Can Cultures Survive Through Globalization?

An interview with Ed Rubesch on his TedX Taipei talk

Article written by: Edward Rubesch and Joy Yomjinda

Today we talked with Ed Rubesch about his TedX talk in Taiwan several years ago about how cultures can be preserved through globalization and technology.

We saw your talk on YouTube, can you tell us about it?

Ed: (laughs) I'm always surprised when somebody tells me they saw that YouTube video. I think only a few people watched it in the first couple of years, but more often now, when I am running a program of some sort, I meet someone who tells me they saw it. Maybe I'm up to 50 views now or something...ha-ha.

That seems pretty cool that you were invited to Taiwan to do a TED Talk. How did that happen?

Ed: Well I was in Taiwan for a meeting for the Roundtable of Entrepreneurship Education, a group formed by a friend of mine Tina Selig, who runs the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. We used to get together every year in different parts of the world and discuss how to develop entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship better. This was in the early 2000s before entrepreneurship became a real trend. So, it was fun getting together with some of the real pioneers of entrepreneurship development from Silicon Valley and around the world and talking about, how can we do this better?

So, I accidentally ran into the TEDx Taipei people. They said "we're running TED tomorrow, do you want to talk?" And I told them "sure, what would you like me to talk about?"

They had six overall themes for TED that year, and I asked them which one was the least popular. They said the topic about Disappearing Cultures doesn't have anybody speaking at all.

I have always enjoyed the personal challenge of taking a path that few or no one else is taking, so I said I'll do that topic, Disappearing Cultures...and then I needed to figure out what to talk about.

That's how you chose the topic? The one that nobody else was doing?

Ed: Yep, that's exactly how I chose it. I've been lucky, although these days I wouldn't call it luck, to seek opportunities in directions other people aren't going. Over time I realized that doing this is really one of the entrepreneur superpowers.

So are you an expert in culture? How did you develop your talk?

Ed: Well I guess I'm not really an expert in culture but I had some experiences that I could call upon…

First, although I'm an American I had been living in Thailand around 15 years at that point. You really learn a lot about what culture means when you move out of your own culture, and begin to immerse yourself in somebody else's, especially if you're willing to go with a somewhat open mind and explore a little bit. Which is what I always love to do. By then, I was doing a lot of driving around the region, from Bangkok to Myanmar, to Cambodia, all over Laos, and even up into Yunnan in China.

So, not only was I learning a lot about the culture of this region [Southeast Asia], compared to my former home in the US, but I was also seeing lots of various subcultures: the way people lived in rural areas was very different from the way city people lived. And I met Hill Tribes in some of the remote villages in Laos and southern China. So I had been exposed to a range of cultures by then, and I'm curious and like to explore, and learn from those experiences.

And in addition to all of that I had done a PhD which had a heavy dose of sociology in it. That gave me a good foundation in terms of learning about people, being able to observe and interview to learn about people's lives, and having a general appreciation how groups of people are different from each other.

So you used those experiences and knowledge to make your talk?

Ed: Yes, plus a few other tidbits and observations I had found along the way. For example, one time when I was at Stanford in Palo Alto in the US, I went to an ATM to get some money. Now, this was a standard ATM from a big US Bank, and the first thing the machine asked me to do was to choose a language. OK, no surprise, the ATM offered choices of English, and Spanish, which is very common throughout the US and especially in California. But there was a third language offered, which I had never heard of, “Hmoob.”

My natural curiosity was stoked...how could there be a language, so common that it was being offered as one of three languages in an ATM in Palo Alto, that I had never heard of before?

Well as soon as I got back to my computer I looked it up and found out Hmoob is the language of the Mong people, a Hill Tribe group still living in parts of Laos, Thailand and southern China. I had met Mong people but I had never realized how the language was written. I found this cool at so many levels: I had found it in an ATM in high-tech Palo Alto, but it was linking back to a group of people I had met in some of my travels into the mountains of Laos. I was amazed.

Wow, that is cool! What a coincidence!

Ed: Well, it was a coincidence, but on the other hand, if you move through the world with a curious mind--I always tell entrepreneurs, Explore Forever!--you will find that you will slowly gather a whole bunch of potentially interesting coincidences. You can never guarantee any one of them will be of any use...but together they begin to build up a body of interesting knowledge. After a while, interesting coincidences become actually quite common. And that wasn’t the only coincidence that I relied upon in my talk.

Around that time, I had also read that Apple had recently added the Cherokee language to Apple phones, and this was to help keep the Cherokee language and culture alive. I also found this very interesting! The Cherokee tribe in the US was the only Native American tribe to have its own written language. The chief of that tribe was named Sequoya (sometimes Sequoyah) and he was a brilliant person. He believed that to keep his tribe alive it needed to have a written language so that it could be preserved. The oral tradition used by most Native American tribes would die out if the people died out. But written records would live forever.

Wow, that is also interesting. How do you know all that?

Ed: Haha...yeah that isn't a story that most people study. I learned a little bit about Cherokee when I opened my first company. I am a mechanical engineer who likes to drive off-road around southeast Asia, and the first company I started was designing and building off-road accessories for Jeep Cherokee. At first I was just looking for a simple name related to Cherokee. But as I read more about the Cherokee People and their leader, Sequoya, I was fascinated. I named my company Sequoya.

Many people think I chose that name because I wanted to pretend to be related to the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and some people think it's related to the tree. But all of those investors, and trees, and elementary schools--whether they know it or not--are named after Sequoya, the man who devised a written language, he also started a Cherokee newspaper, too, by the way, to keep his people’s culture alive. That's why I named my company after him.

You really brought together a crazy mix of stuff for your talk!

Ed: Yes, (laughing), but really I like to live life this way. And as anybody who has been in one of my entrepreneurship programs will tell you, this is what I believe is the heart of entrepreneurial innovation: bringing things together in an interesting new mix!

So, those were the main pieces I started to put together as the core of my talk. And then I did some research to get some interesting facts to back up some of those stories and that's what I talked about at TEDx Taipei.

And what was your final conclusion? Can technology help prevent cultures from disappearing?

Ed: Basically I said I didn't know, in fact, I tried to explain that I do not know what it means to preserve a culture. I gave the example of how all of my students can create cool little pictures just using letters and symbols that they type in chat. I'm not talking about the graphic emoji or stickers that we have a lot these days. I'm talking about the more basic--and also more clever, in my opinion--pictures that are made with parentheses, letters, hash signs, and commas, colons, and semicolons...that sort of thing.

And I basically asked, if a teenager can make these clever graphic messages with 26 letters and some symbols...what could a Cherokee teenager accomplish? Because the Cherokee alphabet has even more: 85 letters! I think this is a cool possibility, and it is made possible on all iPhones.

But then I also asked: the Cherokee elders would have been gratified that Apple made their alphabet available to the world, but would they feel about what a Cherokee teenager might innovate with all of those extra symbols? Because whether we like it or not, living cultures are always evolving and innovating. I can’t imagine a way to preserve a culture unless you actually kill it.

And that is how I developed my TEDx Taipei talk!

Click the link to watch Ed's talk on this topic >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbQA9cQjMbA

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