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Put a Dent in the Universe

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Epidemiologist and CEO Mark Stibitch shares the Front-Line Info on COVID-19

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Dent has always been a forum for coming together as a community to better understand what goes into denting the universe. Fortunately, we are finding new ways to convene even as the world changes around us daily. 

On Friday, we launched our Dent @ Home series to hear a talk from Mark Stibitch, epidemiologist and CEO. 

We were excited about Mark Stibich’s keynote before this crisis, but now he might be uniquely positioned to help dent the universe back into shape. Mark Stibich, Ph.D is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Xenex Disinfection Services which is manufacturing germ-zapping robots, which can be used to sterilize hospitals much more efficiently, effectively, and safely than humans. This invention could both be a key part of the solution to this crisis and a major improvement to our healthcare system. Mark is also a respected epidemiologist with high-level knowledge about the pandemic. We were so grateful to learn from him together. 

Mark was a fountain of information—particularly about primary sources where you can get the most up-to-date information about the virus. We’ve curated some notes and links below. 

Links and Notes from Epidemiologist Mark Stibitch

Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)

  • View total confirmed cases, active cases, and recovered cases
  • See rankings of where there are the most cases
  • Break down the data by country, state/province, or county. 

Ourworldindata.org: Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) – Statistics and Research

  • Detailed data on severity, symptoms, healthcare capacity, fatality rates, and confirmed deaths. 

The Covid Tracking Project

  • Most up to date information on testing

Covid19 Health Data

  • Shows projected hospital resource use (broken down by state)

World Health Organization landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines

  • Details about vaccines in development

Temperature, Humidity and Latitude Analysis to Predict Potential Spread and Seasonality for COVID-19

  • How will warmer seasonal weather affect the virus? 

Video of Xenex’s Lightstrike disinfecting robot

Propublica: “Are Hospitals Near Me Ready for Coronavirus? Here Are Nine Different Scenarios.”

NIH: “New coronavirus stable for hours on surfaces”

CDC Print Resources

COVID-19 Clinical Trials

CDC Information for Clinicians on Therapeutic Options for COVID-19 Patients

CDC: “What You Need To Know About Handwashing”

Google Doodle: “Recognizing Ignaz Semmelweis and Handwashing”

Virtual sessions like these are part of how we’re supporting this amazing community of scientists, entrepreneurs, technologists, artists, astronauts, and misfits. If you’re interested in viewing the recording of the full session, the Dent community might be a fit for you. You can apply for the Dent Passport here. 

Dent’s virtual sessions and events help our community break through the sense of isolation that tends to haunt people who do remarkable things. In addition to virtual sessions like these, Dent Passport members receive: 

  • Free Access to a Stable of Business and Leadership Coaches
  • Quarterly Dent Passport Book Club Subscription
  • Weekly Dent @ Home sessions
  • Community “Morning Routines” and “Fika Breaks” to connect with others. 
  • Passport Community Directory and Facilitated Introductions

Dent 2020 Postponed to March 2021

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5:00pm PT 3/10/2020

We have made the difficult decision to postpone our upcoming Dent 2020 conference in Santa Fe to March 21-24, 2021.

Although we were encouraged that there have been no confirmed coronavirus incidents in New Mexico to date, many factors led us to take this step, including: our beloved Denters who are demographically at risk from unnecessary travel, the uncertainty of available child care as school districts across the country start to close, and increasing corporate travel restrictions.

As you might imagine, unwinding a conference this close to the event is incredibly complex. We have asked our conference hotel La Fonda on the Plaza to cancel all room reservations made at the Dent rate, and your 2020 ticket will be automatically reissued for the 2021 conference. La Fonda has been incredibly gracious and helpful in this process, and we very much look forward to returning there next year.

To say we are disappointed that we are unable to hold Dent as scheduled would be an understatement. Even if we were to go ahead with the conference as planned, we believe it would live in the shadow of great uncertainty and would take away from the experience that makes Dent so remarkable.

No doubt the coronavirus will have further impact on our plans for other 2020 events. Like all of you, we await further guidance from public health professionals as we evaluate what will and will not be possible. We will let you know as soon as we have a better sense of our updated calendar.

We are so grateful for your continued support of Dent and are terribly sorry that we will not be able to visit with all of you in Santa Fe.

Steve and Jason

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why did you wait until now to cancel the event?

We believe that the Dent Conference is a powerful and important part of the year for our members, and the information about COVID-19 has been quick to develop and difficult to track. We have spent much of the last month in close contact with medical and pandemic experts and have been working to make the best decision we can.

As recently as a week ago, we felt that hosting Dent as planned would be both safe and beneficial, but pandemics don’t play by the rules, and we no longer believe that to be the responsible choice.

Q: What should I do about air travel I booked?

Most airlines are offer fee-free refunds or credits on travel booked during this time period. Reach out to your airline about details — or re-schedule your flights for next March!

Q: What happens to my Dent registration?

We will automatically carry-forward your full Dent registration to next year’s conference on March 21-24, 2021. As we get a better handle on what effects the coronavirus will have on our schedule for the rest of 2020, we will look for other opportunities we can provide between now and then that Dent 2020 ticket holders will have access to.

Q: How can I help?

That’s a very Denty question, thank you for asking. If you have any suggestions or ideas for ways to connect the Dent community virtually in the coming months, we welcome those ideas.

As always, Dent is as much from the community as for the community, and your participation is what makes it amazing. So in short — stay connected!

Asking the Big Questions with Yaleʼs Matthew Croasmun and Evan Rosa

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One of our friends and long-time Denters, Everett Harper once said that Dent is unique because Denters are“generous with their curiosity.” In this spirit, we are so excited to announce that Matthew Croasmun and Evan Rosa from The Yale Center for Faith and Culture will be speaking at Dent 2020. They’ll be speaking about “Living a Life Worthy of Your Humanity” and bringing curiosity to life’s biggest questions. Apply for Dent now. 

Matthew Croasmun and Evan Rosa are taking a broad, humanistic, cross-cultural view of faith, culture, and the big questions.

Matthew runs a program for Yale Undergraduates called Life Worth Living, wherein students learn about—and interrogate their values—about what makes a good life. “The program I direct,” he says, “leads students into profound inter-religious encounters as they interact with visions of the good life from Buddhism to Islam to Utilitarianism to Nietzsche.” He makes a dent in the universe by helping “people ask and answer the big questions of life across important and enduring lines of difference.”

Evan works at the intersection of academic research and public engagement. His work includes founding and producing The Table, “an online journal and podcast exploring diverse Christian perspectives on life’s big questions.” On the introduction to his podcast, he says:

“My job will be to bring together wise voices, and learn with you, about topics like the meaning of love in today’s political context, how to be humble, what it means to be human in modern technological society, how to live through and respond to deep personal suffering, and so much more.”

These are the kinds of big questions we want you to bring to Dent 2020—so we can learn together with generosity, curiosity, and humility. Evan and Matthew will help lead us through the big questions; we can’t wait. Apply for Dent 2020 now.

The Reinventions of Meow Wolf’s Vince Kadlubek

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We previously announced that Dent 2020’s opening reception will be held at Santa Fe’s Meow Wolf. But we’re even more excited to announce that Meow Wolf Founder Vince Kadlubek will be delivering a keynote address!

Our theme this year is “Reinvention.” Vince Kadlubek reinvented himself and his business many times over. You won’t want to miss out, so apply for Dent 2020 now.

Vince Kadlubek, CEO of Meow Wolf at the House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe.

In high school, Vince Kadlubek wrote a story about a kid who “hates school. He hates the government. He hates money. He hates the fake.” By age 32, he was “making $50/day delivering food, living at my parents’ house on the south side of Santa Fe, and dreaming of becoming an accomplished playwright.”

Vince’s first reinvention was transforming from a Caulfield-esque anti-establishment loner into a member of a collective. Vince teamed up with a group of weird-art-making, anarchy-minded, psychedelic-using kids. They put a bunch of random words in a hat and pulled out two: “meow” and “wolf.” And thus the collective was born.

Vince Kadlubek, CEO of Meow Wolf with Christian Ristrow’s Becoming Human Sculpture.
Photo Credit: Kate Russell/meowwolf.com, via Rolling Stone

“All of a sudden,” Vince said, “I found myself in an entirely new existence with unreal momentum.”

After a few exhibitions, the collective quickly found the non-profit arts organization model unsustainable—creatively, inter-personally, and (unsurprisingly) financially. The solution, Vince found, was to create their own institution.

In 2017, Meow Wolf became a corporation accountable to a board of directors and under Vince’s leadership—no longer a non-profit answerable to a collective of artists. They began attracting VC funding. By 2019, they had hired executives from Disney and Goldman Sachs, employed more than 500 people, and had scored a nine-figure valuation,

This sort of reinvention is the stuff of Silicon Valley fantasies—rapid growth, a “viral sensation,” and a swarm of VC funding.

It’s not without its challenges. How do you go from making cool shit with your rowdy crew to multiple major expansions? How do you go from an anarchistic collective to corporation? And how do you do it without losing the friends you made along the way? We’re excited to find out. Apply for Dent 2020 now.

Jonna Mendez was the CIA’s Head of Disguise (and She’s Speaking at Dent 2020)

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Jonna Mendez will be speaking at Dent 2020 in Santa Fe, NM (March 22-25). You can request an invitation here.

The theme of Dent 2020 is Reinvention.

That might mean reinventing your career, your product, your team, or your business model.

But with Former CIA Head of Disguise Jonna Mendez, the reinvention is literal: she disguised spies, making them nearly unrecognizable. We can’t wait to hear her ripped-from-the-blockbusters stories at Dent 2020 in Santa Fe, March 22-25 2020.

mage result for jonna mendez

Jonna Mendez served in the CIA for over 25 years, rising to the position of Chief of Disguise, running a multi-million-dollar program with staff positioned all over the world. Her specialties were identity transformation, disguise, and clandestine photography (including spy gadgets like tiny cameras in pens!).

She and her husband (Antonio J. Mendez, also a CIA officer) have written three books together. First, Spy Dust about their work against the Soviets in Moscow during the last decade of the Cold War. They also wrote Argo, the true story of her husband’s rescue of six U.S. diplomats from Tehran (which was adapted into the 2013 Academy Award-Winning film). Most recently, they published The Moscow Rules also about their work in Moscow.

Jonna’s popcorn-worthy true stories have us ready to hear more at Dent 2020. Haven’t you always wanted to know the behind-the-scenes of spy work? Is it just like the movies? And can acting like a secret agent help me in my daily life?

First, In this TED talk, Jonna discusses the “Moscow Rules:” the key rules of espionage that you could implement in your personal or professional life:

  1. Trust your gut
  2. Don’t look back, you are never completely alone.
  3. Stay consistent over time.
  4. Know the opposition and their terrain intimately
  5. Pick the time and the place
  6. Keep your options open
  7. There is no limit to a human being’s ability to rationalize the truth.

Though these may seem like common sense, when you hear them described with life-and-death, global political stakes, you’ll see why they’re essential.

Second, In this video for Wired, she breaks down the (often fiendishly simple, but just as often elaborate) disguises she creates—altering everything from your mustache to your walk to how you use silver wear.

Finally, here she breaks down spy disguise scenes from 30 spy movies and shows. Haven’t you always wondered how realistic those are?

There are clearly a lot more stories where they came from and we’re on the edge of our seats to hear them at Dent 2020.

How Barbara Rae-Venter Reinvented Herself and Created Investigative Genetic Genealogy

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A previously retired, hobby genetic genealogist helps catch a serial killer. Though it sounds like a procedural on TNT, for Barbara Rae-Venter it’s a true story. And unlikely, cross-disciplinary, post-career reinvention stories are exactly what Dent is all about.

Barbara Rae-Venter helped catch the Golden State Killer. At the 2019 Dent conference, she told us the (binge-worthy) story. 

And she’ll be back attending Dent 2020, in Santa Fe, March 22nd-25th 2020.

Barbara Rae-Venter’s talk at the 2019 Dent Conference

Barbara had gotten a Ph.d in Biology early in her life, but then went on to become a patent lawyer, specializing in biotech. When she retired, she expected to be“working on [her] tennis game” and dabbling in some genealogy research. After successfully volunteering to help an adoptee find their birth parent, she began to get approached by law enforcement asking for her help, including Paul Holes, the detective working on the Golden State Killer case.

After creating a profile of the perpetrator (blue eyes, likely balding, etc) Barbara cross-referenced DNA from the crime scene with DNA uploaded to an online service to construct a family tree. By looking for ancestors of the perpetrator, she was able to narrow the field to a few suspects. And abracadabra, only one had blue eyes: Joseph James DeAngelo. In 2019, He was arrested and charged with eight counts of first-degree murder.

Through this work, Barbara created a new field: Investigative Genetic Genealogy. Since then, Barbara has been featured as one of Nature’s 10, Time’s 100 Most Influential People, and a profile in The New York Times. She’s gone on to help solve more cases, including the recently solved “Clearfield Rapist” case.

Barbara at the TIME 100 Gala. Photo Credit: Zimbio.com

In addition to speaking at Dent 2019, Barbara is a Dent Passport member (learn more about Dent Passport here.) Every quarter, we send Passport members a book. This quarter, we all read Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. In Range, David J. Epstein describes“slow bakers” or“late specializers:” people who dabble and experiment in a variety of practices before becoming “elite.” Though there is a fetishization of prodigies and hyper-specificity, (Gladwell’s 10,000 hours for example) Epstein’s research reveals that generalism can triumph.

The theme of Dent 2020 is “Reinvention.” Too many cultural myths tell us that“dents in the universe”are the dominion of the young, the myopic, and the prodigies. Barbara’s journey is a powerful counter-narrative: Broad curiosity, hobbies, and dabbling pays off. It’s never too late to make a new dent in the universe.

Apply for Dent 2020 here.