(UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: Hey, Pastry Chef Goldie here. How's it going? How's tricks?
Mmm. Buttery, buttery, sugary dollop.
Happy birthday to you
People seem to love birthdays, that's for sure.
These once-a-year milestones that mark our births,
are something that we all have. They can spark a joyful excitement,
-sometimes even tears and tantrums. -ALL: Happy birthday... (GASPING)
JEFF: And I'll bet that a whole lot of us have at least one special birthday
that we keep thinking about for the rest of our lives.
My most memorable birthday was when I was 13.
The day came and all of us forgot.
Including me, in fact.
I pretended to know about it and be stoically disappointed and crushed
and it was the first taste of that delicious,
bitter fruit of martyrdom. (LAUGHS)
But since then birthdays, schmirthdays, what do I care.
My unlucky 13th may have tainted forever my unbridled love for birthdays.
But I think that it's now time to set aside my personal ambivalences
and do some investigating.
What is it about this one single day that means so much to so many? Here we go.
-(CHEERING) -(FIREWORKS BOOMING)
(UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: Look at me shepherding that balloon bouquet.
Hey, now, despite my complicated
comme ci, comme ca, feelings about birthdays,
I'm going to park all of that today
so that I can play apprentice to this marvelous lady.
She's a birthday party planner who doesn't curse the darkness,
she lights a birthday candle.
We're throwing a birthday party for a very deserving boy.
This isn't just a whim or a one-time thing for you.
Yeah, so we have an organization called "The Birthday Party Project."
So we partner with homeless shelters, transitional living facilities,
and we show up and throw a big birthday bash.
JEFF: Really? That's a seriously beautiful thing.
(UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: Today's guest of honor is a young fella by the name of D'uane.
The Birthday Party Project is throwing him a 15th birthday bash,
after finding out that his family has hit some hard times.
As a matter of fact, they lost their home.
Now, part of what we hope is going to be a kick
for this gentleman is that it's a surprise.
I need to know some information, before he gets here, about D'uane.
He loves soccer, soccer loves him.
So this right here is a great way to say "We love you,
"and other people love you, and we see you."
-"We see you." -We see you.
We are keeping our eyes fixed on that door and we want to see the look on his face.
(WHISPERS) I think he's coming.
-ALL: Surprise! -(APPLAUDING)
(CHEERING)
JEFF: Three cheers for D'uane. Hip-hip!
ALL: Hooray!
-Hip-hip! Hooray! -ALL: Hooray!
-Hip-hip! Hooray! (CHUCKLES ) -ALL: Hooray!
JEFF: What do you think? When he opened the door was he surprised?
He was. When he gets like surprised-surprised, he's silent.
Yes.
DELORIAN: So he doesn't know what to do, but smile.
Like everybody is special in their own ways.
And when you get to celebrate a person's birthday,
it just lets them know, who's really behind them.
-PAIGE: Look at him. -DELORIAN: He's out here having a ball.
-He seems to be... Hey, hey, hey. -(LAUGHS)
You kids. Keep your ball out of our yard.
Ready? (GROANS) Happy birthday!
(JAZZY UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: D'uane's shindig has a soccer theme. Well, so far, so good.
Hey, you know, folks have these soirees all over the globe
in so many different and unexpected ways.
In Japan, on a child's first birthday a selection of objects is laid out
and whatever the kid picks is said to decide their future.
In Denmark, it's traditional to be sprinkled with black pepper
if you're still single on your 30th birthday.
What's with the deadline? And pepper, "Achoo!"
And in China, the birthday girl or boy is given a single noodle,
that fills an entire bowl,
but they're supposed to be careful not to sever it
because shortening the noodle can shorten your life
and bring untold bad luck. Wow.
-Whoo! -ALL: Happy birthday to you
FEMALE VOICE: Cha-cha-cha.
ALL: Happy birthday to you
FEMALE VOICE: Cha-cha-cha.
ALL: Happy birthday, dear D'uane
Cha-cha-cha.
ALL: Happy birthday to you
(CHEERING, APPLAUDING)
JEFF: Yeah! What? What?
(CHEERING)
-Sorry... -JEFF: Wait a minute.
-(LAUGHING) -Wow!
-Did you get a camera? -Camera...
-Did you get... -DELORIAN: Oh, my gosh.
You do photography or are you interested in photography?
-Yeah. Yes. -JEFF: You are?
He may be an elegant person of few words,
but this birthday man looks to me to be filled with inward glee.
(CHEERING, APPLAUDING)
-These are nice. -JEFF: Do you want to say anything?
I just want to say that I appreciate every one of you guys that came,
and all the work that you put into this, and I won't forget this day.
-JEFF: Really? -Yeah.
I won't forget this day either.
(EMOTIONAL MUSIC PLAYING)
-JEFF: You can do anything you want. -Ah...
-(INTENSE MUSIC PLAYING) -(WIND WHISTLING)
JEFF: Ah. And your secret wish, dear D'uane, is my command.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: Aleck and Brodacks, wham, wham, wham.
(GROANS)
No. No. No.
Look at that, I can roister with the best of 'em, what a blast.
Hey, maybe if I'd had my 13th marked with a blowout like this...
Did you see that?
...I might've not spent all these years left
with a cob salad of emotions about birthdays.
I think it was a bit of a social triumph. All the kids seemed to have a ball.
So, I started today, uh, thinking, "Well, birthdays."
You know, I'm kind of, "Oh, please, don't do anything."
But it was fun. I actually had fun.
(INDISTINCT CHEERING)
JEFF: Seeing the gratified radiance on D'uane's handsome face
has taught me a great lesson here today,
that there's potential meaning and value in them thar birthday hills.
(DANCE MUSIC PLAYING)
ALL: Happy birthday!
(CHEERING, APPLAUDING)
JEFF: Hey, and one other thing.
I'm always touched by that thing when people say,
"Well, I took another trip around the sun."
You know, one more year. "How many more do I get? I don't know.
"But there are only a finite number of times
"we can have wonderful, peaceful, loving fun."
Oh, it's a long, long while
From May to December
But the days grow short
When you reach September
JEFF: Oh, my gosh, D'uane's fun-filled 15th has got me thinking now
about birthdays from a bygone time.
These annual ceremonies were just a stone gas.
That's me, that bouncy three-year-old
has a whole adventuresome life ahead of him.
Sometimes I feel like I'm in the witch's castle
and she's turned over the hourglass
and I'm watching the grains of sand, you know, get fewer and fewer.
Oh, the days dwindle down...
I remember birthdays from way back, distinctly,
but then the ones as they, you know, pile up blur into each other.
It seems almost as if time accelerates as we chock up the years.
Could that really be what's happening?
Well, this clock-related conundrum deserves a further inspection.
(BUGGY ENGINE WHIRRING)
JEFF: And I got a date with a neuroscientist
who's arriving in some kind of souped-up thingamabob,
who may be able to tell me a thing or two about a thing or two.
What's he going to do? Take me back to the future?
Hey, Jeff, I'm David Eagleman.
I've come to tell you why time seems to speed up as you get older.
Let's roll.
Look at this thing. You look like you... Come on, come on.
(ENGINE REVVING)
I just had a kind of a flashback of all my birthdays.
It struck me that when I was a kid, you know, summer vacations?
-Endless. -Endless.
Endless summer, those three months. Now... boom.
My birthday again, bing, what happened?
And when you were a child, everything was new,
you were learning how to ride a bike, how to play baseball,
how to play the piano, and how to interact with people and so on.
And so your brain was laying down lots of memory
because everything was new. As a result, when you got to your,
you know, eighth birthday, you look back so much had happened
during your seventh, you had all these memories
that you can look back on.
Now, the problem is you're laying down very few new memories.
You know how to operate in the world.
And as a result, when it becomes your birthday,
you look back you think, bam, I was just there again.
Right, you got to keep living a full life.
So that's the trick. The trick is to seek novelty,
to seek challenges all the time.
So learning new things. Teaching an old dog, or a maturing dog,
new and newer and newer tricks.
Yes, if you're doing something that you don't know how to do
and you really are learning and struggling to figure it out,
then your brain is writing down memory.
-(ROCK MUSIC PLAYING) -JEFF: Oh, yeah, yeah, I think I got it.
In order to squeeze the most juice out of my remaining years...
I need to keep laying down new flashbacks.
So this not-so spring chicken is about to learn some fresh
barnyard tricks and I got company.
What's going on? Hey. Who is this? Foe or friend?
-Are you foe or friend? -Whoo!
-Come here. Come here. (CHUCKLES) -Whoo! (LAUGHS)
JEFF: What's your name?
Sandy or Grama Sandy they know me by.
-My friend Pat. -JEFF: Hello!
What's going on? Now, why do you ladies go in for this kind of thing?
-Because I never did it before. -Because he was just...
Well, he was just telling us that in order to make time slow down
and to make you younger I guess, and...
You should do something off the normal range.
-Yes. -DAVID: This doesn't technically
make you younger but it makes it seem as though you lived longer.
-SANDY: Oh. -JEFF: See, it's a trick.
Because... it's a trick, but it's a good trick
because you get to look back
at all these memories that you've laid down.
Here's my philosophy.
-PAT: What? -Not because I'm older
but because it's all the way I've done my life.
-JEFF: Yes. -Every day that I wake up,
I feel like I've been given a free ticket to Disneyland.
Oh, my gosh.
I mean, you got to go out and use that ticket.
I'd like to, uh, challenge you to a race.
JEFF: I'm up for it. Let's get on the road.
SANDY: Let's go.
JEFF: Let me pass out a couple of items about my fellow racer.
Happy birthday! Whoo!
JEFF: This 71-year-old from Reno, Nevada is something of a social media sensation.
Celebrate you. It's your special day.
JEFF: Known all around the campus for her escapades of derring-do,
Grama Sandy takes on unfamiliar experiences just for the heck of it.
Whoo-hoo!
-(ENGINES REVVING) -(TENSE MUSIC PLAYING)
Sandy, I want you to hear something, okay? Listen to this.
(ENGINE REVVING)
SANDY: Well, listen to this.
(ENGINE REVVING)
Sandy, eat my dust.
-We'll see who's eating dust. -I hope you like it medium rare.
You're the boss. You're the boss. You're the boss.
I'm going to get off to a fast start.
On your mark, Talladega Goldblum, get set, and...
(HORN BLOWS)
Hey, hey, hey! Come on.
SANDY: We got this!
(SCREAMS)
I got off to a slow start.
(SANDY SCREAMING)
JEFF: Despite my first class salty trash talk, it turns out to be not me,
but Grama Sandy who's serving up a big helping of desert dust.
(SCREAMING) We got this! Whoo-hoo!
JEFF: Looks like I'm about to eat a filling desert of humble pie
with a side order of crow.
JEFF: Sandy,
-let me be the first to congratulate you. -(SANDY LAUGHS)
You beat me fair and square. I did eat your dust.
I was literally eating your dust.
I'm sorry, but somebody had to eat it.
JEFF: Well, I did. In this case, I did. Thank you for doing that with me.
-Thank you. -Congratulations.
JEFF: So, what have I learned, apart from the agony
and the bitter taste of defeat?
Sandy, Sandy, Sandy.
JEFF: Well, I'd say that breaking out of my comfort zone
is certainly humiliating, but it also might provide something
that becomes ripe for reminiscence.
We had a really good race, didn't we?
Where there's struggle, there's life. She made it hard for me
and it was a "ha-noo" new, and a fun thing to do.
And that was very invigorating.
If I had any more time in that fountain of youth contraption,
I'd be, uh, Benjamin Button.
(UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: Well, as you can see, I haven't physically regressed.
But I do feel like I'm tripping the light fantastic
with a Peter Panian joie de vivre.
And I think that I could start to embrace Grama Sandy's robust credo of carpe diem.
So much so, that, uh, I'm about to share it with a posse of birthday revelers.
We've been invited to a birthday party, you and I.
They're going to be doing something at this party
that I have never done ever.
That's all I'll say. Let's go to a party. I think we're fashionably early.
(LAUGHS)
(UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: Oh, my gosh, look at this little oasis. I love this whole scene.
I want to be part of it. I'm crashing it. I'm crashing it. Come with me.
Oh, hello.
Well, look... you magical characters. Are we here for somebody's birthday?
MALE VOICE: Yes! This is Allison and Veronica, the birthday girls.
JEFF: Happy birthday, and you look very much similar to each other.
-VERONICA: We get that. -I'm guessing that you're twins?
-Yes. We have a smart one. -Ding, ding, ding.
-Is this birthday special for you? -Yes.
-Are all birthdays special? -Well... well, this is our 24th birthday.
Twenty-four.
So we didn't want to do like the regular birthday.
You know, everyone just come gather around.
So we're like, we got to do something monumental,
something that kind of like signifies a shift in our life, in time.
-You know what I mean? Yeah. -JEFF: Really?
Do you think the birthday is the personal solstice of some kind?
Your solar return. You've taken one complete
-rotation around the sun. -Orbit. Yes.
Birthdays are a rebirth, a new number which can change your own outlook.
Yes, yes. Let's let the cat out of the bag.
What we're going to do tonight is...
-Walk across hot coals. -(MIMICS DRUM ROLL) Coals.
We're going to walk across hot coals.
(TENSE MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: What the twins are really talking about is, uh, walking on fire.
This ritual, it's over 3,000 years old,
is not for the thin-skinned, scaredy-cat types.
I knew I smelled something before I saw it.
-We're going to be burned alive. -(LAUGHTER)
That thing looks... That fire is way out of control already. Holy cat.
I brought some marshmallows and weenies, I think I had the wrong idea.
This guy here is Dimitris.
He's an anthropologist who's going to conduct some kind of wild probe.
And me and my fellow revelers are the guinea pigs.
Anthropologists will tell you that from the dawn of mankind,
ritual was one of those things that actually
allows us to strengthen the bonds between us,
and they're fundamental to the way we structure society.
Oh. How'd you find out about all this? You... you...
Well, we have, uh, ways of doing experiments.
One of them is by measuring people's physiological reactions.
So one thing we're measuring today is how stressed they are.
-How stressed we all are? -DIMITRIS: Yes.
What are you measuring that tells you how stressed we...
-We're measuring heart rate. -JEFF: Heart rate?
These rituals allow us to celebrate some of the most meaningful
-transitions in our lives. -Yes.
Birthdays, our wedding, our college graduation,
and of course even the ultimate transition which is death.
-Those are always marked by ritual. -Oh, yes.
When our ancestors got together for the first time around the fire
and they danced together,
this was the moment where they stopped being individuals,
and they started being a group.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: What Dimitris is referring to is something called
collective effervescence.
That phrase was coined by a French sociologist
named Emile Durkheim, in the early 20th century.
Durkheim argued convincingly that the shared exaltation
and connection to one another that our ancestors experienced
when engaging in all kinds of rituals...
(TENSE MUSIC PLAYING)
...contributed to the creation of the community phenomenon.
These formalized cooperative events, therefore,
are the building blocks of our society.
(FIREWORKS EXPLODING)
(INTENSE MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: But right now, what's concerning me isn't the promise of connection,
it's getting fed to the flames and coming out like a giant French fry.
I don't want to get burned. No, no, no, no, no, no. My criteria is absolutely no.
I don't like to get even the slightest, slightest burn on the stove.
It's horrible.
KEVIN: The human body is capable of tremendous feats.
Is there a little bit of risk? Yeah, there's a little bit of risk.
That's just the truth of genuine firewalking.
But what about in life? What worth doing doesn't have a little risk?
If you had to characterize the risk, what would it be?
A minor burn on your foot.
(MUSIC FADES)
One of the beautiful things about firewalking
is there is a little mystery. However, there's also a lot of science,
the body itself has ways of cooling.
Then of course, while I don't call it mind over matter,
in firewalking, we often refer to mind in matter.
Your mind affects your body. What is on the other side of the coal bed?
Symbolically, for many it's about overcoming fear.
Fear holds us back in life.
The more you can connect with that, the more impactful the experience will be.
-I love that. -Yes.
The fire is open.
JEFF: Oh, boy, I guess in order to really immerse myself in this, uh,
sacrament of sorts, I'm going to need to let go and surrender.
One by one, my comrades face the inferno.
(CHEERING)
JEFF: I got to say, there's something that's mysteriously unifying
about this scorching ceremony.
(CHEERING)
(FLAMES ROAR)
-JEFF: And then there was one. -ALL: Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff!
JEFF: Come on, Jeffy boy, don't you want to drink deep
from that shared effervescence?
I can do it. I can do it.
(TRIUMPHANT MUSIC PLAYING)
JEFF: I got a high threshold. That doesn't hurt.
Ow!
(CHEERING)
JEFF: Wow. Great balls of fire. I did it.
I did it! I feel high as a kite. I'm made of pure air.
But what about my firewalking pals?
Did this particular observance link our tender hearts together forever?
So, let's have a look here. Here is where you walk across fire.
ALL: Whoa!
DIMITRIS: During those moments of high excitement,
everybody's heart rate goes up at exactly the same time.
-At the same time. -Wow!
-That is so cool. -We're all connected.
-We're in sync. -So this is the kind
of emotional alignment that we discussed.
You will become more bonded because of this ritual.
Now, this is how these kinds of rituals work.
I really enjoyed being with you.
-Connecting... -And likewise.
-Same. -Yeah. There's something magical, deep,
-profound and beautiful about that to me. -We're all truly connected,
and because of that we are truly alive in this moment.
ALL: Aww.
-JEFF: Happy birthday. Happy birthday. -VERONICA: Thank you.
JEFF: I'll never have another birthday or go to another birthday party
without thinking of this particular experience.
You can't think about birthdays without thinking about life
and why each of us is special and worth celebrating.
Could it be that my 13th birthday curse has finally been lifted?
Birthdays can remind us to be always supremely present...
and that it's possible to be loved and appreciated just for who we are.
Birthdays are opportunities to make lasting sweet memories...
and at their most mystical and bodacious,
they can be expressions of infinite gratitude.
MALE VOICE: One, two, three!
JEFF: Hey, I can now finally say amen to that.
Now, listen, I think a birthday may be a good time to say,
"Jeez, I've had a delicious time of it
"and I should be counting my lucky stars daily
"with religious fervor.
"Thank you. Thank you for another year. And if I'm lucky to live another day,
"how can I even better cherish this incredible gift?"
(LAUGHS) Oh, geez. I'm a lucky guy.
("HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU" TUNE PLAYING)
(MUSIC FADES)