It Was Objectively Interesting

It’s been 4 weeks since my adventure at The Objective Standard Conference (TOS_Con) in Park City, Utah, but I just realized I hadn’t written a blog post about it yet.

I t was such a great adventure, and although, smaller, longer, and different from FEE-Con it was also very valuable.

I learned a lot. I also had a ton of fun, that said FEECon was a better conference, it helped that there were more young people there.

TOS-Con had some amazing and unique sessions. Some were more interesting to me than others, and some I admittedly didn’t enjoy but there were others I was ecstatic about.

I used to hate poetry and see little value in it, but I was so intrigued and enamored but the seminar they had on it. The speaker had such a wonderful passion for it and led the talk very well. She explained her ideas well, in that she “taught us to fish” so to speak, she didn’t just explain the ideas of a single poem she taught the whole conference how to go about understanding poems to get the most out of them.

I also absolutely loved the seminar on the morality of ads. This seminar was led by Tim Chermak of Platform Marketing. He talked about how he believes the Declaration of Independence is among the best ads ever created. He explained that one of the main points of ads is persuasion, and one of the goals of the declaration was to persuade every reader that the United States was something worth creating and that the ones who signed it were the ones fit to start it, among other things. While I think it’s very interesting to think of the declaration as an ad I personally think its a little bit of a stretch, but still a very valuable lesson at any rate.

Another particularly memorable point in his talk was his sentiments about how marketing shapes culture and whether or not it’s intrusive. For this point, he brought out the case study of The Lego Movie, which he labeled as a “two-hour ad”. He has a point. The point of the movie is to get legos on your brain so you’ll go out and buy them…after seeing how much fun they can be. We may be annoyed by ads that interrupt our social media feeds, or that interrupt our television programs… until they are the program. Ads are an important part of communication, even though we don’t always find them helpful.

The world is moving fast, faster than ever before and that’s okay and helpful. Believe it or not, marketing and ads have guided much of that progress. Imagine if so many of the brilliant entrepreneurs, inventors, and innovators of the day had never seen ads for past inventions or ideas. Or, to circle back, what if the founding fathers of America had never written and published the Declaration of Independence, there wouldn’t be near the space for these ideas to take shape.

Lastly, it was so fun to be there with other Praxians. Most of them I had previously met at FEE-Con, but I met a few others, and I got to see some other friends again. It was so fun to stay up late with Praxians and enjoy time together in person chatting about our current pursuits and having fun playing games, and even enjoying some meals together.

Then there was the dancing, swing dancing to be specific, not only was there a lesson and practice, but there was also an all-conference banquet and dance, I had fun learning, teaching, and dancing with Praxians. I got to dance with others, including the instructor, David Crawford who was amazing! I guess 20+ years of dancing will lead to that. It was so fun to be a non-school dance with friends I had hardly gotten the chance to dance with before. I got to be a part of helping other Praxians learn about my passion for dance.

If you’re wondering about the picture, it’s a bunch of the Praxians I hung out with. We all got dressed up for the closing banquet and dance, and the events photographer snapped and edited it for us… with a photoshopped background. Thanks to Pavel Rusakov for the photo.