(Note – I posted this on Wattpad the other day.) 

Thank you all for coming out on such short notice. I promise I won’t take any more time than i need to.

Several years ago I downloaded an app that offered the entire works of William Shakespeare to my smartphone. The entire process took less than five minutes. That astounded me. Five minutes for 37 full plays and 154 sonnets. All of it would be accessible on a device no bigger than a paperback book and only a fraction of the width.

Machines process information more efficiently than human beings do. It would take us days, if not more, to read all that, even without taking into account our biological needs to eat, sleep and use the bathroom. And at the end of it nothing more than a small percentage of that would be retained, with vast swaths lost to the ether of our inefficient and easily distracted minds.

What I tasked my research team with was finding a way to transfer information to the human mind in the same way it’s transferred from one digital format to another. That means speed is paramount along with complete and total retention and immediate access.

Today we are innovating education – inexpensive education that’s available to everyone – at a level that’s never been seen before.

Introducing Read Bars. Just like a digital file, a single Read Bar can contain the entire works of Shakespeare. The entire works of William Faulkner. The entirety of the Holy Bible.

Digital files are simply encoded so that when the file is read they are arranged in a certain manner that is comprehensible to the human eye, ear or mind. It can be searched and specific elements retrieved and recalled with no loss and no alteration. The information is the same the 78th time you pull it up as it was the first time.

So it is with Read Bars. Reading, listening or watching is, it turns out, a terrible way to input information. Not only is it time-consuming – movies take two hours, books take days or weeks and so on – but we never remember everything. A certain scene or passage might stick out but we can’t recall the entire book, movie, album or other material.

Read Bars gets around that. It transfers information directly through the bloodstream and to the brain, where it remains permanently and perfectly. You’ll be able to quote lines from Hamlet with ease, recall Bible verses perfectly and otherwise quickly consume content.

I can’t get into the details of the technology but suffice it to say it’s remarkable and comes through the hard work of a team of scientists who have spent decades looking into how the brain processes information and comparing it to digital systems. Implants and other cybernetics may be the stuff of science fiction but they found simple food was the best way to bring in data.

The official launch of Read Bars will take place two months from today, at which point they’ll be available wherever you can get other quick snacks. We’re starting with material that’s in the public domain – specifically the works of William Shakespeare I referenced in the opening – but we have plans to expand into licensed content within our first year. That will keep costs down at the outset and let us prove the concept to the public.

To help you all gain an idea of just what it is we’re talking about, everyone here will get a Shakespeare-encoded Read Bar on their way out of the auditorium. You’ll be able to recall Iago’s soliloquy from Macbeth before the end of the day.

I’ll now take a few questions.