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So, I'm an artist.

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I live in New York, and I've been working in advertising

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for -- ever since I left school,

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so about seven, eight years now,

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and it was draining.

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I worked a lot of late nights. I worked a lot of weekends,

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and I found myself never having time for all the projects

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that I wanted to work on on my own.

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And one day I was at work and I saw a talk

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by Stefan Sagmeister on TED,

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and it was called "The power of time off,"

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and he spoke about how every seven years,

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he takes a year off from work so he could

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do his own creative projects, and I was instantly inspired,

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and I just said, "I have to do that. I have to take a year off.

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I need to take time to travel and spend time with my family

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and start my own creative ideas."

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So the first of those projects ended up being

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something I called "One Second Every Day."

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Basically I'm recording one second of every day of my life

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for the rest of my life,

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chronologically compiling these one-second

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tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video

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until, you know, I can't record them anymore.

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The purpose of this project is, one:

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I hate not remembering things that I've done in the past.

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There's all these things that I've done with my life

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that I have no recollection of

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unless someone brings it up, and sometimes I think,

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"Oh yeah, that's something that I did."

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And something that I realized early on in the project

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was that if I wasn't doing anything interesting,

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I would probably forget to record the video.

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So the day -- the first time that I forgot, it really hurt me,

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because it's something that I really wanted to --

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from the moment that I turned 30, I wanted

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to keep this project going until forever,

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and having missed that one second, I realized,

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it just kind of created this thing in my head

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where I never forgot ever again.

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So if I live to see 80 years of age,

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I'm going to have a five-hour video

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that encapsulates 50 years of my life.

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When I turn 40, I'll have a one-hour video

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that includes just my 30s.

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This has really

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invigorated me day-to-day, when I wake up,

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to try and do something interesting with my day.

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Now, one of the things that I have issues with is that,

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as the days and weeks and months go by,

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time just seems to start blurring

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and blending into each other

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and, you know, I hated that,

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and visualization is the way to trigger memory.

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You know, this project for me is a way for me

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to bridge that gap and remember everything that I've done.

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Even just this one second allows me to remember

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everything else I did that one day.

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It's difficult, sometimes, to pick that one second.

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On a good day, I'll have maybe three or four seconds

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that I really want to choose,

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but I'll just have to narrow it down to one,

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but even narrowing it down to that one allows me

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to remember the other three anyway.

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It's also kind of a protest, a personal protest,

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against the culture we have now where people

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just are at concerts with their cell phones out

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recording the whole concert, and they're disturbing you.

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They're not even enjoying the show.

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They're watching the concert through their cell phone.

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I hate that. I admittedly used to be that guy a little bit,

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back in the day, and I've decided that the best way

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for me to still capture and keep a visual memory of my life

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and not be that person, is to just record that one second

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that will allow me to trigger that memory of,

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"Yeah, that concert was amazing. I really loved that concert."

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And it just takes a quick, quick second.

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I was on a three-month road trip this summer.

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It was something that I've been dreaming about doing my whole life,

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just driving around the U.S. and Canada

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and just figuring out where to go the next day,

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and it was kind of outstanding.

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I actually ran out, I spent too much money on my road trip

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for the savings that I had to take my year off,

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so I had to, I went to Seattle and I spent some time

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with friends working on a really neat project.

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One of the reasons that I took my year off was to spend more time with my family,

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and this really tragic thing happened where

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my sister-in-law,

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her intestine suddenly strangled one day,

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and we took her to the emergency room,

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and she was, she was in really bad shape.

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We almost lost her a couple of times,

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and I was there with my brother every day.

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It helped me realize something else during this project,

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is that recording that one second on a really bad day

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is extremely difficult.

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It's not -- we tend to take our cameras out when we're doing awesome things.

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Or we're, "Oh, yeah, this party, let me take a picture."

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But we rarely do that when we're having a bad day,

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and something horrible is happening.

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And I found that it's actually been very, very important

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to record even just that one second of a really bad moment.

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It really helps you appreciate the good times.

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It's not always a good day, so when you have a bad one,

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I think it's important to remember it,

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just as much as it is important to remember the [good] days.

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Now one of the things that I do is I don't use any filters,

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I don't use anything to -- I try to capture the moment

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as much as possible as the way that I saw it with my own eyes.

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I started a rule of first person perspective.

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Early on, I think I had a couple of videos where

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you would see me in it, but I realized that wasn't the way to go.

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The way to really remember what I saw

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was to record it as I actually saw it.

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Now a couple of things that I have in my head about this project are,

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wouldn't it be interesting if thousands of people were doing this?

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I turned 31 last week, which is there.

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I think it would be interesting to see

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what everyone did with a project like this.

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I think everyone would have a different interpretation of it.

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I think everyone would benefit from just having that one second to remember every day.

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Personally, I'm tired of forgetting,

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and this is a really easy thing to do.

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I mean, we all have HD-capable cameras in our pockets right now --

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most people in this room, I bet --

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and it's something that's --

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I never want to forget another day that I've ever lived,

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and this is my way of doing that,

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and it'd be really interesting also to see,

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if you could just type in on a website,

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"June 18, 2018,"

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and you would just see a stream of people's lives

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on that particular day from all over the world.

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And I don't know, I think this project has a lot of possibilities,

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and I encourage you all to record just a small snippet of your life every day,

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so you can never forget that that day, you lived.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)