The best ad the world has ever seen is The Crazy Ones from Apple.

In it, they celebrate people “who are crazy enough to think they can change the world” because they are the ones who do.

It could have been called “The Optimists” because the future is created by optimists.

So we made our own version, as an homage to Apple and all the crazy optimists changing the world.

Here’s to the optimists

We asked our community to nominate people who should be in it and got a lot of suggestions – thank you! If we had included them all it would have been a one hour video, but we’ve only got one minute.

From start to end, here they are. For these short bios we have borrowed heavily from Wikipedia. Another crazy project.

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate.

In early 2009, when she was eleven years old, she wrote a blog detailing her life during the Pakistani Taliban occupation. She received more and more attention and, to silence her, Talibani gunmen shot her in the head.

She survived and the assassination attempt created a lot of support for her. She used that platform to argue for girl’s education.

In 2014 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is a South African and American entrepreneur and engineer.

He is working insanely hard to speed up the world’s transition to sustainable energy via Tesla and make humanity multiplanetary via SpaceX.

Musk is also connecting our brains to the machines via Neuralink and moving transportation below the surface with tunnel drilling company, Boring Company.

Marie Curie

Marie Skłodowska Curie was a Polish and French physicist and chemist.

She won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for the pioneering work developing the theory of “radioactivity”—a term she coined.

She was the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris in 1906.

In 1911 she won Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium, using techniques she invented for isolating radioactive isotopes.

She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist.

In the 1970s Gates co-founded Microsoft and created and made the vision, “a computer on every desk and in every home”, come true.

Later in life he left Microsoft and spent all his time building the world’s largest philanthropic foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Since the mid-90s Bill and Melinda Gates have donated over 50 billion dollars.

Anousheh Ansari

Ansari is an Iranian and American engineer and entrepreneur.

She co-founded and was CEO for Telecom Technologies, Inc. In the early 2000s she sponsored the Ansari X Prize, a competition for the world’s first private spaceflight, won by Scaled Composites in 2004.

In 2006 she became the first Iranian and first female Muslim in space. Ansari was the fourth overall self-funded space tourist, and the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station.

Today she is CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation.

Walt Disney

Walt Disney was an entrepreneur, animator, writer, voice actor and film producer.

In the 1920s he co-founded Walt Disney Co. with his brother Roy. Walt co-developed the character Mickey Mouse in 1928, his first highly popular success. He also provided the voice for his creation in the early years.

In 1937 he wrote and produced the first animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In the 1950s he opened Disneyland and, by the time of his death in the 1960s, he was planning to build an entire city, EPCOT.

George Washington Carver

Carver was an American agricultural scientist and inventor.

He developed techniques to improve soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton. He wanted poor farmers to grow other crops, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, as a source of their food and improve their quality of life.

Carver was also a leader in promoting environmentalism.

He was the most prominent black scientist of the early 20th century.

Melinda Gates

Melinda Gates is a computer scientist, manager and philanthropist.

In the 1980s she became a marketing manager at Microsoft, responsible for leading the development of various multimedia products.

In 2000 she co-founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2015 she founded Pivotal Ventures as a separate, independent organization to identify, help develop and implement innovative solutions to problems affecting U.S. women and families.

In 2019, Gates debuted as an author with the book The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World and it became an instant bestseller.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Sirleaf is a Liberian politician who served as the 24th President of Liberia.

She won the 2005 presidential election and was re-elected in 2011. She was the first woman in Africa elected as president of her country.

She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, in recognition of her efforts to bring women into the peacekeeping process.

In 2016, she was elected as the Chair of the Economic Community of West African States, making her the first woman to hold the position since it was created.

Nelson Mandela

Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary and a political leader.

He spent 27 years in prison for his freedom fight.

In the early 1990s he negotiated with Frank W. de Klerk which resulted in the 1994 multiracial general election in which Mandela led the ANC to victory and became president.

He was the country’s first black head of state and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election.

In 1993 he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tawakkol Karman

Karman is a Yemeni Nobel Laureate, journalist, politician, and human rights activist.

She gained prominence in her country after 2005 in her roles as a Yemeni journalist and an advocate for a mobile phone news service that was denied a license in 2007, after which she led protests for press freedom. She organized weekly protests after May 2007, expanding the issues for reform.

In 2011 Karman became the international public face of the Yemeni uprising that is part of the Arab Spring uprisings. She was called the “Mother of the Revolution.”

In 2011 she won the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Yemeni and the first Arab woman to do that.

Peter Diamandis

Diamandis is Greek American engineer, physician and entrepreneur.

He has co-founded several endeavors and companies, among them International Space University and Zero Gravity Corporation.

In the late 1990s he launched the X Prize, a $10 million competition awarded to the first private spaceflight.

Together with Ray Kurzweil he founded Singularity University and has written three bestselling books.

Katherine Graham

Graham was an American publisher and owner of the Washington Post.

She led the newspaper as the first female publisher of a major American newspaper, from 1963 to 1991. Graham presided over the paper as it reported on the Watergate scandal, which eventually led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. Her memoir, Personal History, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998

Boyan Slat

Slat is a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur.

Aged 16, Slat came across more plastic than fish while diving in Greece. He decided to devote a high school project for a more in-depth investigation into ocean plastic pollution and why it was considered impossible to clean up.

He later came up with the idea to build a passive system, using the circulating ocean currents to his advantage, which he presented at a TEDx talk in 2012.

In 2013 Slat founded The Ocean Cleanup, of which he is now the CEO.

They are now cleaning up both oceans and rivers using specially built boats and ships.

Lilian Bland

Bland was an Anglo-Irish journalist and pioneer aviator.

An uncle sent her a postcard of the Blériot monoplane from Paris, inspiring her to take up flying. She studied the monoplane’s measurements during the first official aviation meeting held in Blackpool in 1909, and added her thoughts into the design of her plane, the Mayfly.

Bland successfully built a flyable model biplane with a wingspan of six feet.

In 1911 she became the first woman in the British Isles, and maybe even in the world, to design, build, and fly an aircraft.

Jeff Bezos

Bezos is an American entrepreneur and space enthusiast.

In 1994 Bezos founded Amazon, after learning that internet usage increased 2300 percent year over year. He started by selling books but has since expanded to selling almost everything via Amazon.com. The company now has over one million employees and has made Bezos the world’s richest person.

In the early 2000s he founded space company Blue Origin to make it possible to for millions and billions of people to live in space.

Wangari Maathai

Maathai was a Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist.

As a beneficiary of the Kennedy Airlift, she studied in the United States, earning a Bachelor’s Degree. She became the first woman in East and Central Africa to become a Doctor of Philosophy.

In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights.

Maathai was an elected member of the Parliament of Kenya and also served as assistant minister for environment and natural resources.

In 2004 she won the Nobel Peace Prize as the first African woman.

Steve Jobs

Jobs was an American entrepreneur.

In the 1970s he co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak. Their Apple II was one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers.

After leaving Apple in the 1980s, he bought Pixar, which under his leadership produced the first 3D computer-animated feature film, Toy Story.

In the 1990s he returned to an almost bankrupt Apple, turning it around and producing a series of hit products, the iPod, iPhone and the iPad. Over two billion iPhones have been sold, making Apple the world’s highest-valued company.

He coined the phrase “putting a dent in the universe,” which is what we are crazy and optimistic enough to think that we can do.