Curious minds do not think alike

An unconference that celebrates revolutionary thinking

By Dror Berman and Ali Jordan

Picture this: You’ve settled into a large forested campsite in Sonoma County with 130 other founders, academics, mathematicians, policymakers, and technologists for a weekend “conference.” Under a massive canvas circus tent stands a whiteboard that’s been divided into 64 sections. In each section, guests have eagerly proposed their conference sessions — signed only with a first name — leaving you to examine the discussions, activities, and exercises without bias or even a full understanding of who, or what, you might get out of this.

You decide that out of the next eight congruent attendee-led sessions, you will join a Caltech mathematical physicist, a well-known artist, and the head of product for a large tech company to explore AI, quantum, and creativity. For the next 45 minutes, you and the other session attendees examine AI’s potential impact on the learning process, creativity, and how our productivity (for countless industries) will change with AI. The artist shares how this could propel his field into new mediums and provide artists with new creative superpowers, but that humans, and the human condition, will never truly be taken out of art. The physicist shares how quantum computing might augment this new world, while the technologist offers insights into new breakthroughs in generative AI.

This is Curiosity Camp. This is the only time of the year you can hotly debate how political upheaval might affect the world’s semiconductor industry, and then in the next hour, listen rapturously as biologists and technologists unpack how we might tackle our growing wildfire epidemic.

This is our favorite time of year. And we know that for this year’s 130 guests, this weekend was meaningful to them on so many levels.

Let’s break it down

Curiosity Camp is hosted on an idyllic Russian River campsite and focuses on insightful and activity-filled unconference sessions (a taste of which we shared above). Guests fly in from around the world, armed with provocative questions, challenging viewpoints, and an eagerness to solve many of the big problems facing us today.

Curiosity Camp lets us bring together friends, old and new, and lets us welcome people into our community in a manner unlike anything else. Camp is also something that we’ve got down to a science.

Our first Camp was held back in 2013. And throughout the last nine Camps (we took a COVID hiatus), we’ve stuck to our beloved unconference structure. Unconferences are events with no preset schedule, no booths, no panels, no stuffy board rooms, and no ego. Each unconference speaking session is proposed that day by attendees, and then the conversations that follow are propelled by those who join the session. We’ve watched policymakers, biologists, and technologists all converge to tackle how we might solve our wildfire and climate crisis. We’ve practiced the art of deepening our human connection with a group of physicists, researchers, highly-successful entrepreneurs, and well-known CEOs.

Our campers range from Nobel laureates to government officials, executives, founders, and academic researchers. But the best part is, our campers don’t know who is who before they arrive. Each year we save the bios and lists of accolades for after Camp. Instead, we encourage campers to bring an open mind and a sense of curiosity. You never know who your lunch buddy might be.

Each camper contributes to unconference sessions, shares insights, explores scientific discoveries they are curious about, shares their progress and challenges around company building, and builds on each other’s ideas. The conversations were powerful.

And while Curiosity Camp follows Chatham House Rules, meaning we don’t go into details about who led each session, (we want our unconference to be a safe space for bold ideas), that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to share some of this year’s session and photo highlights.

Here were a few of our favorite sessions.

• The future of work is… unclear. But could Universal Basic Income (UBI) and the gig economy be leveraged to unleash our creativity and propel our economy to greater heights? Attendees explored how these two crucial components might help us unlock unprecedented levels of creativity and productivity.
• Gamifying our World: What if we take a global problem, abstract it, gamify it, and track how people solve it? What if we could crowdsource problem-solving and use the intelligence of millions to learn more about our world? Tech enthusiasts and creative minds alike met during this session to map out the intersection of fun and learning.
• Battle of the physicists: Is time travel real? What math proves the multiverse? And what does Hollywood get right about space, time, and quantum computing? All this and more was hotly debated in a session co-led by a theoretical physicist and a mathematical physicist. We left with a deeper understanding of space, where the fields of physics intersect, and where they venture away from one another.
• Saving nature with biotechnology: what tools and biotechnologies can we use to intervene in nature for conservation and regeneration applications? What are the technical, social, and financial dimensions of genetic intervention and rescue? Because let’s face it, we all want to live in a vibrant world and feel like we’re contributing to a healthy ecosystem.
• A complex simulation: attendees divided amongst themselves and took sides in an activity-filled simulation exploring geopolitical and economic power structures — and how quickly those can change when new information comes to light.
• International ocean station: how much do we really know about our oceans and the underwater world? This session explored the potential implications of an International Ocean Station. Scientists, technologists, and environmentalists met to debate what’s really possible below the water’s surface.
• The ethics of it all: Biotechnology is advancing. And with it, come the ethical concerns and implications of enhancing the human genome. What is truly equitable, just, and fair? What Pandora’s Box will we open the further we delve into designing life? This session led to a fascinating discussion that blended technology, ethics, and society.

Our 130 guests brought such variety to this year’s inspiring and moving sessions. From interactive games to thoughtful scientific queries to honest emotional discussions about life and upbringing: campers pulled from a deep well of knowledge this year. Over the course of a weekend, we witnessed new partnerships form; saw research ideas exchanged, resources and support shared openly and honestly, and watched as new bonds formed.

Once again, we left camp feeling light as air — inspired and propelled ahead by the conversations we had and the connections we made.

What’s in store for next year?

Where has the time gone? Next year will mark our 10th year of Camp! We welcome more opportunities to learn from one another. We’re already making a note of some special ways we might celebrate 10 incredible years of Curiosity Camp. Expect more inspiring hikes, more ways to expand the mind and explore your work from different perspectives, and opportunities to grow with our special community.

And as we look ahead, we will continue to conceive ways to bring a taste of camp into other events and our work. Curiosity Camp will continue to be a huge part of our ethos at Innovation Endeavors.

Please drop your info here If you would like to nominate yourself or someone else to join us for Curiosity Camp next year.