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Put a Dent in the Universe

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Dent Dinner Atlanta + Zac Brown Band/Collective Soul Private Concert

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Join us for a Dent:Dinner Atlanta followed by a live concert featuring Zac Brown Band and Collective Soul on September 28, 2021. You can register here.

Join the party!

Denter Mike Cottmeyer has reserved Denter-only tickets to see Zac Brown Band and Collective Soul as they perform for his company in Atlanta, and we’d love to have you join us there.

We’ll sit down for dinner at 5:30 PM to give us time to enjoy our food, wine, and conversation before joining the concert at 7:30 PM. Zac Brown Band is a grammy-award winning southern rock band from Atlanta, and Collective Soul is probably best known for their songs “Shine,” “December”, and “The World I Know.”

This event is exclusively for Dent conference 2021 attendees and Passport members. Click here if you are neither, but are interested in joining the Dent community and having access to this gathering.

The performances will be great, but the opportunity to get out into the world and share music and a meal with what Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist David Horsey calls “an eclectic group of generally brilliant human beings” is the real reward.

Register here!

Daniel DiGriz on “Practical Time Travel” – Or How to Go Back and Choose What You Really Want

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Join us on Friday, August 27, 2021 at 11:00am PT as entrepreneur Daniel DiGriz shows us how to take control of the options life presents us, and how to create our own futures. RSVP here.

Daniel DiGriz

We have busy, often successful lives, by most definitions. But we were born dreamers, and there were things we always wanted to do that we never did. They don’t go on a bucket list, because they plug into our deepest sense of self, and they’re not one and done (attend the Olympics, ride a mechanical bull, hop islands in Greece). Instead, they require protracted time (learn to play guitar, speak Italian, write a mystery novel, earn a karate blackbelt). They moved us to explore who we are, but some “no” stopped us, time passed, and they don’t seem practical according to our current template for the future.

On Friday, August 27, 2021 at 11:00am PT, Daniel will demonstrate via readily available examples and practical tools, how we can change the template, overcome the constraint of time, topple the “no”, and even live longer so we have more options. RSVP here to claim your spot.

Daniel DiGriz is a serial entrepreneur, startup founder, and investor in numerous businesses and asset growth opportunities. By trade, he is a brand storyteller, enterprise evangelist, and community organizer for business. Daniel’s companies include MadPipe® which puts good ideas in front of a broader market with sales-aligned marketing, brand messaging, and campaign direction. And Free Agent Source, Inc.—the consulting firm that delivers enterprise projects through direct relationships with consultants. He also works closely with the Clark Hulings Foundation on its mission to leverage creative intelligence to drive innovation. Daniel’s website is digriz.com and his social profiles include Twitter, Youtube, and Linkedin.

Dent “Causeplay” Dinner San Diego

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TLDR; Dent 2021 Conference ticket holders are invited to join us for a hosted dinner in San Diego on July 23rd, first-come, first-served, in connection with the SDCC Shrine a “causeplay” charity event organized by Denter Chris Morrow.

Cosplayer Lisa Lower

It’s a tradition for members of the Dent community to converge in July for San Diego for Comic-Con, but sadly, for the second year now, the in-person event is on hold.

The pandemic has not dissuaded Denter Chris Morrow. In 2020 she launched a gathering in San Diego called the “San Diego Causeplayer Community Shrine” (SDCC Shrine) which she organized as a way for thousands of fans to continue connecting over their shared love of the convention.

The SDCC Shrine invites all to dress up in cosplay, and give blood to the San Diego Blood Bank. As a reward, Funko Pop collectables and other goodies are provided to blood donors.

Integral to this event are many central figures in the “causeplay” world — people like Christopher Canole who cosplays as “Dude Vader” every weekend for charity.

This year, Dent is supporting the gathering by helping fund rewards for those who give blood. Plus, we’ll host a dinner on July 23, where 2021 Dent conference registered attendees can meet and mingle with Chris and we can drink a toast to some of the most prominent, generous, and creative causeplayers.

Slots at the dinner are going fast: only three spots remain as of this writing. If you are registered for the 2021 Dent Conference email kim AT dentthefuture dot com to RSVP.

Your Seat Awaits!

Dr. Brian Brown on Breakthrough Applications of mRNA Technology

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Join us on Friday, June 4, 2021 as Dr. Brian Brown, one of the leading scientists in the field of mRNA-induced immunity examines the implications and realities of this exciting new scientific domain. RSVP here.

Dr. Brian Brown

Just 15 months ago, most people had never heard of Messenger RNA (mRNA). Today 132 million Americans are fully vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 thanks to breakthrough applications of mRNA technology. After more than 25 years of research, scientists now say we are on the verge of the most dramatic change to vaccine creation since cow viruses were first used two centuries ago.

Immunologist and molecular biologist Dr. Brian Brown has spent over 20 years working at the intersection of gene therapy and immunity, including with the leaders who invented the adenoviral vector that’s become the backbone of the J&J and Astrazeneca vaccines.

On Friday June 4, Dr. Brown will present a Dent @ Home talk where he will discuss how mRNA technology emerged as the leading basis for COVID and other new vaccines, and he will explore the ways other next generation technologies are being developed to ‘hack’ the immune system to treat a broad range of diseases.

Dr. Brown’s research career spans immune oncology, molecular immunology, microRNA biology, and genetic engineering. His training began with doctoral studies in Canada where he worked to establish ways to overcome the immune response hindering gene therapy. He subsequently did his postdoctoral studies in Italy where he helped develop a new platform for controlling gene expression, which has led to improvements in experimental treatments for genetic disease, cancer, and viral infection. Dr. Brown’s lab is now working to identify the factors that control immunity and tolerance, and translate these findings into strategies that can be used to turn the immune system against cancer or viruses.


He is the Associate Director of the Precision Immunology Institute (PrIISM), acting Director of the Icahn Genomics Institute, and a Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

In Pursuit of a Life Worth Living

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Join us on Friday, April 30, as Dr. Matthew Croasmun of Yale University examines what “making a dent” might truly mean. RSVP here.

Dr. Matthew Croasmun

One of the most popular courses at Yale University is HUMS 411, “Life Worth Living.” Taught by Dr. Matthew Croasmun, the class outlines the values of different traditions and ideologies through foundational texts and guest lecturers. The goal is for students to develop skills in the life-long process of reflecting on, and discerning, the good life.

Dr. Croasmun says“What we’re trying to do is offer students an opportunity to think critically about the most important question of their lives across important and enduring lines of difference. That can only be good for them as individuals and as global citizens.”

As we all ponder what making a “dent in the universe” really means — and how we will achieve that end, it behooves all of us to deeply consider the fundamental question of what our pursuits will mean in the long run.

Dr. Croasmun will be joining us onstage at the 2021 Dent Conference in Santa Fe, NM to talk about how he equips students, educators, and the public for the lifelong process of discerning, articulating, and pursuing the good life by engaging the world’s philosophical and religious traditions.

Members and followers of the Dent community can catch a pre-conference interview on Zoom with Dr. Croasmun on Friday April 30, 2021 by registering here.

Matt Croasmun is Associate Research Scholar and Director of the Life Worth Living Program at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and Lecturer of Divinity & Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of The Emergence of Sin: the Cosmic Tyrant in Romans (2017) and For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference (2019).

Basics of Using Discord

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At Dent, we’ve begun to host our Happy Hour @ Home events over Discord, because it allows people to move between different channels as if they were rooms at a venue. It makes for better conversation — but Discord is still an unfamiliar tool to many of us. Here are a few basics on how to get connected.

Connecting to the Server

Discord, like Slack, is an app that allows you to connect to any number of servers that you create or are invited to.

In your event confirmation email, you should find an invitation link to the Dent Discord server. Once you’ve installed the Discord app on your computer or phone, you should be able to click the link in order to add yourself to the Dent server.

Once you connect, you should be looking at an interface a little bit like this:

In my case, I have several “servers” on the left, but you can see the “Dent” server is highlighted, and it shows the #general chat channel. On the right, I can see who from this server is currently online.

Connecting to Voice

Now that you’re connected to the server, you’ll need to join a Voice Channel in order to chat with others. You’ll see a list of available voice channels in the left sidebar. Think of these as different rooms or spaces at a party venue — you can see who’s in those rooms and you can click on any of them to join (or leave) the conversation whenever you’d like.

If I click on the Lobby, I’ll see that I have joined — like this:

Once you’re connected to a voice channel, you’ll also be able to see anyone who has turned on their video in the voice channel.

To turn on your own video, you can click the green “Video” button that you see in the lower lefthand of the interface.

Basic Troubleshooting

Down in the bottom left of the screen you’ll see your username and few icons, including a “gear” icon. If you click the gear icon, you’ll get to the settings screen. Pick Voice & Video settings from the list of settings:

From here, you can select an “input device” (that is the microphone you want to use) and an “output device” (the speakers or headphones where you’d like to be able to hear others). If they’re not working, try clicking the drop-down and selecting a different option:

You can also switch between microphone settings:

  • Voice Activity
  • Push to Talk

If you have it set to “voice activity,” Discord will automatically detect when you are speaking and transmit your voice. When you’re not talking, it will automatically mute your microphone.

If you’d prefer to manually control when your microphone is activated, you can set a key (or button on your mouse) to enable your microphone. Then you tap that button when you want to talk.