feedback for their success.

There’s even a Microsoft-driven movement to get all your medical records on-line for easy access. It hasn’t really caught on yet because of privacy concerns. But the logic seems solid. On-line access to medical records streamlines care. More engagement with a health care coach might make you healthier. And everybody has their phone with them nearly all the time. Instead of checking on your messages, your phone could be checking on you.

I say there are two factors that contribute to a good blog. First, good writing; second, you have to annoy somebody. I promise to do at least one of those things today. Let’s start with homeopathy.

Recently, I wrote about a group in the UK called 10:23. Their goal was to swallow as many homeopathic pills as they could and see if they could overdose. They didn’t. But they did piss off a lot of people, especially those who are firm believers in sugar pills. I believe sugar pills can fix you, in some cases, because of the power of the placebo effect. But if you don’t believe, they might give you a tummy ache.

Something else might bring on an ache: Those who call America a Christian nation. For some years now, nice folks in Texas have been altering school textbooks to trumpet America’s roots in Christianity. The Rev. Peter Marshall, for one, believes in America’s “Bible-based foundations” and “Christian heritage,” as it says on his website. This sort of thing gets good traction with guys like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

Fundamentalists will tell you that the Founding Fathers were Christians, and important documents like the Mayflower Compact supposedly back that up. In the words of the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the state was founded “to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.”

Um, give me a minute to find my passport. Canada’s looking good. They have health care there and the Olympics, too.

It’s true that you can’t discuss Pilgrims or Puritans without talking religion. There was also a religious foundation to the American Revolution. Historians cite the Great Awakening, a movement of the 1700s. Pushed along by evangelicals, the Great Awakening provided a foundation for rebellion.

Fair enough. But Thomas Jefferson was against the idea of establishment churches. He’s the one who came up with the phrase “wall of separation” between church and state. Roger Williams, the theologian who got Rhode Island going, believed in religious tolerance.

The New York Times Magazine quotes conservative Richard Brookhiser about the Founding Fathers’ faith: “What they said was ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God.’ They didn’t say, “We put our faith in Jesus Christ.”

Other historians concur: George Washington wrote about God but there isn’t one biblical reference in all his work. Washington was a Mason, remember, and made reference to the Grand Architect of the Universe, a pointedly non-Christian terminology. (“Oh, Grand Architect, will your plan for the new kitchen include some Italian marble?”)

These facts about the Founders don’t stop Newt Gingrich and others from talking about a Christian America. But then fundamentalists also believe earth was created 10,000 years ago and Jesus had a pet Stegosaurus.

Roger Williams was more on the mark. He said, “God is too large to be housed under one roof.” I can work with that, because if you think all the answers are in one book, you haven’t read enough books.

What’s the gift economy? In simple terms it’s about giving stuff away for free without expecting anything back. Hold on, isn’t everything supposed to be monetized? Where’s the revenue stream in a gift economy? In other words, “show me the money!” Or, if you work at Goldman Sachs, “Where’s my multi-million-dollar bonus that I peeled from the hide of the American people?”

Well, what happens if there is no cash bonus, Mr. Blankfein? Worse, what happens if there is nothing tangible bartered or traded?

Now even I’m getting dizzy.

To steady my nerves I looked up a guy called Nipun Mehta, who is a leader in the gift economy movement. He has a lot of projects. There’s Charity Focus, a site that brings together volunteers with worthwhile projects. It started with the idea of gifting time.

Nipun Mehta was an engineer at Sun Microsystems who quit his presumably well-paying job at the age of 25. The Wall Street Journal published this explanation from Mr. Mehta: “I loved what I was doing and the people I worked with (but) I wanted to experiment with this idea of giving without any strings attached, doing things just for the love of it.”

He started building websites for nonprofits and this led to HelpOthers.org. It’s a site dedicated to small acts of kindness, like people paying for stranger’s meals at restaurants. Mehta is also giving away something called “Smile Cards” which give you ideas for nice things to do. You can freely download the designs and have them printed up. If you don’t want to do that, he’ll send you a few for free.

“We don’t charge for anything, nor do we advertise anything. The project is sustained by anonymous friends who donate what they can, not as a payment for what they have received but as a pay-it-forward act for someone they don’t know … someone like you.” – Nipun Mehta

He’s also practiced the gift economy in a project called Karma Kitchen. There are no prices on the menu and the check reads $0.00. It works because the person who was there before you pays for your meal, and when you leave, you pay for the next person. The experiment happens on Sundays at a restaurant in Berkeley, California and in another in Washington, DC. Berkeley, I get that. They are all communists there. But DC? If these goods and services are being given without strings attached, what is everyone gaining?

Something given away can even have a higher value than something paid for. In one of his blog posts, Mr. Mehta cites research that suggests that unless the compensation for work is adequate, you might as well not pay anything and get more effort. As he writes, “You get what you pay for. And if you never try paying for it, you might even get more.”

Which brings me back to KarmaTube. As somebody who’s made a living off media for several decades, I haven’t really warmed to the idea of free media. But Vimeo has become a useful tool to share work with others and build community. And some of that free stuff is pretty good. Like this:

Written by Lee Schneider

One person, one idea. That’s the Auteur Theory, which refers to a film director being the solo heart and soul of a movie. A little thing called non-linear editing blew all that up. Lightworks, Avid and now Final Cut Pro are insider names to most media consumers, but if you think these technologies are a small aspect of the media that is placed before you, well, you’d be wrong. These technologies are game changers. Why? Technology drives culture. In the 1970s, VHS became the vehicle of choice for pornography. In a wonderful assignation of tech-meets-flesh, the old men who masturbated under blankets in sleazy theaters were replaced by people masturbating at home. VHS, propelled on a surging sea of porno, became a dominant way to deliver movies, leading to the decline of Western civilization and Richard Simmons’ exercise videos, though not necessarily in that order.

Can you feel the burn? It’s not your fast-twitch muscle fibers that are on fire. It’s the immolation of pop culture, consuming itself almost as fast as it can be produced.

Final Cut Pro and Avid and television are an especially combustible mix. These non-linear systems have made post-production cheaper but they’ve also dumbed it down. Anybody can edit now and it’s way faster than it used to be. Clients can order changes and expect them overnight. Multiple editors can work on the same project at the same time, even in different cities.

Reality television has been shaped by non-linear editing far more than it’s been shaped by our appetite for cheating-spouse drama or seeing if people can lose weight if they are yelled at enough. Hours of footage can be digitized and then tossed at legions of editors who shape the story. Yes, that’s right. It’s really the editors who are shaping the story, not the directors who shot the footage or the executive producers who are spending the budget. Editors, sometimes working with story editors, are running things.

This is a good thing, I think, because editors see more footage than anybody and are in the best position to judge it. Further, this editorial or curatorial function has spread like a virus across all media. Look at the Huffington Post. The Queen of the Aggregators has risen to royal status by curating the news. It started out by being a master editor and gatherer of content. So many other laudable sites, like Boing Boing, Treehugger, Mashable and TechCrunch do a little reporting on their own, but they are editors at heart. Less hunting, more gathering. Mostly they curating and assembling content in their digital workshops.

Thanks to my friend H.A. Arnarson for giving me the idea to write about this. Recently, he’s been an editor-supervising producer on a show called “1000 Ways to Die.” We first met ten years ago when I hired him to edit a documentary I was executive producing about Arnold Schwarzenegger. The production was floundering a little bit and I as executive producer was doing my job, spending the budget in quiet desperation as we hunted for the cut. Then H.A. came along and made it work with his editorial vision.

The editor is the new auteur.

photo credit: dbking via Creative Commons

They were played on Nixon. They were played on Senator Mary L. Landrieu. Sacha Baron Cohen used them in Borat. I’m talking about dirty tricks. In a citizen-journalist-famous-for-15-minutes way, they are back. They’ve even been called a legitimate tool of “investigation.” (“Honey, I was using this nanny cam to investigate the babysitter and it caught you with the pool boy. Care to comment?”)

Quick review. When Richard Nixon made a speech one time in LA’s Chinatown, a prankster named Dick Tuck arranged for adorable children to hold up signs saying “Welcome” in Chinese. Only the signs really said, “What About the Hughes Loan?”, a reference to a controversial loan Howard Hughes made to Nixon’s brother. Nixon was furious and reportedly tore up one of the signs. More recently, James O’Keefe III, a 25-year-old guerrilla videographer, was accused with three other men of seeking to tamper with the office phones of Democratic Senator Mary L. Landrieu. Apparently, the four impersonated repairmen to gain entry to the office of the Louisiana senator.

O’Keefe called his deception an “investigation.” You might argue that impersonating repairmen was gonzo journalism, an act of civil disobedience or a new way to dig for the truth. Digging for the truth – by lying about who you are. Give me a moment to think about that.

In this regard, I am not an angel. In Greece once, with one foot on the dock and another on a boat, I handed a police officer a dummy videotape so we could get the real one out of the country. When I worked for NBC and Fox I wore a wire a couple of times. We conferred with network lawyers before we tried anything like that. When I wore a wire I made a point of saying that everything spoken was on the record. We did those kinds of recordings in states where you didn’t need the consent of the other party, so it was legal. We also didn’t trespass where we didn’t belong. We followed the rules, and listened to the network lawyers, but we knew if we screwed up it would be our asses in a sling, not theirs.

Rougher game now. Fuzzier boundaries. You have Borat and O’Keefe. As a documentary guy I noticed a big change after Borat. People were suspicious about interviews. Was I going to hoax them like Borat, punk them like Ashton or trick them like Colbert? These days, people want to screen an interview before it airs. I feel that old slippery slope under my feet: If I show them the interview they will talk about their hair or why they hadn’t had that mole removed. Suddenly we’re not talking about the story, we’re talking about their performance. The interview becomes performance art.

Lady Gaga, Sacha Baron Cohen and James O’Keefe are all in the same game – entertainment. In their brand of performance art you get to lie, impersonate people and wear funny outfits. I like entertainment, but if you’re wearing a funny outfit, the only people who consent to an interview with you are other entertainers. A closed-loop system. Get ready for Lady Gaga to anchor CNN.

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There was Bill Overgard. I met him once: I remember only a leather jacket and a puff of smoke; a man of mystery. I had no idea he was a comics icon, a veteran of 31 years of drawing Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, and a protégé of Milton Caniff who assisted Caniff on Steve Canyon. Bill wrote screenplays and novels, and when his scripts for ThunderCats came in I had no clue how we were going to get the animators to turn his adventurous works of literature into cartoons.

Every ThunderCats script was reviewed by a psychologist to be sure it would be a positive experience for the young viewer. It worked! If you check the statistics during the period the cartoon aired, you’ll see that murder rates went down, school attendance went up and SAT scores went through the roof. When kids weren’t scoring really high on their SATs or busy not committing crimes they were peeing their beds, scared to death with nightmares of Mumm-Ra, the bad guy of ThunderCats.

When I look back I wonder: Why did I get that job and why was it useful? Why did my writing journey include furry superheroes? Here’s a little story:

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, went to Reed College for six months and then dropped out. He slept on the floor in friends’ rooms and returned coke bottles for the five-cent deposit. He decided to take a calligraphy class. He learned about serif and san serif typefaces, the varying amount of space between letters and what makes for great typography. He found it fascinating and had no hope of it ever having any practical application in his life.

Ten years later he was designing the Mac computer and it all came back to him. The Mac became the first computer with beautiful typography. Other manufacturers copied the Mac and that’s the reason we have all these fonts and we’re not writing in courier; because Steve took calligraphy.

It’s easy, of course, to connect the dots looking backward. Going forward, well, we’ve built life’s road and we’re walking along it. We’re always preparing, but what are we preparing for?

My ThunderCats journey didn’t have a map. In 1986 we’d just had our first child, I needed a job, my father knew a guy who knew a guy and I found myself in a room with Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin and Peter Lawrence. I couldn’t have predicted how they would teach me about visual thinking, a skill I use every day, and also about being a superhero, a necessary thing for any journalist.

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My doctor gave me six months to live. But when I couldn’t pay the bill he gave me six months more.
-Walter Matthau, actor

You go to a doctor. The doctor gives you a pill. You get better. Then you find out the doctor gave you a sugar pill and you got better anyway.

You might have gotten better without bothering to go to the doctor at all. Or it could be the Placebo Effect. This has some folks in the UK pretty ticked off.

On January 30, a group called 10:23 is protesting an English drug store chain’s decision to sell homeopathic remedies. Boing Boing carried the story that 300 unbelievers across the UK are each planning to swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills. It’s a mass “overdose” intended to show that the homeopathic remedies are nothing but sugar pills and fake medicine. The event should be interesting, particularly if any of the protesters go into a sugar-induced coma.

Homeopathy is based on three central ideas: First, the Law of Similars: whatever causes your symptoms can also cure them. If you can’t sleep, try caffeine. Second, the Law of Infinitesimals. When you dilute a cure in water, it gets stronger. Third, the Law of Succussion, which states that each time you dilute your cure in water you are to tap the bottle to “potentize” it. Homeopaths believe this allows the water to retain the memory or vibration of the cure.

If you believe in homeopathy, this information is unbearably exciting. If you don’t, it sounds like superstitious nonsense and “magik” from 1796, which is when homeopathy was invented by one Samuel Hahnemann.

What if it’s not about what’s in the pills at all? What if their potency is predicated upon the intent of the user, the mystique surrounding the pills, or the package they came in? In 1955, an anesthesiologist named Henry Knowles Beecher said that a drug or doctor’s success is due to the patient’s expectation of a desired outcome. His research suggested that more than 30 percent of the time, patients felt better when they believed the treatment was going to make them feel better. Subsequent researchers say Beecher’s research was flawed, but there’s no denying that when people in white coats and medical degrees on the wall say reassuring words, people feel better. It also works when the people are wearing feathers and a loin cloth if that’s the cultural norm of what a healer looks like.

Expectations are powerful: Reference a puzzling study from the 1920s. A research team wanted to know if making factory lighting brighter would improve worker productivity. It did. But then worker productivity also improved when researchers made the lighting dimmer. The secret? The workers came to expect that any change would make them more productive, no matter whether they could see or were working in the dark.

We’re still in the dark regarding the Placebo Effect. It might prove to be the real mechanism for understanding healing energy based on intention and belief. It might be a vestige of old superstition and “magik.” It certainly reveals a lot about how people heal.

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Yadda yadda. Is that what you hear when someone is speaking? Or maybe it’s the trombone in those Charlie Brown specials. You know, when the parents or teachers talk: wah wah wah. If that’s the case, you’d suck as a documentary director.

Listening is an art. Ask any hostage negotiator, professional mediator or marriage counselor. I’ve been in the offices of a few back when Bush was president – not the hostage negotiators, just the marriage counselors. Their advice mostly is to listen to your partner complain until sap runs from your ears and your head catches on fire, and then you have to put out the fire with a cup of cold coffee and listen some more. (Note to self: I remember those marriage counseling sessions did not go so well.)

Still, there is remarkable power in telling your story. Director Heather Ross demonstrates this in her excellent film Girls on the Wall, which screened in Hollywood and will be seen on PBS stations. In the film, Heather interviews some really hard case inmates who happen to be girls. They talk about the robberies and murders they’ve committed. They tell stories of abuse and addiction. But mostly, they heal. This is the most remarkable part of the film: You become a witness to inner change, and that change is initiated by the act of storytelling. The women of the film tell their stories to Heather, and in a theater workshop they are attending in the lock up, and they are transformed into leaders, they get connected to their families, they experience emotions they’ve hitherto locked down tight.

Heather, like many good directors, becomes a catalyst for change, by simply holding listening space for the speaker. There’s a lot that goes into documentary work: stamina, an heroic undaunted strength in the face of challenge. But the biggest production skill just might be listening: You ask questions and you gotta hear what people are saying.

In Jacqueline Novogratz’ book “The Blue Sweater,” she tells the story of returning to Rwanda after the genocide and listening to survivors, sometimes for hours at a time. She witnessed how these survivors were able to move beyond a terrible inner hurt. She writes about how she empowered people just by listening to them.

On the SHELTER blog, the companion piece to a film we’re making about shelter, we’re started featuring interviews with people who are homeless or transitioning from homelessness. We’re also meeting the game-changers who are coming up with ways to address homelessness. As we do these interviews I can endorse Novogratz’ experience. Simply giving people the opportunity to talk empowers them. Why is it enough, then, just to be heard and acknowledged?

Freud figured that one out. At first, hypnosis was his preferred technique, and he soon found out that prone people were liberated from linear thought. Later, he dropped hypnosis, but kept the couch. He had discovered that talking was a powerful agent of change.

There’s a picture of Freud’s couch at the beginning of this post, and it looks pretty comfortable and kind of bohemian. If you want to see people change, and be lucky enough to get them in your film, you want to start with a comfortable couch, at least figuratively speaking. Then all you need to do is ask good questions and listen.

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Have you heard about the new world consciousness arriving by 2012?

According to experts:

a) A worldwide natural disaster will occur, directed by Roland Emmerich, only this time the special effects will be really happening.
b) A return to the Utopian world of Avatar, only this time you won’t need 3D glasses because it really will be in 3D.

Which will it be? The answer in a moment.

If civilization ended tomorrow, would this create a new consciousness? Let’s see. There’d be fewer people. We’d live close to the land and close to each other. When we wanted to create art we’d just pick up some squirrel dung and make shapes to stick on our cave walls. See, I don’t like this scenario already. You can forget culture altogether: Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Henri Rousseau duly noted, people like to form groups and kill other people. Also, why would Nature start cooperating with human aspirations and goals? It hasn’t so far.

Rousseau, the painter among the three sages mentioned above, got it right. Sure, he did “The Dream,” showing a woman communing with nature on a comfy divan, but he also painted “The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope,” which is more like it.

Nature looks nice but can be brutal, and if the world goes primitive it won’t be pretty.

The good news is that the leading edge of the new age is already here, and like most great changes, it’s gradual. In Hollywood, it’s not just Jim Cameron dreaming of a future guided by the wisdom of Gaia, the Earth mother. c3 Conscious Creatives is dedicated to creating more conscious media, and John Raatz of the Visioneering Group is finding new ways to distribute what he is calling Transformational Media: Media that shows how people change and uplifts humanity. Bob Ballard runs the Hearts of Fire Project, which is intended to empower homeless people through artistic self-expression. He sees homeless people not as helpless people, but instead as those on the vanguard of a new culture expressing what’s really important in the world: love, community and connection. “The homeless can teach us that people are important, not what people have,” he says.

Change means that onetime fringe values are entering mainstream culture. Michael Cera can discuss silent Vipassana meditation on the David Letterman show, and Letterman can sound genuinely interested. James Cameron can do a $230-mil (maybe more) movie that glorifies respect for the Earth and millions embrace it. Only the critic from the New Yorker didn’t seem to get the Gaia message, dismissing Cameron as a hippie thinker with a huge checkbook. Cameron may be that, but good thing his message was heard by many.

Oh, the answer to the quiz? There isn’t one. The Mayans may have been great predictors of the future, but the fact that their calendar ends in 2012 means only one thing. Time to get a new calendar.

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