"He" is John Lloyd, and he's a producer and creator of lots of beloved British comedies.
He starts with a simple but weird question:
What are the things we don't know?
Well, putting aside, um, like 96% of everything for a minute, he's got a list of three biggies.
Big Thing We Don't Understand #1: Consciousness.
Hm, what is that pesky thing anyway? Good thing we don't have to touch it. Ew.
Big Thing We Don't Understand #2: Gravity.
We know some things about atoms and such, but do we have a clue what makes gravity work? Nope.
Big Thing We Don't Understand #3: Explosions.
We don't really know what makes them happen. (Maybe it's consciousness, ahem.)
Big Thing We Don't Understand #4: Comedy.
OK, this is getting personal. Lloyd's created some very funny stuff (like "Blackadder") and even he doesn't know what makes anyone laugh. (That's him with the rubber nose, btw.)
But he says this is all cool because "ignorance drives science."
"Any fool can find answers. People who ask new questions, they're the geniuses." — John Lloyd
If "ignorance is at the heart of any new kind of discovery," as he says, maybe you don't really need to know much.
Lloyd reckons the trick is figuring out what you do need to know.
So we might stop investing so much in arguments about things we can't really know while we're letting really important things in our own lives go by unnoticed.
What use is being smart if you don't use it intelligently?
And then, boom. There it is. Here's what's smart:
Kindness.
Kindness is always better than almost anything. And we all know it, even if we'd rather not admit it to our insecure — OK, selfish — selves sometimes.
Lloyd suggests it's worth getting over that hesitation and doing what we know to be right. It's "extraordinarily powerful," sez him.
Because:
The video makes all of this just plain impossible to argue with. Enjoy.
