(Mechanical noises) (Music) (Applause) 

This is about a place in London called Kiteflyer's Hill where I used to go and spend hours going "" When is he coming back? When is he coming back? "" So this is another one dedicated to that guy... 
who I've got over. 
But this is "" Kiteflyer's Hill. "" It's a beautiful song written by a guy called Martin Evan, actually, for me. 
Boo Hewerdine, Thomas Dolby, thank you very much for inviting me. It's been a blessing singing for you. 
Thank you very much. 
♫ Do you remember when we used to go ♫ ♫ up to Kiteflyer's Hill? ♫ ♫ Those summer nights, so still ♫ ♫ with all of the city beneath us ♫ ♫ and all of our lives ahead ♫ ♫ before cruel and foolish words ♫ ♫ were cruelly and foolishly said ♫ ♫ Some nights I think of you ♫ ♫ and then I go up ♫ ♫ on Kiteflyer's Hill ♫ ♫ wrapped up against the winter chill ♫ ♫ And somewhere in the city beneath me ♫ ♫ you lie asleep in your bed ♫ ♫ and I wonder if ever just briefly ♫ 
♫ do I creep in your dreams now and then ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Have the years been kind? ♫ ♫ And do you think of me sometimes ♫ ♫ up on Kiteflyer's Hill? ♫ ♫ Oh, I pray you one day will ♫ ♫ We won't say a word ♫ ♫ We won't need them ♫ ♫ Sometimes silence is best ♫ ♫ We'll just stand in the still of the evening ♫ ♫ and whisper farewell to loneliness ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ 
♫ Do you think of me sometimes? ♫ ♫ And do you ever make that climb? ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Have the years been kind? ♫ ♫ And do you ever make that climb ♫ ♫ up on Kiteflyer's Hill? Kiteflyer's... ♫ ♫ [French] ♫ ♫ Where are you? Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Kiteflyer's... ♫ (Applause) Gracias. Thank you very much. 

I'm actually here to make a challenge to people. 
I know there have been many challenges made to people. 
The one I'm going to make is that it is time for us to reclaim what peace really means. 
Peace is not "" Kumbaya, my Lord. "" Peace is not the dove and the rainbow — as lovely as they are. 
When I see the symbols of the rainbow and the dove, I think of personal serenity. 
I think of meditation. 
I do not think about what I consider to be peace, which is sustainable peace with justice and equality. 
It is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives, where these people have enough access to education and health care, so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from fear. 
This is called human security. 
And I am not a complete pacifist like some of my really, really heavy-duty, non-violent friends, like Mairead McGuire. 
I understand that humans are so "" messed up "" — to use a nice word, because I promised my mom I'd stop using the F-bomb in public. 
And I'm trying harder and harder. 
Mom, I'm really trying. 
We need a little bit of police; we need a little bit of military, but for defense. 
We need to redefine what makes us secure in this world. 
It is not arming our country to the teeth. 
It is not getting other countries to arm themselves to the teeth with the weapons that we produce and we sell them. 
It is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure, to make the people of the world secure. 
I was thinking about the recent ongoings in Congress, where the president is offering 8.4 billion dollars to try to get the START vote. 
I certainly support the START vote. 
But he's offering 84 billion dollars for the modernizing of nuclear weapons. 
Do you know the figure that the U.N. talks about for fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals is 80 billion dollars? 
Just that little bit of money, which to me, I wish it was in my bank account — it's not, but... 
In global terms, it's a little bit of money. 
But it's going to modernize weapons we do not need and will not be gotten rid of in our lifetime, unless we get up off our... 
and take action to make it happen, unless we begin to believe that all of the things that we've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make human security. 
It is saving the tigers. 
It is stopping the tar sands. 
It is having access to medical equipment that can actually tell who does have cancer. 
It is all of those things. 
It is using our money for all of those things. 
It is about action. 
I was in Hiroshima a couple of weeks ago, and His Holiness — we're sitting there in front of thousands of people in the city, and there were about eight of us Nobel laureates. 
And he's a bad guy. He's like a bad kid in church. 
We're staring at everybody, waiting our turn to speak, and he leans over to me, and he says, "Jody, I'm a Buddhist monk." 
I said, "" Yes, Your Holiness. 
Your robe gives it away. "" (Laughter) He said, "" You know that I kind of like meditation, and I pray. "" I said, "" That's good. That's good. 
We need that in the world. 
I don't follow that, but that's cool. "" And he says, "" But I have become skeptical. 
I do not believe that meditation and prayer will change this world. 
I think what we need is action. "" His Holiness, in his robes, is my new action hero. 
I spoke with Aung Sun Suu Kyi a couple of days ago. 
As most of you know, she's a hero for democracy in her country, Burma. 
You probably also know that she has spent 15 of the last 20 years imprisoned for her efforts to bring about democracy. 
She was just released a couple of weeks ago, and we're very concerned to see how long she will be free, because she is already out in the streets in Rangoon, agitating for change. 
She is already out in the streets, working with the party to try to rebuild it. 
But I talked to her for a range of issues. 
But one thing that I want to say, because it's similar to what His Holiness said. 
She said, "" You know, we have a long road to go to finally get democracy in my country. 
But I don't believe in hope without endeavor. 
I don't believe in the hope of change, unless we take action to make it so. "" Here's another woman hero of mine. 
She's my friend, Dr. Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. 
She has been in exile for the last year and a half. 
You ask her where she lives — where does she live in exile? 
She says the airports of the world. 
She is traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections. 
And instead of going home, she conferred with all the other women that she works with, who said to her, "" Stay out. We need you out. 
We need to be able to talk to you out there, so that you can give the message of what's happening here. "" A year and a half — she's out speaking on behalf of the other women in her country. 
Wangari Maathai — 2004 Peace laureate. 
They call her the "" Tree Lady, "" but she's more than the Tree Lady. 
Working for peace is very creative. 
It's hard work every day. 
When she was planting those trees, I don't think most people understand that, at the same time, she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country. 
People could not gather without getting busted and taken to jail. 
But if they were together planting trees for the environment, it was okay — creativity. 
But it's not just iconic women like Shirin, like Aung Sun Suu Kyi, like Wangari Maathai — it is other women in the world who are also struggling together to change this world. 
The Women's League of Burma, 11 individual organizations of Burmese women came together because there's strength in numbers. 
Working together is what changes our world. 
The Million Signatures Campaign of women inside Burma working together to change human rights, to bring democracy to that country. 
When one is arrested and taken to prison, another one comes out and joins the movement, recognizing that if they work together, they will ultimately bring change in their own country. 
Mairead McGuire in the middle, Betty Williams on the right-hand side — bringing peace to Northern Ireland. 
I'll tell you the quick story. 
An IRA driver was shot, and his car plowed into people on the side of the street. 
There was a mother and three children. 
The children were killed on the spot. 
It was Mairead's sister. 
Instead of giving in to grief, depression, defeat in the face of that violence, Mairead hooked up with Betty — a staunch Protestant and a staunch Catholic — and they took to the streets to say, "" No more violence. "" And they were able to get tens of thousands of, primarily, women, some men, in the streets to bring about change. 
And they have been part of what brought peace to Northern Ireland, and they're still working on it, because there's still a lot more to do. 
This is Rigoberta Menchu Tum. 
She also received the Peace Prize. 
She is now running for president. 
She is educating the indigenous people of her country about what it means to be a democracy, about how you bring democracy to the country, about educating, about how to vote — but that democracy is not just about voting; it's about being an active citizen. 
That's what I got stuck doing — the landmine campaign. 
One of the things that made this campaign work is because we grew from two NGOs to thousands in 90 countries around the world, working together in common cause to ban landmines. 
Some of the people who worked in our campaign could only work maybe an hour a month. 
They could maybe volunteer that much. 
There were others, like myself, who were full-time. 
But it was the actions, together, of all of us that brought about that change. 
In my view, what we need today is people getting up and taking action to reclaim the meaning of peace. 
It's not a dirty word. 
It's hard work every single day. 
And if each of us who cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time as we could, we would change this world, we would save this world. 
And we can't wait for the other guy. We have to do it ourselves. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Growing up, I didn't always understand why my parents made me follow the rules that they did. 
Like, why did I really have to mow the lawn? 
Why was homework really that important? 
Why couldn't I put jelly beans in my oatmeal? 
My childhood was abound with questions like this. 
Normal things about being a kid and realizing that sometimes, it was best to listen to my parents even when I didn't exactly understand why. 
And it's not that they didn't want me to think critically. 
Their parenting always sought to reconcile the tension between having my siblings and I understand the realities of the world, while ensuring that we never accepted the status quo as inevitable. 
I came to realize that this, in and of itself, was a very purposeful form of education. 
One of my favorite educators, Brazilian author and scholar Paulo Freire, speaks quite explicitly about the need for education to be used as a tool for critical awakening and shared humanity. 
In his most famous book, "" Pedagogy of the Oppressed, "" he states, "" No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. "" I've been thinking a lot about this lately, this idea of humanity, and specifically, who in this world is afforded the privilege of being perceived as fully human. 
Over the course of the past several months, the world has watched as unarmed black men, and women, have had their lives taken at the hands of police and vigilante. 
These events and all that has transpired after them have brought me back to my own childhood and the decisions that my parents made about raising a black boy in America that growing up, I didn't always understand in the way that I do now. 
I think of how hard it must have been, how profoundly unfair it must have felt for them to feel like they had to strip away parts of my childhood just so that I could come home at night. 
For example, I think of how one night, when I was around 12 years old, on an overnight field trip to another city, my friends and I bought Super Soakers and turned the hotel parking lot into our own water-filled battle zone. 
We hid behind cars, running through the darkness that lay between the streetlights, boundless laughter ubiquitous across the pavement. 
But within 10 minutes, my father came outside, grabbed me by my forearm and led me into our room with an unfamiliar grip. 
Before I could say anything, tell him how foolish he had made me look in front of my friends, he derided me for being so naive. 
Looked me in the eye, fear consuming his face, and said, "" Son, I'm sorry, but you can't act the same as your white friends. 
You can't pretend to shoot guns. 
You can't run around in the dark. 
You can't hide behind anything other than your own teeth. "" I know now how scared he must have been, how easily I could have fallen into the empty of the night, that some man would mistake this water for a good reason to wash all of this away. 
These are the sorts of messages I've been inundated with my entire life: Always keep your hands where they can see them, don't move too quickly, take off your hood when the sun goes down. 
My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice, an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs, so that they wouldn't make a memory of this skin. 
So that we could be kids, not casket or concrete. 
And it's not because they thought it would make us better than anyone else it's simply because they wanted to keep us alive. 
All of my black friends were raised with the same message, the talk, given to us when we became old enough to be mistaken for a nail ready to be hammered to the ground, when people made our melanin synonymous with something to be feared. 
But what does it do to a child to grow up knowing that you cannot simply be a child? 
That the whims of adolescence are too dangerous for your breath, that you cannot simply be curious, that you are not afforded the luxury of making a mistake, that someone's implicit bias might be the reason you don't wake up in the morning. 
But this cannot be what defines us. 
Because we have parents who raised us to understand that our bodies weren't meant for the backside of a bullet, but for flying kites and jumping rope, and laughing until our stomachs burst. 
We had teachers who taught us how to raise our hands in class, and not just to signal surrender, and that the only thing we should give up is the idea that we aren't worthy of this world. 
So when we say that black lives matter, it's not because others don't, it's simply because we must affirm that we are worthy of existing without fear, when so many things tell us we are not. 
I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born, where a toy in his hand isn't mistaken for anything other than a toy. 
And I refuse to accept that we can't build this world into something new, some place where a child's name doesn't have to be written on a t-shirt, or a tombstone, where the value of someone's life isn't determined by anything other than the fact that they had lungs, a place where every single one of us can breathe. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I want to share with you some ideas about the secret power of time, in a very short time. 
Video: All right, start the clock please. 30 seconds studio. 
Keep it quiet please. Settle down. 
It's about time. End sequence. Take one. 
15 seconds studio. 
10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two... 
Philip Zimbardo: Let's tune into the conversation of the principals in Adam's temptation. 
"Come on Adam, don't be so wishy-washy. Take a bite." "I did." 
"One bite, Adam. Don't abandon Eve." 
"" I don't know, guys. 
I don't want to get in trouble. "" "Okay. One bite. What the hell?" 
(Laughter) Life is temptation. It's all about yielding, resisting, yes, no, now, later, impulsive, reflective, present focus and future focus. 
Promised virtues fall prey to the passions of the moment. 
Of teenage girls who pledged sexual abstinence and virginity until marriage — thank you George Bush — the majority, 60 percent, yielded to sexual temptations within one year. 
And most of them did so without using birth control. 
So much for promises. 
Now lets tempt four-year-olds, giving them a treat. 
They can have one marshmallow now. But if they wait until the experimenter comes back, they can have two. 
Of course it pays, if you like marshmallows, to wait. 
What happens is two-thirds of the kids give in to temptation. 
They cannot wait. The others, of course, wait. 
They resist the temptation. They delay the now for later. 
Walter Mischel, my colleague at Stanford, went back 14 years later, to try to discover what was different about those kids. 
There were enormous differences between kids who resisted and kids who yielded, in many ways. 
The kids who resisted scored 250 points higher on the SAT. 
That's enormous. That's like a whole set of different IQ points. 
They didn't get in as much trouble. They were better students. 
They were self-confident and determined. And the key for me today, the key for you, is, they were future-focused rather than present-focused. 
So what is time perspective? That's what I'm going to talk about today. 
Time perspective is the study of how individuals, all of us, divide the flow of your human experience into time zones or time categories. 
And you do it automatically and non-consciously. 
They vary between cultures, between nations, between individuals, between social classes, between education levels. 
And the problem is that they can become biased, because you learn to over-use some of them and under-use the others. 
What determines any decision you make? 
You make a decision on which you're going to base an action. 
For some people it's only about what is in the immediate situation, what other people are doing and what you're feeling. 
And those people, when they make their decisions in that format — we're going to call them "" present-oriented, "" because their focus is what is now. 
For others, the present is irrelevant. 
It's always about "" What is this situation like that I've experienced in the past? "" So that their decisions are based on past memories. 
And we're going to call those people "" past-oriented, "" because they focus on what was. 
For others it's not the past, it's not the present, it's only about the future. 
Their focus is always about anticipated consequences. 
Cost-benefit analysis. 
We're going to call them "" future-oriented. "" Their focus is on what will be. 
So, time paradox, I want to argue, the paradox of time perspective, is something that influences every decision you make, you're totally unaware of. 
Namely, the extent to which you have one of these biased time perspectives. 
Well there is actually six of them. There are two ways to be present-oriented. 
There is two ways to be past-oriented, two ways to be future. 
You can focus on past-positive, or past-negative. 
You can be present-hedonistic, namely you focus on the joys of life, or present-fatalist — it doesn't matter, your life is controlled. 
You can be future-oriented, setting goals. 
Or you can be transcendental future: namely, life begins after death. 
Developing the mental flexibility to shift time perspectives fluidly depending on the demands of the situation, that's what you've got to learn to do. 
So, very quickly, what is the optimal time profile? 
High on past-positive. Moderately high on future. 
And moderate on present-hedonism. 
And always low on past-negative and present-fatalism. 
So the optimal temporal mix is what you get from the past — past-positive gives you roots. You connect your family, identity and your self. 
What you get from the future is wings to soar to new destinations, new challenges. 
What you get from the present hedonism is the energy, the energy to explore yourself, places, people, sensuality. 
Any time perspective in excess has more negatives than positives. 
What do futures sacrifice for success? 
They sacrifice family time. They sacrifice friend time. 
They sacrifice fun time. They sacrifice personal indulgence. 
They sacrifice hobbies. And they sacrifice sleep. So it affects their health. 
And they live for work, achievement and control. 
I'm sure that resonates with some of the TEDsters. 
(Laughter) And it resonated for me. I grew up as a poor kid in the South Bronx ghetto, a Sicilian family — everyone lived in the past and present. 
I'm here as a future-oriented person who went over the top, who did all these sacrifices because teachers intervened, and made me future oriented. 
Told me don't eat that marshmallow, because if you wait you're going to get two of them, until I learned to balance out. 
I've added present-hedonism, I've added a focus on the past-positive, so, at 76 years old, I am more energetic than ever, more productive, and I'm happier than I have ever been. 
I just want to say that we are applying this to many world problems: changing the drop-out rates of school kids, combating addictions, enhancing teen health, curing vets' PTSD with time metaphors — getting miracle cures — promoting sustainability and conservation, reducing physical rehabilitation where there is a 50-percent drop out rate, altering appeals to suicidal terrorists, and modifying family conflicts as time-zone clashes. 
So I want to end by saying: many of life's puzzles can be solved by understanding your time perspective and that of others. 
And the idea is so simple, so obvious, but I think the consequences are really profound. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

(Music) This is the human test, a test to see if you are a human. 
Please raise your hand if something applies to you. 
Are we agreed? Yes? 
Then let's begin. 
Have you ever eaten a booger long past your childhood? 
(Laughter) It's okay, it's safe here. 
Have you ever made a small, weird sound when you remembered something embarrassing? 
Have you ever purposely lowercased the first letter of a text in order to come across as sad or disappointed? 
(Laughter) Okay. 
Have you ever ended a text with a period as a sign of aggression? Okay. Period. 
Have you ever laughed or smiled when someone said something shitty to you and then spent the rest of the day wondering why you reacted that way? 
Yes. 
Have you ever seemed to lose your airplane ticket a thousand times as you walked from the check-in to the gate? 
Yes. 
Have you ever put on a pair of pants and then much later realized that there was a loose sock smushed up against your thigh? 
(Laughter) Good. 
Have you ever tried to guess someone else's password so many times that it locked their account? 
Mmm. 
Have you ever had a nagging feeling that one day you will be discovered as a fraud? 
Yes, it's safe here. 
Have you ever hoped that there was some ability you hadn't discovered yet that you were just naturally great at? 
Mmm. 
Have you ever broken something in real life, and then found yourself looking for an "" undo "" button in real life? 
Have you ever misplaced your TED badge and then immediately started imagining what a three-day Vancouver vacation might look like? 
Have you ever marveled at how someone you thought was so ordinary could suddenly become so beautiful? 
Have you ever stared at your phone smiling like an idiot while texting with someone? 
Have you ever subsequently texted that person the phrase "" I'm staring at the phone smiling like an idiot ""? 
Have you ever been tempted to, and then gave in to the temptation, of looking through someone else's phone? 
Have you ever had a conversation with yourself and then suddenly realized you're a real asshole to yourself? 
(Laughter) Has your phone ever run out of battery in the middle of an argument, and it sort of felt like the phone was breaking up with both of you? 
Have you ever thought that working on an issue between you was futile because it should just be easier than this, or this is supposed to happen just naturally? 
Have you ever realized that very little, in the long run, just happens naturally? 
Have you ever woken up blissfully and suddenly been flooded by the awful remembrance that someone had left you? 
Have you ever lost the ability to imagine a future without a person that no longer was in your life? 
Have you ever looked back on that event with the sad smile of autumn and the realization that futures will happen regardless? 
Congratulations. 
You have now completed the test. 
You are all human. 
(Applause) 

We grew up interacting with the physical objects around us. 
There are an enormous number of them that we use every day. 
Unlike most of our computing devices, these objects are much more fun to use. 
When you talk about objects, one other thing automatically comes attached to that thing, and that is gestures: how we manipulate these objects, how we use these objects in everyday life. 
We use gestures not only to interact with these objects, but we also use them to interact with each other. 
A gesture of "" Namaste! "", maybe, to respect someone, or maybe, in India I don't need to teach a kid that this means "" four runs "" in cricket. 
It comes as a part of our everyday learning. 
So, I am very interested, from the beginning, how our knowledge about everyday objects and gestures, and how we use these objects, can be leveraged to our interactions with the digital world. 
Rather than using a keyboard and mouse, why can I not use my computer in the same way that I interact in the physical world? 
So, I started this exploration around eight years back, and it literally started with a mouse on my desk. 
Rather than using it for my computer, I actually opened it. 
Most of you might be aware that, in those days, the mouse used to come with a ball inside, and there were two rollers that actually guide the computer where the ball is moving, and, accordingly, where the mouse is moving. 
So, I was interested in these two rollers, and I actually wanted more, so I borrowed another mouse from a friend — never returned to him — and I now had four rollers. 
Interestingly, what I did with these rollers is, basically, I took them off of these mouses and then put them in one line. 
It had some strings and pulleys and some springs. 
What I got is basically a gesture-interface device that actually acts as a motion-sensing device made for two dollars. 
So, here, whatever movement I do in my physical world is actually replicated inside the digital world just using this small device that I made, around eight years back, in 2000. 
Because I was interested in integrating these two worlds, I thought of sticky notes. 
I thought, "" Why can I not connect the normal interface of a physical sticky note to the digital world? "" A message written on a sticky note to my mom, on paper, can come to an SMS, or maybe a meeting reminder automatically syncs with my digital calendar — a to-do list that automatically syncs with you. 
But you can also search in the digital world, or maybe you can write a query, saying, "What is Dr. Smith's address?" 
and this small system actually prints it out — so it actually acts like a paper input-output system, just made out of paper. 
In another exploration, I thought of making a pen that can draw in three dimensions. 
So, I implemented this pen that can help designers and architects not only think in three dimensions, but they can actually draw, so that it's more intuitive to use that way. 
Then I thought, "" Why not make a Google Map, but in the physical world? "" Rather than typing a keyword to find something, I put my objects on top of it. 
If I put a boarding pass, it will show me where the flight gate is. 
A coffee cup will show where you can find more coffee, or where you can trash the cup. 
So, these were some of the earlier explorations I did because the goal was to connect these two worlds seamlessly. 
Among all these experiments, there was one thing in common: I was trying to bring a part of the physical world to the digital world. 
I was taking some part of the objects, or any of the intuitiveness of real life, and bringing them to the digital world, because the goal was to make our computing interfaces more intuitive. 
What we are interested in is information. 
We want to know about things. 
We want to know about dynamic things going around. 
So I thought, around last year — in the beginning of the last year — I started thinking, "" Why can I not take this approach in the reverse way? "" Maybe, "" How about I take my digital world and paint the physical world with that digital information? "" Because pixels are actually, right now, confined in these rectangular devices that fit in our pockets. 
Why can I not remove this confine and take that to my everyday objects, everyday life so that I don't need to learn the new language for interacting with those pixels? 
So, in order to realize this dream, I actually thought of putting a big-size projector on my head. 
I think that's why this is called a head-mounted projector, isn't it? 
I took it very literally, and took my bike helmet, put a little cut over there so that the projector actually fits nicely. 
So now, what I can do — I can augment the world around me with this digital information. 
Later, we moved to a much better, consumer-oriented pendant version of that, that many of you now know as the SixthSense device. 
But the most interesting thing about this particular technology is that you can carry your digital world with you wherever you go. 
You can start using any surface, any wall around you, as an interface. 
The camera is actually tracking all your gestures. 
Whatever you're doing with your hands, it's understanding that gesture. 
And, actually, if you see, there are some color markers that in the beginning version we are using with it. 
You stop by a wall, and start painting on that wall. 
But we are not only tracking one finger, here. 
We are giving you the freedom of using all of both of your hands, so you can actually use both of your hands to zoom into or zoom out of a map just by pinching all present. 
The camera is actually doing — just, getting all the images — is doing the edge recognition and also the color recognition and so many other small algorithms are going on inside. 
So, technically, it's a little bit complex, but it gives you an output which is more intuitive to use, in some sense. 
Rather than getting your camera out of your pocket, you can just do the gesture of taking a photo, and it takes a photo for you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
And later I can find a wall, anywhere, and start browsing those photos or maybe, "" OK, I want to modify this photo a little bit and send it as an email to a friend. "" So, we are looking for an era where computing will actually merge with the physical world. 
And, of course, if you don't have any surface, you can start using your palm for simple operations. 
Here, I'm dialing a phone number just using my hand. 
The camera is actually not only understanding your hand movements, but, interestingly, is also able to understand what objects you are holding in your hand. 
For example, in this case, the book cover is matched with so many thousands, or maybe millions of books online, and checking out which book it is. 
Once it has that information, it finds out more reviews about that, or maybe New York Times has a sound overview on that, so you can actually hear, on a physical book, a review as sound. 
(Video) Famous talk at Harvard University — This was Obama's visit last week to MIT. 
(Video) And particularly I want to thank two outstanding MIT — Pranav Mistry: So, I was seeing the live [video] of his talk, outside, on just a newspaper. 
Your newspaper will show you live weather information rather than having it updated. 
(Applause) When I'm going back, I can just use my boarding pass to check how much my flight has been delayed, because at that particular time, I'm not feeling like opening my iPhone, and checking out a particular icon. 
And I think this technology will not only change the way — (Laughter) Yes. 
The fun part is, I'm going to the Boston metro, and playing a pong game inside the train on the ground, right? 
(Laughter) And I think the imagination is the only limit of what you can think of when this kind of technology merges with real life. 
And many of you are excited about the next-generation tablet computers to come out in the market. 
So, rather than waiting for that, I actually made my own, just using a piece of paper. 
So, what I did here is remove the camera — All the webcam cameras have a microphone inside the camera. 
I removed the microphone from that, and then just pinched that — like I just made a clip out of the microphone — and clipped that to a piece of paper, any paper that you found around. 
So now the sound of the touch is getting me when exactly I'm touching the paper. 
But the camera is actually tracking where my fingers are moving. 
You can of course watch movies. 
(Video) Good afternoon. My name is Russell, and I am a Wilderness Explorer in Tribe 54. "" PM: And you can of course play games. 
(Car engine) Here, the camera is actually understanding how you're holding the paper and playing a car-racing game. 
(Applause) Many of you already must have thought, OK, you can browse. 
So, more interestingly, I'm interested in how we can take that in a more dynamic way. 
When I come back to my desk, I can just pinch that information back to my desktop so I can use my full-size computer. 
(Applause) And why only computers? We can just play with papers. 
Paper world is interesting to play with. 
Here, I'm taking a part of a document, and putting over here a second part from a second place, and I'm actually modifying the information that I have over there. 
Yeah. And I say, "" OK, this looks nice, let me print it out, that thing. "" So I now have a print-out of that thing. 
So the workflow is more intuitive, the way we used to do it maybe 20 years back, rather than now switching between these two worlds. 
So, as a last thought, I think that integrating information to everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but will also help us, in some way, to stay human, to be more connected to our physical world. 
And it will actually help us not end up being machines sitting in front of other machines. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
Chris Anderson: So, Pranav, first of all, you're a genius. 
This is incredible, really. 
What are you doing with this? Is there a company being planned? 
Pranav Mistry: So, there are lots of companies, sponsor companies of Media Lab interested in taking this ahead in one or another way. 
PM: I'm trying to make this more available to people so that anyone can develop their own SixthSense device, because the hardware is actually not that hard to manufacture or hard to make your own. 
We will provide all the open source software for them, maybe starting next month. 
CA: Open source? Wow. 
(Applause) CA: Are you going to come back to India with some of this, at some point? 
CA: What are your plans? MIT? India? 
How are you going to split your time going forward? 
All of this work that you have seen is all about my learning in India. 
And now, if you see, it's more about the cost-effectiveness: this system costs you $300 compared to the $20,000 surface tables, or anything like that. 
Or maybe even the $2 mouse gesture system at that time was costing around $5,000? 
I showed that, at a conference, to President Abdul Kalam, at that time, and then he said, "" OK, we should use this in Bhabha Atomic Research Centre for some use of that. "" So I'm excited about how I can bring the technology to the masses rather than just keeping that technology in the lab environment. 
(Applause) CA: Based on the people we've seen at TED, I would say you're truly one of the two or three best inventors in the world right now. 
Thank you so much. 
That's fantastic. 

So magic is a very introverted field. 
While scientists regularly publish their latest research, we magicians do not like to share our methods and secrets. 
That's true even amongst peers. 
But if you look at creative practice as a form of research, or art as a form of R & D for humanity, then how could a cyber illusionist like myself share his research? 
Now my own speciality is combining digital technology and magic. 
And about three years ago, I started an exercise in openness and inclusiveness by reaching out into the open-source software community to create new digital tools for magic — tools that could eventually be shared with other artists to start them off further on in the process and to get them to the poetry faster. 
Today, I'd like to show you something which came out of these collaborations. 
It's an augmented reality projection tracking and mapping system, or a digital storytelling tool. 
Could we bring down the lights please? Thank you. 
So let's give this a try. 
And I'm going to use it to give you my take on the stuff of life. 
(Applause) (Music) Terribly sorry. I forgot the floor. 
Wake up. 
Hey. 
Come on. 
(Music) Please. (Music) 
Come on. 
Ah, sorry about that. 
Forgot this. 
(Music) Give it another try. 
Okay. 
He figured out the system. 
(Music) (Laughter) (Applause) (Music) Uh oh. (Music) 
All right. Let's try this. 
Come on. 
(Music) (Laughter) (Music) Hey. (Music) 
You heard her, go ahead. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Bye-bye. (Applause) 

I would like to share with you a new model of higher education, a model that, once expanded, can enhance the collective intelligence of millions of creative and motivated individuals that otherwise would be left behind. 
Look at the world. 
Pick up a place and focus on it. 
You will find humans chasing higher education. 
Let's meet some of them. 
Patrick. 
Patrick was born in Liberia to a family of 20 children. 
During the civil war, he and his family were forced to flee to Nigeria. 
There, in spite of his situation, he graduated high school with nearly perfect grades. 
He wanted to continue to higher education, but due to his family living on the poverty line, he was soon sent to South Africa to work and send back money to feed his family. 
Patrick never gave up his dream of higher education. 
Late at night, after work, he surfed the Net looking for ways to study. 
Meet Debbie. 
Debbie is from Florida. 
Her parents didn't go to college, and neither did any of her siblings. 
Debbie has worked all her life, pays taxes, supports herself month to month, proud of the American dream, a dream that just won't be complete without higher education. 
But Debbie doesn't have the savings for higher education. 
She can't pay the tuition. 
Neither could she leave work. 
Meet Wael. 
Wael is from Syria. 
He's firsthand experiencing the misery, fear and failure imposed on his country. 
He's a big believer in education. 
He knew that if he would find an opportunity for higher education, an opportunity to get ahead of the rest, he has a better chance to survive in a world turned upside down. 
The higher education system failed Patrick, Debbie and Wael, exactly as it is failing millions of potential students, millions that graduate high school, millions that are qualified for higher education, millions that want to study yet cannot access for various reasons. 
First, financial. 
Universities are expensive. We all know it. 
In large parts of the world, higher education is unattainable for an average citizen. 
This is probably the biggest problem facing our society. 
Higher education stopped being a right for all and became a privilege for the few. 
Second, cultural. 
Students who are qualified for higher education, can afford, want to study, cannot because it is not decent, it is not a place for a woman. 
This is the story of countless women in Africa, for example, prevented from higher education because of cultural barriers. 
And here comes the third reason: UNESCO stated that in 2025, 100 million students will be deprived from higher education simply because there will not be enough seats to accommodate them, to meet the demand. 
They will take a placement test, they will pass it, but they still won't have access because there are no places available. 
These are the reasons I founded University of the People, a nonprofit, tuition-free, degree-granting university to give an alternative, to create an alternative to those who have no other, an alternative that will be affordable and scalable, an alternative that will disrupt the current education system, open the gates to higher education for every qualified student regardless of what they earn, where they live, or what society says about them. 
Patrick, Debbie and Wael are only three examples out of the 1,700 accepted students from 143 countries. 
We — (Applause) — Thank you. 
We didn't need to reinvent the wheel. 
We just looked at what wasn't working and used the amazing power of the Internet to get around it. 
We set out to build a model that will cut down almost entirely the cost of higher education, and that's how we did it. 
First, bricks and mortar cost money. 
Universities have expenses that virtual universities don't. 
We don't need to pass these expenses onto our students. 
They don't exist. 
We also don't need to worry about capacity. 
There are no limits of seats in virtual university. 
Actually, nobody needs to stand at the back of the lecture hall. 
Textbooks is also something our students don't need to buy. 
By using open educational resources and the generosity of professors who are putting their material free and accessible, we don't need to send our students to buy textbooks. 
All of our materials come free. 
Even professors, the most expensive line in any university balance sheet, come free to our students, over 3,000 of them, including presidents, vice chancellors, professors and academic advisors from top universities such as NYU, Yale, Berkeley and Oxford, came on board to help our students. 
Finally, it's our belief in peer-to-peer learning. 
We use this sound pedagogical model to encourage our students from all over the world to interact and study together and also to reduce the time our professors need to labor over class assignments. 
If the Internet has made us a global village, this model can develop its future leadership. 
Look how we do it. 
We only offer two programs: business administration and computer science, the two programs that are most in demand worldwide, the two programs that are likeliest to help our students find a job. 
When our students are accepted, they are placed in a small classroom of 20 to 30 students to ensure that those who need personalized attention get it. 
Moreover, for every nine weeks' course, they meet a new peer, a whole new set of students from all over the world. 
Every week, when they go into the classroom, they find the lecture notes of the week, the reading assignment, the homework assignment, and the discussion question, which is the core of our studies. 
Every week, every student must contribute to the class discussion and also must comment on the contribution of others. 
This way, we open our students' minds, we develop a positive shift in attitude toward different cultures. 
By the end of each week, the students take a quiz, hand in their homework, which are assessed by their peers under the supervision of the instructors, get a grade, move to the next week. 
By the end of the course, they take the final exam, get a grade, and follow to the next course. 
We opened the gates for higher education for every qualified student. 
Every student with a high school diploma, sufficient English and Internet connection can study with us. 
We don't use audio. We don't use video. 
Broadband is not necessary. 
Any student from any part of the world with any Internet connection can study with us. 
We are tuition-free. 
All we ask our students to cover is the cost of their exams, 100 dollars per exam. 
A full-time bachelor degree student taking 40 courses, will pay 1,000 dollars a year, 4,000 dollars for the entire degree, and for those who cannot afford even this, we offer them a variety of scholarships. 
It is our mission that nobody will be left behind for financial reasons. 
With 5,000 students in 2016, this model is financially sustainable. 
Five years ago, it was a vision. 
Today, it is a reality. 
Last month, we got the ultimate academic endorsement to our model. 
University of the People is now fully accredited. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
With this accreditation, it's our time now to scale up. 
We have demonstrated that our model works. 
I invite universities and, even more important, developing countries' governments, to replicate this model to ensure that the gates of higher education will open widely. 
A new era is coming, an era that will witness the disruption of the higher education model as we know it today, from being a privilege for the few to becoming a basic right, affordable and accessible for all. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters. 
Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language. 
But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. 
Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so. 
I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. 
Since the age of five, I started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. 
I learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years. 
Since we only have five minutes, it's better that we have a fast and simpler way. 
A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. 
You only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy. 
The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature — enough to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers. 
Today I'm going to start with eight to show you how the method works. 
You are ready? 
Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square. 
You get a mouth. 
This is a person going for a walk. 
Person. 
If the shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides, as if she was yelling frantically, "" Help! I'm on fire! "" — This symbol actually is originally from the shape of the flame, but I like to think that way. Whichever works for you. 
This is a tree. 
Tree. 
The sun. 
The moon. 
The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west. 
I call these eight characters radicals. 
They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters. 
A person. 
If someone walks behind, that is "" to follow. "" As the old saying goes, two is company, three is a crowd. 
If a person stretched their arms wide, this person is saying, "" It was this big. "" The person inside the mouth, the person is trapped. 
He's a prisoner, just like Jonah inside the whale. 
One tree is a tree. Two trees together, we have the woods. 
Three trees together, we create the forest. 
Put a plank underneath the tree, we have the foundation. 
Put a mouth on the top of the tree, that's "" idiot. "" (Laughter) Easy to remember, since a talking tree is pretty idiotic. 
Remember fire? 
Two fires together, I get really hot. 
Three fires together, that's a lot of flames. 
Set the fire underneath the two trees, it's burning. 
For us, the sun is the source of prosperity. 
Two suns together, prosperous. 
Three together, that's sparkles. 
Put the sun and the moon shining together, it's brightness. 
It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night. 
The sun is coming up above the horizon. Sunrise. 
A door. Put a plank inside the door, it's a door bolt. 
Put a mouth inside the door, asking questions. 
Knock knock. Is anyone home? 
This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading. 
On the left, we have a woman. 
Two women together, they have an argument. 
(Laughter) Three women together, be careful, it's adultery. 
So we have gone through almost 30 characters. 
By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32. 
The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. 
So with very little effort, you will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is the same as a Chinese eight-year-old. 
So after we know the characters, we start building phrases. 
For example, the mountain and the fire together, we have fire mountain. It's a volcano. 
We know Japan is the land of the rising sun. 
This is a sun placed with the origin, because Japan lies to the east of China. 
So a sun, origin together, we build Japan. 
A person behind Japan, what do we get? 
A Japanese person. 
The character on the left is two mountains stacked on top of each other. 
In ancient China, that means in exile, because Chinese emperors, they put their political enemies in exile beyond mountains. 
Nowadays, exile has turned into getting out. 
A mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit. 
This is a slide to remind me that I should stop talking and get off of the stage. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. 
We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces. 
So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. 
(Laughter) How can we lend and borrow more things, without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? 
How can we share more memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? 
Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans. 
I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade. 
In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. 
And her death was sudden and unexpected. 
I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you. 
So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard, and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to..." 
I didn't know what to expect from this experiment, but by the next day, the wall was entirely filled out, and it kept growing. 
"Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy." 
"Before I die, I want to hold her one more time." 
So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times. 
It's about knowing you're not alone; it's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways; it's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change. 
I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate people who wanted to make a wall with their community. 
So, my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and beyond. 
Together, we've shown how powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice, and share more with one another. 
Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us, as individuals and as a community, and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

The writer George Eliot cautioned us that, among all forms of mistake, prophesy is the most gratuitous. 
The person that we would all acknowledge as her 20th-century counterpart, Yogi Berra, agreed. 
He said, "" It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. "" I'm going to ignore their cautions and make one very specific forecast. 
In the world that we are creating very quickly, we're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction, and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs. 
Our cars are very quickly going to start driving themselves, which means we're going to need fewer truck drivers. 
We're going to hook Siri up to Watson and use that to automate a lot of the work that's currently done by customer service reps and troubleshooters and diagnosers, and we're already taking R2D2, painting him orange, and putting him to work carrying shelves around warehouses, which means we need a lot fewer people to be walking up and down those aisles. 
Now, for about 200 years, people have been saying exactly what I'm telling you — the age of technological unemployment is at hand — starting with the Luddites smashing looms in Britain just about two centuries ago, and they have been wrong. 
Our economies in the developed world have coasted along on something pretty close to full employment. 
Which brings up a critical question: Why is this time different, if it really is? 
The reason it's different is that, just in the past few years, our machines have started demonstrating skills they have never, ever had before: understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing, answering, writing, and they're still acquiring new skills. 
For example, mobile humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive, but the research arm of the Defense Department just launched a competition to have them do things like this, and if the track record is any guide, this competition is going to be successful. 
So when I look around, I think the day is not too far off at all when we're going to have androids doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now. 
And we're creating a world where there is going to be more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs. 
It's a world that Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling "the new machine age." 
The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news. 
This is the best economic news on the planet these days. 
Not that there's a lot of competition, right? 
This is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons. 
The first is, technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we're on where output goes up over time, while at the same time, prices go down, and volume and quality just continue to explode. 
Now, some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism, but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. 
This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide. 
The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that, once the androids start doing jobs, we don't have to do them anymore, and we get freed up from drudgery and toil. 
Now, when I talk about this with my friends in Cambridge and Silicon Valley, they say, "" Fantastic. No more drudgery, no more toil. 
This gives us the chance to imagine an entirely different kind of society, a society where the creators and the discoverers and the performers and the innovators come together with their patrons and their financiers to talk about issues, entertain, enlighten, provoke each other. "" It's a society really, that looks a lot like the TED Conference. 
And there's actually a huge amount of truth here. 
We are seeing an amazing flourishing taking place. 
In a world where it is just about as easy to generate an object as it is to print a document, we have amazing new possibilities. 
The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers, and they're responsible for massive amounts of innovation. 
And artists who were formerly constrained can now do things that were never, ever possible for them before. 
So this is a time of great flourishing, and the more I look around, the more convinced I become that this quote, from the physicist Freeman Dyson, is not hyperbole at all. 
This is just a plain statement of the facts. 
["" Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences. "" — Freeman Dyson] Which brings up another great question: What could possibly go wrong in this new machine age? 
Right? Great, hang up, flourish, go home. 
We're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges as we head deeper into the future that we're creating. 
The first are economic, and they're really nicely summarized in an apocryphal story about a back-and-forth between Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther, who was the head of the auto workers union. 
They were touring one of the new modern factories, and Ford playfully turns to Reuther and says, "" Hey Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues? "" And Reuther shoots back, "" Hey Henry, how are you going to get them to buy cars? "" Reuther's problem in that anecdote is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy that's full of machines, and we see this very clearly in the statistics. 
If you look over the past couple decades at the returns to capital — in other words, corporate profits — we see them going up, and we see that they're now at an all-time high. 
If we look at the returns to labor, in other words total wages paid out in the economy, we see them at an all-time low and heading very quickly in the opposite direction. 
So this is clearly bad news for Reuther. 
It looks like it might be great news for Ford, but it's actually not. If you want to sell huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people, you really want a large, stable, prosperous middle class. 
We have had one of those in America for just about the entire postwar period. 
But the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now. 
We all know a lot of the statistics, but just to repeat one of them, median income in America has actually gone down over the past 15 years, and we're in danger of getting trapped in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization continue to go up over time. 
The societal challenges that come along with that kind of inequality deserve some attention. 
There are a set of societal challenges that I'm actually not that worried about, and they're captured by images like this. 
This is not the kind of societal problem that I am concerned about. 
There is no shortage of dystopian visions about what happens when our machines become self-aware, and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us. 
I'm going to start worrying about those the day my computer becomes aware of my printer. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about. 
To tell you the kinds of societal challenges that are going to come up in the new machine age, I want to tell a story about two stereotypical American workers. 
And to make them really stereotypical, let's make them both white guys. 
And the first one is a college-educated professional, creative type, manager, engineer, doctor, lawyer, that kind of worker. 
We're going to call him "" Ted. "" He's at the top of the American middle class. 
His counterpart is not college-educated and works as a laborer, works as a clerk, does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy. 
We're going to call that guy "" Bill. "" And if you go back about 50 years, Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives. 
For example, in 1960 they were both very likely to have full-time jobs, working at least 40 hours a week. 
But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented, as we started to automate the economy, and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses, as we started to progressively inject technology and automation and digital stuff into the economy, the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot. 
Over this time frame, Ted has continued to hold a full-time job. Bill hasn't. 
In many cases, Bill has left the economy entirely, and Ted very rarely has. 
Over time, Ted's marriage has stayed quite happy. 
Bill's hasn't. 
And Ted's kids have grown up in a two-parent home, while Bill's absolutely have not over time. 
Other ways that Bill is dropping out of society? 
He's decreased his voting in presidential elections, and he's started to go to prison a lot more often. 
So I cannot tell a happy story about these social trends, and they don't show any signs of reversing themselves. 
They're also true no matter which ethnic group or demographic group we look at, and they're actually getting so severe that they're in danger of overwhelming even the amazing progress we made with the Civil Rights Movement. 
And what my friends in Silicon Valley and Cambridge are overlooking is that they're Ted. 
They're living these amazingly busy, productive lives, and they've got all the benefits to show from that, while Bill is leading a very different life. 
They're actually both proof of how right Voltaire was when he talked about the benefits of work, and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils. 
["" Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need. "" — Voltaire] So with these challenges, what do we do about them? 
The economic playbook is surprisingly clear, surprisingly straightforward, in the short term especially. 
The robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two, so the classic Econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine: Encourage entrepreneurship, double down on infrastructure, and make sure we're turning out people from our educational system with the appropriate skills. 
But over the longer term, if we are moving into an economy that's heavy on technology and light on labor, and we are, then we have to consider some more radical interventions, for example, something like a guaranteed minimum income. 
Now, that's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable, because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth. 
I did a little bit of research on this notion, and it might calm some folk down to know that the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman. 
And if you find yourself worried that something like a guaranteed income is going to stifle our drive to succeed and make us kind of complacent, you might be interested to know that social mobility, one of the things we really pride ourselves on in the United States, is now lower than it is in the northern European countries that have these very generous social safety nets. 
So the economic playbook is actually pretty straightforward. 
The societal one is a lot more challenging. 
I don't know what the playbook is for getting Bill to engage and stay engaged throughout life. 
I do know that education is a huge part of it. 
I witnessed this firsthand. 
I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education, and what that education taught me is that the world is an interesting place and my job is to go explore it. 
The school stopped in third grade, so then I entered the public school system, and it felt like I had been sent to the Gulag. 
With the benefit of hindsight, I now know the job was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer, but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of bore me into some submission with what was going on around me. 
We have to do better than this. 
We cannot keep turning out Bills. 
So we see some green shoots that things are getting better. 
We see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people, from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones. 
We see very prominent business voices telling us we need to rethink some of the things that we've been holding dear for a while. 
And we see very serious and sustained and data-driven efforts to understand how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have. 
So the green shoots are out there. 
I don't want to pretend for a minute that what we have is going to be enough. 
We're facing very tough challenges. 
To give just one example, there are about five million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months. 
We're not going to fix things for them by sending them back to Montessori. 
And my biggest worry is that we're creating a world where we're going to have glittering technologies embedded in kind of a shabby society and supported by an economy that generates inequality instead of opportunity. 
But I actually don't think that's what we're going to do. 
I think we're going to do something a lot better for one very straightforward reason: The facts are getting out there. 
The realities of this new machine age and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known. 
If we wanted to accelerate that process, we could do things like have our best economists and policymakers play "" Jeopardy! "" against Watson. 
We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip. 
And if we do enough of these kinds of things, the awareness is going to sink in that things are going to be different. 
And then we're off to the races, because I don't believe for a second that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try. 
I started my talk with quotes from wordsmiths who were separated by an ocean and a century. 
Let me end it with words from politicians who were similarly distant. 
Winston Churchill came to my home of MIT in 1949, and he said, "" If we are to bring the broad masses of the people in every land to the table of abundance, it can only be by the tireless improvement of all of our means of technical production. "" Abraham Lincoln realized there was one other ingredient. 
He said, "" I am a firm believer in the people. 
If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. 
The great point is to give them the plain facts. "" So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear, and I have every confidence that we're going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging, abundant economy that we're creating. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

As a singer-songwriter, people often ask me about my influences or, as I like to call them, my sonic lineages. 
And I could easily tell you that I was shaped by the jazz and hip hop that I grew up with, by the Ethiopian heritage of my ancestors, or by the 1980s pop on my childhood radio stations. 
But beyond genre, there is another question: how do the sounds we hear every day influence the music that we make? 
I believe that everyday soundscape can be the most unexpected inspiration for songwriting, and to look at this idea a little bit more closely, I'm going to talk today about three things: nature, language and silence — or rather, the impossibility of true silence. 
And through this I hope to give you a sense of a world already alive with musical expression, with each of us serving as active participants, whether we know it or not. 
I'm going to start today with nature, but before we do that, let's quickly listen to this snippet of an opera singer warming up. 
Here it is. 
(Singing) (Singing ends) It's beautiful, isn't it? 
Gotcha! 
That is actually not the sound of an opera singer warming up. 
That is the sound of a bird slowed down to a pace that the human ear mistakenly recognizes as its own. 
It was released as part of Peter Szöke's 1987 Hungarian recording "The Unknown Music of Birds," where he records many birds and slows down their pitches to reveal what's underneath. 
Let's listen to the full-speed recording. 
(Bird singing) Now, let's hear the two of them together so your brain can juxtapose them. 
(Bird singing at slow then full speed) (Singing ends) It's incredible. 
Perhaps the techniques of opera singing were inspired by birdsong. 
As humans, we intuitively understand birds to be our musical teachers. 
In Ethiopia, birds are considered an integral part of the origin of music itself. 
The story goes like this: 1,500 years ago, a young man was born in the Empire of Aksum, a major trading center of the ancient world. 
His name was Yared. 
When Yared was seven years old his father died, and his mother sent him to go live with an uncle, who was a priest of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, one of the oldest churches in the world. 
Now, this tradition has an enormous amount of scholarship and learning, and Yared had to study and study and study and study, and one day he was studying under a tree, when three birds came to him. 
One by one, these birds became his teachers. 
They taught him music — scales, in fact. 
And Yared, eventually recognized as Saint Yared, used these scales to compose five volumes of chants and hymns for worship and celebration. 
And he used these scales to compose and to create an indigenous musical notation system. 
And these scales evolved into what is known as kiñit, the unique, pentatonic, five-note, modal system that is very much alive and thriving and still evolving in Ethiopia today. 
Now, I love this story because it's true at multiple levels. 
Saint Yared was a real, historical figure, and the natural world can be our musical teacher. 
And we have so many examples of this: the Pygmies of the Congo tune their instruments to the pitches of the birds in the forest around them. 
Musician and natural soundscape expert Bernie Krause describes how a healthy environment has animals and insects taking up low, medium and high-frequency bands, in exactly the same way as a symphony does. 
And countless works of music were inspired by bird and forest song. 
Yes, the natural world can be our cultural teacher. 
So let's go now to the uniquely human world of language. 
Every language communicates with pitch to varying degrees, whether it's Mandarin Chinese, where a shift in melodic inflection gives the same phonetic syllable an entirely different meaning, to a language like English, where a raised pitch at the end of a sentence... 
(Going up in pitch) implies a question? 
(Laughter) As an Ethiopian-American woman, I grew up around the language of Amharic, Amhariña. 
It was my first language, the language of my parents, one of the main languages of Ethiopia. 
And there are a million reasons to fall in love with this language: its depth of poetics, its double entendres, its wax and gold, its humor, its proverbs that illuminate the wisdom and follies of life. 
But there's also this melodicism, a musicality built right in. 
And I find this distilled most clearly in what I like to call emphatic language — language that's meant to highlight or underline or that springs from surprise. 
Take, for example, the word: "" indey. "" Now, if there are Ethiopians in the audience, they're probably chuckling to themselves, because the word means something like "" No! "" or "" How could he? "" or "" No, he didn't. "" It kind of depends on the situation. 
But when I was a kid, this was my very favorite word, and I think it's because it has a pitch. 
It has a melody. 
You can almost see the shape as it springs from someone's mouth. 
"" Indey "" — it dips, and then raises again. 
And as a musician and composer, when I hear that word, something like this is floating through my mind. 
(Music and singing "" Indey "") (Music ends) Or take, for example, the phrase for "" It is right "" or "" It is correct "" — "Lickih nehu... Lickih nehu." 
It's an affirmation, an agreement. 
"Lickih nehu." 
When I hear that phrase, something like this starts rolling through my mind. 
(Music and singing "" Lickih nehu "") (Music ends) And in both of those cases, what I did was I took the melody and the phrasing of those words and phrases and I turned them into musical parts to use in these short compositions. 
And I like to write bass lines, so they both ended up kind of as bass lines. 
Now, this is based on the work of Jason Moran and others who work intimately with music and language, but it's also something I've had in my head since I was a kid, how musical my parents sounded when they were speaking to each other and to us. 
It was from them and from Amhariña that I learned that we are awash in musical expression with every word, every sentence that we speak, every word, every sentence that we receive. 
Perhaps you can hear it in the words I'm speaking even now. 
Finally, we go to the 1950s United States and the most seminal work of 20th century avant-garde composition: John Cage's "" 4: 33, "" written for any instrument or combination of instruments. 
The musician or musicians are invited to walk onto the stage with a stopwatch and open the score, which was actually purchased by the Museum of Modern Art — the score, that is. 
And this score has not a single note written and there is not a single note played for four minutes and 33 seconds. 
And, at once enraging and enrapturing, Cage shows us that even when there are no strings being plucked by fingers or hands hammering piano keys, still there is music, still there is music, still there is music. 
And what is this music? 
It was that sneeze in the back. 
(Laughter) It is the everyday soundscape that arises from the audience themselves: their coughs, their sighs, their rustles, their whispers, their sneezes, the room, the wood of the floors and the walls expanding and contracting, creaking and groaning with the heat and the cold, the pipes clanking and contributing. 
And controversial though it was, and even controversial though it remains, Cage's point is that there is no such thing as true silence. 
Even in the most silent environments, we still hear and feel the sound of our own heartbeats. 
The world is alive with musical expression. 
We are already immersed. 
Now, I had my own moment of, let's say, remixing John Cage a couple of months ago when I was standing in front of the stove cooking lentils. 
And it was late one night and it was time to stir, so I lifted the lid off the cooking pot, and I placed it onto the kitchen counter next to me, and it started to roll back and forth making this sound. 
(Sound of metal lid clanking against a counter) (Clanking ends) And it stopped me cold. 
I thought, "" What a weird, cool swing that cooking pan lid has. "" So when the lentils were ready and eaten, I hightailed it to my backyard studio, and I made this. 
(Music, including the sound of the lid, and singing) (Music ends) Now, John Cage wasn't instructing musicians to mine the soundscape for sonic textures to turn into music. 
He was saying that on its own, the environment is musically generative, that it is generous, that it is fertile, that we are already immersed. 
Musician, music researcher, surgeon and human hearing expert Charles Limb is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and he studies music and the brain. 
And he has a theory that it is possible — it is possible — that the human auditory system actually evolved to hear music, because it is so much more complex than it needs to be for language alone. 
And if that's true, it means that we're hard-wired for music, that we can find it anywhere, that there is no such thing as a musical desert, that we are permanently hanging out at the oasis, and that is marvelous. 
We can add to the soundtrack, but it's already playing. 
And it doesn't mean don't study music. 
Study music, trace your sonic lineages and enjoy that exploration. 
But there is a kind of sonic lineage to which we all belong. 
So the next time you are seeking percussion inspiration, look no further than your tires, as they roll over the unusual grooves of the freeway, or the top-right burner of your stove and that strange way that it clicks as it is preparing to light. 
When seeking melodic inspiration, look no further than dawn and dusk avian orchestras or to the natural lilt of emphatic language. 
We are the audience and we are the composers and we take from these pieces we are given. 
We make, we make, we make, we make, knowing that when it comes to nature or language or soundscape, there is no end to the inspiration — if we are listening. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In 2011, during the final six months of Kim Jong-Il's life, I lived undercover in North Korea. 
I was born and raised in South Korea, their enemy. 
I live in America, their other enemy. 
Since 2002, I had visited North Korea a few times. 
And I had come to realize that to write about it with any meaning, or to understand the place beyond the regime's propaganda, the only option was total immersion. 
So I posed as a teacher and a missionary at an all-male university in Pyongyang. 
The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology was founded by Evangelical Christians who cooperate with the regime to educate the sons of the North Korean elite, without proselytizing, which is a capital crime there. 
The students were 270 young men, expected to be the future leaders of the most isolated and brutal dictatorship in existence. 
When I arrived, they became my students. 
2011 was a special year, marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of North Korea's original Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung. 
To celebrate the occasion, the regime shut down all universities, and sent students off to the fields to build the DPRK's much-heralded ideal as the world's most powerful and prosperous nation. 
My students were the only ones spared from that fate. 
North Korea is a gulag posing as a nation. 
Everything there is about the Great Leader. 
Every book, every newspaper article, every song, every TV program — there is just one subject. 
The flowers are named after him, the mountains are carved with his slogans. 
Every citizen wears the badge of the Great Leader at all times. 
Even their calendar system begins with the birth of Kim Il-Sung. 
The school was a heavily guarded prison, posing as a campus. 
Teachers could only leave on group outings accompanied by an official minder. 
Even then, our trips were limited to sanctioned national monuments celebrating the Great Leader. 
The students were not allowed to leave the campus, or communicate with their parents. 
Their days were meticulously mapped out, and any free time they had was devoted to honoring their Great Leader. 
Lesson plans had to meet the approval of North Korean staff, every class was recorded and reported on, every room was bugged, and every conversation, overheard. 
Every blank space was covered with the portraits of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, like everywhere else in North Korea. 
We were never allowed to discuss the outside world. 
As students of science and technology, many of them were computer majors but they did not know the existence of the Internet. 
They had never heard of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. 
Facebook, Twitter — none of those things would have meant a thing. 
And I could not tell them. 
I went there looking for truth. 
But where do you even start when an entire nation's ideology, my students' day-to-day realities, and even my own position at the universities, were all built on lies? 
I started with a game. 
We played "" Truth and Lie. "" A volunteer would write a sentence on the chalkboard, and the other students had to guess whether it was a truth or a lie. 
Once a student wrote, "" I visited China last year on vacation, "" and everyone shouted, "" Lie! "" They all knew this wasn't possible. 
Virtually no North Korean is allowed to leave the country. 
Even traveling within their own country requires a travel pass. 
I had hoped that this game would reveal some truth about my students, because they lie so often and so easily, whether about the mythical accomplishments of their Great Leader, or the strange claim that they cloned a rabbit as fifth graders. 
The difference between truth and lies seemed at times hazy to them. 
It took me a while to understand the different types of lies; they lie to shield their system from the world, or they were taught lies, and were just regurgitating them. 
Or, at moments, they lied out of habit. 
But if all they have ever known were lies, how could we expect them to be otherwise? 
Next, I tried to teach them essay writing. 
But that turned out to be nearly impossible. 
Essays are about coming up with one's own thesis, and making an evidence-based argument to prove it. 
These students, however, were simply told what to think, and they obeyed. 
In their world, critical thinking was not allowed. 
I also gave them the weekly assignment of writing a personal letter, to anybody. 
It took a long time, but eventually some of them began to write to their mothers, their friends, their girlfriends. 
Although those were just homework, and would never reach their intended recipients, my students slowly began to reveal their true feelings in them. 
They were worried about their future. 
In those letters, they rarely ever mentioned their Great Leader. 
I was spending all of my time with these young men. 
We all ate meals together, played basketball together. 
I often called them gentlemen, which made them giggle. 
They blushed at the mention of girls. 
And I came to adore them. 
And watching them open up even in the tiniest of ways, was deeply moving. 
But something also felt wrong. 
During those months of living in their world, I often wondered if the truth would, in fact, improve their lives. 
I wanted so much to tell them the truth, of their country and of the outside world, where Arab youth were turning their rotten regime inside out, using the power of social media, where everyone except them was connected through the world wide web, which wasn't worldwide after all. 
But for them, the truth was dangerous. 
By encouraging them to run after it, I was putting them at risk — of persecution, of heartbreak. 
When you're not allowed to express anything in the open, you become good at reading what is unspoken. 
In one of their personal letters to me, a student wrote that he understood why I always called them gentlemen. 
It was because I was wishing them to be gentle in life, he said. 
On my last day in December of 2011, the day Kim Jong-Il's death was announced, their world shattered. 
I had to leave without a proper goodbye. 
Once, toward the end of my stay, a student said to me, "" Professor, we never think of you as being different from us. 
Our circumstances are different, but you're the same as us. 
We want you to know that we truly think of you as being the same. "" Today, if I could respond to my students with a letter of my own, which is of course impossible, I would tell them this: "" My dear gentlemen, It's been a bit over three years since I last saw you. 
And now, you must be 22 — maybe even as old as 23. 
At our final class, I asked you if there was anything you wanted. 
The only wish you expressed, the only thing you ever asked of me in all those months we spent together, was for me to speak to you in Korean. 
Just once. 
I was there to teach you English; you knew it wasn't allowed. 
But I understood then, you wanted to share that bond of our mother tongue. 
I called you my gentlemen, but I don't know if being gentle in Kim Jong-Un's merciless North Korea is a good thing. 
I don't want you to lead a revolution — let some other young person do it. 
The rest of the world might casually encourage or even expect some sort of North Korean Spring, but I don't want you to do anything risky, because I know in your world, someone is always watching. 
I don't want to imagine what might happen to you. 
If my attempts to reach you have inspired something new in you, I would rather you forget me. 
Become soldiers of your Great Leader, and live long, safe lives. 
You once asked me if I thought your city of Pyongyang was beautiful, and I could not answer truthfully then. 
But I know why you asked. 
I know that it was important for you to hear that I, your teacher, the one who has seen the world that you are forbidden from, declare your city as the most beautiful. 
I know hearing that would make your lives there a bit more bearable, but no, I don't find your capital beautiful. 
Not because it's monotone and concrete, but because of what it symbolizes: a monster that feeds off the rest of the country, where citizens are soldiers and slaves. 
All I see there is darkness. 
But it's your home, so I cannot hate it. 
And I hope instead that you, my lovely young gentlemen, will one day help make it beautiful. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

War has been a part of my life since I can remember. 
I was born in Afghanistan, just six months after the Soviets invaded, and even though I was too young to understand what was happening, I had a deep sense of the suffering and the fear around me. 
Those early experiences had a major impact on how I now think about war and conflict. 
I learned that when people have a fundamental issue at stake, for most of them, giving in is not an option. 
For these types conflicts — when people's rights are violated, when their countries are occupied, when they're oppressed and humiliated — they need a powerful way to resist and to fight back. 
Which means that no matter how destructive and terrible violence is, if people see it as their only choice, they will use it. 
Most of us are concerned with the level of violence in the world. 
But we're not going to end war by telling people that violence is morally wrong. 
Instead, we must offer them a tool that's at least as powerful and as effective as violence. 
This is the work I do. 
For the past 13 years, I've been teaching people in some of the most difficult situations around the world how they can use nonviolent struggle to conduct conflict. 
Most people associate this type of action with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. 
But people have been using nonviolent action for thousands of years. 
In fact, most of the rights that we have today in this country — as women, as minorities, as workers, as people of different sexual orientations and citizens concerned with the environment — these rights weren't handed to us. 
They were won by people who fought for them and who sacrificed for them. 
But because we haven't learned from this history, nonviolent struggle as a technique is widely misunderstood. 
I met recently with a group of Ethiopian activists, and they told me something that I hear a lot. 
They said they'd already tried nonviolent action, and it hadn't worked. 
Years ago they held a protest. 
The government arrested everyone, and that was the end of that. 
The idea that nonviolent struggle is equivalent to street protests is a real problem. 
Because although protests can be a great way to show that people want change, on their own, they don't actually create change — at least change that is fundamental. 
(Laughter) Powerful opponents are not going to give people what they want just because they asked nicely... 
or even not so nicely. 
(Laughter) Nonviolent struggle works by destroying an opponent, not physically, but by identifying the institutions that an opponent needs to survive, and then denying them those sources of power. 
Nonviolent activists can neutralize the military by causing soldiers to defect. 
They can disrupt the economy through strikes and boycotts. 
And they can challenge government propaganda by creating alternative media. 
There are a variety of methods that can be used to do this. 
My colleague and mentor, Gene Sharp, has identified 198 methods of nonviolent action. 
And protest is only one. 
Let me give you a recent example. 
Until a few months ago, Guatemala was ruled by corrupt former military officials with ties to organized crime. 
People were generally aware of this, but most of them felt powerless to do anything about it — until one group of citizens, just 12 regular people, put out a call on Facebook to their friends to meet in the central plaza, holding signs with a message: "" Renuncia YA "" — resign already. 
To their surprise, 30,000 people showed up. 
They stayed there for months as protests spread throughout the country. 
At one point, the organizers delivered hundreds of eggs to various government buildings with a message: "" If you don't have the huevos "" — the balls — "" to stop corrupt candidates from running for office, you can borrow ours. "" (Laughter) (Applause) President Molina responded by vowing that he would never step down. 
And the activists realized that they couldn't just keep protesting and ask the president to resign. 
They needed to leave him no choice. 
So they organized a general strike, in which people throughout the country refused to work. 
In Guatemala City alone, over 400 businesses and schools shut their doors. 
Meanwhile, farmers throughout the country blocked major roads. 
Within five days, the president, along with dozens of other government officials, resigned already. 
(Applause) I've been greatly inspired by the creativity and bravery of people using nonviolent action in nearly every country in the world. 
For example, recently a group of activists in Uganda released a crate of pigs in the streets. 
You can see here that the police are confused about what to do with them. 
(Laughter) The pigs were painted the color of the ruling party. 
One pig was even wearing a hat, a hat that people recognized. 
(Laughter) Activists around the world are getting better at grabbing headlines, but these isolated actions do very little if they're not part of a larger strategy. 
A general wouldn't march his troops into battle unless he had a plan to win the war. 
Yet this is how most of the world's nonviolent movements operate. 
Nonviolent struggle is just as complex as military warfare, if not more. 
Its participants must be well-trained and have clear objectives, and its leaders must have a strategy of how to achieve those objectives. 
The technique of war has been developed over thousands of years with massive resources and some of our best minds dedicated to understanding and improving how it works. 
Meanwhile, nonviolent struggle is rarely systematically studied, and even though the number is growing, there are still only a few dozen people in the world who are teaching it. 
This is dangerous, because we now know that our old approaches of dealing with conflict are not adequate for the new challenges that we're facing. 
The US government recently admitted that it's in a stalemate in its war against ISIS. 
But what most people don't know is that people have stood up to ISIS using nonviolent action. 
When ISIS captured Mosul in June 2014, they announced that they were putting in place a new public school curriculum, based on their own extremist ideology. 
But on the first day of school, not a single child showed up. 
Parents simply refused to send them. 
They told journalists they would rather homeschool their children than to have them brainwashed. 
This is an example of just one act of defiance in just one city. 
But what if it was coordinated with the dozens of other acts of nonviolent resistance that have taken place against ISIS? 
What if the parents' boycott was part of a larger strategy to identify and cut off the resources that ISIS needs to function; the skilled labor needed to produce food; the engineers needed to extract and refine oil; the media infrastructure and communications networks and transportation systems, and the local businesses that ISIS relies on? 
It may be difficult to imagine defeating ISIS with action that is nonviolent. 
But it's time we challenge the way we think about conflict and the choices we have in facing it. 
Here's an idea worth spreading: let's learn more about where nonviolent action has worked and how we can make it more powerful, just like we do with other systems and technologies that are constantly being refined to better meet human needs. 
It may be that we can improve nonviolent action to a point where it is increasingly used in place of war. 
Violence as a tool of conflict could then be abandoned in the same way that bows and arrows were, because we have replaced them with weapons that are more effective. 
With human innovation, we can make nonviolent struggle more powerful than the newest and latest technologies of war. 
The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning violence but in making violence obsolete. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Music) These bees are in my backyard in Berkeley, California. 
Until last year, I'd never kept bees before, but National Geographic asked me to photograph a story about them, and I decided, to be able to take compelling images, I should start keeping bees myself. 
And as you may know, bees pollinate one third of our food crops, and lately they've been having a really hard time. 
So as a photographer, I wanted to explore what this problem really looks like. 
So I'm going to show you what I found over the last year. 
This furry little creature is a fresh young bee halfway emerged from its brood cell, and bees right now are dealing with several different problems, including pesticides, diseases, and habitat loss, but the single greatest threat is a parasitic mite from Asia, Varroa destructor. 
And this pinhead-sized mite crawls onto young bees and sucks their blood. 
This eventually destroys a hive because it weakens the immune system of the bees, and it makes them more vulnerable to stress and disease. 
Now, bees are the most sensitive when they're developing inside their brood cells, and I wanted to know what that process really looks like, so I teamed up with a bee lab at U.C. Davis and figured out how to raise bees in front of a camera. 
I'm going to show you the first 21 days of a bee's life condensed into 60 seconds. 
This is a bee egg as it hatches into a larva, and those newly hatched larvae swim around their cells feeding on this white goo that nurse bees secrete for them. 
Then, their head and their legs slowly differentiate as they transform into pupae. 
Here's that same pupation process, and you can actually see the mites running around in the cells. 
Then the tissue in their body reorganizes and the pigment slowly develops in their eyes. 
The last step of the process is their skin shrivels up and they sprout hair. 
(Music) So — (Applause) As you can see halfway through that video, the mites were running around on the baby bees, and the way that beekeepers typically manage these mites is they treat their hives with chemicals. 
In the long run, that's bad news, so researchers are working on finding alternatives to control these mites. 
This is one of those alternatives. 
It's an experimental breeding program at the USDA Bee Lab in Baton Rouge, and this queen and her attendant bees are part of that program. 
Now, the researchers figured out that some of the bees have a natural ability to fight mites, so they set out to breed a line of mite-resistant bees. 
This is what it takes to breed bees in a lab. 
The virgin queen is sedated and then artificially inseminated using this precision instrument. 
Now, this procedure allows the researchers to control exactly which bees are being crossed, but there's a tradeoff in having this much control. 
They succeeded in breeding mite-resistant bees, but in that process, those bees started to lose traits like their gentleness and their ability to store honey, so to overcome that problem, these researchers are now collaborating with commercial beekeepers. 
This is Bret Adee opening one of his 72,000 beehives. 
He and his brother run the largest beekeeping operation in the world, and the USDA is integrating their mite-resistant bees into his operation with the hope that over time, they'll be able to select the bees that are not only mite-resistant but also retain all of these qualities that make them useful to us. 
And to say it like that makes it sound like we're manipulating and exploiting bees, and the truth is, we've been doing that for thousands of years. 
We took this wild creature and put it inside of a box, practically domesticating it, and originally that was so that we could harvest their honey, but over time we started losing our native pollinators, our wild pollinators, and there are many places now where those wild pollinators can no longer meet the pollination demands of our agriculture, so these managed bees have become an integral part of our food system. 
So when people talk about saving bees, my interpretation of that is we need to save our relationship to bees, and in order to design new solutions, we have to understand the basic biology of bees and understand the effects of stressors that we sometimes cannot see. 
In other words, we have to understand bees up close. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In half a century of trying to help prevent wars, there's one question that never leaves me: How do we deal with extreme violence without using force in return? 
When you're faced with brutality, whether it's a child facing a bully on a playground or domestic violence — or, on the streets of Syria today, facing tanks and shrapnel, what's the most effective thing to do? 
Fight back? Give in? 
Use more force? 
This question: "" How do I deal with a bully without becoming a thug in return? "" has been with me ever since I was a child. 
I remember I was about 13, glued to a grainy black and white television in my parents' living room as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, and kids not much older than me were throwing themselves at the tanks and getting mown down. 
And I rushed upstairs and started packing my suitcase. 
And my mother came up and said, "" What on Earth are you doing? "" And I said, "" I'm going to Budapest. "" And she said, "" What on Earth for? "" And I said, "" Kids are getting killed there. 
There's something terrible happening. "" And she said, "" Don't be so silly. "" And I started to cry. 
And she got it, she said, "" Okay, I see it's serious. 
You're much too young to help. 
You need training. I'll help you. 
But just unpack your suitcase. "" And so I got some training and went and worked in Africa during most of my 20s. 
But I realized that what I really needed to know I couldn't get from training courses. 
I wanted to understand how violence, how oppression, works. 
And what I've discovered since is this: Bullies use violence in three ways. 
They use political violence to intimidate, physical violence to terrorize and mental or emotional violence to undermine. 
And only very rarely in very few cases does it work to use more violence. 
Nelson Mandela went to jail believing in violence, and 27 years later he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the skills, the incredible skills, that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy. 
And they did it in a total devotion to non-violence. 
They realized that using force against force doesn't work. 
So what does work? 
Over time I've collected about a half-dozen methods that do work — of course there are many more — that do work and that are effective. 
And the first is that the change that has to take place has to take place here, inside me. 
It's my response, my attitude, to oppression that I've got control over, and that I can do something about. 
And what I need to develop is self-knowledge to do that. 
That means I need to know how I tick, when I collapse, where my formidable points are, where my weaker points are. 
When do I give in? 
What will I stand up for? 
And meditation or self-inspection is one of the ways — again it's not the only one — it's one of the ways of gaining this kind of inner power. 
And my heroine here — like Satish's — is Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. 
She was leading a group of students on a protest in the streets of Rangoon. 
They came around a corner faced with a row of machine guns. 
And she realized straight away that the soldiers with their fingers shaking on the triggers were more scared than the student protesters behind her. 
But she told the students to sit down. 
And she walked forward with such calm and such clarity and such total lack of fear that she could walk right up to the first gun, put her hand on it and lower it. 
And no one got killed. 
So that's what the mastery of fear can do — not only faced with machine guns, but if you meet a knife fight in the street. 
But we have to practice. 
So what about our fear? 
I have a little mantra. 
My fear grows fat on the energy I feed it. 
And if it grows very big it probably happens. 
So we all know the three o'clock in the morning syndrome, when something you've been worrying about wakes you up — I see a lot of people — and for an hour you toss and turn, it gets worse and worse, and by four o'clock you're pinned to the pillow by a monster this big. 
The only thing to do is to get up, make a cup of tea and sit down with the fear like a child beside you. 
You're the adult. 
The fear is the child. 
And you talk to the fear and you ask it what it wants, what it needs. 
How can this be made better? 
How can the child feel stronger? 
And you make a plan. 
And you say, "" Okay, now we're going back to sleep. 
Half-past seven, we're getting up and that's what we're going to do. "" I had one of these 3 a.m. episodes on Sunday — paralyzed with fear at coming to talk to you. 
(Laughter) So I did the thing. 
I got up, made the cup of tea, sat down with it, did it all and I'm here — still partly paralyzed, but I'm here. 
(Applause) So that's fear. What about anger? 
Wherever there is injustice there's anger. 
But anger is like gasoline, and if you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno. 
But anger as an engine — in an engine — is powerful. 
If we can put our anger inside an engine, it can drive us forward, it can get us through the dreadful moments and it can give us real inner power. 
And I learned this in my work with nuclear weapon policy-makers. 
Because at the beginning I was so outraged at the dangers they were exposing us to that I just wanted to argue and blame and make them wrong. 
Totally ineffective. 
In order to develop a dialogue for change we have to deal with our anger. 
It's okay to be angry with the thing — the nuclear weapons in this case — but it is hopeless to be angry with the people. 
They are human beings just like us. 
And they're doing what they think is best. 
And that's the basis on which we have to talk with them. 
So that's the third one, anger. 
And it brings me to the crux of what's going on, or what I perceive as going on, in the world today, which is that last century was top-down power. 
It was still governments telling people what to do. 
This century there's a shift. 
It's bottom-up or grassroots power. 
It's like mushrooms coming through concrete. 
It's people joining up with people, as Bundy just said, miles away to bring about change. 
And Peace Direct spotted quite early on that local people in areas of very hot conflict know what to do. 
They know best what to do. 
So Peace Direct gets behind them to do that. 
And the kind of thing they're doing is demobilizing militias, rebuilding economies, resettling refugees, even liberating child soldiers. 
And they have to risk their lives almost every day to do this. 
And what they've realized is that using violence in the situations they operate in is not only less humane, but it's less effective than using methods that connect people with people, that rebuild. 
And I think that the U.S. military is finally beginning to get this. 
Up to now their counter-terrorism policy has been to kill insurgents at almost any cost, and if civilians get in the way, that's written as "" collateral damage. "" And this is so infuriating and humiliating for the population of Afghanistan, that it makes the recruitment for al-Qaeda very easy, when people are so disgusted by, for example, the burning of the Koran. 
So the training of the troops has to change. 
And I think there are signs that it is beginning to change. 
The British military have always been much better at this. 
But there is one magnificent example for them to take their cue from, and that's a brilliant U.S. lieutenant colonel called Chris Hughes. 
And he was leading his men down the streets of Najaf — in Iraq actually — and suddenly people were pouring out of the houses on either side of the road, screaming, yelling, furiously angry, and surrounded these very young troops who were completely terrified, didn't know what was going on, couldn't speak Arabic. 
And Chris Hughes strode into the middle of the throng with his weapon above his head, pointing at the ground, and he said, "" Kneel. "" And these huge soldiers with their backpacks and their body armor, wobbled to the ground. 
And complete silence fell. 
And after about two minutes, everybody moved aside and went home. 
Now that to me is wisdom in action. 
In the moment, that's what he did. 
And it's happening everywhere now. 
You don't believe me? 
Have you asked yourselves why and how so many dictatorships have collapsed over the last 30 years? 
Dictatorships in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mali, Madagascar, Poland, the Philippines, Serbia, Slovenia, I could go on, and now Tunisia and Egypt. 
And this hasn't just happened. 
A lot of it is due to a book written by an 80-year-old man in Boston, Gene Sharp. 
He wrote a book called "" From Dictatorship to Democracy "" with 81 methodologies for non-violent resistance. 
And it's been translated into 26 languages. 
It's flown around the world. 
And it's being used by young people and older people everywhere, because it works and it's effective. 
So this is what gives me hope — not just hope, this is what makes me feel very positive right now. 
Because finally human beings are getting it. 
We're getting practical, doable methodologies to answer my question: How do we deal with a bully without becoming a thug? 
We're using the kind of skills that I've outlined: inner power — the development of inner power — through self-knowledge, recognizing and working with our fear, using anger as a fuel, cooperating with others, banding together with others, courage, and most importantly, commitment to active non-violence. 
Now I don't just believe in non-violence. 
I don't have to believe in it. 
I see evidence everywhere of how it works. 
And I see that we, ordinary people, can do what Aung San Suu Kyi and Ghandi and Mandela did. 
We can bring to an end the bloodiest century that humanity has ever known. 
And we can organize to overcome oppression by opening our hearts as well as strengthening this incredible resolve. 
And this open-heartedness is exactly what I've experienced in the entire organization of this gathering since I got here yesterday. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So this is James Risen. 
You may know him as the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. 
Long before anybody knew Edward Snowden's name, Risen wrote a book in which he famously exposed that the NSA was illegally wiretapping the phone calls of Americans. 
But it's another chapter in that book that may have an even more lasting impact. 
In it, he describes a catastrophic US intelligence operation in which the CIA quite literally handed over blueprints of a nuclear bomb to Iran. 
If that sounds crazy, go read it. 
It's an incredible story. 
But you know who didn't like that chapter? 
The US government. 
For nearly a decade afterwards, Risen was the subject of a US government investigation in which prosecutors demanded that he testify against one of his alleged sources. 
And along the way, he became the face for the US government's recent pattern of prosecuting whistleblowers and spying on journalists. 
You see, under the First Amendment, the press has the right to publish secret information in the public interest. 
But it's impossible to exercise that right if the media can't also gather that news and protect the identities of the brave men and women who get it to them. 
So when the government came knocking, Risen did what many brave reporters have done before him: he refused and said he'd rather go to jail. 
So from 2007 to 2015, Risen lived under the specter of going to federal prison. 
That is, until just days before the trial, when a curious thing happened. 
Suddenly, after years of claiming it was vital to their case, the government dropped their demands to Risen altogether. 
It turns out, in the age of electronic surveillance, there are very few places reporters and sources can hide. 
And instead of trying and failing to have Risen testify, they could have his digital trail testify against him instead. 
So completely in secret and without his consent, prosecutors got Risen's phone records. 
They got his email records, his financial and banking information, his credit reports, even travel records with a list of flights he had taken. 
And it was among this information that they used to convict Jeffrey Sterling, Risen's alleged source and CIA whistleblower. 
Sadly, this is only one case of many. 
President Obama ran on a promise to protect whistleblowers, and instead, his Justice Department has prosecuted more than all other administrations combined. 
Now, you can see how this could be a problem, especially because the government considers so much of what it does secret. 
Since 9 / 11, virtually every important story about national security has been the result of a whistleblower coming to a journalist. 
So we risk seeing the press unable to do their job that the First Amendment is supposed to protect because of the government's expanded ability to spy on everyone. 
But just as technology has allowed the government to circumvent reporters' rights, the press can also use technology to protect their sources even better than before. 
And they can start from the moment they begin speaking with them, rather than on the witness stand after the fact. 
Communications software now exists that wasn't available when Risen was writing his book, and is much more surveillance-resistant than regular emails or phone calls. 
For example, one such tool is SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that was originally created by the late Internet luminary Aaron Swartz, and is now developed at the non-profit where I work, Freedom of the Press Foundation. 
Instead of sending an email, you go to a news organization's website, like this one here on The Washington Post. 
From there, you can upload a document or send information much like you would on any other contact form. 
It'll then be encrypted and stored on a server that only the news organization has access to. 
So the government can no longer secretly demand the information, and much of the information they would demand wouldn't be available in the first place. 
SecureDrop, though, is really only a small part of the puzzle for protecting press freedom in the 21st century. 
Unfortunately, governments all over the world are constantly developing new spying techniques that put us all at risk. 
And it's up to us going forward to make sure that it's not just the tech-savvy whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden, who have an avenue for exposing wrongdoing. 
It's just as vital that we protect the next veteran's health care whistleblower alerting us to overcrowded hospitals, or the next environmental worker sounding the alarm about Flint's dirty water, or a Wall Street insider warning us of the next financial crisis. 
After all, these tools weren't just built to help the brave men and women who expose crimes, but are meant to protect all of our rights under the Constitution. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We are drowning in news. 
Reuters alone puts out three and a half million news stories a year. 
That's just one source. 
My question is: How many of those stories are actually going to matter in the long run? 
That's the idea behind The Long News. 
It's a project by The Long Now Foundation, which was founded by TEDsters including Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand. 
And what we're looking for is news stories that might still matter 50 or 100 or 10,000 years from now. 
And when you look at the news through that filter, a lot falls by the wayside. 
To take the top stories from the A.P. this last year, is this going to matter in a decade? 
Or this? Or this? 
Really? Is this going to matter in 50 or 100 years? Okay, that was kind of cool. (Laughter) 
But the top story of this past year was the economy, and I'm just betting that, sooner or later, this particular recession is going to be old news. 
So, what kind of stories might make a difference for the future? 
Well, let's take science. 
Someday, little robots will go through our bloodstreams fixing things. 
Some recent stories: nanobees zap tumors with real bee venom; they're sending genes into the brain; a robot they built that can crawl through the human body. 
We're having trouble feeding six billion today. 
What about global politics? 
The world's going to be very different when and if China sets the agenda, and they may. 
They've overtaken the U.S. as the world's biggest car market, they've overtaken Germany as the largest exporter, and they've started doing DNA tests on kids to choose their careers. 
Some recent discoveries: There's an ant colony from Argentina that has now spread to every continent but Antarctica; there's a self-directed robot scientist that's made a discovery — soon, science may no longer need us, and life may no longer need us either; a microbe wakes up after 120,000 years. 
It seems that with or without us, life will go on. 
But my pick for the top Long News story of this past year was this one: water found on the moon. 
My point is this: In the long run, some news stories are more important than others. 
(Applause) 

What does a working mother look like? 
If you ask the Internet, this is what you'll be told. 
Never mind that this is what you'll actually produce if you attempt to work at a computer with a baby on your lap. 
(Laughter) But no, this isn't a working mother. 
You'll notice a theme in these photos. We'll look at a lot of them. 
That theme is amazing natural lighting, which, as we all know, is the hallmark of every American workplace. 
There are thousands of images like these. 
Just put the term "" working mother "" into any Google image search engine, stock photo site. 
They're all over the Internet, they're topping blog posts and news pieces, and I've become kind of obsessed with them and the lie that they tell us and the comfort that they give us, that when it comes to new working motherhood in America, everything's fine. 
But it's not fine. 
As a country, we are sending millions of women back to work every year, incredibly and kind of horrifically soon after they give birth. 
That's a moral problem but today I'm also going to tell you why it's an economic problem. 
I got so annoyed and obsessed with the unreality of these images, which look nothing like my life, that I recently decided to shoot and star in a parody series of stock photos that I hoped the world would start to use just showing the really awkward reality of going back to work when your baby's food source is attached to your body. 
I'm just going to show you two of them. 
(Laughter) Nothing says "" Give that girl a promotion "" like leaking breast milk through your dress during a presentation. 
You'll notice that there's no baby in this photo, because that's not how this works, not for most working mothers. 
Did you know, and this will ruin your day, that every time a toilet is flushed, its contents are aerosolized and they'll stay airborne for hours? 
And yet, for many new working mothers, this is the only place during the day that they can find to make food for their newborn babies. 
I put these things, a whole dozen of them, into the world. 
I wanted to make a point. 
I didn't know what I was also doing was opening a door, because now, total strangers from all walks of life write to me all the time just to tell me what it's like for them to go back to work within days or weeks of having a baby. 
I'm going to share 10 of their stories with you today. 
They are totally real, some of them are very raw, and not one of them looks anything like this. 
Here's the first. 
"" I was an active duty service member at a federal prison. 
I returned to work after the maximum allowed eight weeks for my C-section. 
A male coworker was annoyed that I had been out on 'vacation,' so he intentionally opened the door on me while I was pumping breast milk and stood in the doorway with inmates in the hallway. "" Most of the stories that these women, total strangers, send to me now, are not actually even about breastfeeding. 
A woman wrote to me to say, "" I gave birth to twins and went back to work after seven unpaid weeks. 
Emotionally, I was a wreck. 
Physically, I had a severe hemorrhage during labor, and major tearing, so I could barely get up, sit or walk. 
My employer told me I wasn't allowed to use my available vacation days because it was budget season. "" I've come to believe that we can't look situations like these in the eye because then we'd be horrified, and if we get horrified then we have to do something about it. 
So we choose to look at, and believe, this image. 
I don't really know what's going on in this picture, because I find it weird and slightly creepy. 
(Laughter) Like, what is she doing? 
But I know what it tells us. 
It tells us that everything's fine. 
This working mother, all working mothers and all of their babies, are fine. 
There's nothing to see here. 
And anyway, women have made a choice, so none of it's even our problem. 
I want to break this choice thing down into two parts. 
The first choice says that women have chosen to work. 
So, that's not true. 
Today in America, women make up 47 percent of the workforce, and in 40 percent of American households a woman is the sole or primary breadwinner. 
Our paid work is a part, a huge part, of the engine of this economy, and it is essential for the engines of our families. 
On a national level, our paid work is not optional. 
Choice number two says that women are choosing to have babies, so women alone should bear the consequences of those choices. 
You know, that's one of those things that when you hear it in passing, can sound correct. 
I didn't make you have a baby. 
I certainly wasn't there when that happened. 
But that stance ignores a fundamental truth, which is that our procreation on a national scale is not optional. 
The babies that women, many of them working women, are having today, will one day fill our workforce, protect our shores, make up our tax base. 
Our procreation on a national scale is not optional. 
These aren't choices. 
We need women to work. We need working women to have babies. 
So we should make doing those things at the same time at least palatable, right? 
OK, this is pop quiz time: what percentage of working women in America do you think have no access to paid maternity leave? 
88 percent. 
88 percent of working mothers will not get one minute of paid leave after they have a baby. 
So now you're thinking about unpaid leave. 
It exists in America. It's called FMLA. It does not work. 
Because of the way it's structured, all kinds of exceptions, half of new mothers are ineligible for it. 
Here's what that looks like. 
"" We adopted our son. 
When I got the call, the day he was born, I had to take off work. 
I had not been there long enough to qualify for FMLA, so I wasn't eligible for unpaid leave. 
When I took time off to meet my newborn son, I lost my job. "" These corporate stock photos hide another reality, another layer. 
Of those who do have access to just that unpaid leave, most women can't afford to take much of it at all. 
A nurse told me, "" I didn't qualify for short-term disability because my pregnancy was considered a preexisting condition. 
We used up all of our tax returns and half of our savings during my six unpaid weeks. 
We just couldn't manage any longer. 
Physically it was hard, but emotionally it was worse. 
I struggled for months being away from my son. "" So this decision to go back to work so early, it's a rational economic decision driven by family finances, but it's often physically horrific because putting a human into the world is messy. 
A waitress told me, "" With my first baby, I was back at work five weeks postpartum. 
With my second, I had to have major surgery after giving birth, so I waited until six weeks to go back. 
I had third degree tears. "" 23 percent of new working mothers in America will be back on the job within two weeks of giving birth. 
"" I worked as a bartender and cook, average of 75 hours a week while pregnant. 
I had to return to work before my baby was a month old, working 60 hours a week. 
One of my coworkers was only able to afford 10 days off with her baby. "" Of course, this isn't just a scenario with economic and physical implications. 
Childbirth is, and always will be, an enormous psychological event. 
A teacher told me, "" I returned to work eight weeks after my son was born. 
I already suffer from anxiety, but the panic attacks I had prior to returning to work were unbearable. "" Statistically speaking, the shorter a woman's leave after having a baby, the more likely she will be to suffer from postpartum mood disorders like depression and anxiety, and among many potential consequences of those disorders, suicide is the second most common cause of death in a woman's first year postpartum. 
Heads up that this next story — I've never met this woman, but I find it hard to get through. 
"" I feel tremendous grief and rage that I lost an essential, irreplaceable and formative time with my son. 
Labor and delivery left me feeling absolutely broken. 
For months, all I remember is the screaming: colic, they said. 
On the inside, I was drowning. 
Every morning, I asked myself how much longer I could do it. 
I was allowed to bring my baby to work. 
I closed my office door while I rocked and shushed and begged him to stop screaming so I wouldn't get in trouble. 
I hid behind that office door every damn day and cried while he screamed. 
I cried in the bathroom while I washed out the pump equipment. 
Every day, I cried all the way to work and all the way home again. 
I promised my boss that the work I didn't get done during the day, I'd make up at night from home. 
I thought, there's just something wrong with me that I can't swing this. "" So those are the mothers. 
What of the babies? 
As a country, do we care about the millions of babies born every year to working mothers? 
I say we don't, not until they're of working and tax-paying and military-serving age. 
We tell them we'll see them in 18 years, and getting there is kind of on them. 
One of the reasons I know this is that babies whose mothers have 12 or more weeks at home with them are more likely to get their vaccinations and their well checks in their first year, so those babies are more protected from deadly and disabling diseases. 
But those things are hidden behind images like this. 
America has a message for new mothers who work and for their babies. 
Whatever time you get together, you should be grateful for it, and you're an inconvenience to the economy and to your employers. 
That narrative of gratitude runs through a lot of the stories I hear. 
A woman told me, "" I went back at eight weeks after my C-section because my husband was out of work. 
Without me, my daughter had failure to thrive. 
She wouldn't take a bottle. 
She started losing weight. 
Thankfully, my manager was very understanding. 
He let my mom bring my baby, who was on oxygen and a monitor, four times a shift so I could nurse her. "" There's a little club of countries in the world that offer no national paid leave to new mothers. 
Care to guess who they are? 
The first eight make up eight million in total population. 
They are Papua New Guinea, Suriname and the tiny island nations of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tonga. 
Number nine is the United States of America, with 320 million people. 
Oh, that's it. 
That's the end of the list. 
Every other economy on the planet has found a way to make some level of national paid leave work for the people doing the work of the future of those countries, but we say, "" We couldn't possibly do that. "" We say that the market will solve this problem, and then we cheer when corporations offer even more paid leave to the women who are already the highest-educated and highest-paid among us. 
Remember that 88 percent? 
Those middle- and low-income women are not going to participate in that. 
We know that there are staggering economic, financial, physical and emotional costs to this approach. 
We have decided — decided, not an accident, to pass these costs directly on to working mothers and their babies. 
We know the price tag is higher for low-income women, therefore disproportionately for women of color. 
We pass them on anyway. 
All of this is to America's shame. 
But it's also to America's risk. 
Because what would happen if all of these individual so-called choices to have babies started to turn into individual choices not to have babies. 
One woman told me, "" New motherhood is hard. It shouldn't be traumatic. 
When we talk about expanding our family now, we focus on how much time I would have to care for myself and a new baby. 
If we were to have to do it again the same way as with our first, we might stick with one kid. "" The birthrate needed in America to keep the population stable is 2.1 live births per woman. 
In America today, we are at 1.86. 
We need women to have babies, and we are actively disincentivizing working women from doing that. 
What would happen to work force, to innovation, to GDP, if one by one, the working mothers of this country were to decide that they can't bear to do this thing more than once? 
I'm here today with only one idea worth spreading, and you've guessed what it is. 
It is long since time for the most powerful country on Earth to offer national paid leave to the people doing the work of the future of this country and to the babies who represent that future. 
Childbirth is a public good. 
This leave should be state-subsidized. 
It should have no exceptions for small businesses, length of employment or entrepreneurs. 
It should be able to be shared between partners. 
I've talked today a lot about mothers, but co-parents matter on so many levels. 
Not one more woman should have to go back to work while she is hobbling and bleeding. 
Not one more family should have to drain their savings account to buy a few days of rest and recovery and bonding. 
Not one more fragile infant should have to go directly from the incubator to day care because his parents have used up all of their meager time sitting in the NICU. 
Not one more working family should be told that the collision of their work, their needed work and their needed parenthood, is their problem alone. 
The catch is that when this is happening to a new family, it is consuming, and a family with a new baby is more financially vulnerable than they've ever been before, so that new mother cannot afford to speak up on her own behalf. 
But all of us have voices. 
I am done, done having babies, and you might be pre-baby, you might be post-baby, you might be no baby. 
It should not matter. 
We have to stop framing this as a mother's issue, or even a women's issue. 
This is an American issue. 
We need to stop buying the lie that these images tell us. 
We need to stop being comforted by them. 
We need to question why we're told that this can't work when we see it work everywhere all over the world. 
We need to recognize that this American reality is to our dishonor and to our peril. 
Because this is not, this is not, and this is not what a working mother looks like. 

Let me tell you a story. 
It goes back 200 million years. 
It's a story of the neocortex, which means "" new rind. "" So in these early mammals, because only mammals have a neocortex, rodent-like creatures. 
It was the size of a postage stamp and just as thin, and was a thin covering around their walnut-sized brain, but it was capable of a new type of thinking. 
Rather than the fixed behaviors that non-mammalian animals have, it could invent new behaviors. 
So a mouse is escaping a predator, its path is blocked, it'll try to invent a new solution. 
That may work, it may not, but if it does, it will remember that and have a new behavior, and that can actually spread virally through the rest of the community. 
Another mouse watching this could say, "Hey, that was pretty clever, going around that rock," and it could adopt a new behavior as well. 
Non-mammalian animals couldn't do any of those things. 
They had fixed behaviors. 
Now they could learn a new behavior but not in the course of one lifetime. 
In the course of maybe a thousand lifetimes, it could evolve a new fixed behavior. 
That was perfectly okay 200 million years ago. 
The environment changed very slowly. 
It could take 10,000 years for there to be a significant environmental change, and during that period of time it would evolve a new behavior. 
Now that went along fine, but then something happened. 
Sixty-five million years ago, there was a sudden, violent change to the environment. 
We call it the Cretaceous extinction event. 
That's when the dinosaurs went extinct, that's when 75 percent of the animal and plant species went extinct, and that's when mammals overtook their ecological niche, and to anthropomorphize, biological evolution said, "Hmm, this neocortex is pretty good stuff," and it began to grow it. 
And mammals got bigger, their brains got bigger at an even faster pace, and the neocortex got bigger even faster than that and developed these distinctive ridges and folds basically to increase its surface area. 
If you took the human neocortex and stretched it out, it's about the size of a table napkin, and it's still a thin structure. 
It's about the thickness of a table napkin. 
But it has so many convolutions and ridges it's now 80 percent of our brain, and that's where we do our thinking, and it's the great sublimator. 
We still have that old brain that provides our basic drives and motivations, but I may have a drive for conquest, and that'll be sublimated by the neocortex into writing a poem or inventing an app or giving a TED Talk, and it's really the neocortex that's where the action is. 
Fifty years ago, I wrote a paper describing how I thought the brain worked, and I described it as a series of modules. 
Each module could do things with a pattern. 
It could learn a pattern. It could remember a pattern. 
It could implement a pattern. 
And these modules were organized in hierarchies, and we created that hierarchy with our own thinking. 
And there was actually very little to go on 50 years ago. 
It led me to meet President Johnson. 
I've been thinking about this for 50 years, and a year and a half ago I came out with the book "How To Create A Mind," which has the same thesis, but now there's a plethora of evidence. 
The amount of data we're getting about the brain from neuroscience is doubling every year. 
Spatial resolution of brainscanning of all types is doubling every year. 
We can now see inside a living brain and see individual interneural connections connecting in real time, firing in real time. 
We can see your brain create your thoughts. 
We can see your thoughts create your brain, which is really key to how it works. 
So let me describe briefly how it works. 
I've actually counted these modules. 
We have about 300 million of them, and we create them in these hierarchies. 
I'll give you a simple example. 
I've got a bunch of modules that can recognize the crossbar to a capital A, and that's all they care about. 
A beautiful song can play, a pretty girl could walk by, they don't care, but they see a crossbar to a capital A, they get very excited and they say "" crossbar, "" and they put out a high probability on their output axon. 
That goes to the next level, and these layers are organized in conceptual levels. 
Each is more abstract than the next one, so the next one might say "" capital A. "" That goes up to a higher level that might say "" Apple. "" Information flows down also. 
If the apple recognizer has seen A-P-P-L, it'll think to itself, "" Hmm, I think an E is probably likely, "" and it'll send a signal down to all the E recognizers saying, "" Be on the lookout for an E, I think one might be coming. "" The E recognizers will lower their threshold and they see some sloppy thing, could be an E. 
Ordinarily you wouldn't think so, but we're expecting an E, it's good enough, and yeah, I've seen an E, and then apple says, "Yeah, I've seen an Apple." 
Go up another five levels, and you're now at a pretty high level of this hierarchy, and stretch down into the different senses, and you may have a module that sees a certain fabric, hears a certain voice quality, smells a certain perfume, and will say, "" My wife has entered the room. "" Go up another 10 levels, and now you're at a very high level. 
You're probably in the frontal cortex, and you'll have modules that say, "" That was ironic. 
That's funny. She's pretty. "" You might think that those are more sophisticated, but actually what's more complicated is the hierarchy beneath them. 
There was a 16-year-old girl, she had brain surgery, and she was conscious because the surgeons wanted to talk to her. 
You can do that because there's no pain receptors in the brain. 
And whenever they stimulated particular, very small points on her neocortex, shown here in red, she would laugh. 
So at first they thought they were triggering some kind of laugh reflex, but no, they quickly realized they had found the points in her neocortex that detect humor, and she just found everything hilarious whenever they stimulated these points. 
"You guys are so funny just standing around," was the typical comment, and they weren't funny, not while doing surgery. 
So how are we doing today? 
Well, computers are actually beginning to master human language with techniques that are similar to the neocortex. 
I actually described the algorithm, which is similar to something called a hierarchical hidden Markov model, something I've worked on since the '90s. 
"" Jeopardy "" is a very broad natural language game, and Watson got a higher score than the best two players combined. 
It got this query correct: "" A long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping, "" and it quickly responded, "" What is a meringue harangue? "" And Jennings and the other guy didn't get that. 
It's a pretty sophisticated example of computers actually understanding human language, and it actually got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and several other encyclopedias. 
Five to 10 years from now, search engines will actually be based on not just looking for combinations of words and links but actually understanding, reading for understanding the billions of pages on the web and in books. 
So you'll be walking along, and Google will pop up and say, "" You know, Mary, you expressed concern to me a month ago that your glutathione supplement wasn't getting past the blood-brain barrier. 
Well, new research just came out 13 seconds ago that shows a whole new approach to that and a new way to take glutathione. 
Let me summarize it for you. "" Twenty years from now, we'll have nanobots, because another exponential trend is the shrinking of technology. 
They'll go into our brain through the capillaries and basically connect our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud providing an extension of our neocortex. 
Now today, I mean, you have a computer in your phone, but if you need 10,000 computers for a few seconds to do a complex search, you can access that for a second or two in the cloud. 
In the 2030s, if you need some extra neocortex, you'll be able to connect to that in the cloud directly from your brain. 
So I'm walking along and I say, "" Oh, there's Chris Anderson. 
He's coming my way. 
I'd better think of something clever to say. 
I've got three seconds. 
My 300 million modules in my neocortex isn't going to cut it. 
I need a billion more. "" I'll be able to access that in the cloud. 
And our thinking, then, will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking, but the non-biological portion is subject to my law of accelerating returns. 
And remember what happens the last time we expanded our neocortex? 
That was two million years ago when we became humanoids and developed these large foreheads. 
Other primates have a slanted brow. 
They don't have the frontal cortex. 
But the frontal cortex is not really qualitatively different. 
It's a quantitative expansion of neocortex, but that additional quantity of thinking was the enabling factor for us to take a qualitative leap and invent language and art and science and technology and TED conferences. 
No other species has done that. 
And so, over the next few decades, we're going to do it again. 
We're going to again expand our neocortex, only this time we won't be limited by a fixed architecture of enclosure. 
It'll be expanded without limit. 
That additional quantity will again be the enabling factor for another qualitative leap in culture and technology. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

(Music) (Applause) Thank you. 
Hi, everybody. 
Ban-gap-seum-ni-da. 
I'd like to share with you a little bit of me playing my life. 
I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair. 
The violin, which meant everything to me, became a grave burden on me. 
Although many people tried to comfort and encourage me, their words sounded like meaningless noise. 
When I was just about to give everything up after years of suffering, I started to rediscover the true power of music. 
(Music) In the midst of hardship, it was the music that gave me — that restored my soul. 
The comfort the music gave me was just indescribable, and it was a real eye-opening experience for me too, and it totally changed my perspective on life and set me free from the pressure of becoming a successful violinist. 
Do you feel like you are all alone? 
I hope that this piece will touch and heal your heart, as it did for me. 
(Music) (Applause) Thank you. 
Now, I use my music to reach people's hearts and have found there are no boundaries. 
My audience is anyone who is here to listen, even those who are not familiar with classical music. 
I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few. 
Now, with my last piece, I'd like to show you that classical music can be so much fun, exciting, and that it can rock you. 
Let me introduce you to my brand new project, "Baroque in Rock," which became a golden disc most recently. 
It's such an honor for me. 
I think, while I'm enjoying my life as a happy musician, I'm earning a lot more recognition than I've ever imagined. 
But it's now your turn. 
Changing your perspectives will not only transform you but also the whole world. 
Just play your life with all you have, and share it with the world. 
I really look forward to witnessing a transforming world by you, TEDsters. 
Play your life, and stay tuned. 
(Music) (Applause) 

I was raised by lesbians in the mountains, and I sort of came like a forest gnome to New York City a while back. 
(Laughter) Really messed with my head, but I'll get into that later. 
I'll start with when I was eight years old. 
I took a wood box, and I buried a dollar bill, a pen and a fork inside this box in Colorado. 
And I thought some strange humanoids or aliens in 500 years would find this box and learn about the way our species exchanged ideas, maybe how we ate our spaghetti. 
I really didn't know. 
Anyway, this is kind of funny, because here I am, 30 years later, and I'm still making boxes. 
Now, at some point I was in Hawaii — I like to hike and surf and do all that weird stuff, and I was making a collage for my ma. 
And I took a dictionary and I ripped it up, and I made it into a sort of Agnes Martin grid, and I poured resin all over it and a bee got stuck. 
Now, she's afraid of bees and she's allergic to them, so I poured more resin on the canvas, thinking I could hide it or something. 
Instead, the opposite happened: It sort of created a magnification, like a magnifying glass, on the dictionary text. 
So what did I do? I built more boxes. 
This time, I started putting electronics, frogs, strange bottles I'd find in the street — anything I could find — because I was always finding things my whole life, and trying to make relationships and tell stories between these objects. 
So I started drawing around the objects, and I realized: Holy moly, I can draw in space! 
I can make free-floating lines, like the way you would draw around a dead body at a crime scene. 
So I took the objects out, and I created my own taxonomy of invented specimens. 
First, botanical — which you can kind of get a sense of. 
Then I made some weird insects and creatures. 
It was really fun; I was just drawing on the layers of resin. 
And it was cool, because I was actually starting to have shows and stuff, I was making some money, I could take my girlfriend for dinner, and like, go to Sizzler. 
It was some good shit, man. 
(Laughter) At some point, I got up to the human form, life-size resin sculptures with drawings of humans inside the layers. 
This was great, except for one thing: I was going to die. 
I didn't know what to do, because the resin was going to kill me. 
And I went to bed every night thinking about it. 
So I tried using glass. 
I started drawing on the layers of glass, almost like if you drew on a window, then you put another window, and another window, and you had all these windows together that made a three-dimensional composition. 
And this really worked, because I could stop using the resin. 
So I did this for years, which culminated in a very large work, which I call "" The Triptych. "" "" The Triptych "" was largely inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's "" [The] Garden of Earthly Delights, "" which is a painting in the [Museo del] Prado in Spain. 
Do you guys know this painting? 
Good, it's a cool painting. 
It's kind of ahead of its time, they say. 
So, "" The Triptych. "" I'll walk you through this piece. 
It weighs 24,000 pounds. 
It's 18 feet long. 
It's double-sided, so it's 36 feet of composition. 
It's kind of weird. 
Well, that's the blood fountain. 
(Laughter) To the left, you have Jesus and the locusts. 
There's a cave where all these animal-headed creatures travel between two worlds. 
They go from the representational world, to this analog-mesh underworld, where they're hiding. 
This is where the animal-headed creatures are by the lighthouse, and they're all about to commit mass suicide into the ocean. 
The ocean is made up of thousands of elements. 
This is a bird god tied up to a battleship. 
(Laughter) Billy Graham is in the ocean; the Horizon from the oil spill; Waldo; Osama Bin Laden's shelter — there's all kinds of weird stuff that you can find if you look really hard, in the ocean. 
Anyway, this is a lady creature. 
She's coming out of the ocean, and she's spitting oil into one hand and she has clouds coming out of her other hand. 
Her hands are like scales, and she has the mythological reference of the Earth and cosmos in balance. 
So that's one side of "" The Triptych. "" It's a little narrative thing. 
That's her hand that she's spitting into. 
And then, when you go to the other side, she has like a trunk, like a bird's beak, and she's spitting clouds out of her trunk. 
Then she has an 18-foot-long serpent's tail that connects "" The Triptych. "" Anyway, her tail catches on fire from the back of the volcano. 
(Laughter) I don't know why that happened. (Laughter) 
That happens, you know. 
Her tail terminates in a cycloptic eyeball, made out of 1986 terrorist cards. 
Have you guys seen those? 
They were made in the 1980's, they're like baseball cards of terrorists. 
Way ahead of their time. 
(Laughter) That will bring you to my latest project. 
I'm in the middle of two projects: One's called "" Psychogeographies. "" It's about a six-year project to make 100 of these humans. 
Each one is an archive of our culture, through our ripped-up media and matter, whether it's encyclopedias or dictionaries or magazines. 
But each one acts as a sort of an archive in the shape of a human, and they travel in groups of 20, 4, or 12 at a time. 
They're like cells — they come together, they divide. 
And you kind of walk through them. It's taking me years. 
Each one is basically a 3,000-pound microscope slide with a human stuck inside. 
This one has a little cave in his chest. 
That's his head; there's the chest, you can kind of see the beginning. 
I'm going to go down the body for you: There's a waterfall coming out of his chest, covering his penis — or not-penis, or whatever it is, a kind of androgynous thing. 
I'll take you quickly through these works, because I can't explain them for too long. 
There are the layers, you can kind of see it. 
That's a body getting split in half. 
This one has two heads, and it's communicating between the two heads. 
You can see the pills coming out, going into one head from this weird statue. 
There's a little forest scene inside the chest cavity. 
Can you see that? 
Anyway, this talk's all about these boxes, like the boxes we're in. 
This box we're in, the solar system is a box. 
This brings you to my latest box. 
It's a brick box. It's called Pioneer Works. 
(Cheers) Inside of this box is a physicist, a neuroscientist, a painter, a musician, a writer, a radio station, a museum, a school, a publishing arm to disseminate all the content we make there into the world; a garden. 
We shake this box up, and all these people kind of start hitting each other like particles. 
And I think that's the way you change the world. 
You redefine your insides and the box that you're living in. 
And you come together to realize that we're all in this together, that this delusion of difference — this idea of countries, of borders, of religion — doesn't work. 
We're all really made up of the same stuff, in the same box. 
And if we don't start exchanging that stuff sweetly and nicely, we're all going to die real soon. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

We always hear that texting is a scourge. 
The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today. 
The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true, and it's easy to think that it is true, but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now, we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is, in which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all. 
What do I mean by that? 
Basically, if we think about language, language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked. 
That's what we're probably genetically specified for. 
That's how we use language most. 
Writing is something that came along much later, and as we saw in the last talk, there's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened, but according to traditional estimates, if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then writing only came along at about 11: 07 p.m. 
That's how much of a latterly thing writing is. 
So first there's speech, and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice. 
Now don't get me wrong, writing has certain advantages. 
When you write, because it's a conscious process, because you can look backwards, you can do things with language that are much less likely if you're just talking. 
For example, imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:" "" The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours, till the graduate retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself. "" That's beautiful, but let's face it, nobody talks that way. 
Or at least, they shouldn't if they're interested in reproducing. That — (Laughter) is not the way any human being speaks casually. 
Casual speech is something quite different. 
Linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words. 
You'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking. 
That's what speech is like. 
Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic. 
It's much less reflective — very different from writing. 
So we naturally tend to think, because we see language written so often, that that's what language is, but actually what language is, is speech. They are two things. 
Now of course, as history has gone by, it's been natural for there to be a certain amount of bleed between speech and writing. 
So, for example, in a distant era now, it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing. 
So I mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie where they clear their throat, and they go, "" Ahem, ladies and gentlemen, "" and then they speak in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech. 
It's formal. It uses long sentences like this Gibbon one. 
It's basically talking like you write, and so, for example, we're thinking so much these days about Lincoln because of the movie. 
The Gettysburg Address was not the main meal of that event. 
For two hours before that, Edward Everett spoke on a topic that, frankly, cannot engage us today and barely did then. 
The point of it was to listen to him speaking like writing. 
Ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours. 
It was perfectly natural. 
That's what people did then, speaking like writing. 
Well, if you can speak like writing, then logically it follows that you might want to also sometimes write like you speak. 
The problem was just that in the material, mechanical sense, that was harder back in the day for the simple reason that materials don't lend themselves to it. 
It's almost impossible to do that with your hand except in shorthand, and then communication is limited. 
On a manual typewriter it was very difficult, and even when we had electric typewriters, or then computer keyboards, the fact is that even if you can type easily enough to keep up with the pace of speech, more or less, you have to have somebody who can receive your message quickly. 
Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message, then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak. 
And that's where texting comes in. 
And so, texting is very loose in its structure. 
No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk? 
No, and so therefore why would you when you were texting? 
What texting is, despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That's what texting is. 
Now we can write the way we talk. 
And it's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline. 
We see this general bagginess of the structure, the lack of concern with rules and the way that we're used to learning on the blackboard, and so we think that something has gone wrong. 
It's a very natural sense. 
But the fact of the matter is that what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity. 
That's what we're seeing in this fingered speech. 
And in order to understand it, what we want to see is the way, in this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up. 
And so, for example, there is in texting a convention, which is LOL. 
Now LOL, we generally think of as meaning "" laughing out loud. "" And of course, theoretically, it does, and if you look at older texts, then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud. 
But if you text now, or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become, you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore. 
It's evolved into something that is much subtler. 
This is an actual text that was done by a non-male person of about 20 years old not too long ago. 
"I love the font you're using, btw." 
Julie: "" lol thanks gmail is being slow right now "" Now if you think about it, that's not funny. 
No one's laughing. (Laughter) And yet, there it is, so you assume there's been some kind of hiccup. 
Then Susan says "" lol, I know, "" again more guffawing than we're used to when you're talking about these inconveniences. 
So Julie says, "" I just sent you an email. "" Susan: "" lol, I see it. "" Very funny people, if that's what LOL means. 
This Julie says, "" So what's up? "" Susan: "" lol, I have to write a 10 page paper. "" She's not amused. Let's think about it. 
LOL is being used in a very particular way. 
It's a marker of empathy. It's a marker of accommodation. 
We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles. 
Any spoken language that's used by real people has them. 
If you happen to speak Japanese, think about that little word "" ne "" that you use at the end of a lot of sentences. 
If you listen to the way black youth today speak, think about the use of the word "" yo. "" Whole dissertations could be written about it, and probably are being written about it. 
A pragmatic particle, that's what LOL has gradually become. 
It's a way of using the language between actual people. 
Another example is "" slash. "" Now, we can use slash in the way that we're used to, along the lines of, "" We're going to have a party-slash-networking session. "" That's kind of like what we're at. 
Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today. 
It's used to change the scene. 
So for example, this Sally person says, "So I need to find people to chill with" and Jake says, "" Haha "" — you could write a dissertation about "" Haha "" too, but we don't have time for that — "Haha so you're going by yourself? Why?" 
Sally: "" For this summer program at NYU. "" Jake: "" Haha. Slash I'm watching this video with suns players trying to shoot with one eye. "" The slash is interesting. 
I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. 
Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a conversation and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. 
You don't just zip right into it. 
You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "" Hmm, makes you think — "" when it really didn't, but what you're really — (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is change the topic. 
You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. 
All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker — or two, or three. 
Texting has developed one from this slash. 
So we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing, and yet it's easy to think, well, something is still wrong. 
There's a lack of structure of some sort. 
It's not as sophisticated as the language of The Wall Street Journal. 
Well, the fact of the matter is, look at this person in 1956, and this is when texting doesn't exist, "" I Love Lucy "" is still on the air. 
"" Many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table, cannot write grammatically — "" We've heard that sort of thing before, not just in 1956. 1917, Connecticut schoolteacher. 
1917. This is the time when we all assume that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect because the people on "" Downton Abbey "" are articulate, or something like that. 
So, "" From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' "" And so on. You can go even further back than this. 
It's the President of Harvard. It's 1871. 
There's no electricity. People have three names. 
"" Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing. "" And he's talking about people who are otherwise well prepared for college studies. 
You can go even further back. 
1841, some long-lost superintendent of schools is upset because of what he has for a long time "" noted with regret the almost entire neglect of the original "" blah blah blah blah blah. 
Or you can go all the way back to 63 A.D. — (Laughter) — and there's this poor man who doesn't like the way people are speaking Latin. 
As it happens, he was writing about what had become French. 
And so, there are always — (Laughter) (Applause) — there are always people worrying about these things and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning. 
And so, the way I'm thinking of texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills, and that means that they're able to do two things. 
Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. 
That's also true of being bidialectal. 
That's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing. 
And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire. 
It's very simple. 
If somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitory message board in 1993, the slang would have changed a little bit since the era of "" Love Story, "" but they would understand what was on that message board. 
Take that person from 1993 — not that long ago, this is "" Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure "" — those people. 
Take those people and they read a very typical text written by a 20-year-old today. 
Often they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as what it looks like to us when they're batting around on their little devices. 
So in closing, if I could go into the future, if I could go into 2033, the first thing I would ask is whether David Simon had done a sequel to "" The Wire. "" I would want to know. 
And — I really would ask that — and then I'd want to know actually what was going on on "" Downton Abbey. "" That'd be the second thing. 
And then the third thing would be, please show me a sheaf of texts written by 16-year-old girls, because I would want to know where this language had developed since our times, and ideally I would then send them back to you and me now so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening right under our noses. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

I've noticed something interesting about society and culture. 
Everything risky requires a license. 
So, learning to drive, owning a gun, getting married. 
There's a certain — (Laughter) That's true in everything risky, except technology. 
For some reason, there's no standard syllabus, there's no basic course. 
They just sort of give you your computer and then kick you out of the nest. 
You're supposed to learn this stuff — how? 
Just by osmosis. 
Nobody ever sits down and tells you, "" This is how it works. "" So today I'm going to tell you ten things that you thought everybody knew, but it turns out they don't. 
First of all, on the web, if you want to scroll down, don't pick up the mouse and use the scroll bar. 
That's a terrible waste of time. 
Do that only if you're paid by the hour. 
Instead, hit the space bar. 
The space bar scrolls down one page. 
Hold down the Shift key to scroll back up again. 
So, space bar to scroll down one page; works in every browser, in every kind of computer. 
Also on the web, when you're filling in one of these forms like your addresses, I assume you know that you can hit the Tab key to jump from box to box to box. 
But what about the pop-up menu where you put in your state? 
Don't open the pop-up menu. 
That's a terrible waste of calories. 
Type the first letter of your state over and over and over. 
So if you want Connecticut, go, C, C, C. 
If you want Texas, go T, T, and you jump right to that thing without even opening the pop-up menu. 
Also on the web, when the text is too small, what you do is hold down the Control key and hit plus, plus, plus. 
You make the text larger with each tap. 
Works on every computer, every web browser, or minus, minus, to get smaller again. 
If you're on the Mac, it might be Command instead. 
When you're typing on your Blackberry, Android, iPhone, don't bother switching layouts to the punctuation layout to hit the period and then a space, then try to capitalize the next letter. 
Just hit the space bar twice. 
The phone puts the period, the space, and the capital for you. 
Go space, space. 
It is totally amazing. 
Also when it comes to cell phones, on all phones, if you want to redial somebody that you've dialed before, all you have to do is hit the call button, and it puts the last phone number into the box for you, and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it. 
No need to go to the recent calls list if you're trying to call somebody just hit the call button again. 
Something that drives me crazy: When I call you and leave a message on your voice mail, I hear you saying, "" Leave a message, "" and then I get these 15 seconds of freaking instructions, like we haven't had answering machines for 45 years! 
(Laughter) I'm not bitter. (Laughter) 
So it turns out there's a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this. 
Phone: At the tone, please... 
(Beep) David Pogue: Unfortunately, the carriers didn't adopt the same keystroke, so it's different by carrier, so it devolves upon you to learn the keystroke for the person you're calling. 
I didn't say these were going to be perfect. 
So most of you think of Google as something that lets you look up a web page, but it is also a dictionary. 
Type the word "" define "" and the word you want to know. 
You don't even have to click anything. 
There's the definition as you type. 
It's also a complete FAA database. 
Type the name of the airline and the flight. 
It shows you where the flight is, the gate, the terminal, how long until it lands. 
You don't need an app. 
It's also unit and currency conversion. 
Again, you don't have to click one of the results. 
Just type it into the box, and there's your answer. 
While we're talking about text — When you want to highlight — this is just an example — (Laughter) When you want to highlight a word, please don't waste your life dragging across it with the mouse like a newbie. 
Double click the word. 
Watch "" 200 "" — I go double-click, it neatly selects just that word. 
Also, don't delete what you've highlighted. 
You can just type over it. 
This is in every program. 
Also, you can go double-click, drag, to highlight in one-word increments as you drag. 
Much more precise. 
Again, don't bother deleting. 
Just type over it. 
(Laughter) Shutter lag is the time between your pressing the shutter button and the moment the camera actually snaps. 
It's extremely frustrating on any camera under $1,000. 
(Camera click) (Laughter) So, that's because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and exposure, but if you pre-focus with a half-press, leave your finger down — no shutter lag! 
You get it every time. 
I've just turned your $50 camera into a $1,000 camera with that trick. 
And finally, it often happens that you're giving a talk, and for some reason, the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you! 
(Laughter) So when that happens — this works in Keynote, PowerPoint, it works in every program — all you do is hit the letter B key, B for blackout, to black out the slide, make everybody look at you, and then when you're ready to go on, you hit B again, and if you're really on a roll, you can hit the W key for "" whiteout, "" and you white out the slide, and then you can hit W again to un-blank it. 
So I know I went super fast. 
If you missed anything, I'll be happy to send you the list of these tips. 
In the meantime, congratulations. 
You all get your California Technology License. 
Have a great day. 
(Applause) 

For more than 100 years, the telephone companies have provided wiretapping assistance to governments. 
For much of this time, this assistance was manual. 
Surveillance took place manually and wires were connected by hand. 
Calls were recorded to tape. 
But as in so many other industries, computing has changed everything. 
The telephone companies built surveillance features into the very core of their networks. 
I want that to sink in for a second: Our telephones and the networks that carry our calls were wired for surveillance first. 
First and foremost. 
So what that means is that when you're talking to your spouse, your children, a colleague or your doctor on the telephone, someone could be listening. 
Now, that someone might be your own government; it could also be another government, a foreign intelligence service, or a hacker, or a criminal, or a stalker or any other party that breaks into the surveillance system, that hacks into the surveillance system of the telephone companies. 
But while the telephone companies have built surveillance as a priority, Silicon Valley companies have not. 
And increasingly, over the last couple years, Silicon Valley companies have built strong encryption technology into their communications products that makes surveillance extremely difficult. 
For example, many of you might have an iPhone, and if you use an iPhone to send a text message to other people who have an iPhone, those text messages cannot easily be wiretapped. 
And in fact, according to Apple, they're not able to even see the text messages themselves. 
Likewise, if you use FaceTime to make an audio call or a video call with one of your friends or loved ones, that, too, cannot be easily wiretapped. 
And it's not just Apple. 
WhatsApp, which is now owned by Facebook and used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, also has built strong encryption technology into its product, which means that people in the Global South can easily communicate without their governments, often authoritarian, wiretapping their text messages. 
So, after 100 years of being able to listen to any telephone call — anytime, anywhere — you might imagine that government officials are not very happy. 
And in fact, that's what's happening. 
Government officials are extremely mad. 
And they're not mad because these encryption tools are now available. 
What upsets them the most is that the tech companies have built encryption features into their products and turned them on by default. 
It's the default piece that matters. 
In short, the tech companies have democratized encryption. 
And so, government officials like British Prime Minister David Cameron, they believe that all communications — emails, texts, voice calls — all of these should be available to governments, and encryption is making that difficult. 
Now, look — I'm extremely sympathetic to their point of view. 
We live in a dangerous time in a dangerous world, and there really are bad people out there. 
There are terrorists and other serious national security threats that I suspect we all want the FBI and the NSA to monitor. 
But those surveillance features come at a cost. 
The reason for that is that there is no such thing as a terrorist laptop, or a drug dealer's cell phone. 
We all use the same communications devices. 
What that means is that if the drug dealers' telephone calls or the terrorists' telephone calls can be intercepted, then so can the rest of ours, too. 
And I think we really need to ask: Should a billion people around the world be using devices that are wiretap friendly? 
So the scenario of hacking of surveillance systems that I've described — this is not imaginary. 
In 2009, the surveillance systems that Google and Microsoft built into their networks — the systems that they use to respond to lawful surveillance requests from the police — those systems were compromised by the Chinese government, because the Chinese government wanted to figure out which of their own agents the US government was monitoring. 
By the same token, in 2004, the surveillance system built into the network of Vodafone Greece — Greece's largest telephone company — was compromised by an unknown entity, and that feature, the surveillance feature, was used to wiretap the Greek Prime Minister and members of the Greek cabinet. 
The foreign government or hackers who did that were never caught. 
And really, this gets to the very problem with these surveillance features, or backdoors. 
When you build a backdoor into a communications network or piece of technology, you have no way of controlling who's going to go through it. 
You have no way of controlling whether it'll be used by your side or the other side, by good guys, or by bad guys. 
And so for that reason, I think that it's better to build networks to be as secure as possible. 
Yes, this means that in the future, encryption is going to make wiretapping more difficult. 
It means that the police are going to have a tougher time catching bad guys. 
But the alternative would mean to live in a world where anyone's calls or anyone's text messages could be surveilled by criminals, by stalkers and by foreign intelligence agencies. 
And I don't want to live in that kind of world. 
And so right now, you probably have the tools to thwart many kinds of government surveillance already on your phones and already in your pockets, you just might not realize how strong and how secure those tools are, or how weak the other ways you've used to communicate really are. 
And so, my message to you is this: We need to use these tools. 
We need to secure our telephone calls. 
We need to secure our text messages. 
I want you to use these tools. 
I want you to tell your loved ones, I want you to tell your colleagues: Use these encrypted communications tools. 
Don't just use them because they're cheap and easy, but use them because they're secure. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Traditional prescriptions for growth in Africa are not working very well. 
After one trillion dollars in African development-related aid in the last 60 years, real per capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s. 
Aid is not doing too well. 
In response, the Bretton Woods institutions — the IMF and the World Bank — pushed for free trade not aid, yet the historical record shows little empirical evidence that free trade leads to economic growth. 
The newly prescribed silver bullet is microcredit. 
We seem to be fixated on this romanticized idea that every poor peasant in Africa is an entrepreneur. 
(Laughter) Yet my work and travel in 40-plus countries across Africa have taught me that most people want jobs instead. 
My solution: Forget micro-entrepreneurs. 
Let's invest in building pan-African titans like Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim. 
Mo took a contrarian bet on Africa when he founded Celtel International in '98 and built it into a mobile cellular provider with 24 million subscribers across 14 African countries by 2004. 
The Mo model might be better than the everyman entrepreneur model, which prevents an effective means of diffusion and knowledge-sharing. 
Perhaps we are not at a stage in Africa where many actors and small enterprises leads to growth through competition. 
Consider these two alternative scenarios. 
One: You loan 200 dollars to each of 500 banana farmers allowing them to dry their surplus bananas and fetch 15 percent more revenue at the local market. 
Or two: You give 100,000 dollars to one savvy entrepreneur and help her set up a factory that yields 40 percent additional income to all 500 banana farmers and creates 50 additional jobs. 
We invested in the second scenario, and backed 26-year-old Kenyan entrepreneur Eric Muthomi to set up an agro-processing factory called Stawi to produce gluten-free banana-based flour and baby food. 
Stawi is leveraging economies of scale and using modern manufacturing processes to create value for not only its owners but its workers, who have an ownership in the business. 
Our dream is to take an Eric Muthomi and try to help him become a Mo Ibrahim, which requires skill, financing, local and global partnerships, and extraordinary perseverance. 
But why pan-African? 
The scramble for Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884 — where, quite frankly, we Africans were not exactly consulted — (Laughter) (Applause) — resulted in massive fragmentation and many sovereign states with small populations: Liberia, four million; Cape Verde, 500,000. 
Pan-Africa gives you one billion people, granted across 55 countries with trade barriers and other impediments, but our ancestors traded across the continent before Europeans drew lines around us. 
The pan-African opportunities outweigh the challenges, and that's why we're expanding Stawi's markets from just Kenya to Algeria, Nigeria, Ghana, and anywhere else that will buy our food. 
We hope to help solve food security, empower farmers, create jobs, develop the local economy, and we hope to become rich in the process. 
While it's not the sexiest approach, and maybe it doesn't achieve the same feel-good as giving a woman 100 dollars to buy a goat on kiva.org, perhaps supporting fewer, higher-impact entrepreneurs to build massive businesses that scale pan-Africa can help change this. 
The political freedom for which our forebearers fought is meaningless without economic freedom. 
We hope to aid this fight for economic freedom by building world-class businesses, creating indigenous wealth, providing jobs that we so desperately need, and hopefully helping achieve this. 
Africa shall rise. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Tom Rielly: So Sangu, of course, this is strong rhetoric. 
You're making 100 percent contrast between microcredit and regular investment and growing regular investment. 
Do you think there is a role for microcredit at all? 
Sangu Delle: I think there is a role. 
Microcredit has been a great, innovative way to expand financial access to the bottom of the pyramid. 
But for the problems we face in Africa, when we are looking at the Marshall Plan to revitalize war-torn Europe, it was not full of donations of sheep. 
We need more than just microcredit. 
We need more than just give 200 dollars. 
We need to build big businesses, and we need jobs. 
TR: Very good. Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

One day, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez was walking along the streets of downtown Los Angeles when he heard beautiful music. 
And the source was a man, an African-American man, charming, rugged, homeless, playing a violin that only had two strings. 
And I'm telling a story that many of you know, because Steve's columns became the basis for a book, which was turned into a movie, with Robert Downey Jr. acting as Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the Juilliard-trained double bassist whose promising career was cut short by a tragic affliction with paranoid schizophrenia. 
Nathaniel dropped out of Juilliard, he suffered a complete breakdown, and 30 years later he was living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. 
I encourage all of you to read Steve's book or to watch the movie to understand not only the beautiful bond that formed between these two men, but how music helped shape that bond, and ultimately was instrumental — if you'll pardon the pun — in helping Nathaniel get off the streets. 
I met Mr. Ayers in 2008, two years ago, at Walt Disney Concert Hall. 
He had just heard a performance of Beethoven's First and Fourth symphonies, and came backstage and introduced himself. 
He was speaking in a very jovial and gregarious way about Yo-Yo Ma and Hillary Clinton and how the Dodgers were never going to make the World Series, all because of the treacherous first violin passage work in the last movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. 
And we got talking about music, and I got an email from Steve a few days later saying that Nathaniel was interested in a violin lesson with me. 
Now, I should mention that Nathaniel refuses treatment because when he was treated it was with shock therapy and Thorazine and handcuffs, and that scar has stayed with him for his entire life. 
But as a result now, he is prone to these schizophrenic episodes, the worst of which can manifest themselves as him exploding and then disappearing for days, wandering the streets of Skid Row, exposed to its horrors, with the torment of his own mind unleashed upon him. 
And Nathaniel was in such a state of agitation when we started our first lesson at Walt Disney Concert Hall — he had a kind of manic glint in his eyes, he was lost. 
And he was talking about invisible demons and smoke, and how someone was poisoning him in his sleep. 
And I was afraid, not for myself, but I was afraid that I was going to lose him, that he was going to sink into one of his states, and that I would ruin his relationship with the violin if I started talking about scales and arpeggios and other exciting forms of didactic violin pedagogy. 
(Laughter) So, I just started playing. 
And I played the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. 
And as I played, I understood that there was a profound change occurring in Nathaniel's eyes. 
It was as if he was in the grip of some invisible pharmaceutical, a chemical reaction, for which my playing the music was its catalyst. 
And Nathaniel's manic rage was transformed into understanding, a quiet curiosity and grace. 
And in a miracle, he lifted his own violin and he started playing, by ear, certain snippets of violin concertos which he then asked me to complete — Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. 
And we started talking about music, from Bach to Beethoven and Brahms, Bruckner, all the B's, from Bartók, all the way up to Esa-Pekka Salonen. 
And I understood that he not only had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, but he related to this music at a personal level. 
He spoke about it with the kind of passion and understanding that I share with my colleagues in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. 
And through playing music and talking about music, this man had transformed from the paranoid, disturbed man that had just come from walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles to the charming, erudite, brilliant, Juilliard-trained musician. 
Music is medicine. Music changes us. 
And for Nathaniel, music is sanity. 
Because music allows him to take his thoughts and delusions and shape them through his imagination and his creativity, into reality. 
And that is an escape from his tormented state. 
And I understood that this was the very essence of art. 
This was the very reason why we made music, that we take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core, our emotions, and through our artistic lens, through our creativity, we're able to shape those emotions into reality. 
And the reality of that expression reaches all of us and moves us, inspires and unites us. 
And for Nathaniel, music brought him back into a fold of friends. 
The redemptive power of music brought him back into a family of musicians that understood him, that recognized his talents and respected him. 
And I will always make music with Nathaniel, whether we're at Walt Disney Concert Hall or on Skid Row, because he reminds me why I became a musician. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thanks. 
Robert Gupta. 
(Applause) Robert Gupta: I'm going to play something that I shamelessly stole from cellists. 
So, please forgive me. 
(Laughter) (Music) (Applause) 

I had a fire nine days ago. 
My archive: 175 films, my 16-millimeter negative, all my books, my dad's books, my photographs. 
I'd collected — I was a collector, major, big-time. 
It's gone. 
I just looked at it, and I didn't know what to do. 
I mean, this was — was I my things? 
I always live in the present — I love the present. 
I cherish the future. 
And I was taught some strange thing as a kid, like, you've got to make something good out of something bad. 
You've got to make something good out of something bad. 
This was bad! Man, I was — I cough. I was sick. 
That's my camera lens. The first one — the one I shot my Bob Dylan film with 35 years ago. 
That's my feature film. "" King, Murray "" won Cannes Film Festival 1970 — the only print I had. 
That's my papers. 
That was in minutes — 20 minutes. 
Epiphany hit me. Something hit me. 
"You've got to make something good out of something bad," I started to say to my friends, neighbors, my sister. 
By the way, that's "" Sputnik. "" I ran it last year. 
"" Sputnik "" was downtown, the negative. It wasn't touched. 
These are some pieces of things I used in my Sputnik feature film, which opens in New York in two weeks downtown. 
I called my sister. I called my neighbors. I said, "" Come dig. "" That's me at my desk. 
That was a desk took 40-some years to build. 
You know — all the stuff. 
That's my daughter, Jean. 
She came. She's a nurse in San Francisco. 
"" Dig it up, "" I said. "" Pieces. 
I want pieces. Bits and pieces. "" I came up with this idea: a life of bits and pieces, which I'm just starting to work on — my next project. 
That's my sister. She took care of pictures, because I was a big collector of snapshot photography that I believed said a lot. 
And those are some of the pictures that — something was good about the burnt pictures. 
I didn't know. I looked at that — I said, "" Wow, is that better than the — "" That's my proposal on Jimmy Doolittle. I made that movie for television. 
It's the only copy I had. Pieces of it. 
Idea about women. 
So I started to say, "" Hey, man, you are too much! 
You could cry about this. "" I really didn't. 
I just instead said, "I'm going to make something out of it, and maybe next year..." And I appreciate this moment to come up on this stage with so many people who've already given me so much solace, and just say to TEDsters: I'm proud of me. That I take something bad, I turn it, and I'm going to make something good out of this, all these pieces. 
That's Arthur Leipzig's original photograph I loved. 
I was a big record collector — the records didn't make it. Boy, I tell you, film burns. Film burns. 
I mean, this was 16-millimeter safety film. 
The negatives are gone. 
That's my father's letter to me, telling me to marry the woman I first married when I was 20. 
That's my daughter and me. 
She's still there. She's there this morning, actually. 
That's my house. 
My family's living in the Hilton Hotel in Scotts Valley. 
That's my wife, Heidi, who didn't take it as well as I did. 
My children, Davey and Henry. 
My son, Davey, in the hotel two nights ago. 
So, my message to you folks, from my three minutes, is that I appreciate the chance to share this with you. I will be back. I love being at TED. 
I came to live it, and I am living it. 
That's my view from my window outside of Santa Cruz, in Bonny Doon, just 35 miles from here. 
Thank you everybody. 
(Applause) 

I wanted to just start by asking everyone a question: How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader? 

As an Arab female photographer, I have always found ample inspiration for my projects in personal experiences. 
The passion I developed for knowledge, which allowed me to break barriers towards a better life was the motivation for my project I Read I Write. 
Pushed by my own experience, as I was not allowed initially to pursue my higher education, I decided to explore and document stories of other women who changed their lives through education, while exposing and questioning the barriers they face. 
I covered a range of topics that concern women's education, keeping in mind the differences among Arab countries due to economic and social factors. 
As I started this work, it was not always easy to convince the women to participate. 
Only after explaining to them how their stories might influence other women's lives, how they would become role models for their own community, did some agree. 
Seeking a collaborative and reflexive approach, I asked them to write their own words and ideas on prints of their own images. 
Those images were then shared in some of the classrooms, and worked to inspire and motivate other women going through similar educations and situations. 
Aisha, a teacher from Yemen, wrote, "" I sought education in order to be independent and to not count on men with everything. "" One of my first subjects was Umm El-Saad from Egypt. 
When we first met, she was barely able to write her name. 
She was attending a nine-month literacy program run by a local NGO in the Cairo suburbs. 
Months later, she was joking that her husband had threatened to pull her out of the classes, as he found out that his now literate wife was going through his phone text messages. 
(Laughter) Naughty Umm El-Saad. 
I saw how she was longing to gain control over her simple daily routines, small details that we take for granted, from counting money at the market to helping her kids in homework. 
Despite her poverty and her community's mindset, which belittles women's education, Umm El-Saad, along with her Egyptian classmates, was eager to learn how to read and write. 
In Tunisia, I met Asma, one of the four activist women I interviewed. 
That marriage lasted for a year. 
At 14, she became the third wife of a 60-year-old man, and by the time she was 18, she was a divorced mother of three. 
Despite her poverty, despite her social status as a divorcée in an ultra-conservative society, and despite the opposition of her parents to her going back to school, Fayza knew that her only way to control her life was through education. 
She is now 26. 
She received a grant from a local NGO to fund her business studies at the university. 
Her goal is to find a job, rent a place to live in, and bring her kids back with her. 
And here I would like to end with a quote by Yasmine, one of the four activist women I interviewed in Tunisia. 
Yasmine wrote, "" Question your convictions. 
Don't accept their enslavement, for your mother birthed you free. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Allison Hunt: My three minutes hasn't started yet, has it? 
Chris Anderson: No, you can't start the three minutes. 
Reset the three minutes, that's just not fair. 
AH: Oh my God, it's harsh up here. 
I mean I'm nervous enough as it is. 
But I am not as nervous as I was five weeks ago. 
Five weeks ago I had total hip replacement surgery. 
Do you know that surgery? 
Electric saw, power drill, totally disgusting unless you're David Bolinsky, in which case it's all truth and beauty. 
Sure David, if it's not your hip, it's truth and beauty. 
Anyway, I did have a really big epiphany around the situation, so Chris invited me to tell you about it. 
But first you need to know two things about me. 
Just two things. 
I'm Canadian, and I'm the youngest of seven kids. 
Now, in Canada, we have that great healthcare system. 
That means we get our new hips for free. 
And being the youngest of seven, I have never been at the front of the line for anything. OK? 
So my hip had been hurting me for years. 
I finally went to the doctor, which was free. 
And she referred me to an orthopedic surgeon, also free. 
Finally got to see him after 10 months of waiting — almost a year. 
That is what free gets you. 
I met the surgeon, and he took some free X-rays, and I got a good look at them. And you know, even I could tell my hip was bad, and I actually work in marketing. 
So he said, "" Allison, we've got to get you on the table. 
I'm going to replace your hip — it's about an 18-month wait. "" 18 more months. 
I'd already waited 10 months, and I had to wait 18 more months. 
You know, it's such a long wait that I actually started to even think about it in terms of TEDs. 
I wouldn't have my new hip for this TED. 
I wouldn't have my new hip for TEDGlobal in Africa. 
I would not have my new hip for TED2008. 
I would still be on my bad hip. That was so disappointing. 
So, I left his office and I was walking through the hospital, and that's when I had my epiphany. 
This youngest of seven had to get herself to the front of the line. 
Oh yeah. 
Can I tell you how un-Canadian that is? 
We do not think that way. 
We don't talk about it. It's not even a consideration. 
In fact, when we're traveling abroad, it's how we identify fellow Canadians. 
"After you." "Oh, no, no. After you." 
Hey, are you from Canada? "" Oh, me too! Hi! "" "Great! Excellent!" 
So no, suddenly I wasn't averse to butting any geezer off the list. 
Some 70-year-old who wanted his new hip so he could be back golfing, or gardening. 
No, no. Front of the line. 
So by now I was walking the lobby, and of course, that hurt, because of my hip, and I kind of needed a sign. 
And I saw a sign. 
In the window of the hospital's tiny gift shop there was a sign that said, "" Volunteers Needed. "" Hmm. 
Well, they signed me up immediately. 
No reference checks. None of the usual background stuff, no. 
They were desperate for volunteers because the average age of the volunteer at the hospital gift shop was 75. 
Yeah. They needed some young blood. 
So, next thing you know, I had my bright blue volunteer vest, I had my photo ID, and I was fully trained by my 89-year-old boss. 
I worked alone. 
Every Friday morning I was at the gift shop. 
While ringing in hospital staff's Tic Tacs, I'd casually ask, "" What do you do? "" Then I'd tell them, "" Well, I'm getting my hip replaced — in 18 months. 
It's gonna be so great when the pain stops. Ow! "" All the staff got to know the plucky, young volunteer. 
My next surgeon's appointment was, coincidentally, right after a shift at the gift shop. 
So, naturally, I had my vest and my identification. 
I draped them casually over the chair in the doctor's office. 
And you know, when he walked in, I could just tell that he saw them. 
Moments later, I had a surgery date just weeks away, and a big fat prescription for Percocet. 
Now, word on the street was that it was actually my volunteering that got me to the front of the line. 
And, you know, I'm not even ashamed of that. 
Two reasons. 
First of all, I am going to take such good care of this new hip. 
But also I intend to stick with the volunteering, which actually leads me to the biggest epiphany of them all. 
Even when a Canadian cheats the system, they do it in a way that benefits society. 

This is a vending machine in Los Angeles. 
It's in a shopping mall, and it sells fish eggs. 
It's a caviar vending machine. 
This is the Art-o-mat, an art vending machine that sells small artistic creations by different artists, usually on small wood blocks or matchboxes, in limited edition. 
This is Oliver Medvedik. He's not a vending machine, but he is one of the founders of Genspace, a community biolab in Brooklyn, New York, where anybody can go and take classes and learn how to do things like grow E. coli that glows in the dark or learn how to take strawberry DNA. 
In fact, I saw Oliver do one of these strawberry DNA extractions about a year ago, and this is what led me onto this bizarre path that I'm going to talk to you right now. 
Because strawberry DNA is really fascinating, because it's so beautiful. 
I'd never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before, before I saw it in this form. 
And a lot of people, especially in the art community, don't necessarily engage in science in this way. 
I instantly joined Genspace after this, and I asked Oliver, "" Well, if we can do this strawberries, can we do this with people as well? "" And about 10 minutes later, we were both spinning it in vials together and coming up with a protocol for human DNA extraction. 
And I started doing this on my own, and this is what my DNA actually looks like. 
And I was at a dinner party with some friends, some artist friends, and I was telling them about this project, and they couldn't believe that you could actually see DNA. 
So I said, all right, let's get out some supplies right now. 
And I started having these bizarre dinner parties at my house on Friday nights where people would come over and we would do DNA extractions, and I would actually capture them on video, because it created this kind of funny portrait as well. 
(Laughter) These are people who don't necessarily regularly engage with science whatsoever. 
You can kind of tell from their reactions. 
But they became fascinated by it, and it was really exciting for me to see them get excited about science. 
And so I started doing this regularly. 
It's kind of an odd thing to do with your Friday nights, but this is what I started doing, and I started collecting a whole group of my friends' DNA in small vials and categorizing them. 
This is what that looked like. 
And it started to make me think about a couple of things. 
First of all, this looked a lot like my Facebook wall. 
So in a way, I've created sort of a genetic network, a genetic social network, really. 
And the second thing was, one time a friend came over and looked at this on my table and was like, "" Oh. 
Why are they numbered? Is this person more rare than the other one? "" And I hadn't even thought about that. 
They were just numbered because that was the order that I extracted the DNA in. 
But that made me think about collecting toys, and this thing that's going on right now in the toy world with blind box toys, and being able to collect these rare toys. 
You buy these boxes. You're not sure what's going to be inside of them. 
But then, when you open them up, you have different rarities of the toys. 
And so I thought that was interesting. 
I started thinking about this and the caviar vending machine and the Art-o-mat all together, and some reason, I was one night drawing a vending machine, thinking about doing paintings of a vending machine, and the little vial of my DNA was sitting there, and I saw this kind of beautiful collaboration between the strands of DNA and the coils of a vending machine. 
And so, of course, I decided to create an art installation called the DNA Vending Machine. 
Here it is. 
(Music) ["" DNA Vending Machine is an art installation about our increasing access to biotechnology. ""] ["" For a reasonable cost, you can purchase a sample of human DNA from a traditional vending machine. ""] ["" Each sample comes packaged with a collectible limited edition portrait of the human specimen. ""] ["" DNA Vending Machine treats DNA as a collectible material and brings to light legal issues over the ownership of DNA. ""] Gabriel Garcia-Colombo: So the DNA Vending Machine is currently in a couple galleries in New York, and it's selling out pretty well, actually. 
We're in the first edition of 100 pieces, hoping to do another edition pretty soon. 
I'd actually like to get it into more of a metro hub, like Grand Central or Penn Station, right next to some of the other, actual vending machines in that location. 
But really with this project and a lot of my art projects I want to ask the audience a question, and that is, when biotechnology and DNA sequencing becomes as cheap as, say, laser cutting or 3D printing or buying caviar from a vending machine, will you still submit your sample of DNA to be part of the vending machine? 
And how much will these samples be worth? 
And will you buy someone else's sample? 
And what will you be able to do with that sample? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Five years ago, I experienced a bit of what it must have been like to be Alice in Wonderland. 
And I was scared. (Laughter) Really scared. Scared of these students with their big brains and their big books and their big, unfamiliar words. 
But as these conversations unfolded, I experienced what Alice must have when she went down that rabbit hole and saw that door to a whole new world. 
And I believe the key to opening that door is great communication. 
We desperately need great communication from our scientists and engineers in order to change the world. 
Our scientists and engineers are the ones that are tackling our grandest challenges, from energy to environment to health care, among others, and if we don't know about it and understand it, then the work isn't done, and I believe it's our responsibility as non-scientists to have these interactions. 
So scientists and engineers, please, talk nerdy to us. 
I want to share a few keys on how you can do that to make sure that we can see that your science is sexy and that your engineering is engaging. 
Instead, as Einstein said, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. 
You can clearly communicate your science without compromising the ideas. 
Have you ever wondered why they're called bullet points? (Laughter) What do bullets do? Bullets kill, and they will kill your presentation. 
A slide like this is not only boring, but it relies too much on the language area of our brain, and causes us to become overwhelmed. 
Instead, this example slide by Genevieve Brown is much more effective. It's showing that the special structure of trabeculae are so strong that they actually inspired the unique design of the Eiffel Tower. 
And the trick here is to use a single, readable sentence that the audience can key into if they get a bit lost, and then provide visuals which appeal to our other senses and create a deeper sense of understanding of what's being described. 
So I think these are just a few keys that can help the rest of us to open that door and see the wonderland that is science and engineering. 
And because the engineers that I've worked with have taught me to become really in touch with my inner nerd, I want to summarize with an equation. (Laughter) Take your science, subtract your bullet points and your jargon, divide by relevance, meaning share what's relevant to the audience, and multiply it by the passion that you have for this incredible work that you're doing, and that is going to equal incredible interactions that are full of understanding. 
And so, scientists and engineers, when you've solved this equation, by all means, talk nerdy to me. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) 

Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see. 
And I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space, to make the invisible visible, because what that does, it expands our horizons, it transforms our perception, it opens our minds and it touches our heart. 
We can see how organisms emerge and grow, how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. 
And at the grand scale, time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion. 
Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane, and by turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery, we can see something that's above us constantly but invisible: the vast network of air travel over the United States. 
We can turn data into a time-lapse view of a global economy in motion. 
And decades of data give us the view of our entire planet as a single organism sustained by currents circulating throughout the oceans and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere, pulsing with lightning, crowned by the aurora Borealis. 
At the other extreme, there are things that move too fast for our eyes, but we have technology that can look into that world as well. 
With high-speed cameras, we can do the opposite of time lapse. 
And we can see how nature's ingenious devices work, and perhaps we can even imitate them. 
When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it's the greatest flier in nature. 
And by tracking markers on an insect's wings, we can visualize the air flow that they produce. 
And what we learn can lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers that can expand our vision of important and remote places. 
The electron microscope fires electrons which creates images which can magnify things by as much as a million times. 
And there are unseen creatures living all over your body, including mites that spend their entire lives dwelling on your eyelashes, crawling over your skin at night. 
Can you guess what this is? 
A caterpillar's mouth. 
An eggshell. 
We think we know most of the animal kingdom, but there may be millions of tiny species waiting to be discovered. 
A spider also has great secrets, because spiders' silk thread is pound for pound stronger than steel but completely elastic. 
This journey will take us all the way down to the nano world. 
The silk is 100 times thinner than human hair. 
On there is bacteria, and near that bacteria, 10 times smaller, a virus. 
Inside of that, 10 times smaller, three strands of DNA. 
With the tip of a powerful microscope, we can actually move atoms and begin to create amazing nano devices. 
Some could one day patrol our body for all kinds of diseases and clean out clogged arteries along the way. 
Tiny chemical machines of the future can one day, perhaps, repair DNA. 
We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances, born of our drive to unveil the mysteries of life. 
So under an endless rain of cosmic dust, the air is full of pollen, micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets and supernova explosions. 
Knowing that there's so much around us we can't see forever changes our understanding of the world, and by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize that we exist in the living universe, and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards. 

What do you do when you have a headache? 
You swallow an aspirin. 
But for this pill to get to your head, where the pain is, it goes through your stomach, intestines and various other organs first. 
Swallowing pills is the most effective and painless way of delivering any medication in the body. 
The downside, though, is that swallowing any medication leads to its dilution. 
And this is a big problem, particularly in HIV patients. 
When they take their anti-HIV drugs, these drugs are good for lowering the virus in the blood, and increasing the CD4 cell counts. 
But they are also notorious for their adverse side effects, but mostly bad, because they get diluted by the time they get to the blood, and worse, by the time they get to the sites where it matters most: within the HIV viral reservoirs. 
These areas in the body — such as the lymph nodes, the nervous system, as well as the lungs — where the virus is sleeping, and will not readily get delivered in the blood of patients that are under consistent anti-HIV drugs therapy. 
However, upon discontinuation of therapy, the virus can awake and infect new cells in the blood. 
Now, all this is a big problem in treating HIV with the current drug treatment, which is a life-long treatment that must be swallowed by patients. 
One day, I sat and thought, "" Can we deliver anti-HIV directly within its reservoir sites, without the risk of drug dilution? "" As a laser scientist, the answer was just before my eyes: Lasers, of course. 
If they can be used for dentistry, for diabetic wound-healing and surgery, they can be used for anything imaginable, including transporting drugs into cells. 
As a matter of fact, we are currently using laser pulses to poke or drill extremely tiny holes, which open and close almost immediately in HIV-infected cells, in order to deliver drugs within them. 
"" How is that possible? "" you may ask. 
Well, we shine a very powerful but super-tiny laser beam onto the membrane of HIV-infected cells while these cells are immersed in liquid containing the drug. 
The laser pierces the cell, while the cell swallows the drug in a matter of microseconds. 
Before you even know it, the induced hole becomes immediately repaired. 
Now, we are currently testing this technology in test tubes or in Petri dishes, but the goal is to get this technology in the human body, apply it in the human body. 
"" How is that possible? "" you may ask. 
Well, the answer is: through a three-headed device. 
Using the first head, which is our laser, we will make an incision in the site of infection. 
Using the second head, which is a camera, we meander to the site of infection. 
Finally, using a third head, which is a drug-spreading sprinkler, we deliver the drugs directly at the site of infection, while the laser is again used to poke those cells open. 
Well, this might not seem like much right now. 
But one day, if successful, this technology can lead to complete eradication of HIV in the body. 
Yes. A cure for HIV. 
This is every HIV researcher's dream — in our case, a cure lead by lasers. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Applause) (Music) (Applause) Angella Ahn: Thank you. (Applause) 
Thank you so much. 
We are so honored to be here at TEDWomen, sharing our music with you. 
What an exciting and inspiring event. 
What you just heard is "" Skylife "" by David Balakrishnan. 
We want to play you one more selection. 
It's by Astor Piazzolla, an Argentine composer. 
And we talk about different ideas — he had this idea that he thought music should be from the heart. 
This was in the middle of the 20th century when music from the heart, beautiful music, wasn't the most popular thing in the classical music world. 
It was more atonal and twelve-tone. 
And he insisted on beautiful music. 
So this is "" Oblivion "" by Astor Piazzolla. 
Thank you. 
(Music) (Applause) 

I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. 
I gave out homework assignments. 
What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. 
After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. 
But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily? 
I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? 
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. 
I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. 
Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. 
It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. 
To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. 
Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "" How do I build grit in kids? 
How do I keep them motivated for the long run? "" The honest answer is, I don't know. 
So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "" growth mindset. "" This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. 
Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition. 
But we need more. 
We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. 

As an artist, connection is very important to me. 
Through my work I'm trying to articulate that humans are not separate from nature and that everything is interconnected. 
I first went to Antarctica almost 10 years ago, where I saw my first icebergs. 
I was in awe. 
My heart beat fast, my head was dizzy, trying to comprehend what it was that stood in front of me. 
The icebergs around me were almost 200 feet out of the water, and I could only help but wonder that this was one snowflake on top of another snowflake, year after year. 
Icebergs are born when they calve off of glaciers or break off of ice shelves. 
Each iceberg has its own individual personality. 
They have a distinct way of interacting with their environment and their experiences. 
Some refuse to give up and hold on to the bitter end, while others can't take it anymore and crumble in a fit of dramatic passion. 
It's easy to think, when you look at an iceberg, that they're isolated, that they're separate and alone, much like we as humans sometimes view ourselves. 
But the reality is far from it. 
As an iceberg melts, I am breathing in its ancient atmosphere. 
As the iceberg melts, it is releasing mineral-rich fresh water that nourishes many forms of life. 
I approach photographing these icebergs as if I'm making portraits of my ancestors, knowing that in these individual moments they exist in that way and will never exist that way again. 
It is not a death when they melt; it is not an end, but a continuation of their path through the cycle of life. 
Some of the ice in the icebergs that I photograph is very young — a couple thousand years old. 
And some of the ice is over 100,000 years old. 
The last pictures I'd like to show you are of an iceberg that I photographed in Qeqetarsuaq, Greenland. 
It's a very rare occasion that you get to actually witness an iceberg rolling. 
So here it is. 
You can see on the left side a small boat. 
That's about a 15-foot boat. 
And I'd like you to pay attention to the shape of the iceberg and where it is at the waterline. 
You can see here, it begins to roll, and the boat has moved to the other side, and the man is standing there. 
This is an average-size Greenlandic iceberg. 
It's about 120 feet above the water, or 40 meters. 
And this video is real time. 
(Music) And just like that, the iceberg shows you a different side of its personality. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

To most of you, this is a device to buy, sell, play games, watch videos. 
I think it might be a lifeline. 
I think actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin. 
Texting: I know I say texting and a lot of you think sexting, a lot of you think about the lewd photos that you see — hopefully not your kids sending to somebody else — or trying to translate the abbreviations LOL, LMAO, HMU. 
I can help you with those later. 
But the parents in the room know that texting is actually the best way to communicate with your kids. 
It might be the only way to communicate with your kids. 
(Laughter) The average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month, unless she's a girl, then it's closer to 4,000. 
And the secret is she opens every single one. 
Texting has a 100 percent open rate. 
Now the parents are really alarmed. 
It's a 100 percent open rate even if she doesn't respond to you when you ask her when she's coming home for dinner. 
I promise she read that text. 
And this isn't some suburban iPhone-using teen phenomenon. 
Texting actually overindexes for minority and urban youth. 
I know this because at DoSomething.org, which is the largest organization for teenagers and social change in America, about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging. 
We're now texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green or to work on homeless issues and things like that. 
We're finding it 11 times more powerful than email. 
We've also found an unintended consequence. 
We've been getting text messages back like these. 
"" I don't want to go to school today. 
The boys call me faggot. "" "" I was cutting, my parents found out, and so I stopped. 
But I just started again an hour ago. "" Or, "" He won't stop raping me. 
He told me not to tell anyone. 
It's my dad. Are you there? "" That last one's an actual text message that we received. 
And yeah, we're there. 
I will not forget the day we got that text message. 
And so it was that day that we decided we needed to build a crisis text hotline. 
Because this isn't what we do. 
We do social change. 
Kids are just sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them and there's nowhere else to turn that they're sending them to us. 
So think about it, a text hotline; it's pretty powerful. 
It's fast, it's pretty private. 
No one hears you in a stall, you're just texting quietly. 
It's real time. 
We can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals. 
That's great. 
But the thing that really makes this awesome is the data. 
Because I'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals. 
I want to prevent this shit from happening. 
So think about a cop. 
There's something in New York City. 
The police did it. It used to be just guess work, police work. 
And then they started crime mapping. 
And so they started following and watching petty thefts, summonses, all kinds of things — charting the future essentially. 
And they found things like, when you see crystal meth on the street, if you add police presence, you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen. 
In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place, the murder rate fell 60 percent. 
So think about the data from a crisis text line. 
There is no census on bullying and dating abuse and eating disorders and cutting and rape — no census. 
Maybe there's some studies, some longitudinal studies, that cost lots of money and took lots of time. 
Or maybe there's some anecdotal evidence. 
Imagine having real time data on every one of those issues. 
You could inform legislation. 
You could inform school policy. 
You could say to a principal, "" You're having a problem every Thursday at three o'clock. 
What's going on in your school? "" You could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result. 
This is really, to me, the power of texting and the power of data. 
Because while people are talking about data, making it possible for Facebook to mine my friend from the third grade, or Target to know when it's time for me to buy more diapers, or some dude to build a better baseball team, I'm actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school, to help that girl stop cutting in the bathroom and absolutely to help that girl whose father's raping her. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So recently, some white guys and some black women swapped Twitter avatars, or pictures online. 
They didn't change their content, they kept tweeting the same as usual, but suddenly, the white guys noticed they were getting called the n-word all the time and they were getting the worst kind of online abuse, whereas the black women all of a sudden noticed things got a lot more pleasant for them. 
Now, if you're my five-year-old, your Internet consists mostly of puppies and fairies and occasionally fairies riding puppies. 
That's a thing. Google it. 
But the rest of us know that the Internet can be a really ugly place. 
I mean changing the way you click, because clicking is a public act. 
It's no longer the case that a few powerful elites control all the media and the rest of us are just passive receivers. 
I used to think, oh, okay, I get dressed up, I put on a lot of makeup, I go on television, I talk about the news. 
And then I go home and I browse the web and I'm reading Twitter, and that's a private act of consuming media. 
Everything we blog, everything we Tweet, and everything we click is a public act of making media. 
We are the new editors. 
We decide what gets attention based on what we give our attention to. 
There's all these hidden algorithms that decide what you see more of and what we all see more of based on what you click on, and that in turn shapes our whole culture. 
Over three out of five Americans think we have a major incivility problem in our country right now, but I'm going to guess that at least three out of five Americans are clicking on the same insult-oriented, rumor-mongering trash that feeds the nastiest impulses in our society. 
In an increasingly noisy media landscape, the incentive is to make more noise to be heard, and that tyranny of the loud encourages the tyranny of the nasty. 
It does not have to be that way. 
It does not. 
We can change the incentive. 
Speak up. Speak out. Be a good person. 
And second, we've got to stop clicking on the lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeding linkbait. 
If you don't like the 24 / 7 all Kardashian all the time programming, you've got to stop clicking on the stories about Kim Kardashian's sideboob. 
I know you do it. (Applause) You too, apparently. 
I mean, really, same example: if you don't like politicians calling each other names, stop clicking on the stories about what one guy in one party called the other guy in the other party. 
If what gets the most clicks wins, then we have to start shaping the world we want with our clicks, because clicking is a public act. 
So click responsibly. Thank you. 

(Music) ♫ I don't understand myself, ♫ ♫ why they keep talking of love, ♫ ♫ if they come near me, ♫ ♫ if they look into my eyes and kiss my hand. ♫ ♫ I don't understand myself, ♫ ♫ why they talk of magic, ♫ ♫ that no one withstands, ♫ ♫ if he sees me, if he passes by. ♫ ♫ But if the red light is on ♫ ♫ in the middle of the night ♫ ♫ and everybody listens to my song, ♫ ♫ then it is plain to see. ♫ ♫ My lips, they give so fiery a kiss, ♫ 
♫ my limbs, they are supple and soft. ♫ ♫ It is written for me in the stars, ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss, thou shalt love. ♫ ♫ My feet, they glide and float, ♫ ♫ my eyes, they lure and glow. ♫ ♫ And I dance as if entranced, 'cause I know, ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss. ♫ ♫ In my veins, ♫ ♫ runs a dancer's blood, ♫ ♫ because my beautiful mother ♫ ♫ was the Queen of dance ♫ ♫ in the gilded Alcazar. ♫ ♫ She was so very beautiful, ♫ ♫ I often saw her in my dreams. ♫ 
♫ If she beat the tambourine ♫ ♫ to her beguiling dance, all eyes were glowing admiringly. ♫ ♫ She reawakened in me, ♫ ♫ mine is the same lot. ♫ ♫ I dance like her at midnight ♫ ♫ and from deep within I feel: ♫ ♫ My lips, they give so fiery a kiss, ♫ ♫ my limbs, they are supple and soft. ♫ ♫ It is written for me in the stars, ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss, thou shalt love. ♫ ♫ And I dance as if entranced, 'cause I know, ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss. ♫ 
(Applause) 

In the spring of 2016, a legal battle between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation captured the world's attention. 
Apple has built security features into its mobile products which protect data on its devices from everyone but the owner. 
That means that criminals, hackers and yes, even governments are all locked out. 
For Apple's customers, this is a great thing. 
But governments are not so happy. 
You see, Apple has made a conscious decision to get out of the surveillance business. 
Apple has tried to make surveillance as difficult as possible for governments and any other actors. 
There are really two smartphone operating systems in the global smartphone market: iOS and Android. 
iOS is made by Apple. Android is made by Google. 
Apple has spent a lot of time and money to make sure that its products are as secure as possible. 
Apple encrypts all data stored on iPhones by default, and text messages sent from one Apple customer to another Apple customer are encrypted by default without the user having to take any actions. 
What this means is that, if the police seize an iPhone and it has a password, they'll have a difficult time getting any data off of it, if they can do it at all. 
In contrast, the security of Android just really isn't as good. 
Android phones, or at least most of the Android phones that have been sold to consumers, do not encrypt data stored on the device by default, and the built-in text messaging app in Android does not use encryption. 
So if the police seize an Android phone, chances are, they'll be able to get all the data they want off of that device. 
Two smartphones from two of the biggest companies in the world; one that protects data by default, and one that doesn't. 
Apple is a seller of luxury goods. 
It dominates the high end of the market. 
And we would expect a manufacturer of luxury goods to have products that include more features. 
But not everyone can afford an iPhone. 
That's where Android really, really dominates: at the middle and low end of the market, smartphones for the billion and a half people who cannot or will not spend 600 dollars on a phone. 
But the dominance of Android has led to what I call the "" digital security divide. "" That is, there is now increasingly a gap between the privacy and security of the rich, who can afford devices that secure their data by default, and of the poor, whose devices do very little to protect them by default. 
So, think of the average Apple customer: a banker, a lawyer, a doctor, a politician. 
These individuals now increasingly have smartphones in their pockets that encrypt their calls, their text messages, all the data on the device, without them doing really anything to secure their information. 
In contrast, the poor and the most vulnerable in our societies are using devices that leave them completely vulnerable to surveillance. 
In the United States, where I live, African-Americans are more likely to be seen as suspicious or more likely to be profiled, and are more likely to be targeted by the state with surveillance. 
But African-Americans are also disproportionately likely to use Android devices that do nothing at all to protect them from that surveillance. 
This is a problem. 
We must remember that surveillance is a tool. 
It's a tool used by those in power against those who have no power. 
And while I think it's absolutely great that companies like Apple are making it easy for people to encrypt, if the only people who can protect themselves from the gaze of the government are the rich and powerful, that's a problem. 
And it's not just a privacy or a cybersecurity problem. 
It's a civil rights problem. 
So the lack of default security in Android is not just a problem for the poor and vulnerable users who are depending on these devices. 
This is actually a problem for our democracy. 
I'll explain what I mean. 
Modern social movements rely on technology — from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. 
The organizers of these movements and the members of these movements increasingly communicate and coordinate with smartphones. 
And so, naturally governments that feel threatened by these movements will also target the organizers and their smartphones. 
Now, it's quite possible that a future Martin Luther King or a Mandela or a Gandhi will have an iPhone and be protected from government surveillance. 
But chances are, they'll probably have a cheap, $20 Android phone in their pocket. 
And so if we do nothing to address the digital security divide, if we do nothing to ensure that everyone in our society gets the same benefits of encryption and is equally able to protect themselves from surveillance by the state, not only will the poor and vulnerable be exposed to surveillance, but future civil rights movements may be crushed before they ever reach their full potential. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Helen Walters: Chris, thank you so much. 
I have a question for you. 
We saw recently in the press that Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook covers over his camera and does something with his headphone mic jack. 
So I wanted to ask you a personal question, which is: Do you do that? 
And, on behalf of everyone here, particularly myself, Should we be doing that? 
Should we be covering these things? 
Christopher Soghoian: Putting a sticker — actually, I like Band-Aids, because you can remove them and put them back on whenever you want to make a call or a Skype call. 
Putting a sticker over your web cam is probably the best thing you can do for your privacy in terms of bang for buck. 
There really is malware, malicious software out there that can take over your web cam, even without the light turning on. 
This is used by criminals. This is used by stalkers. 
You can buy $19.99 "" spy on your ex-girlfriend "" software online. 
It's really terrifying. 
And then, of course, it's used by governments. 
And there's obviously a sexual violence component to this, which is that this kind of surveillance can be used most effectively against women and other people who can be shamed in our society. 
Even if you think you have nothing to hide, at the very least, if you have children, teenagers in your lives, make sure you put a sticker on their camera and protect them. 
HW: Wow. Thank you so much. CS: Thank you. 
HW: Thanks, Chris. 
(Applause) 

(Music) ♫ They stood together ♫ ♫ under a tree in tall grass ♫ ♫ on TV ♫ ♫ telling the world ♫ ♫ their story ♫ ♫ We will be left to wander ♫ ♫ and fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and took our husbands ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ We will live on ♫ ♫ then fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and killed our children ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I believe ♫ 
♫ I believe the almighty knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ You've got something this little life ♫ ♫ can never take away ♫ ♫ Running through the darkness of night ♫ ♫ with a child by her side ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Daybreak brings a sign of new life ♫ 
♫ with the power to stand ♫ ♫ Crossing the border ♫ ♫ she said, "" You will grow free on this land "" ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I can feel your power ♫ ♫ in these words she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on living ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ 
♫ to keep on giving ♫ ♫ and forgiving ♫ ♫ Aung San Suu Kyi ♫ ♫ living under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ When her people asked her for a message ♫ ♫ she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ Now we know the words, let's sing. ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ 
♫ People of hope ♫ ♫ People of change ♫ ♫ People of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ I believe the almighty ♫ ♫ knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Recently, I flew over a crowd of thousands of people in Brazil playing music by George Frideric Handel. 
I also drove along the streets of Amsterdam, again playing music by this same composer. 
Let's take a look. 
(Music: George Frideric Handel, "" Allegro. "" Performed by Daria van den Bercken.) (Video) Daria van den Bercken: I live there on the third floor. 
(In Dutch) I live there on the corner. 
and you'd be really welcome. 
Man: (In Dutch) Does that sound like fun? Child: (In Dutch) Yes! 
[(In Dutch) "" Handel house concert ""] (Applause) Daria van den Bercken: All this was a real magical experience for hundreds of reasons. 
Now you may ask, why have I done these things? 
They're not really typical for a musician's day-to-day life. 
Well, I did it because I fell in love with the music and I wanted to share it with as many people as possible. 
It started a couple of years ago. 
I was sitting at home on the couch with the flu and browsing the Internet a little, when I found out that Handel had written works for the keyboard. 
Well, I was surprised. I did not know this. 
So I downloaded the sheet music and started playing. 
And what happened next was that I entered this state of pure, unprejudiced amazement. 
It was an experience of being totally in awe of the music, and I had not felt that in a long time. 
It might be easier to relate to this when you hear it. 
The first piece that I played through started like this. 
(Music) Well this sounds very melancholic, doesn't it? 
And I turned the page and what came next was this. 
(Music) Well, this sounds very energetic, doesn't it? 
So within a couple of minutes, and the piece isn't even finished yet, I experienced two very contrasting characters: beautiful melancholy and sheer energy. 
And I consider these two elements to be vital human expressions. 
And the purity of the music makes you hear it very effectively. 
I've given a lot of children's concerts for children of seven and eight years old, and whatever I play, whether it's Bach, Beethoven, even Stockhausen, or some jazzy music, they are open to hear it, really willing to listen, and they are comfortable doing so. 
And when classes come in with children who are just a few years older, 11, 12, I felt that I sometimes already had trouble in reaching them like that. 
The complexity of the music does become an issue, and actually the opinions of others — parents, friends, media — they start to count. 
But the young ones, they don't question their own opinion. 
They are in this constant state of wonder, and I do firmly believe that we can keep listening like these seven-year-old children, even when growing up. 
And that is why I have played not only in the concert hall but also on the street, online, in the air: to feel that state of wonder, to truly listen, and to listen without prejudice. 
And I would like to invite you to do so now. 
(Music: George Frideric Handel, "" Chaconne in G Major. "" Performed by Daria van den Bercken.) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

You know, what I do is write for children, and I'm probably America's most widely read children's author, in fact. 
And I always tell people that I don't want to show up looking like a scientist. 
You can have me as a farmer, or in leathers, and no one has ever chose farmer. 
I'm here today to talk to you about circles and epiphanies. 
And you know, an epiphany is usually something you find that you dropped someplace. 
You've just got to go around the block to see it as an epiphany. 
That's a painting of a circle. 
A friend of mine did that — Richard Bollingbroke. 
It's the kind of complicated circle that I'm going to tell you about. 
My circle began back in the '60s in high school in Stow, Ohio where I was the class queer. 
I was the guy beaten up bloody every week in the boys' room, until one teacher saved my life. 
She saved my life by letting me go to the bathroom in the teachers' lounge. 
She did it in secret. 
She did it for three years. 
And I had to get out of town. 
I had a thumb, I had 85 dollars, and I ended up in San Francisco, California — met a lover — and back in the '80s, found it necessary to begin work on AIDS organizations. 
About three or four years ago, I got a phone call in the middle of the night from that teacher, Mrs. Posten, who said, "" I need to see you. 
I'm disappointed that we never got to know each other as adults. 
Could you please come to Ohio, and please bring that man that I know you have found by now. 
And I should mention that I have pancreatic cancer, and I'd like you to please be quick about this. "" Well, the next day we were in Cleveland. 
We took a look at her, we laughed, we cried, and we knew that she needed to be in a hospice. 
We found her one, we got her there, and we took care of her and watched over her family, because it was necessary. 
It's something we knew how to do. 
And just as the woman who wanted to know me as an adult got to know me, she turned into a box of ashes and was placed in my hands. 
And what had happened was the circle had closed, it had become a circle — and that epiphany I talked about presented itself. 
The epiphany is that death is a part of life. 
She saved my life; I and my partner saved hers. 
And you know, that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does. 
It needs truth and beauty, and I'm so happy it's been mentioned so much here today. 
It also needs — it needs dignity, love and pleasure, and it's our job to hand those things out. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

But anyway, this is about the evils of science, so I think it ’ s perfect. 
♫ My oh my, walking by, who ’ s the apple of my eye? ♫ ♫ Why, it's my very own Clonie. ♫ ♫ Oh, if I should stroll the hood, who knew I could look so good ♫ ♫ just talking on the phone to Clonie. ♫ ♫ We are pals, it's cool, 'cause we're not lonely, ♫ ♫ shallow gene pool is nothing to my only Clonie. ♫ ♫ Me and you, hustling through, holding on through thick and thin, ♫ ♫ just day by day, our DNA, so the Olson twins got nothing on us. ♫ ♫ We'll survive, side by side. Mother Nature, don ’ t you call her phony, she ’ s my Clonie. ♫ 
♫ Was wealthy, but not healthy, had no one to dwell with me, ♫ ♫ so look who I got born — Clonie. ♫ ♫ Far from broke, bored, rich folk, we don't need no natural yolk — ♫ ♫ our babies come full-formed, Clonie. ♫ ♫ We'll be huggable, get a publicist ♫ ♫ and show them, be the most lovable thing since fucking Eminem. ♫ ♫ Oh my friend, multiply, we ’ re a franchise, like Walt Disney or Hannibal Lecter. ♫ ♫ We can tell our cancer cells are more benign than old Phil Spector. ♫ ♫ We ’ ll survive side by side, should have signed with Verve instead of Sony. ♫ 
♫ You ’ re my Clonie. ♫ "" Oh Clonie, how I love you. "" "Ha, I'm the only person I ever loved." 
♫ Gee, that's swell. I guess you're just my fatal attraction-ie. You ’ re my Clonie. ♫ Thank you. 
(Applause) 

There are 39 million people in the world who are blind. 
Eighty percent of them are living in low-income countries such as Kenya, and the absolute majority do not need to be blind. 
They are blind from diseases that are either completely curable or preventable. 
Knowing this, with my young family, we moved to Kenya. 
We secured equipment, funds, vehicles, we trained a team, we set up a hundred clinics throughout the Great Rift Valley to try and understand a single question: why are people going blind, and what can we do? 
The challenges were great. 
When we got to where we were going, we set up our high-tech equipment. 
Power was rarely available. 
We'd have to run our equipment from petrol power generators. 
And then something occurred to me: There has to be an easier way, because it's the patients who are the most in need of access to eye care who are the least likely to get it. 
More people in Kenya, and in sub-Saharan Africa, have access to a mobile phone than they do clean running water. 
So we said, could we harness the power of mobile technology to deliver eye care in a new way? 
And so we developed Peek, a smartphone [system] that enables community healthcare workers and empowers them to deliver eye care everywhere. 
We set about replacing traditional hospital equipment, which is bulky, expensive and fragile, with smartphone apps and hardware that make it possible to test anyone in any language and of any age. 
Here we have a demonstration of a three-month-old having their vision accurately tested using an app and an eye tracker. 
We've got many trials going on in the community and in schools, and through the lessons that we've learned in the field, we've realized it's extremely important to share the data in non-medical jargon so that people understand what we're examining and what that means to them. 
So here, for example, we use our sight sim application, once your vision has been measured, to show carers and teachers what the visual world is like for that person, so they can empathize with them and help them. 
Once we've discovered somebody has low vision, the next big challenge is to work out why, and to be able to do that, we need to have access to the inside of the eye. 
Traditionally, this requires expensive equipment to examine an area called the retina. 
The retina is the single part of the eye that has huge amounts of information about the body and its health. 
We've developed 3D-printed, low-cost hardware that comes in at less than five dollars to produce, which can then be clipped onto a smartphone and makes it possible to get views of the back of the eye of a very high quality. 
And the beauty is, anybody can do it. 
In our trials on over two and half thousand people, the smartphone with the add-on clip is comparable to a camera that is hugely more expensive and hugely more difficult to transport. 
When we first moved to Kenya, we went with 150,000 dollars of equipment, a team of 15 people, and that was what was needed to deliver health care. 
Now, all that's needed is a single person on a bike with a smartphone. 
And it costs just 500 dollars. 
The issue of power supply is overcome by harnessing the power of solar. 
Our healthcare workers travel with a solar-powered rucksack which keeps the phone charged and backed up. 
Now we go to the patient rather than waiting for the patient never to come. 
We go to them in their homes and we give them the most comprehensive, high-tech, accurate examination, which can be delivered by anyone with minimal training. 
We can link global experts with people in the most rural, difficult-to-reach places that are beyond the end of the road, effectively putting those experts in their homes, allowing us to make diagnoses and make plans for treatment. 
Project managers, hospital directors, are able to search on our interface by any parameter they may be interested in. 
Here in Nakuru, where I've been living, we can search for people by whatever condition. 
Here are people who are blind from a curable condition cataract. 
Each red pin depicts somebody who is blind from a disease that is curable and treatable, and they're locatable. 
We can use bulk text messaging services to explain that we're coming to arrange a treatment. 
What's more, we've learned that this is something that we haven't built just for the community but with the community. 
Those blue pins that drop represent elders, or local leaders, that are connected to those people who can ensure that we can find them and arrange treatment. 
So for patients like Mama Wangari, who have been blind for over 10 years and never seen her grandchildren, for less than 40 dollars, we can restore her eyesight. 
This is something that has to happen. 
It's only in statistics that people go blind by the millions. 
The reality is everyone goes blind on their own. 
But now, they might just be a text message away from help. 
(Applause) And now because live demos are always a bad idea, we're going to try a live demo. 
(Laughter) So here we have the Peek Vision app. 
Okay, and what we're looking at here, this is Sam's optic nerve, which is a direct extension of her brain, so I'm actually looking at her brain as we look there. 
We can see all parts of the retina. 
It makes it possible to pick up diseases of the eye and of the body that would not be possible without access to the eye, and that clip-on device can be manufactured for just a few dollars, and people can be cured of blindness, and I think it says a lot about us as a human race if we've developed cures and we don't deliver them. 
But now we can. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? 
That's the question that changed my life forever. 
Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. 
I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell. 
At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place where it snowed and I became a massage therapist. 
With this job all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere. 
For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life. 
That is, until my life took a detour. 
I went home from work early one day with what I thought was the flu, and less than 24 hours later I was in the hospital on life support with less than a two percent chance of living. 
It wasn't until days later as I lay in a coma that the doctors diagnosed me with bacterial meningitis, a vaccine-preventable blood infection. 
Over the course of two and a half months I lost my spleen, my kidneys, the hearing in my left ear and both of my legs below the knee. 
When my parents wheeled me out of the hospital I felt like I had been pieced back together like a patchwork doll. 
I thought the worst was over until weeks later when I saw my new legs for the first time. 
The calves were bulky blocks of metal with pipes bolted together for the ankles and a yellow rubber foot with a raised rubber line from the toe to the ankle to look like a vein. 
I didn't know what to expect, but I wasn't expecting that. 
With my mom by my side and tears streaming down our faces, I strapped on these chunky legs and I stood up. 
They were so painful and so confining that all I could think was, how am I ever going to travel the world in these things? 
How was I ever going to live the life full of adventure and stories, as I always wanted? 
And how was I going to snowboard again? 
That day, I went home, I crawled into bed and this is what my life looked like for the next few months: me passed out, escaping from reality, with my legs resting by my side. 
I was absolutely physically and emotionally broken. 
But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy. 
And that is when it dawned on me that I didn't have to be five-foot-five anymore. 
I could be as tall as I wanted! 
(Laughter) (Applause) Or as short as I wanted, depending on who I was dating. (Laughter) 
And if I snowboarded again, my feet aren't going to get cold. (Laughter) 
And best of all, I thought, I can make my feet the size of all the shoes that are on the sales rack. (Laughter) And I did! 
So there were benefits here. 
It was this moment that I asked myself that life-defining question: If my life were a book and I were the author, how would I want the story to go? 
And I began to daydream. 
I daydreamed like I did as a little girl and I imagined myself walking gracefully, helping other people through my journey and snowboarding again. 
And I didn't just see myself carving down a mountain of powder, I could actually feel it. 
I could feel the wind against my face and the beat of my racing heart as if it were happening in that very moment. 
And that is when a new chapter in my life began. 
Four months later I was back up on a snowboard, although things didn't go quite as expected: My knees and my ankles wouldn't bend and at one point I traumatized all the skiers on the chair lift when I fell and my legs, still attached to my snowboard — (Laughter) — went flying down the mountain, and I was on top of the mountain still. 
I was so shocked, I was just as shocked as everybody else, and I was so discouraged, but I knew that if I could find the right pair of feet that I would be able to do this again. 
And this is when I learned that our borders and our obstacles can only do two things: one, stop us in our tracks or two, force us to get creative. 
So I decided to make a pair myself. 
My leg maker and I put random parts together and we made a pair of feet that I could snowboard in. 
As you can see, rusted bolts, rubber, wood and neon pink duct tape. 
And yes, I can change my toenail polish. 
It was these legs and the best 21st birthday gift I could ever receive — a new kidney from my dad — that allowed me to follow my dreams again. 
From there, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa, where I helped to put shoes on thousands of children's feet so they could attend school. 
And just this past February, I won two back-to-back World Cup gold medals — (Applause) — which made me the highest ranked adaptive female snowboarder in the world. 
Eleven years ago, when I lost my legs, I had no idea what to expect. 
But if you ask me today, if I would ever want to change my situation, I would have to say no. 
Because my legs haven't disabled me, if anything they've enabled me. 
They've forced me to rely on my imagination and to believe in the possibilities, and that's why I believe that our imaginations can be used as tools for breaking through borders, because in our minds, we can do anything and we can be anything. 
It's believing in those dreams and facing our fears head-on that allows us to live our lives beyond our limits. 
And although today is about innovation without borders, I have to say that in my life, innovation has only been possible because of my borders. 
I've learned that borders are where the actual ends, but also where the imagination and the story begins. 
So the thought that I would like to challenge you with today is that maybe instead of looking at our challenges and our limitations as something negative or bad, we can begin to look at them as blessings, magnificent gifts that can be used to ignite our imaginations and help us go further than we ever knew we could go. 
It's not about breaking down borders. 
It's about pushing off of them and seeing what amazing places they might bring us. 

In June of 1998, Tori Murden McClure left Nags Head, North Carolina for France. 
That's her boat, the American Pearl. 
It's 23 feet long and just six feet across at its widest point. 
The deck was the size of a cargo bed of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. 
Tori and her friends built it by hand, and it weighed about 1,800 pounds. 
Her plan was to row it alone across the Atlantic Ocean — no motor, no sail — something no woman and no American had ever done before. 
This would be her route: over 3,600 miles across the open North Atlantic Ocean. 
Professionally, Tori worked as a project administrator for the city of Louisville, Kentucky, her hometown, but her real passion was exploring. 
This was not her first big expedition. 
Several years earlier, she'd become the first woman to ski to the South Pole. 
She was an accomplished rower in college, even competed for a spot on the 1992 U.S. Olympic team, but this, this was different. 
(Video) (Music) Tori Murden McClure: Hi. It's Sunday, July 5. 
Sector time 9 a.m. 
So that's Kentucky time now. 
Dawn Landes: Tori made these videos as she rowed. 
This is her 21st day at sea. 
At this point, she'd covered over 1,000 miles, had had no radio contact in more than two weeks following a storm that disabled all her long-range communications systems just five days in. 
Most days looked like this. 
At this point, she'd rowed over 200,000 strokes, fighting the current and the wind. 
Some days, she traveled as little as 15 feet. 
Yeah. 
And as frustrating as those days were, other days were like this. 
(Video) TMM: And I want to show you my little friends. 
DL: She saw fish, dolphins, whales, sharks, and even some sea turtles. 
After two weeks with no human contact, Tori was able to contact a local cargo ship via VHF radio. 
(Video) TMM: Do you guys have a weather report, over? 
Man: Heading up to a low ahead of you but it's heading, and you're obviously going northeast and there's a high behind us. 
That'd be coming east-northeast also. 
TMM: Good. 
DL: She's pretty happy to talk to another human at this point. 
(Video) TMM: So weather report says nothing dramatic is going to happen soon. 
DL: What the weather report didn't tell her was that she was rowing right into the path of Hurricane Danielle in the worst hurricane season on record in the North Atlantic. 
(Video) TMM: Just sprained my ankle. 
There's a very strong wind from the east now. 
It's blowing about. 
It's blowing! 
After 12 days of storm I get to row for four hours without a flagging wind. 
I'm not very happy right now. 
As happy as I was this morning, I am unhappy now, so... 
DL: After nearly three months at sea, she'd covered over 3,000 miles. 
She was two thirds of the way there, but in the storm, the waves were the size of a seven-story building. 
Her boat kept capsizing. 
Some of them were pitchpole capsizes, flipping her end over end, and rowing became impossible. 
(Video) TMM: It's 6: 30 a.m. 
I'm in something big, bad and ugly. 
Two capsizes. 
Last capsize, I took the rib off the top of my ceiling with my back. 
I've had about six capsizes now. 
The last one was a pitchpole. 
I have the Argus beacon with me. 
I would set off the distress signal, but quite frankly, I don't think they'd ever be able to find this little boat. 
It's so far underwater right now, the only part that's showing pretty much is the cabin. 
It's about 10 a.m. 
I've lost track of the number of capsizes. 
I seem to capsize about every 15 minutes. 
I think I may have broken my left arm. 
The waves are tearing the boat to shreds. 
I keep praying because I'm not sure I'm going to make it through this. 
DL: Tori set off her distress beacon and was rescued by a passing container ship. 
They found her abandoned boat two months later adrift near France. 
I read about it in the newspaper. 
In 1998, I was a high school student living in Louisville, Kentucky. 
Now, I live in New York City. I'm a songwriter. 
And her bravery stuck with me, and I'm adapting her story into a musical called "" Row. "" When Tori returned home, she was feeling disheartened, she was broke. 
She was having a hard time making the transition back into civilization. 
In this scene, she sits at home. 
The phone is ringing, her friends are calling, but she doesn't know how to talk to them. 
She sings this song. It's called "" Dear Heart. "" (Guitar) When I was dreaming, I took my body to beautiful places I'd never been. 
I saw Gibraltar, and stars of Kentucky burned in the moonlight, making me smile. 
And when I awoke here, the sky was so cloudy. 
I walked to a party where people I know try hard to know me and ask where I've been, but I can't explain what I've seen to them. 
Ah, listen, dear heart. 
Just pay attention, go right from the start. 
Ah, listen, dear heart. 
You can fall off the map, but don't fall apart. 
Ooh ooh ooh, ah ah ah ah ah. 
Ah ah, ah ah ah. 
When I was out there, the ocean would hold me, rock me and throw me, light as a child. 
But now I'm so heavy, nothing consoles me. 
My mind floats like driftwood, wayward and wild. 
Ah, listen, dear heart. 
Just pay attention, go right from the start. 
Ah, listen, dear heart. 
You can fall off the map, but don't fall apart. 
Ooh. 
Eventually, Tori starts to get her feet under her. 
She starts hanging out with her friends again. 
She meets a guy and falls in love for the first time. 
She gets a new job working for another Louisville native, Muhammad Ali. 
One day, at lunch with her new boss, Tori shares the news that two other women are setting out to row across the mid-Atlantic, to do something that she almost died trying to do. 
His response was classic Ali: "" You don't want to go through life as the woman who almost rowed across the ocean. "" He was right. 
Tori rebuilt the American Pearl, and in December of 1999, she did it. 
(Applause) (Guitar) Thank you. (Applause) 

I would like to demonstrate for the first time in public that it is possible to transmit a video from a standard off-the-shelf LED lamp to a solar cell with a laptop acting as a receiver. 
There is no Wi-Fi involved, it's just light. 
And you may wonder, what's the point? 
And the point is this: There will be a massive extension of the Internet to close the digital divide, and also to allow for what we call "" The Internet of Things "" — tens of billions of devices connected to the Internet. 
In my view, such an extension of the Internet can only work if it's almost energy-neutral. 
This means we need to use existing infrastructure as much as possible. 
And this is where the solar cell and the LED come in. 
I demonstrated for the first time, at TED in 2011, Li-Fi, or Light Fidelity. 
Li-Fi uses off-the-shelf LEDs to transmit data incredibly fast, and also in a safe and secure manner. 
Data is transported by the light, encoded in subtle changes of the brightness. 
If we look around, we have many LEDs around us, so there's a rich infrastructure of Li-Fi transmitters around us. 
But so far, we have been using special devices — small photo detectors, to receive the information encoded in the data. 
I wanted to find a way to also use existing infrastructure to receive data from our Li-Fi lights. 
And this is why I have been looking into solar cells and solar panels. 
A solar cell absorbs light and converts it into electrical energy. 
This is why we can use a solar cell to charge our mobile phone. 
But now we need to remember that the data is encoded in subtle changes of the brightness of the LED, so if the incoming light fluctuates, so does the energy harvested from the solar cell. 
This means we have a principal mechanism in place to receive information from the light and by the solar cell, because the fluctuations of the energy harvested correspond to the data transmitted. 
Of course the question is: can we receive very fast and subtle changes of the brightness, such as the ones transmitted by our LED lights? 
And the answer to that is yes, we can. 
We have shown in the lab that we can receive up to 50 megabytes per second from a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell. 
And this is faster than most broadband connections these days. 
Now let me show you in practice. 
In this box is a standard, off-the-shelf LED lamp. 
This is a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell; it is connected to the laptop. 
And also we have an instrument here to visualize the energy we harvest from the solar cell. 
And this instrument shows something at the moment. 
This is because the solar cell already harvests light from the ambient light. 
Now what I would like to do first is switch on the light, and I'll simply, only switch on the light, for a moment, and what you'll notice is that the instrument jumps to the right. 
So the solar cell, for a moment, is harvesting energy from this artificial light source. 
If I turn it off, we see it drops. 
I turn it on... 
So we harvest energy with the solar cell. 
But next I would like to activate the streaming of the video. 
And I've done this by pressing this button. 
So now this LED lamp here is streaming a video by changing the brightness of the LED in a very subtle way, and in a way that you can't recognize with your eye, because the changes are too fast to recognize. 
But in order to prove the point, I can block the light of the solar cell. 
So first you notice the energy harvesting drops and the video stops as well. 
If I remove the blockage, the video will restart. 
(Applause) And I can repeat that. 
So we stop the transmission of the video and energy harvesting stops as well. 
So that is to show that the solar cell acts as a receiver. 
But now imagine that this LED lamp is a street light, and there's fog. 
And so I want to simulate fog, and that's why I brought a handkerchief with me. 
(Laughter) And let me put the handkerchief over the solar cell. 
First you notice the energy harvested drops, as expected, but now the video still continues. 
This means, despite the blockage, there's sufficient light coming through the handkerchief to the solar cell, so that the solar cell is able to decode and stream that information, in this case, a high-definition video. 
What's really important here is that a solar cell has become a receiver for high-speed wireless signals encoded in light, while it maintains its primary function as an energy-harvesting device. 
That's why it is possible to use existing solar cells on the roof of a hut to act as a broadband receiver from a laser station on a close by hill, or indeed, lamp post. 
And It really doesn't matter where the beam hits the solar cell. 
And the same is true for translucent solar cells integrated into windows, solar cells integrated into street furniture, or indeed, solar cells integrated into these billions of devices that will form the Internet of Things. 
Because simply, we don't want to charge these devices regularly, or worse, replace the batteries every few months. 
As I said to you, this is the first time I've shown this in public. 
It's very much a lab demonstration, a prototype. 
But my team and I are confident that we can take this to market within the next two to three years. 
And we hope we will be able to contribute to closing the digital divide, and also contribute to connecting all these billions of devices to the Internet. 
And all of this without causing a massive explosion of energy consumption — because of the solar cells, quite the opposite. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I design engineering projects for middle school and high school students, often using materials that are pretty unexpected. 
My inspiration comes from problems in my daily life. 
For example, one time I needed a costume to go to a comic convention, but I didn't want to spend too much money, so I made my own... 
with a light-up crown and skirt. 
(Laughter) Another time, I was devastated because my favorite mobile game, Flappy Bird, was being taken off the app store. (Laughter) 
So I was faced with the dilemma to either never update my phone or never play Flappy Bird again. (Laughter) 
Unhappy with both options, I did the only thing that made sense to me. 
I made a physical version of Flappy Bird that could never be taken off the app store. 
(Laughter) (Music) (Beeping) (Music) (Laughter) So a few of my friends were also pretty addicted to the game, and I invited them to play as well. 
(Video) Friend: Ah! 
(Laughter) (Video) Friend: What the heck? (Laughter) 
And they told me that it was just as infuriating as the original game. (Laughter) 
So I uploaded a demo of this project online, and to my surprise it went viral. 
It had over two million views in just a few days. 
(Laughter) And what's more interesting are people's comments. 
A lot of people wanted to make it their own, or asked me how it was made. 
So this kind of confirmed my idea that through a creative project, we can teach people about engineering. 
With the money made from the viral video, we were able to let students in our classroom all make their own game in a box. 
Although it was pretty challenging, they learned a lot of new concepts in engineering and programming. 
And they were all eager to learn so they could finish the game as well. 
(Laughter) So before Flappy Bird Box, I had the idea of using creative engineering projects to teach students. 
When I was teaching at a middle school, we asked our students to build a robot from a standard technology kit. 
And I noticed that a lot of them seemed bored. 
Then a few of them started taking pieces of paper and decorating their robots. 
And then more of them got into it, and they became more interested in the project. 
So I started looking for more creative ways to introduce technology to students. 
What I found was that most technology kits available in school look a little intimidating. 
They're all made of plastic parts that you can't customize. 
On top of that, they're all very expensive, costing hundreds of dollars per kit. 
So that's certainly not very affordable for most classroom budgets. 
Since I didn't find anything, I decided to make something on my own. 
I started with paper and fabric. 
After all, we all played with those since we were kids, and they are also pretty cheap and can be found anywhere around the house. 
And I prototyped a project where students can create a light-up creature using fabric and googly eyes. 
They were all helping each other in classrooms, and were laughing and discussing the project. 
And most importantly, they were able to insert their own creativity into the project. 
So because of the success of this project, I continued to create more engineering projects to challenge my students. 
And I also started to take these workshops outside of school and into the community. 
And something really interesting happened. 
I noticed a lot of people from very diverse backgrounds started coming to our workshops. 
And specifically, there were a lot more women and minorities than I expected, and that you wouldn't usually see at a traditional engineering workshop. 
Now take a look at this employee report at a major technology company in 2016. 
Women make up only 19 percent of the technology workforce. 
And underrepresented minorities make up only four percent. 
This statistic might look familiar if you walked into a high school robotics club, or a college engineering class. 
Now, there's a wide variety of problems that contribute to the lack of diversity in the technology force. 
Perhaps one solution could be to introduce technology to students through creative projects. 
I'm not saying that this could solve everything, but it could introduce technology to people who originally wouldn't be interested in it because of how it has been portrayed and taught in school. 
So how do we start to change the perception of technology? 
Most students think that it's boring or unwelcoming, so I have always designed projects following three principles. 
First is having a low floor, and that means this project is easy to get started. 
So take a look at this tutorial. 
The first project we asked students to learn is to make a circuit on paper. 
As you can see, it doesn't take very long to learn, and it's pretty easy even for beginners. 
And having a low floor also means that we're removing the financial barrier that prevents people from completing a project. 
So with paper, copper tape, lightbulb and a battery, people can complete this project for under a dollar. 
So second principle is having a high ceiling. 
This means that there's a lot of room to grow, and students are constantly being challenged. 
At first it might just be a light-up creature, but then you can add sensors and microcontrollers, and start to program the creature to interact with its environment. 
(Laughter) And finally, the third principle is customization. 
This means that we can make this project relevant to anyone. 
That's the beauty of using everyday materials; it's very easy to customize using paper and fabric. 
So even if you don't like Flappy Bird, you can still make your own game. 
(Video) Student: So our game is about Justin Bieber, because he's been speeding, and the object is to prevent him from getting caught by the LAPD — (Laughter) (Video) Student: Yeah, but he's changing so — we're a part of his posse. (Laughter) 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the P.O. box at the end of the day, and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones in general. 
And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents, I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone, which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital, but I was just looking for some sort of scribble, some unkempt cursive from my mother. 
And so when I moved to New York City after college and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression, I did the only thing I could think of at the time. 
I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens and dozens of them. I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere. 
I blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet: that if you asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked. 
Overnight, my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak — a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in rural Kansas, all asking me, a 22-year-old girl who barely even knew her own coffee order, to write them a love letter and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox. 
Well, today I fuel a global organization that is fueled by those trips to the mailbox, fueled by the ways in which we can harness social media like never before to write and mail strangers letters when they need them most, but most of all, fueled by crates of mail like this one, my trusty mail crate, filled with the scriptings of ordinary people, strangers writing letters to other strangers not because they're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup of coffee, but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing. 
But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper. 
They could not tell you about the ink of their own love letters. 
They're the ones from my generation, the ones of us that have grown up into a world where everything is paperless, and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen. 
We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook, and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less. 
But what if it's not about efficiency this time? 
I was on the subway yesterday with this mail crate, which is a conversation starter, let me tell you. 
If you ever need one, just carry one of these. (Laughter) And a man just stared at me, and he was like, "Well, why don't you use the Internet?" 
And I thought, "" Well, sir, I am not a strategist, nor am I specialist. I am merely a storyteller. "" And so I could tell you about a woman whose husband has just come home from Afghanistan, and she is having a hard time unearthing this thing called conversation, and so she tucks love letters throughout the house as a way to say, "" Come back to me. 
Find me when you can. "" Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters around her campus in Dubuque, Iowa, only to find her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love letters hanging from the trees, tucked in the bushes and the benches. 
Or the man who decides that he is going to take his life, uses Facebook as a way to say goodbye to friends and family. 
Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow, scripted by strangers who were there for him when. 
These are the kinds of stories that convinced me that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency, because she is an art form now, all the parts of her, the signing, the scripting, the mailing, the doodles in the margins. 
The mere fact that somebody would even just sit down, pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through, with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iPhone is pinging and we've got six conversations rolling in at once, that is an art form that does not fall down to the Goliath of "" get faster, "" no matter how many social networks we might join. 
We still clutch close these letters to our chest, to the words that speak louder than loud, when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say, the words that we have needed to write, to sisters and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long. 
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 

(Music) (Music) (Applause) (Applause) 

Chris Anderson: The rights of citizens, the future of the Internet. 
So I would like to welcome to the TED stage the man behind those revelations, Ed Snowden. 
(Applause) Ed is in a remote location somewhere in Russia controlling this bot from his laptop, so he can see what the bot can see. 
Ed, welcome to the TED stage. 
What can you see, as a matter of fact? 
Edward Snowden: Ha, I can see everyone. 
This is amazing. 
(Laughter) CA: Ed, some questions for you. 
You've been called many things in the last few months. 
You've been called a whistleblower, a traitor, a hero. 
What words would you describe yourself with? 
ES: You know, everybody who is involved with this debate has been struggling over me and my personality and how to describe me. 
But when I think about it, this isn't the question that we should be struggling with. 
Who I am really doesn't matter at all. 
If I'm the worst person in the world, you can hate me and move on. 
What really matters here are the issues. 
What really matters here is the kind of government we want, the kind of Internet we want, the kind of relationship between people and societies. 
And that's what I'm hoping the debate will move towards, and we've seen that increasing over time. 
If I had to describe myself, I wouldn't use words like "" hero. "" I wouldn't use "" patriot, "" and I wouldn't use "" traitor. "" I'd say I'm an American and I'm a citizen, just like everyone else. 
CA: So just to give some context for those who don't know the whole story — (Applause) — this time a year ago, you were stationed in Hawaii working as a consultant to the NSA. 
As a sysadmin, you had access to their systems, and you began revealing certain classified documents to some handpicked journalists leading the way to June's revelations. 
Now, what propelled you to do this? 
ES: You know, when I was sitting in Hawaii, and the years before, when I was working in the intelligence community, I saw a lot of things that had disturbed me. 
We do a lot of good things in the intelligence community, things that need to be done, and things that help everyone. 
But there are also things that go too far. 
There are things that shouldn't be done, and decisions that were being made in secret without the public's awareness, without the public's consent, and without even our representatives in government having knowledge of these programs. 
When I really came to struggle with these issues, I thought to myself, how can I do this in the most responsible way, that maximizes the public benefit while minimizing the risks? 
And out of all the solutions that I could come up with, out of going to Congress, when there were no laws, there were no legal protections for a private employee, a contractor in intelligence like myself, there was a risk that I would be buried along with the information and the public would never find out. 
But the First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees us a free press for a reason, and that's to enable an adversarial press, to challenge the government, but also to work together with the government, to have a dialogue and debate about how we can inform the public about matters of vital importance without putting our national security at risk. 
And by working with journalists, by giving all of my information back to the American people, rather than trusting myself to make the decisions about publication, we've had a robust debate with a deep investment by the government that I think has resulted in a benefit for everyone. 
And the risks that have been threatened, the risks that have been played up by the government have never materialized. 
We've never seen any evidence of even a single instance of specific harm, and because of that, I'm comfortable with the decisions that I made. 
CA: So let me show the audience a couple of examples of what you revealed. 
If we could have a slide up, and Ed, I don't know whether you can see, the slides are here. 
This is a slide of the PRISM program, and maybe you could tell the audience what that was that was revealed. 
ES: The best way to understand PRISM, because there's been a little bit of controversy, is to first talk about what PRISM isn't. 
Much of the debate in the U.S. has been about metadata. 
They've said it's just metadata, it's just metadata, and they're talking about a specific legal authority called Section 215 of the Patriot Act. 
That allows sort of a warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the entire country's phone records, things like that — who you're talking to, when you're talking to them, where you traveled. 
These are all metadata events. 
PRISM is about content. 
It's a program through which the government could compel corporate America, it could deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the NSA. 
And even though some of these companies did resist, even though some of them — I believe Yahoo was one of them — challenged them in court, they all lost, because it was never tried by an open court. 
They were only tried by a secret court. 
And something that we've seen, something about the PRISM program that's very concerning to me is, there's been a talking point in the U.S. government where they've said 15 federal judges have reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but what they don't tell you is those are secret judges in a secret court based on secret interpretations of law that's considered 34,000 warrant requests over 33 years, and in 33 years only rejected 11 government requests. 
These aren't the people that we want deciding what the role of corporate America in a free and open Internet should be. 
CA: Now, this slide that we're showing here shows the dates in which different technology companies, Internet companies, are alleged to have joined the program, and where data collection began from them. 
Now, they have denied collaborating with the NSA. 
How was that data collected by the NSA? 
ES: Right. So the NSA's own slides refer to it as direct access. 
What that means to an actual NSA analyst, someone like me who was working as an intelligence analyst targeting, Chinese cyber-hackers, things like that, in Hawaii, is the provenance of that data is directly from their servers. 
It doesn't mean that there's a group of company representatives sitting in a smoky room with the NSA palling around and making back-room deals about how they're going to give this stuff away. 
Now each company handles it different ways. 
Some are responsible. 
Some are somewhat less responsible. 
But the bottom line is, when we talk about how this information is given, it's coming from the companies themselves. 
It's not stolen from the lines. 
But there's an important thing to remember here: even though companies pushed back, even though companies demanded, hey, let's do this through a warrant process, let's do this where we actually have some sort of legal review, some sort of basis for handing over these users' data, we saw stories in the Washington Post last year that weren't as well reported as the PRISM story that said the NSA broke in to the data center communications between Google to itself and Yahoo to itself. 
So even these companies that are cooperating in at least a compelled but hopefully lawful manner with the NSA, the NSA isn't satisfied with that, and because of that, we need our companies to work very hard to guarantee that they're going to represent the interests of the user, and also advocate for the rights of the users. 
And I think over the last year, we've seen the companies that are named on the PRISM slides take great strides to do that, and I encourage them to continue. 
CA: What more should they do? 
ES: The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right now, without consulting with lawyers, to protect the rights of users worldwide, is to enable SSL web encryption on every page you visit. 
The reason this matters is today, if you go to look at a copy of "" 1984 "" on Amazon.com, the NSA can see a record of that, the Russian intelligence service can see a record of that, the Chinese service can see a record of that, the French service, the German service, the services of Andorra. 
They can all see it because it's unencrypted. 
The world's library is Amazon.com, but not only do they not support encryption by default, you cannot choose to use encryption when browsing through books. 
This is something that we need to change, not just for Amazon, I don't mean to single them out, but they're a great example. 
All companies need to move to an encrypted browsing habit by default for all users who haven't taken any action or picked any special methods on their own. 
That'll increase the privacy and the rights that people enjoy worldwide. 
CA: Ed, come with me to this part of the stage. 
I want to show you the next slide here. (Applause) This is a program called Boundless Informant. 
What is that? 
ES: So, I've got to give credit to the NSA for using appropriate names on this. 
This is one of my favorite NSA cryptonyms. 
Boundless Informant is a program that the NSA hid from Congress. 
The NSA was previously asked by Congress, was there any ability that they had to even give a rough ballpark estimate of the amount of American communications that were being intercepted. 
They said no. They said, we don't track those stats, and we can't track those stats. 
We can't tell you how many communications we're intercepting around the world, because to tell you that would be to invade your privacy. 
Now, I really appreciate that sentiment from them, but the reality, when you look at this slide is, not only do they have the capability, the capability already exists. 
It's already in place. 
The NSA has its own internal data format that tracks both ends of a communication, and if it says, this communication came from America, they can tell Congress how many of those communications they have today, right now. 
And what Boundless Informant tells us is more communications are being intercepted in America about Americans than there are in Russia about Russians. 
I'm not sure that's what an intelligence agency should be aiming for. 
CA: Ed, there was a story broken in the Washington Post, again from your data. 
The headline says, "" NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year. "" Tell us about that. 
ES: We also heard in Congressional testimony last year, it was an amazing thing for someone like me who came from the NSA and who's seen the actual internal documents, knows what's in them, to see officials testifying under oath that there had been no abuses, that there had been no violations of the NSA's rules, when we knew this story was coming. 
But what's especially interesting about this, about the fact that the NSA has violated their own rules, their own laws thousands of times in a single year, including one event by itself, one event out of those 2,776, that affected more than 3,000 people. 
In another event, they intercepted all the calls in Washington, D.C., by accident. 
What's amazing about this, this report, that didn't get that much attention, is the fact that not only were there 2,776 abuses, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, had not seen this report until the Washington Post contacted her asking for comment on the report. 
And she then requested a copy from the NSA and received it, but had never seen this before that. 
What does that say about the state of oversight in American intelligence when the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has no idea that the rules are being broken thousands of times every year? 
CA: Ed, one response to this whole debate is this: Why should we care about all this surveillance, honestly? 
I mean, look, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. 
What's wrong with that point of view? 
ES: Well, so the first thing is, you're giving up your rights. 
You're saying hey, you know, I don't think I'm going to need them, so I'm just going to trust that, you know, let's get rid of them, it doesn't really matter, these guys are going to do the right thing. 
Your rights matter because you never know when you're going to need them. 
Beyond that, it's a part of our cultural identity, not just in America, but in Western societies and in democratic societies around the world. 
People should be able to pick up the phone and to call their family, people should be able to send a text message to their loved ones, people should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering about how these events are going to look to an agent of the government, possibly not even your government years in the future, how they're going to be misinterpreted and what they're going to think your intentions were. 
We have a right to privacy. 
We require warrants to be based on probable cause or some kind of individualized suspicion because we recognize that trusting anybody, any government authority, with the entirety of human communications in secret and without oversight is simply too great a temptation to be ignored. 
CA: Some people are furious at what you've done. 
I heard a quote recently from Dick Cheney who said that Julian Assange was a flea bite, Edward Snowden is the lion that bit the head off the dog. 
He thinks you've committed one of the worst acts of betrayal in American history. 
What would you say to people who think that? 
ES: Dick Cheney's really something else. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Laughter) I think it's amazing, because at the time Julian Assange was doing some of his greatest work, Dick Cheney was saying he was going to end governments worldwide, the skies were going to ignite and the seas were going to boil off, and now he's saying it's a flea bite. 
So we should be suspicious about the same sort of overblown claims of damage to national security from these kind of officials. 
But let's assume that these people really believe this. 
I would argue that they have kind of a narrow conception of national security. 
The prerogatives of people like Dick Cheney do not keep the nation safe. 
The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. 
Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat doesn't make us safe, and that applies whether it's in Iraq or on the Internet. 
The Internet is not the enemy. 
Our economy is not the enemy. 
American businesses, Chinese businesses, and any other company out there is a part of our society. 
It's a part of our interconnected world. 
There are ties of fraternity that bond us together, and if we destroy these bonds by undermining the standards, the security, the manner of behavior, that nations and citizens all around the world expect us to abide by. 
CA: But it's alleged that you've stolen 1.7 million documents. 
It seems only a few hundred of them have been shared with journalists so far. 
Are there more revelations to come? 
ES: There are absolutely more revelations to come. 
I don't think there's any question that some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come. 
CA: Come here, because I want to ask you about this particular revelation. 
Come and take a look at this. 
I mean, this is a story which I think for a lot of the techies in this room is the single most shocking thing that they have heard in the last few months. 
It's about a program called "" Bullrun. "" Can you explain what that is? 
ES: So Bullrun, and this is again where we've got to thank the NSA for their candor, this is a program named after a Civil War battle. 
The British counterpart is called Edgehill, which is a U.K. civil war battle. 
And the reason that I believe they're named this way is because they target our own infrastructure. 
They're programs through which the NSA intentionally misleads corporate partners. 
They tell corporate partners that these are safe standards. 
They say hey, we need to work with you to secure your systems, but in reality, they're giving bad advice to these companies that makes them degrade the security of their services. 
They're building in backdoors that not only the NSA can exploit, but anyone else who has time and money to research and find it can then use to let themselves in to the world's communications. 
And this is really dangerous, because if we lose a single standard, if we lose the trust of something like SSL, which was specifically targeted by the Bullrun program, we will live a less safe world overall. 
We won't be able to access our banks and we won't be able to access commerce without worrying about people monitoring those communications or subverting them for their own ends. 
CA: And do those same decisions also potentially open America up to cyberattacks from other sources? 
ES: Absolutely. 
One of the problems, one of the dangerous legacies that we've seen in the post-9 / 11 era, is that the NSA has traditionally worn two hats. 
They've been in charge of offensive operations, that is hacking, but they've also been in charge of defensive operations, and traditionally they've always prioritized defense over offense based on the principle that American secrets are simply worth more. 
If we hack a Chinese business and steal their secrets, if we hack a government office in Berlin and steal their secrets, that has less value to the American people than making sure that the Chinese can't get access to our secrets. 
So by reducing the security of our communications, they're not only putting the world at risk, they're putting America at risk in a fundamental way, because intellectual property is the basis, the foundation of our economy, and if we put that at risk through weak security, we're going to be paying for it for years. 
CA: But they've made a calculation that it was worth doing this as part of America's defense against terrorism. 
Surely that makes it a price worth paying. 
ES: Well, when you look at the results of these programs in stopping terrorism, you will see that that's unfounded, and you don't have to take my word for it, because we've had the first open court, the first federal court that's reviewed this, outside the secrecy arrangement, called these programs Orwellian and likely unconstitutional. 
Congress, who has access to be briefed on these things, and now has the desire to be, has produced bills to reform it, and two independent White House panels who reviewed all of the classified evidence said these programs have never stopped a single terrorist attack that was imminent in the United States. 
So is it really terrorism that we're stopping? 
Do these programs have any value at all? 
I say no, and all three branches of the American government say no as well. 
CA: I mean, do you think there's a deeper motivation for them than the war against terrorism? 
ES: I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you, say again? 
CA: Sorry. Do you think there's a deeper motivation for them other than the war against terrorism? 
ES: Yeah. The bottom line is that terrorism has always been what we in the intelligence world would call a cover for action. 
Terrorism is something that provokes an emotional response that allows people to rationalize authorizing powers and programs that they wouldn't give otherwise. 
The Bullrun and Edgehill-type programs, the NSA asked for these authorities back in the 1990s. 
They asked the FBI to go to Congress and make the case. 
The FBI went to Congress and did make the case. 
But Congress and the American people said no. 
They said, it's not worth the risk to our economy. 
They said it's worth too much damage to our society to justify the gains. 
But what we saw is, in the post-9 / 11 era, they used secrecy and they used the justification of terrorism to start these programs in secret without asking Congress, without asking the American people, and it's that kind of government behind closed doors that we need to guard ourselves against, because it makes us less safe, and it offers no value. 
CA: Okay, come with me here for a sec, because I've got a more personal question for you. 
Speaking of terror, most people would find the situation you're in right now in Russia pretty terrifying. 
You obviously heard what happened, what the treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is, and there was a story in Buzzfeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who want you dead. 
How are you coping with this? 
How are you coping with the fear? 
ES: It's no mystery that there are governments out there that want to see me dead. 
I've made clear again and again and again that I go to sleep every morning thinking about what I can do for the American people. 
I don't want to harm my government. 
I want to help my government, but the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society, and say hey, this is not appropriate. 
We shouldn't be threatening dissidents. 
We shouldn't be criminalizing journalism. 
And whatever part I can do to see that end, I'm happy to do despite the risks. 
CA: So I'd actually like to get some feedback from the audience here, because I know there's widely differing reactions to Edward Snowden. 
Suppose you had the following two choices, right? 
You could view what he did as fundamentally a reckless act that has endangered America or you could view it as fundamentally a heroic act that will work towards America and the world's long-term good? 
Those are the two choices I'll give you. 
I'm curious to see who's willing to vote with the first of those, that this was a reckless act? 
There are some hands going up. 
Some hands going up. 
It's hard to put your hand up when the man is standing right here, but I see them. 
ES: I can see you. (Laughter) CA: And who goes with the second choice, the fundamentally heroic act? 
(Applause) (Cheers) And I think it's true to say that there are a lot of people who didn't show a hand and I think are still thinking this through, because it seems to me that the debate around you doesn't split along traditional political lines. 
It's not left or right, it's not really about pro-government, libertarian, or not just that. 
Part of it is almost a generational issue. 
You're part of a generation that grew up with the Internet, and it seems as if you become offended at almost a visceral level when you see something done that you think will harm the Internet. 
Is there some truth to that? 
ES: It is. I think it's very true. 
This is not a left or right issue. 
Our basic freedoms, and when I say our, I don't just mean Americans, I mean people around the world, it's not a partisan issue. 
These are things that all people believe, and it's up to all of us to protect them, and to people who have seen and enjoyed a free and open Internet, it's up to us to preserve that liberty for the next generation to enjoy, and if we don't change things, if we don't stand up to make the changes we need to do to keep the Internet safe, not just for us but for everyone, we're going to lose that, and that would be a tremendous loss, not just for us, but for the world. 
CA: Well, I have heard similar language recently from the founder of the world wide web, who I actually think is with us, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. 
Tim, actually, would you like to come up and say, do we have a microphone for Tim? 
(Applause) Tim, good to see you. Come up there. 
Which camp are you in, by the way, traitor, hero? I have a theory on this, but — Tim Berners-Lee: I've given much longer answers to that question, but hero, if I have to make the choice between the two. 
CA: And Ed, I think you've read the proposal that Sir Tim has talked about about a new Magna Carta to take back the Internet. 
Is that something that makes sense? 
ES: Absolutely. I mean, my generation, I grew up not just thinking about the Internet, but I grew up in the Internet, and although I never expected to have the chance to defend it in such a direct and practical manner and to embody it in this unusual, almost avatar manner, I think there's something poetic about the fact that one of the sons of the Internet has actually become close to the Internet as a result of their political expression. 
And I believe that a Magna Carta for the Internet is exactly what we need. 
We need to encode our values not just in writing but in the structure of the Internet, and it's something that I hope, I invite everyone in the audience, not just here in Vancouver but around the world, to join and participate in. 
CA: Do you have a question for Ed? 
TBL: Well, two questions, a general question — CA: Ed, can you still hear us? 
ES: Yes, I can hear you. CA: Oh, he's back. 
TBL: The wiretap on your line got a little interfered with for a moment. 
(Laughter) ES: It's a little bit of an NSA problem. 
TBL: So, from the 25 years, stepping back and thinking, what would you think would be the best that we could achieve from all the discussions that we have about the web we want? 
ES: When we think about in terms of how far we can go, I think that's a question that's really only limited by what we're willing to put into it. 
I think the Internet that we've enjoyed in the past has been exactly what we as not just a nation but as a people around the world need, and by cooperating, by engaging not just the technical parts of society, but as you said, the users, the people around the world who contribute through the Internet, through social media, who just check the weather, who rely on it every day as a part of their life, to champion that. 
We'll get not just the Internet we've had, but a better Internet, a better now, something that we can use to build a future that'll be better not just than what we hoped for but anything that we could have imagined. 
CA: It's 30 years ago that TED was founded, 1984. 
A lot of the conversation since then has been along the lines that actually George Orwell got it wrong. 
It's not Big Brother watching us. 
We, through the power of the web, and transparency, are now watching Big Brother. 
Your revelations kind of drove a stake through the heart of that rather optimistic view, but you still believe there's a way of doing something about that. 
And you do too. 
ES: Right, so there is an argument to be made that the powers of Big Brother have increased enormously. 
There was a recent legal article at Yale that established something called the Bankston-Soltani Principle, which is that our expectation of privacy is violated when the capabilities of government surveillance have become cheaper by an order of magnitude, and each time that occurs, we need to revisit and rebalance our privacy rights. 
Now, that hasn't happened since the government's surveillance powers have increased by several orders of magnitude, and that's why we're in the problem that we're in today, but there is still hope, because the power of individuals have also been increased by technology. 
I am living proof that an individual can go head to head against the most powerful adversaries and the most powerful intelligence agencies around the world and win, and I think that's something that we need to take hope from, and we need to build on to make it accessible not just to technical experts but to ordinary citizens around the world. 
Journalism is not a crime, communication is not a crime, and we should not be monitored in our everyday activities. 
CA: I'm not quite sure how you shake the hand of a bot, but I imagine it's, this is the hand right here. TBL: That'll come very soon. 
ES: Nice to meet you, and I hope my beam looks as nice as my view of you guys does. 
CA: Thank you, Tim. 
(Applause) I mean, The New York Times recently called for an amnesty for you. 
Would you welcome the chance to come back to America? 
ES: Absolutely. There's really no question, the principles that have been the foundation of this project have been the public interest and the principles that underly the journalistic establishment in the United States and around the world, and I think if the press is now saying, we support this, this is something that needed to happen, that's a powerful argument, but it's not the final argument, and I think that's something that public should decide. 
But at the same time, the government has hinted that they want some kind of deal, that they want me to compromise the journalists with which I've been working, to come back, and I want to make it very clear that I did not do this to be safe. 
I did this to do what was right, and I'm not going to stop my work in the public interest just to benefit myself. 
(Applause) CA: In the meantime, courtesy of the Internet and this technology, you're here, back in North America, not quite the U.S., Canada, in this form. 
I'm curious, how does that feel? 
ES: Canada is different than what I expected. 
It's a lot warmer. 
(Laughter) CA: At TED, the mission is "" ideas worth spreading. "" If you could encapsulate it in a single idea, what is your idea worth spreading right now at this moment? 
ES: I would say the last year has been a reminder that democracy may die behind closed doors, but we as individuals are born behind those same closed doors, and we don't have to give up our privacy to have good government. 
We don't have to give up our liberty to have security. 
And I think by working together we can have both open government and private lives, and I look forward to working with everyone around the world to see that happen. 
Thank you very much. 
CA: Ed, thank you. 
(Applause) 

We're at a tipping point in human history, a species poised between gaining the stars and losing the planet we call home. 
Even in just the past few years, we've greatly expanded our knowledge of how Earth fits within the context of our universe. 
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered thousands of potential planets around other stars, indicating that Earth is but one of billions of planets in our galaxy. 
Kepler is a space telescope that measures the subtle dimming of stars as planets pass in front of them, blocking just a little bit of that light from reaching us. 
Kepler's data reveals planets' sizes as well as their distance from their parent star. 
Together, this helps us understand whether these planets are small and rocky, like the terrestrial planets in our own Solar System, and also how much light they receive from their parent sun. 
In turn, this provides clues as to whether these planets that we discover might be habitable or not. 
Unfortunately, at the same time as we're discovering this treasure trove of potentially habitable worlds, our own planet is sagging under the weight of humanity. 
2014 was the hottest year on record. 
Glaciers and sea ice that have been with us for millennia are now disappearing in a matter of decades. 
These planetary-scale environmental changes that we have set in motion are rapidly outpacing our ability to alter their course. 
But I'm not a climate scientist, I'm an astronomer. 
I study planetary habitability as influenced by stars with the hopes of finding the places in the universe where we might discover life beyond our own planet. 
You could say that I look for choice alien real estate. 
Now, as somebody who is deeply embedded in the search for life in the universe, I can tell you that the more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet itself. 
Each one of these new worlds invites a comparison between the newly discovered planet and the planets we know best: those of our own Solar System. 
Consider our neighbor, Mars. 
Mars is small and rocky, and though it's a bit far from the Sun, it might be considered a potentially habitable world if found by a mission like Kepler. 
Indeed, it's possible that Mars was habitable in the past, and in part, this is why we study Mars so much. 
Our rovers, like Curiosity, crawl across its surface, scratching for clues as to the origins of life as we know it. 
Orbiters like the MAVEN mission sample the Martian atmosphere, trying to understand how Mars might have lost its past habitability. 
Private spaceflight companies now offer not just a short trip to near space but the tantalizing possibility of living our lives on Mars. 
But though these Martian vistas resemble the deserts of our own home world, places that are tied in our imagination to ideas about pioneering and frontiers, compared to Earth Mars is a pretty terrible place to live. 
Consider the extent to which we have not colonized the deserts of our own planet, places that are lush by comparison with Mars. 
Even in the driest, highest places on Earth, the air is sweet and thick with oxygen exhaled from thousands of miles away by our rainforests. 
I worry — I worry that this excitement about colonizing Mars and other planets carries with it a long, dark shadow: the implication and belief by some that Mars will be there to save us from the self-inflicted destruction of the only truly habitable planet we know of, the Earth. 
As much as I love interplanetary exploration, I deeply disagree with this idea. 
There are many excellent reasons to go to Mars, but for anyone to tell you that Mars will be there to back up humanity is like the captain of the Titanic telling you that the real party is happening later on the lifeboats. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. 
But the goals of interplanetary exploration and planetary preservation are not opposed to one another. 
No, they're in fact two sides of the same goal: to understand, preserve and improve life into the future. 
The extreme environments of our own world are alien vistas. 
They're just closer to home. 
If we can understand how to create and maintain habitable spaces out of hostile, inhospitable spaces here on Earth, perhaps we can meet the needs of both preserving our own environment and moving beyond it. 
I leave you with a final thought experiment: Fermi's paradox. 
Many years ago, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked that, given the fact that our universe has been around for a very long time and we expect that there are many planets within it, we should have found evidence for alien life by now. 
So where are they? 
Well, one possible solution to Fermi's paradox is that, as civilizations become technologically advanced enough to consider living amongst the stars, they lose sight of how important it is to safeguard the home worlds that fostered that advancement to begin with. 
It is hubris to believe that interplanetary colonization alone will save us from ourselves, but planetary preservation and interplanetary exploration can work together. 
If we truly believe in our ability to bend the hostile environments of Mars for human habitation, then we should be able to surmount the far easier task of preserving the habitability of the Earth. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In the past few months, I've been traveling for weeks at a time with only one suitcase of clothes. 
One day, I was invited to an important event, and I wanted to wear something special and new for it. 
So I looked through my suitcase and I couldn't find anything to wear. 
I was lucky to be at the technology conference on that day, and I had access to 3D printers. 
So I quickly designed a skirt on my computer, and I loaded the file on the printer. 
It just printed the pieces overnight. 
The next morning, I just took all the pieces, assembled them together in my hotel room, and this is actually the skirt that I'm wearing right now. 
(Applause) So it wasn't the first time that I printed clothes. 
For my senior collection at fashion design school, I decided to try and 3D print an entire fashion collection from my home. 
The problem was that I barely knew anything about 3D printing, and I had only nine months to figure out how to print five fashionable looks. 
I always felt most creative when I worked from home. 
I loved experimenting with new materials, and I always tried to develop new techniques to make the most unique textiles for my fashion projects. 
I loved going to old factories and weird stores in search of leftovers of strange powders and weird materials, and then bring them home to experiment on. 
As you can probably imagine, my roommates didn't like that at all. 
(Laughter) So I decided to move on to working with big machines, ones that didn't fit in my living room. 
I love the exact and the custom work I can do with all kinds of fashion technologies, like knitting machines and laser cutting and silk printing. 
One summer break, I came here to New York for an internship at a fashion house in Chinatown. 
We worked on two incredible dresses that were 3D printed. 
They were amazing — like you can see here. 
But I had a few issues with them. 
They were made from hard plastics and that's why they were very breakable. 
The models couldn't sit in them, and they even got scratched from the plastics under their arms. 
With 3D printing, the designers had so much freedom to make the dresses look exactly like they wanted, but still, they were very dependent on big and expensive industrial printers that were located in a lab far from their studio. 
Later that year, a friend gave me a 3D printed necklace, printed using a home printer. 
I knew that these printers were much cheaper and much more accessible than the ones we used at my internship. 
So I looked at the necklace, and then I thought, "" If I can print a necklace from home, why not print my clothes from home, too? "" I really liked the idea that I wouldn't have to go to the market and pick fabrics that someone else chose to sell — I could just design them and print them directly from home. 
I found a small makerspace, where I learned everything I know about 3D printing. 
Right away, they literally gave me the key to the lab, so I could experiment into the night, every night. 
The main challenge was to find the right filament for printing clothes with. 
So what is a filament? 
Filament is the material you feed the printer with. 
And I spent a month or so experimenting with PLA, which is a hard and scratchy, breakable material. 
The breakthrough came when I was introduced to Filaflex, which is a new kind of filament. 
It's strong, yet very flexible. 
And with it, I was able to print the first garment, the red jacket that had the word "" Liberté "" — "" freedom "" in French — embedded into it. 
I chose this word because I felt so empowered and free when I could just design a garment from my home and then print it by myself. 
And actually, you can easily download this jacket, and easily change the word to something else. 
For example, your name or your sweetheart's name. 
(Laughter) So the printer plates are small, so I had to piece the garment together, just like a puzzle. 
And I wanted to solve another challenge. 
I wanted to print textiles that I would use just like regular fabrics. 
That's when I found an open-source file from an architect who designed a pattern that I love. 
And with it, I was able to print a beautiful textile that I would use just like a regular fabric. 
And it actually even looks a little bit like lace. 
So I took his file and I modified it, and changed it, played with it — many kinds of versions out of it. 
And I needed to print another 1,500 more hours to complete printing my collection. 
So I brought six printers to my home and just printed 24-7. 
And this is actually a really slow process, but let's remember the Internet was significantly slower 20 years ago, so 3D printing will also accelerate and in no time you'll be able to print a T-Shirt in your home in just a couple of hours, or even minutes. 
So you guys, you want to see what it looks like? 
Audience: Yeah! 
(Applause) Danit Peleg: Rebecca is wearing one of my five outfits. 
Almost everything here she's wearing, I printed from my home. 
Even her shoes are printed. 
Audience: Wow! 
Audience: Cool! 
(Applause) Danit Peleg: Thank you, Rebecca. 
(To audience) Thank you, guys. 
So I think in the future, materials will evolve, and they will look and feel like fabrics we know today, like cotton or silk. 
Imagine personalized clothes that fit exactly to your measurements. 
Music was once a very physical thing. 
You would have to go to the record shop and buy CDs, but now you can just download the music — digital music — directly to your phone. 
Fashion is also a very physical thing. 
And I wonder what our world will look like when our clothes will be digital, just like this skirt is. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) [Thank You] (Applause) 

The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. 
It's the only one that can start a war or say "" I love you. "" And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them. 
And why is that? 
How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world? 
I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large habits that we can all fall into. 
First, gossip. 
Speaking ill of somebody who's not present. 
Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping, five minutes later, will be gossiping about us. 
Second, judging. 
We know people who are like this in conversation, and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time. 
Third, negativity. 
I remember one day, I said to her, "" It's October 1 today, "" and she said, "" I know, isn't it dreadful? "" (Laughter) It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative. (Laughter) 
It's our national sport. 
Excuses. 
They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions, and again, hard to listen to somebody who is being like that. 
It demeans our language, actually, sometimes. 
For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it? 
(Laughter) And then, of course, this exaggeration becomes lying, and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us. 
When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. 
So here they are, seven deadly sins of speaking. 
These are things I think we need to avoid. 
But is there a positive way to think about this? 
Yes, there is. 
I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations, that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. 
The word is "" hail, "" and it has a great definition as well. 
I'm not talking about the stuff that falls from the sky and hits you on the head. 
See if you can guess. 
The H, honesty, of course, being true in what you say, being straight and clear. 
The A is authenticity, just being yourself. 
A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it. 
The I is integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say, and being somebody people can trust. 
I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well, for two reasons. 
First of all, I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. 
Perhaps that's not necessary. 
Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. 
But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time. 
I'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously. 
So hail. 
Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song, it is what you say, it's also the way that you say it. 
This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. 
I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking. 
Now, falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between. 
I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. 
But if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. 
You hear the difference? 
We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. 
That's register. 
Then we have timbre. 
It's the way your voice feels. 
Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. 
Well if that's not you, that's not the end of the world, because you can train. 
Go and get a voice coach. 
And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice. 
Then prosody. I love prosody. 
This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. 
It's root one for meaning in conversation. 
People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all. 
That's where the word "" monotonic "" comes from, or monotonous, monotone. 
Also, we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question when it's actually not a question, it's a statement? 
(Laughter) And if you repeat that one, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame, so let's try and break that habit. 
I can get very excited by saying something really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize, and at the end of that, of course, is our old friend silence. 
There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? 
We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. 
Of course, pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal, but you can do it just with pitch. 
(Higher pitch) Where did you leave my keys? 
And finally, volume. 
(Loud) I can get really excited by using volume. 
Sorry about that, if I startled anybody. 
Or, I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. 
That's called sodcasting, (Laughter) Imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. 
It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech. 
Whatever it is, if it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on, and no engine works well without being warmed up. 
Warm up your voice. 
I'm going to show you the six vocal warm-up exercises that I do before every talk I ever do. 
Any time you're going to talk to anybody important, do these. 
First, arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out, ahhhhh, like that. 
One more time. 
Ahhhh, very good. 
Now we're going to warm up our lips, and we're going to go Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba. Very good. 
And now, brrrrrrrrrr, just like when you were a kid. 
We're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. 
Beautiful. You're getting really good at this. 
That's like champagne for the tongue. 
Finally, and if I can only do one, the pros call this the siren. 
It's really good. It starts with "" we "" and goes to "" aw. "" The "" we "" is high, the "" aw "" is low. 
Fantastic. Give yourselves a round of applause. 
(Applause) Next time you speak, do those in advance. 
Now let me just put this in context to close. 
This is a serious point here. 
This is where we are now, right? 
We speak not very well to people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. 
What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose? 
Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound? 
That would be a world that does sound beautiful, and one where understanding would be the norm, and that is an idea worth spreading. 
Thank you. 

I was thinking about my place in the universe, and about my first thought about what infinity might mean, when I was a child. 
And I thought that if time could reach forwards and backwards infinitely, doesn't that mean that every point in time is really infinitely small, and therefore somewhat meaningless. 
So we don't really have a place in the universe, as far as on a time line. 
But nothing else does either. 
Therefore every moment really is the most important moment that's ever happened, including this moment right now. 
And so therefore this music you're about to hear is maybe the most important music you'll ever hear in your life. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 
For those of you who I'll be fortunate enough to meet afterwards, you could please refrain from saying, "Oh my god, you're so much shorter in real life." 
(Laughter) Because it's like the stage is an optical illusion, for some reason. (Laughter) 
Somewhat like the curving of the universe. 
I don't know what it is. I get asked in interviews a lot, "My god, you're guitars are so gigantic!" 
(Laughter) "You must get them custom made — special, humongous guitars." (Laughter) 
(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 

Ichthyology, the study of fishes. 
It looks like a big, boring word, but it's actually quite exciting, because ichthyology is the only "" ology "" with "" YOLO "" in it. 
(Laughter) Now, to the cool kids in the audience, you already know, YOLO stands for "" you only live once, "" and because I only have one life, I'm going to spend it doing what I always dreamt of doing: seeing the hidden wonders of the world and discovering new species. 
And that's what I get to do. 
Now, in recent years, I really focused on caves for finding new species. 
And it turns out, there's lots of new cavefish species out there. 
You just have to know where to look, and to maybe be a little thin. 
(Laughter) Now, cavefishes can tell me a lot about biology and geology. 
They can tell me how the landmasses around them have changed and moved by being stuck in these little holes, and they can tell me about the evolution of sight, by being blind. 
Now, fish have eyes that are essentially the same as ours. 
All vertebrates do, and each time a fish species starts to adapt to this dark, cold, cave environment, over many, many generations, they lose their eyes and their eyesight until the end up like an eyeless cavefish like this one here. 
Now, each cavefish species has evolved in a slightly different way, and each one has a unique geological and biological story to tell us, and that's why it's so exciting when we find a new species. 
So this is a new species we described, from southern Indiana. 
We named it Amblyopsis hoosieri, the Hoosier cavefish. 
(Laughter) Its closest relatives are cavefishes in Kentucky, in the Mammoth Cave system. 
And they start to diverge when the Ohio River split them a few million years ago. 
And in that time they developed these subtle differences in the genetic architecture behind their blindness. 
There's this gene called rhodopsin that's super-critical for sight. 
We have it, and these species have it too, except one species has lost all function in that gene, and the other one maintains it. 
So this sets up this beautiful natural experiment where we can look at the genes behind our vision, and at the very roots of how we can see. 
But the genes in these cavefishes can also tell us about deep geological time, maybe no more so than in this species here. 
This is a new species we described from Madagascar that we named Typhleotris mararybe. 
That means "" big sickness "" in Malagasy, for how sick we got trying to collect this species. 
Now, believe it or not, swimming around sinkholes full of dead things and cave full of bat poop isn't the smartest thing you could be doing with your life, but YOLO. 
(Laughter) Now, I love this species despite the fact that it tried to kill us, and that's because this species in Madagascar, its closest relatives are 6,000 kilometers away, cavefishes in Australia. 
Now, there's no way a three-inch-long freshwater cavefish can swim across the Indian Ocean, so what we found when we compared the DNA of these species is that they've been separated for more than 100 million years, or about the time that the southern continents were last together. 
So in fact, these species didn't move at all. 
It's the continents that moved them. 
And so they give us, through their DNA, this precise model and measure of how to date and time these ancient geological events. 
Now, this species here is so new I'm not even allowed to tell you its name yet, but I can tell you it's a new species from Mexico, and it's probably already extinct. 
It's probably extinct because the only known cave system it's from was destroyed when a dam was built nearby. 
Unfortunately for cavefishes, their groundwater habitat is also our main source of drinking water. 
Now, we actually don't know this species' closest relative, yet. 
It doesn't appear to be anything else in Mexico, so maybe it's something in Cuba, or Florida, or India. 
But whatever it is, it might tell us something new about the geology of the Caribbean, or the biology of how to better diagnose certain types of blindness. 
But I hope we discover this species before it goes extinct too. 
And I'm going to spend my one life as an ichthyologist trying to discover and save these humble little blind cavefishes that can tell us so much about the geology of the planet and the biology of how we see. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Ten years ago, I had my first exhibition here. 
I had no idea if it would work or was at all possible, but with a few small steps and a very steep learning curve, I made my first sculpture, called "" The Lost Correspondent. "" Teaming up with a marine biologist and a local dive center, I submerged the work off the coast of Grenada, in an area decimated by Hurricane Ivan. 
And then this incredible thing happened. 
It transformed. 
One sculpture became two. 
Two quickly became 26. 
And before I knew it, we had the world's first underwater sculpture park. 
In 2009, I moved to Mexico and started by casting local fisherman. 
This grew to a small community, to almost an entire movement of people in defense of the sea. 
And then finally, to an underwater museum, with over 500 living sculptures. 
Gardening, it seems, is not just for greenhouses. 
We've since scaled up the designs: "" Ocean Atlas, "" in the Bahamas, rising 16 feet up to the surface and weighing over 40 tons, to now currently in Lanzarote, where I'm making an underwater botanical garden, the first of its kind in the Atlantic Ocean. 
Each project, we use materials and designs that help encourage life; a long-lasting pH-neutral cement provides a stable and permanent platform. 
It is textured to allow coral polyps to attach. 
We position them down current from natural reefs so that after spawning, there's areas for them to settle. 
The formations are all configured so that they aggregate fish on a really large scale. 
Even this VW Beetle has an internal living habitat to encourage crustaceans such as lobsters and sea urchins. 
So why exhibit my work in the ocean? 
Because honestly, it's really not easy. 
When you're in the middle of the sea under a hundred-foot crane, trying to lower eight tons down to the sea floor, you start to wonder whether I shouldn't have taken up watercolor painting instead. 
(Laughter) But in the end, the results always blow my mind. 
(Music) The ocean is the most incredible exhibition space an artist could ever wish for. 
You have amazing lighting effects changing by the hour, explosions of sand covering the sculptures in a cloud of mystery, a unique timeless quality and the procession of inquisitive visitors, each lending their own special touch to the site. 
(Music) But over the years, I've realized that the greatest thing about what we do, the really humbling thing about the work, is that as soon as we submerge the sculptures, they're not ours anymore, because as soon as we sink them, the sculptures, they belong to the sea. 
As new reefs form, a new world literally starts to evolve, a world that continuously amazes me. 
It's a bit of a cliché, but nothing man-made can ever match the imagination of nature. 
Sponges look like veins across the faces. 
Staghorn coral morphs the form. 
Fireworms scrawl white lines as they feed. 
Tunicates explode from the faces. 
Sea urchins crawl across the bodies feeding at night. 
Coralline algae applies a kind of purple paint. 
The deepest red I've ever seen in my life lives underwater. 
Gorgonian fans oscillate with the waves. 
Purple sponges breathe water like air. 
And grey angelfish glide silently overhead. 
And the amazing response we've had to these works tells me that we've managed to plug into something really primal, because it seems that these images translate across the world, and that's made me focus on my responsibility as an artist and about what I'm trying to achieve. 
I'm standing here today on this boat in the middle of the ocean, and this couldn't be a better place to talk about the really, really important effect of my work. 
Because as we all know, our reefs are dying, and our oceans are in trouble. 
So here's the thing: the most used, searched and shared image of all my work thus far is this. 
And I think this is for a reason, or at least I hope it is. 
What I really hope is that people are beginning to understand that when we think of the environment and the destruction of nature, that we need to start thinking about our oceans, too. 
Since building these sites, we've seen some phenomenal and unexpected results. 
Besides creating over 800 square meters of new habitats and living reef, visitors to the marine park in Cancun now divide half their time between the museum and the natural reefs, providing significant rest for natural, overstressed areas. 
Visitors to "" Ocean Atlas "" in the Bahamas highlighted a leak from a nearby oil refinery. 
The subsequent international media forced the local government to pledge 10 million dollars in coastal cleanups. 
The sculpture park in Grenada was instrumental in the government designating a spot — a marine-protected area. 
Entrance fees to the park now help fund park rangers to manage tourism and fishing quotas. 
The site was actually listed as a "" Wonder of the World "" by National Geographic. 
So why are we all here today in this room? 
What do we all have in common? 
I think we all share a fear that we don't protect our oceans enough. 
And one way of thinking about this is that we don't regard our oceans as sacred, and we should. 
When we see incredible places — like the Himalayas or the La Sagrada Família, or the Mona Lisa, even — when we see these incredible places and things, we understand their importance. 
We call them sacred, and we do our best to cherish them, to protect them and to keep them safe. 
But in order to do that, we are the ones that have to assign that value; otherwise, it will be desecrated by someone who doesn't understand that value. 
So I want to finish up tonight by talking about sacred things. 
When we were naming the site in Cancun, we named it a museum for a very important and simple reason: museums are places of preservation, of conservation and of education. 
They're places where we keep objects of great value to us, where we simply treasure them for them being themselves. 
If someone was to throw an egg at the Sistine Chapel, we'd all go crazy. 
If someone wanted to build a seven-star hotel at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, then we would laugh them out of Arizona. 
Yet every day we dredge, pollute and overfish our oceans. 
And I think it's easier for us to do that, because when we see the ocean, we don't see the havoc we're wreaking. 
Because for most people, the ocean is like this. 
And it's really hard to think of something that's just so plain and so enormous, as fragile. 
It's simply too massive, too vast, too endless. 
And what do you see here? 
I think most people actually look past to the horizon. 
So I think there's a real danger that we never really see the sea, and if we don't really see it, if it doesn't have its own iconography, if we miss its majesty, then there's a big danger that we take it for granted. 
Cancun is famous for spring break, tequila and foam parties. 
And its waters are where frat boys can ride around on Jet Skis and banana boats. 
But because of our work there, there's now a little corner of Cancun that is simply precious for being itself. 
And we don't want to stop in Grenada, in Cancun or the Bahamas. 
Just last month, I installed these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Thames River, in central London, right in front of the Houses of Parliament, putting a stark message about climate change in front of the people that have the power to help change things. 
Because for me, this is just the beginning of the mission. 
We want to team up with other inventors, creators, philanthropists, educators, biologists, to see better futures for our oceans. 
And we want to see beyond sculpture, beyond art, even. 
Say you're a 14-year-old kid from the city, and you've never seen the ocean. 
And instead of getting taken to the natural history museum or an aquarium, you get taken out to the ocean, to an underwater Noah's Ark, which you can access through a dry-glass viewing tunnel, where you can see all the wildlife of the land be colonized by the wildlife of the ocean. 
Clearly, it would blow your mind. 
So let's think big and let's think deep. 
Who knows where our imagination and willpower can lead us? 
I hope that by bringing our art into the ocean, that not only do we take advantage of amazing creativity and visual impact of the setting, but that we are also giving something back, and by encouraging new environments to thrive, and in some way opening up a new — or maybe it's a really old way of seeing the seas: as delicate, precious places, worthy of our protection. 
Our oceans are sacred. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Joe Kowan: I have stage fright. 
I've always had stage fright, and not just a little bit, it's a big bit. 
And it didn't even matter until I was 27. 
That's when I started writing songs, and even then I only played them for myself. 
Just knowing my roommates were in the same house made me uncomfortable. 
But after a couple of years, just writing songs wasn't enough. 
I had all these stories and ideas, and I wanted to share them with people, but physiologically, I couldn't do it. 
I had this irrational fear. 
But the more I wrote, and the more I practiced, the more I wanted to perform. 
So on the week of my 30th birthday, I decided I was going to go to this local open mic, and put this fear behind me. 
Well, when I got there, it was packed. 
There were like 20 people there. 
(Laughter) And they all looked angry. 
But I took a deep breath, and I signed up to play, and I felt pretty good. 
Pretty good, until about 10 minutes before my turn, when my whole body rebelled, and this wave of anxiety just washed over me. 
Now, when you experience fear, your sympathetic nervous system kicks in. 
So you have a rush of adrenaline, your heart rate increases, your breathing gets faster. 
Next your non-essential systems start to shut down, like digestion. (Laughter) So your mouth gets dry, and blood is routed away from your extremities, so your fingers don't work anymore. 
Your pupils dilate, your muscles contract, your Spidey sense tingles, basically your whole body is trigger-happy. (Laughter) That condition is not conducive to performing folk music. (Laughter) 
I mean, your nervous system is an idiot. 
Really? Two hundred thousand years of human evolution, and it still can't tell the difference between a saber tooth tiger and 20 folksingers on a Tuesday night open mic? 
(Laughter) I have never been more terrified — until now. 
(Laughter and cheers) So then it was my turn, and somehow, I get myself onto the stage, I start my song, I open my mouth to sing the first line, and this completely horrible vibrato — you know, when your voice wavers — comes streaming out. 
And this is not the good kind of vibrato, like an opera singer has, this is my whole body just convulsing with fear. 
I mean, it's a nightmare. 
I'm embarrassed, the audience is clearly uncomfortable, they're focused on my discomfort. 
It was so bad. 
But that was my first real experience as a solo singer-songwriter. 
And something good did happen — I had the tiniest little glimpse of that audience connection that I was hoping for. 
And I wanted more. But I knew I had to get past this nervousness. 
That night I promised myself: I would go back every week until I wasn't nervous anymore. 
And I did. I went back every single week, and sure enough, week after week, it didn't get any better. The same thing happened every week. (Laughter) I couldn't shake it. 
And that's when I had an epiphany. 
And I remember it really well, because I don't have a lot of epiphanies. (Laughter) All I had to do was write a song that exploits my nervousness. 
That only seems authentic when I have stage fright, and the more nervous I was, the better the song would be. Easy. 
So I started writing a song about having stage fright. 
First, fessing up to the problem, the physical manifestations, how I would feel, how the listener might feel. 
And then accounting for things like my shaky voice, and I knew I would be singing about a half-octave higher than normal, because I was nervous. 
By having a song that explained what was happening to me, while it was happening, that gave the audience permission to think about it. 
They didn't have to feel bad for me because I was nervous, they could experience that with me, and we were all one big happy, nervous, uncomfortable family. (Laughter) By thinking about my audience, by embracing and exploiting my problem, I was able to take something that was blocking my progress, and turn it into something that was essential for my success. 
And having the stage fright song let me get past that biggest issue right in the beginning of a performance. 
And then I could move on, and play the rest of my songs with just a little bit more ease. 
And eventually, over time, I didn't have to play the stage fright song at all. 
Except for when I was really nervous, like now. (Laughter) Would it be okay if I played the stage fright song for you? 
(Applause) Can I have a sip of water? 
(Music) Thank you. 
♫ I'm not joking, you know, ♫ ♫ this stage fright is real. ♫ ♫ And if I'm up here trembling and singing, ♫ ♫ well, you'll know how I feel. ♫ ♫ And the mistake I'd be making, ♫ ♫ the tremolo caused by my whole body shaking. ♫ ♫ As you sit there feeling embarrassed for me, ♫ ♫ well, you don't have to be. ♫ ♫ Well, maybe just a little bit. ♫ (Laughter) ♫ And maybe I'll try to imagine you all without clothes. ♫ ♫ But singing in front of all naked strangers scares me more than anyone knows. ♫ 
♫ Not to discuss this at length, ♫ ♫ but my body image was never my strength. ♫ ♫ So frankly, I wish that you all would get dressed, ♫ ♫ I mean, you're not even really naked. ♫ ♫ And I'm the one with the problem. ♫ ♫ And you tell me, don't worry so much, you'll be great. ♫ ♫ But I'm the one living with me ♫ ♫ and I know how I get. ♫ ♫ Your advice is gentle but late. ♫ ♫ If not just a bit patronizing. ♫ ♫ And that sarcastic tone doesn't help me when I sing. ♫ 
♫ But we shouldn't talk about these things right now, ♫ ♫ really, I'm up on stage, and you're in the crowd. Hi. ♫ ♫ And I'm not making fun of unnurtured, irrational fear, ♫ ♫ and if I wasn't ready to face this, ♫ ♫ I sure as hell wouldn't be here. ♫ ♫ But if I belt one note out clearly, ♫ ♫ you'll know I'm recovering slowly but surely. ♫ ♫ And maybe next week, I'll set my guitar ringin '♫ ♫ my voice clear as water, and everyone singin'. ♫ ♫ But probably I'll just get up and start groovin ', ♫ 
♫ my vocal cords movin ', ♫ ♫ at speeds slightly faster than sound. ♫ (Applause) 

My name is Emiliano Salinas and I'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in the violent atmosphere this country is living in right now. 
I was born in 1976. 
I grew up in a traditional Mexican family. 
As a child, I had a pretty normal life: I would go to school, play with my friends and cousins. 
But then my father became President of Mexico and my life changed. 
What I'm about to say, at least some of what I'm about to say, will cause controversy. 
Firstly, because I'm the one who's going to say it. 
And secondly, because what I'm going to say is true, and it will make a lot of people nervous because it's something we don't want to hear. 
But it's imperative that we listen because it's undeniable and definitive. 
It will also make members of criminal organizations nervous for the same reasons. 
I'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in this phenomenon, and about four different response levels we citizens have against violence. 
I know many will find it difficult to separate the fact that I'm Carlos Salinas de Gortari's son from the fact that I'm a citizen concerned about the country's current situation. 
Don't worry. 
It's not necessary for understanding the importance of what I'm going to say. 
I think we have a problem in Mexico. 
We have a big problem. 
I think there's consensus on this. 
No one argues — we all agree there's a problem. 
What we don't agree on is what the problem actually is. 
Is it the Zetas? The drug traffickers? The government? 
Corruption? Poverty? Or is it something else? 
I think none of these is the problem. 
I don't mean they don't deserve attention. 
But we won't be able to take care of any of those things if we don't solve the real problem we have in Mexico first. 
The real problem we have is most of us Mexicans, we believe we are victims of our circumstances. 
We are a country of victims. 
Historically, we've always acted as victims of something or somebody. 
We were victims of the Spaniards. 
Then we were victims of the French. 
Then we were victims of Don Porfirio. 
Then we were victims of the PRI. 
Even of Salinas. 
And of El Peje. 
And now of the Zetas and the traffickers and the criminals and the kidnappers... 
Hold on! Wait a minute! 
What if none of these things is the problem? 
The problem is not the things we feel victims of. 
The problem is that we play the role of victims. 
We need to open our eyes and see that we are not victims. 
If only we stopped feeling like victims, if we stopped acting as victims, our country would change so much! 
I'm going to talk about how to go from a society that acts as a victim of circumstances to a responsible, involved society that takes the future of its country in its own hands. 
I'm going to talk about four different levels of civil response against violence, from weakest to strongest. 
The first level, the weakest level of civil response against violence, is denial and apathy. 
Today, much of Mexican society is in denial of the situation we're going through. 
We want to go on with our daily life even though we are not living under normal circumstances. 
Daily life in our country is, to say the least, under extraordinary, exceptional circumstances. 
It's like someone who has a serious illness and pretends it's the flu and it will just go away. 
We want to pretend that Mexico has the flu. 
But it doesn't. 
Mexico has cancer. 
And if we don't do something about it, the cancer will end up killing it. 
We need to move Mexican society from denial and apathy to the next level of citizen response, which is, effectively, recognition. 
And that recognition will sow fear — recognizing the seriousness of the situation. 
But, fear is better than apathy because fear makes us do something. 
Many people in Mexico are afraid today. 
We're very afraid. 
And we're acting out of that fear. 
And let me tell you what the problem is with acting out of fear — and this is the second level of civil response: fear. 
Let's think about Mexican streets: they're unsafe because of violence, so people stay at home. 
Does that make streets more or less safe? 
Less safe! 
So streets become more desolate and unsafe, so we stay home more — which makes streets even more desolate and unsafe, and we stay home even more. 
This vicious circle ends up with the whole population stuck inside their houses, scared to death — even more afraid than when we were out on the streets. 
We need to confront this fear. 
We need to move Mexican society, the members of society who are at this level, to the next level, which is action. 
We need to face our fears and take back our streets, our cities, our neighborhoods. 
For many people, acting involves courage. 
We go from fear to courage. 
They say, "" I can't take it anymore. 
Let's do something about it. "" Recently — this is a sensitive figure — 35 public lynchings have been recorded so far in 2010 in Mexico. 
Usually it's one or two a year. 
Now we're experiencing one every week. 
This shows that society is desperate and it's taking the law into its own hands. 
Unfortunately, violent action — though action is better than no action — but taking part in it only disguises violence. 
If I'm violent with you and you respond with violence, you become part of the violence and you just disguise my violence. 
So civil action is vital, but it's also vital to take people who are at the level of courage and violent action to the next level, which is non-violent action. 
It's pacific, coordinated civil action, which doesn't mean passive action. 
It means it's determined and effective, but not violent. 
There are examples of this kind of action in Mexico. 
Two years ago, in Galena City, Chihuahua, a member of the community was kidnapped, Eric Le Barón. 
His brothers, Benjamín and Julián, got together with the rest of the community to think of the best course of action: to pay the ransom, to take up arms and go after the kidnappers or to ask the government for help. 
In the end, Benjamín and Julián decided the best thing they could do was to organize the community and act together. 
So what did they do? 
They mobilized the whole community of Le Barón to go to Chihuahua, where they organized a sit-in in the central park of the city. 
They sent a message to the kidnappers: "" If you want your ransom come and get it. 
We'll be waiting for you right here. "" They stayed there. 
Seven days later, Eric was set free and was able to return home. 
This is an example of what an organized society can do, a society that acts. 
Of course, criminals can respond. 
And in this case, they did. 
On July 7th, 2009, Benjamín Le Barón was murdered. 
But Julián Le Barón keeps working and he has been mobilizing communities in Chihuahua for over a year. 
And for over a year he has known that a price has been put on his head. 
But he keeps fighting. 
He keeps organizing. 
He keeps mobilizing. 
These heroic acts are present all over the country. 
With a thousand Juliáns working together, Mexico would be a very different country. 
And they're out there! 
They just have to raise their hands. 
I was born in Mexico, I grew up in Mexico and along the way, I learned to love Mexico. 
I think anyone who has stepped foot on this land — not to mention all Mexican people — will agree that it's not difficult to love Mexico. 
I've traveled a lot and nowhere else have I found the passion Mexicans have. 
That devotion we feel for the national football team. 
That devotion we show in helping victims of disasters, such as the earthquake in 1985 or this year's floods. 
The passion with which we've been singing the national anthem since we were kids. 
When we thought Masiosare was the strange enemy, and we sang, with a childlike heart, "a soldier in each son." 
I think the biggest insult, the worst way you can offend a Mexican is to insult their mother. 
A mother is the most sacred thing in life. 
Mexico is our mother and today she cries out for her children. 
We are going through the darkest moment in our recent history. 
Our mother, Mexico, is being violated before our very eyes. 
What are we going to do? 
Masiosare, the strange enemy, is here. 
Where is the soldier in each son? 
Mahatma Gandhi, one of the greatest civil fighters of all time, said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." 
Today in Mexico we're asking for Gandhis. 
We need Gandhis. 
We need men and women who love Mexico and who are willing to take action. 
This is a call for every true Mexican to join this initiative. This is a call 
so that every single thing we love about Mexico — the festivals, the markets, the restaurants, the cantinas, the tequila, the mariachis, the serenades, the posadas, El Grito, the Day of the Dead, San Miguel, the joy, the passion for life, the fight and everything it means to be Mexican — doesn't disappear from this world. 
We're facing a very powerful opponent. 
But we are many more. 
They can take a man's life. 
Anyone can kill me, or you, or you. 
But no one can kill the spirit of true Mexicans. 
The battle is won, but we still have to fight it. 
2000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal said something that today echoes in the heart of every true Mexican. 
He said, "" Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth living. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi. My name is Cameron Russell, and for the last little while, I've been a model. 
Actually, for 10 years. 
And I feel like there's an uncomfortable tension in the room right now because I should not have worn this dress. 
(Laughter) So luckily, I brought an outfit change. 
This is the first outfit change on the TED stage, so you guys are pretty lucky to witness it, I think. 
If some of the women were really horrified when I came out, you don't have to tell me now, but I'll find out later on Twitter. 
(Laughter) I'd also note that I'm quite privileged to be able to transform what you think of me in a very brief 10 seconds. 
Not everybody gets to do that. 
These heels are very uncomfortable, so good thing I wasn't going to wear them. 
The worst part is putting this sweater over my head, because that's when you'll all laugh at me, so don't do anything while it's over my head. 
All right. 
So, why did I do that? 
That was awkward. 
(Laughter) Well — (Laughter) Hopefully not as awkward as that picture. 
Image is powerful, but also, image is superficial. 
I just totally transformed what you thought of me, in six seconds. 
And in this picture, I had actually never had a boyfriend in real life. 
I was totally uncomfortable, and the photographer was telling me to arch my back and put my hand in that guy's hair. 
And of course, barring surgery, or the fake tan that I got two days ago for work, there's very little that we can do to transform how we look, and how we look, though it is superficial and immutable, has a huge impact on our lives. 
So today, for me, being fearless means being honest. 
And I am on this stage because I am a model. 
I am on this stage because I am a pretty, white woman, and in my industry, we call that a sexy girl. 
I'm going to answer the questions that people always ask me, but with an honest twist. 
So the first question is, how do you become a model? 
I always just say, "" Oh, I was scouted, "" but that means nothing. 
The real way that I became a model is I won a genetic lottery, and I am the recipient of a legacy, and maybe you're wondering what is a legacy. 
Well, for the past few centuries we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that we're biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures, and femininity and white skin. 
And this is a legacy that was built for me, and it's a legacy that I've been cashing out on. 
And I know there are people in the audience who are skeptical at this point, and maybe there are some fashionistas who are like, "Wait. Naomi. Tyra. Joan Smalls. Liu Wen." 
And first, I commend you on your model knowledge. Very impressive. 
(Laughter) But unfortunately, I have to inform you that in 2007, a very inspired NYU Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four percent, were non-white. 
The next question people always ask is, "Can I be a model when I grow up?" 
And the first answer is, "" I don't know, they don't put me in charge of that. "" But the second answer, and what I really want to say to these little girls is, "" Why? You know? You can be anything. 
You could be the President of the United States, or the inventor of the next Internet, or a ninja cardiothoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome, because you'd be the first one. "" (Laughter) If, after this amazing list, they still are like, "No, no, Cameron, I want to be a model," well, then I say, "" Be my boss. "" Because I'm not in charge of anything, and you could be the editor in chief of American Vogue or the CEO of H & M, or the next Steven Meisel. 
Saying that you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. 
It's out of your control, and it's awesome, and it's not a career path. 
I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge, because unlike cardiothoracic surgeons, it can just be distilled right now. 
So, if the photographer is right there, the light is right there, like a nice HMI, and the client says, "" We want a walking shot, "" this leg goes first, nice and long, this arm goes back, this arm goes forward, the head is at three quarters, and you just go back and forth, just do that, and then you look back at your imaginary friends, 300, 400, 500 times. 
(Laughter) It will look something like this. (Laughter) 
Hopefully less awkward than that one in the middle. 
That was — I don't know what happened there. 
Unfortunately, after you've gone to school, and you have a résumé and you've done a few jobs, you can't say anything anymore, so if you say you want to be the President of the United States, but your résumé reads, "" Underwear Model: 10 years, "" people give you a funny look. 
The next question is, "" Do they retouch all the photos? "" And yeah, they pretty much retouch all the photos, but that is only a small component of what's happening. 
This picture is the very first picture that I ever took, and it's also the very first time that I had worn a bikini, and I didn't even have my period yet. 
I know we're getting personal, but I was a young girl. 
This is what I looked like with my grandma just a few months earlier. 
Here's me on the same day as this shoot. 
My friend got to come. 
Here's me at a slumber party a few days before I shot French Vogue. 
Here's me on the soccer team and in V Magazine. 
And here's me today. 
And I hope what you're seeing is that these pictures are not pictures of me. 
They are constructions, and they are constructions by a group of professionals, by hairstylists and makeup artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production, and they build this. 
Okay, so the next question people always ask me is, "Do you get free stuff?" 
(Laughter) I do have too many 8-inch heels which I never get to wear, except for earlier, but the free stuff that I get is the free stuff that I get in real life, and that's what we don't like to talk about. 
I grew up in Cambridge, and one time I went into a store and I forgot my money and they gave me the dress for free. 
When I was a teenager, I was driving with my friend who was an awful driver and she ran a red and of course, we got pulled over, and all it took was a "" Sorry, officer, "" and we were on our way. 
And I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are. 
I live in New York, and last year, of the 140,000 teenagers that were stopped and frisked, 86% of them were black and Latino, and most of them were young men. 
And there are only 177,000 young black and Latino men in New York, so for them, it's not a question of, "" Will I get stopped? "" but "" How many times will I get stopped? When will I get stopped? "" When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53% don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78% by the time that they're 17. 
So, the last question people ask me is, "What is it like to be a model?" 
And I think the answer that they're looking for is, "" If you are a little bit skinnier and you have shinier hair, you will be so happy and fabulous. "" And when we're backstage, we give an answer that maybe makes it seem like that. 
We say, "" It's really amazing to travel, and it's amazing to get to work with creative, inspired, passionate people. "" And those things are true, but they're only one half of the story, because the thing that we never say on camera, that I have never said on camera, is, "I am insecure." 
And I'm insecure because I have to think about what I look like every day. 
And if you ever are wondering, "If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair, will I be happier?" 
you just need to meet a group of models, because they have the thinnest thighs, the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes, and they're the most physically insecure women probably on the planet. 
When I was writing this talk, I found it very difficult to strike an honest balance, because on the one hand, I felt very uncomfortable to come out here and say, "Look I've received all these benefits from a deck stacked in my favor," and it also felt really uncomfortable to follow that up with, "and it doesn't always make me happy." 
But mostly it was difficult to unpack a legacy of gender and racial oppression when I am one of the biggest beneficiaries. 
But I'm also happy and honored to be up here and I think that it's great that I got to come before 10 or 20 or 30 years had passed and I'd had more agency in my career, because maybe then I wouldn't tell the story of how I got my first job, or maybe I wouldn't tell the story of how I paid for college, which seems so important right now. 
If there's a takeaway to this talk, I hope it's that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm here today to talk about the two ideas that, at least based on my observations at Khan Academy, are kind of the core, or the key leverage points for learning. 
And it's the idea of mastery and the idea of mindset. 
I saw this in the early days working with my cousins. 
A lot of them were having trouble with math at first, because they had all of these gaps accumulated in their learning. 
And because of that, at some point they got to an algebra class and they might have been a little bit shaky on some of the pre-algebra, and because of that, they thought they didn't have the math gene. 
Or they'd get to a calculus class, and they'd be a little bit shaky on the algebra. 
I saw it in the early days when I was uploading some of those videos on YouTube, and I realized that people who were not my cousins were watching. 
(Laughter) And at first, those comments were just simple thank-yous. 
I thought that was a pretty big deal. 
I don't know how much time you all spend on YouTube. 
Most of the comments are not "" Thank you. "" (Laughter) They're a little edgier than that. 
But then the comments got a little more intense, student after student saying that they had grown up not liking math. 
It was getting difficult as they got into more advanced math topics. 
By the time they got to algebra, they had so many gaps in their knowledge they couldn't engage with it. 
They thought they didn't have the math gene. 
But when they were a bit older, they took a little agency and decided to engage. 
They found resources like Khan Academy and they were able to fill in those gaps and master those concepts, and that reinforced their mindset that it wasn't fixed; that they actually were capable of learning mathematics. 
And in a lot of ways, this is how you would master a lot of things in life. 
It's the way you would learn a martial art. 
In a martial art, you would practice the white belt skills as long as necessary, and only when you've mastered it you would move on to become a yellow belt. 
It's the way you learn a musical instrument: you practice the basic piece over and over again, and only when you've mastered it, you go on to the more advanced one. 
But what we point out — this is not the way a traditional academic model is structured, the type of academic model that most of us grew up in. 
In a traditional academic model, we group students together, usually by age, and around middle school, by age and perceived ability, and we shepherd them all together at the same pace. 
And what typically happens, let's say we're in a middle school pre-algebra class, and the current unit is on exponents, the teacher will give a lecture on exponents, then we'll go home, do some homework. 
The next morning, we'll review the homework, then another lecture, homework, lecture, homework. 
That will continue for about two or three weeks, and then we get a test. 
On that test, maybe I get a 75 percent, maybe you get a 90 percent, maybe you get a 95 percent. 
And even though the test identified gaps in our knowledge, I didn't know 25 percent of the material. 
Even the A student, what was the five percent they didn't know? 
Even though we've identified the gaps, the whole class will then move on to the next subject, probably a more advanced subject that's going to build on those gaps. 
It might be logarithms or negative exponents. 
And that process continues, and you immediately start to realize how strange this is. 
I didn't know 25 percent of the more foundational thing, and now I'm being pushed to the more advanced thing. 
And this will continue for months, years, all the way until at some point, I might be in an algebra class or trigonometry class and I hit a wall. 
And it's not because algebra is fundamentally difficult or because the student isn't bright. 
It's because I'm seeing an equation and they're dealing with exponents and that 30 percent that I didn't know is showing up. 
And then I start to disengage. 
To appreciate how absurd that is, imagine if we did other things in our life that way. 
Say, home-building. 
(Laughter) So we bring in the contractor and say, "" We were told we have two weeks to build a foundation. 
Do what you can. "" (Laughter) So they do what they can. 
Maybe it rains. 
Maybe some of the supplies don't show up. 
And two weeks later, the inspector comes, looks around, says, "" OK, the concrete is still wet right over there, that part's not quite up to code... 
I'll give it an 80 percent. "" (Laughter) You say, "" Great! That's a C. Let's build the first floor. "" (Laughter) Same thing. 
We have two weeks, do what you can, inspector shows up, it's a 75 percent. 
Great, that's a D-plus. 
Second floor, third floor, and all of a sudden, while you're building the third floor, the whole structure collapses. 
And if your reaction is the reaction you typically have in education, or that a lot of folks have, you might say, maybe we had a bad contractor, or maybe we needed better inspection or more frequent inspection. 
But what was really broken was the process. 
We were artificially constraining how long we had to something, pretty much ensuring a variable outcome, and we took the trouble of inspecting and identifying those gaps, but then we built right on top of it. 
So the idea of mastery learning is to do the exact opposite. 
Instead of artificially constraining, fixing when and how long you work on something, pretty much ensuring that variable outcome, the A, B, C, D, F — do it the other way around. 
What's variable is when and how long a student actually has to work on something, and what's fixed is that they actually master the material. 
And it's important to realize that not only will this make the student learn their exponents better, but it'll reinforce the right mindset muscles. 
It makes them realize that if you got 20 percent wrong on something, it doesn't mean that you have a C branded in your DNA somehow. 
It means that you should just keep working on it. 
You should have grit; you should have perseverance; you should take agency over your learning. 
Now, a lot of skeptics might say, well, hey, this is all great, philosophically, this whole idea of mastery-based learning and its connection to mindset, students taking agency over their learning. 
It makes a lot of sense, but it seems impractical. 
To actually do it, every student would be on their own track. 
It would have to be personalized, you'd have to have private tutors and worksheets for every student. 
And these aren't new ideas — there were experiments in Winnetka, Illinois, 100 years ago, where they did mastery-based learning and saw great results, but they said it wouldn't scale because it was logistically difficult. 
The teacher had to give different worksheets to every student, give on-demand assessments. 
But now today, it's no longer impractical. 
We have the tools to do it. 
Students see an explanation at their own time and pace? 
There's on-demand video for that. 
They need practice? They need feedback? 
There's adaptive exercises readily available for students. 
And when that happens, all sorts of neat things happen. 
One, the students can actually master the concepts, but they're also building their growth mindset, they're building grit, perseverance, they're taking agency over their learning. 
And all sorts of beautiful things can start to happen in the actual classroom. 
Instead of it being focused on the lecture, students can interact with each other. 
They can get deeper mastery over the material. 
They can go into simulations, Socratic dialogue. 
To appreciate what we're talking about and the tragedy of lost potential here, I'd like to give a little bit of a thought experiment. 
If we were to go 400 years into the past to Western Europe, which even then, was one of the more literate parts of the planet, you would see that about 15 percent of the population knew how to read. 
And I suspect that if you asked someone who did know how to read, say a member of the clergy, "What percentage of the population do you think is even capable of reading?" 
They might say, "" Well, with a great education system, maybe 20 or 30 percent. "" But if you fast forward to today, we know that that prediction would have been wildly pessimistic, that pretty close to 100 percent of the population is capable of reading. 
But if I were to ask you a similar question: "" What percentage of the population do you think is capable of truly mastering calculus, or understanding organic chemistry, or being able to contribute to cancer research? "" A lot of you might say, "" Well, with a great education system, maybe 20, 30 percent. "" But what if that estimate is just based on your own experience in a non-mastery framework, your own experience with yourself or observing your peers, where you're being pushed at this set pace through classes, accumulating all these gaps? 
Even when you got that 95 percent, what was that five percent you missed? 
And it keeps accumulating — you get to an advanced class, all of a sudden you hit a wall and say, "" I'm not meant to be a cancer researcher; not meant to be a physicist; not meant to be a mathematician. "" I suspect that that actually is the case, but if you were allowed to be operating in a mastery framework, if you were allowed to really take agency over your learning, and when you get something wrong, embrace it — view that failure as a moment of learning — that number, the percent that could really master calculus or understand organic chemistry, 
is actually a lot closer to 100 percent. 
And this isn't even just a "" nice to have. "" I think it's a social imperative. 
We're exiting what you could call the industrial age and we're going into this information revolution. 
And it's clear that some things are happening. 
In the industrial age, society was a pyramid. 
At the base of the pyramid, you needed human labor. 
In the middle of the pyramid, you had an information processing, a bureaucracy class, and at the top of the pyramid, you had your owners of capital and your entrepreneurs and your creative class. 
But we know what's happening already, as we go into this information revolution. 
The bottom of that pyramid, automation, is going to take over. 
Even that middle tier, information processing, that's what computers are good at. 
So as a society, we have a question: All this new productivity is happening because of this technology, but who participates in it? 
Is it just going to be that very top of the pyramid, in which case, what does everyone else do? 
How do they operate? 
Or do we do something that's more aspirational? 
Do we actually attempt to invert the pyramid, where you have a large creative class, where almost everyone can participate as an entrepreneur, an artist, as a researcher? 
And I don't think that this is utopian. 
I really think that this is all based on the idea that if we let people tap into their potential by mastering concepts, by being able to exercise agency over their learning, that they can get there. 
And when you think of it as just a citizen of the world, it's pretty exciting. 
I mean, think about the type of equity we can we have, and the rate at which civilization could even progress. 
And so, I'm pretty optimistic about it. 
I think it's going to be a pretty exciting time to be alive. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Imagine, if you will — a gift. 
I'd like for you to picture it in your mind. 
It's not too big — about the size of a golf ball. 
So envision what it looks like all wrapped up. 
But before I show you what's inside, I will tell you, it's going to do incredible things for you. 
It will bring all of your family together. 
You will feel loved and appreciated like never before and reconnect with friends and acquaintances you haven't heard from in years. 
Adoration and admiration will overwhelm you. 
It will recalibrate what's most important in your life. 
It will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith. 
You'll have a new understanding and trust in your body. 
You'll have unsurpassed vitality and energy. 
You'll expand your vocabulary, meet new people, and you'll have a healthier lifestyle. 
And get this — you'll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing. 
You'll eat countless gourmet meals. 
Flowers will arrive by the truckload. 
People will say to you, "You look great. Have you had any work done?" 
And you'll have a lifetime supply of good drugs. 
You'll be challenged, inspired, motivated and humbled. 
Your life will have new meaning. 
Peace, health, serenity, happiness, nirvana. 
The price? 
$55,000, and that's an incredible deal. 
By now I know you're dying to know what it is and where you can get one. 
Does Amazon carry it? 
Does it have the Apple logo on it? 
Is there a waiting list? 
Not likely. 
This gift came to me about five months ago. 
It looked more like this when it was all wrapped up — not quite so pretty. 
And this, and then this. 
It was a rare gem — a brain tumor, hemangioblastoma — the gift that keeps on giving. 
And while I'm okay now, I wouldn't wish this gift for you. 
I'm not sure you'd want it. 
But I wouldn't change my experience. 
It profoundly altered my life in ways I didn't expect in all the ways I just shared with you. 
So the next time you're faced with something that's unexpected, unwanted and uncertain, consider that it just may be a gift. 
(Applause) 

Ladies and gentlemen, gather around. 
I would love to share with you a story. 
Once upon a time in 19th century Germany, there was the book. 
Now during this time, the book was the king of storytelling. 
It was venerable. 
It was ubiquitous. 
But it was a little bit boring. 
Because in its 400 years of existence, storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device. 
But then one author arrived, and he changed the game forever. 
(Music) His name was Lothar, Lothar Meggendorfer. 
Lothar Meggendorfer put his foot down, and he said, "" Genug ist genug! "" He grabbed his pen, he snatched his scissors. 
This man refused to fold to the conventions of normalcy and just decided to fold. 
History would know Lothar Meggendorfer as — who else? — the world's first true inventor of the children's pop-up book. 
(Music) For this delight and for this wonder, people rejoiced. 
(Cheering) They were happy because the story survived, and that the world would keep on spinning. 
Lothar Meggendorfer wasn't the first to evolve the way a story was told, and he certainly wasn't the last. 
Whether storytellers realized it or not, they were channeling Meggendorfer's spirit when they moved opera to vaudville, radio news to radio theater, film to film in motion to film in sound, color, 3D, on VHS and on DVD. 
There seemed to be no cure for this Meggendorferitis. 
And things got a lot more fun when the Internet came around. 
(Laughter) Because, not only could people broadcast their stories throughout the world, but they could do so using what seemed to be an infinite amount of devices. 
For example, one company would tell a story of love through its very own search engine. 
One Taiwanese production studio would interpret American politics in 3D. 
(Laughter) And one man would tell the stories of his father by using a platform called Twitter to communicate the excrement his father would gesticulate. 
And after all this, everyone paused; they took a step back. 
They realized that, in 6,000 years of storytelling, they've gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls. 
And this was a cause for celebration. 
The art of storytelling has remained unchanged. 
And for the most part, the stories are recycled. 
But the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure, consistent novelty. 
And they remembered a man, one amazing German, every time a new storytelling device popped up next. 
And for that, the audience — the lovely, beautiful audience — would live happily ever after. 
(Applause) 

Some 17 years ago, I became allergic to Delhi's air. 
My doctors told me that my lung capacity had gone down to 70 percent, and it was killing me. 
With the help of IIT, TERI, and learnings from NASA, we discovered that there are three basic green plants, common green plants, with which we can grow all the fresh air we need indoors to keep us healthy. 
We've also found that you can reduce the fresh air requirements into the building, while maintaining industry indoor air-quality standards. 
The three plants are Areca palm, Mother-in-Law's Tongue and money plant. 
The botanical names are in front of you. 
Areca palm is a plant which removes CO2 and converts it into oxygen. 
We need four shoulder-high plants per person, and in terms of plant care, we need to wipe the leaves every day in Delhi, and perhaps once a week in cleaner-air cities. 
We had to grow them in vermi manure, which is sterile, or hydroponics, and take them outdoors every three to four months. 
The second plant is Mother-in-law's Tongue, which is again a very common plant, and we call it a bedroom plant, because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night. 
And we need six to eight waist-high plants per person. 
The third plant is money plant, and this is again a very common plant; preferably grows in hydroponics. 
And this particular plant removes formaldehydes and other volatile chemicals. 
With these three plants, you can grow all the fresh air you need. 
In fact, you could be in a bottle with a cap on top, and you would not die at all, and you would not need any fresh air. 
We have tried these plants at our own building in Delhi, which is a 50,000-square-feet, 20-year-old building. 
And it has close to 1,200 such plants for 300 occupants. 
Our studies have found that there is a 42 percent probability of one's blood oxygen going up by one percent if one stays indoors in this building for 10 hours. 
The government of India has discovered or published a study to show that this is the healthiest building in New Delhi. 
And the study showed that, compared to other buildings, there is a reduced incidence of eye irritation by 52 percent, respiratory systems by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent, lung impairment by 12 percent and asthma by nine percent. 
And this study has been published on September 8, 2008, and it's available on the government of India website. 
Our experience points to an amazing increase in human productivity by over 20 percent by using these plants. 
And also a reduction in energy requirements in buildings by an outstanding 15 percent, because you need less fresh air. 
We are now replicating this in a 1.75-million-square-feet building, which will have 60,000 indoor plants. 
Why is this important? 
It is also important for the environment, because the world's energy requirements are expected to grow by 30 percent in the next decade. 
40 percent of the world's energy is taken up by buildings currently, and 60 percent of the world's population will be living in buildings in cities with a population of over one million in the next 15 years. 
And there is a growing preference for living and working in air-conditioned places. 
"Be the change you want to see in the world," said Mahatma Gandhi. 
And thank you for listening. 
(Applause) 

(Laughter) I was afraid of womanhood. 
Not that I'm not afraid now, but I've learned to pretend. 
I've learned to be flexible. 
In fact, I've developed some interesting tools to help me deal with this fear. 
Let me explain. 
Back in the '50s and' 60s, when I was growing up, little girls were supposed to be kind and thoughtful and pretty and gentle and soft, and we were supposed to fit into roles that were sort of shadowy — really not quite clear what we were supposed to be. 
(Laughter) There were plenty of role models all around us. 
We had our mothers, our aunts, our cousins, our sisters, and of course, the ever-present media bombarding us with images and words, telling us how to be. 
Now my mother was different. 
She was a homemaker, but she and I didn't go out and do girlie things together, and she didn't buy me pink outfits. 
And I just ate it up. 
I drew, and I drew, and since I knew that humor was acceptable in my family, I could draw, do what I wanted to do, and not have to perform, not have to speak — I was very shy — and I could still get approval. 
I was launched as a cartoonist. 
Now when we're young, we don't always know. We know there are rules out there, but we don't always know — we don't perform them right, even though we are imprinted at birth with these things, and we're told what the most important color in the world is. 
We're told what shape we're supposed to be in. 
(Laughter) We're told what to wear — (Laughter) — and how to do our hair — (Laughter) — and how to behave. 
Now the rules that I'm talking about are constantly being monitored by the culture. 
We're being corrected, and the primary policemen are women, because we are the carriers of the tradition. 
Not only that — we always have this vague notion that something's expected of us. 
And on top of all off these rules, they keep changing. 
(Laughter) We don't know what's going on half the time, so it puts us in a very tenuous position. (Laughter) 
Now if you don't like these rules, and many of us don't — I know I didn't, and I still don't, even though I follow them half the time, not quite aware that I'm following them — what better way than to change them [than] with humor? 
It takes the codes of behavior and the codes of dress, and it makes it unexpected, and that's what elicits a laugh. 
Now what if you put together women and humor? 
I think you can get change. 
Because women are on the ground floor, and we know the traditions so well, we can bring a different voice to the table. 
Now I started drawing in the middle of a lot of chaos. 
during the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations, the Watergate hearings and then the feminist movement, and I think I was drawing, trying to figure out what was going on. 
And then also my family was in chaos, and I drew to try to bring my family together — (Laughter) — try to bring my family together with laughter. 
It didn't work. 
But I found my place. 
I found that I didn't have to wear high heels, I didn't have to wear pink, and I could feel like I fit in. 
Now when I was a little older, in my 20s, I realized there are not many women in cartooning. 
And I thought, "" Well, maybe I can break the little glass ceiling of cartooning, "" and so I did. I became a cartoonist. 
I always loved political cartoons, so why don't I do something with the content of my cartoons to make people think about the stupid rules that we're following as well as laugh? "" Now my perspective is a particularly — (Laughter) — my perspective is a particularly American perspective. 
I can't help it. I live here. 
Even though I've traveled a lot, I still think like an American woman. 
But I believe that the rules that I'm talking about are universal, of course — that each culture has its different codes of behavior and dress and traditions, and each woman has to deal with these same things that we do here in the U.S. 
We have amazing antennae. 
Now my work lately has been to collaborate with international cartoonists, which I so enjoy, and it's given me a greater appreciation for the power of cartoons to get at the truth, to get at the issues quickly and succinctly. 
And not only that, it can get to the viewer through not only the intellect, but through the heart. 
My work also has allowed me to collaborate with women cartoonists from across the world — countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Argentina, France — and we have sat together and laughed and talked and shared our difficulties. 
And these women are working so hard to get their voices heard in some very difficult circumstances. 
But I feel blessed to be able to work with them. 
And we talk about how women have such strong perceptions, because of our tenuous position and our role as tradition-keepers, that we can have the great potential to be change-agents. 
And I think, I truly believe, that we can change this thing one laugh at a time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a storyteller. 
And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "" the danger of the single story. "" I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. 
My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. 
So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books. 
I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, (Laughter) and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) 
Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. 
I had never been outside Nigeria. 
We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. 
My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. 
Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. 
(Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. 
But that is another story. 
What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. 
Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. 
Now, things changed when I discovered African books. 
There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. 
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. 
I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. 
I started to write about things I recognized. 
Now, I loved those American and British books I read. 
They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. 
But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. 
So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. 
I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. 
My father was a professor. 
My mother was an administrator. 
And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. 
So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. 
His name was Fide. 
The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. 
My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. 
And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." 
So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. 
Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. 
I was startled. 
It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. 
All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. 
Their poverty was my single story of them. 
Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. 
I was 19. 
My American roommate was shocked by me. 
She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. 
She asked if she could listen to what she called my "" tribal music, "" and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. 
(Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. 
What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. 
Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. 
My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. 
In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals. 
I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. 
But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. 
But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. 
Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "" India, Africa and other countries. "" (Laughter) So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. 
If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. 
I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family. 
This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. 
Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. 
After referring to the black Africans as "" beasts who have no houses, "" he writes, "" They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts. "" Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. 
And one must admire the imagination of John Lok. 
But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "" half devil, half child. "" And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "" authentically African. "" Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, 
that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. 
In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. 
The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. 
My characters drove cars. 
They were not starving. 
Therefore they were not authentically African. 
But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. 
A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. 
The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. 
And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. 
There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. 
I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. 
I remember first feeling slight surprise. 
And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. 
I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. 
I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. 
So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. 
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. 
There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "" nkali. "" It's a noun that loosely translates to "" to be greater than another. "" Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. 
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. 
The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "" secondly. "" Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. 
Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. 
I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. 
I told him that I had just read a novel called "" American Psycho "" — (Laughter) — and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) 
(Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter) 
But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. 
This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. 
I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. 
I did not have a single story of America. 
When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. 
(Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. 
But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. 
My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. 
One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. 
I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. 
And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. 
And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives. 
All of these stories make me who I am. 
But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. 
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. 
They make one story become the only story. 
Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. 
But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. 
I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. 
The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. 
It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. 
It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. 
So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? 
What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? 
What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? 
What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "" a balance of stories. "" What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? 
Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. 
He disagreed. 
He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them. 
Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "" I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. 
Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen... "" (Laughter) And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. 
I was not only charmed, I was very moved. 
Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. 
She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel. 
Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? 
What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? 
What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. 
What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? 
What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? 
What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? 
Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? 
Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. 
I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. 
My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. 
Stories matter. 
Many stories matter. 
Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. 
Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. 
The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. 
She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. 
"" They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained. "" I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I was born and raised in Sierra Leone, a small and very beautiful country in West Africa, a country rich both in physical resources and creative talent. 
However, Sierra Leone is infamous for a decade-long rebel war in the '90s when entire villages were burnt down. 
An estimated 8,000 men, women and children had their arms and legs amputated during this time. 
As my family and I ran for safety when I was about 12 from one of those attacks, I resolved that I would do everything I could to ensure that my own children would not go through the same experiences we had. 
They would, in fact, be part of a Sierra Leone where war and amputation were no longer a strategy for gaining power. 
As I watched people who I knew, loved ones, recover from this devastation, one thing that deeply troubled me was that many of the amputees in the country would not use their prostheses. 
The reason, I would come to find out, was that their prosthetic sockets were painful because they did not fit well. 
The prosthetic socket is the part in which the amputee inserts their residual limb, and which connects to the prosthetic ankle. 
Even in the developed world, it takes a period of three weeks to often years for a patient to get a comfortable socket, if ever. 
Prosthetists still use conventional processes like molding and casting to create single-material prosthetic sockets. 
Such sockets often leave intolerable amounts of pressure on the limbs of the patient, leaving them with pressure sores and blisters. 
It does not matter how powerful your prosthetic ankle is. 
If your prosthetic socket is uncomfortable, you will not use your leg, and that is just simply unacceptable in our age. 
So one day, when I met professor Hugh Herr about two and a half years ago, and he asked me if I knew how to solve this problem, I said, "" No, not yet, but I would love to figure it out. "" And so, for my Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab, I designed custom prosthetic sockets quickly and cheaply that are more comfortable than conventional prostheses. 
I used magnetic resonance imaging to capture the actual shape of the patient's anatomy, then use finite element modeling to better predict the internal stresses and strains on the normal forces, and then create a prosthetic socket for manufacture. 
We use a 3D printer to create a multi-material prosthetic socket which relieves pressure where needed on the anatomy of the patient. 
In short, we're using data to make novel sockets quickly and cheaply. 
In a recent trial we just wrapped up at the Media Lab, one of our patients, a U.S. veteran who has been an amputee for about 20 years and worn dozens of legs, said of one of our printed parts, "" It's so soft, it's like walking on pillows, and it's effing sexy. "" (Laughter) Disability in our age should not prevent anyone from living meaningful lives. 
My hope and desire is that the tools and processes we develop in our research group can be used to bring highly functional prostheses to those who need them. 
For me, a place to begin healing the souls of those affected by war and disease is by creating comfortable and affordable interfaces for their bodies. 
Whether it's in Sierra Leone or in Boston, I hope this not only restores but indeed transforms their sense of human potential. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

One hot October morning, I got off the all-night train in Mandalay, the old royal capital of Burma, now Myanmar. 
And out on the street, I ran into a group of rough men standing beside their bicycle rickshaws. 
And one of them came up and offered to show me around. 
The price he quoted was outrageous. 
It was less than I would pay for a bar of chocolate at home. 
So I clambered into his trishaw, and he began pedaling us slowly between palaces and pagodas. 
And as he did, he told me how he had come to the city from his village. 
He'd earned a degree in mathematics. 
His dream was to be a teacher. 
But of course, life is hard under a military dictatorship, and so for now, this was the only way he could make a living. 
Many nights, he told me, he actually slept in his trishaw so he could catch the first visitors off the all-night train. 
And very soon, we found that in certain ways, we had so much in common — we were both in our 20s, we were both fascinated by foreign cultures — that he invited me home. 
So we turned off the wide, crowded streets, and we began bumping down rough, wild alleyways. 
There were broken shacks all around. 
I really lost the sense of where I was, and I realized that anything could happen to me now. 
I could get mugged or drugged or something worse. 
Nobody would know. 
Finally, he stopped and led me into a hut, which consisted of just one tiny room. 
And then he leaned down, and reached under his bed. 
And something in me froze. 
I waited to see what he would pull out. 
And finally he extracted a box. 
Inside it was every single letter he had ever received from visitors from abroad, and on some of them he had pasted little black-and-white worn snapshots of his new foreign friends. 
So when we said goodbye that night, I realized he had also shown me the secret point of travel, which is to take a plunge, to go inwardly as well as outwardly to places you would never go otherwise, to venture into uncertainty, ambiguity, even fear. 
At home, it's dangerously easy to assume we're on top of things. 
Out in the world, you are reminded every moment that you're not, and you can't get to the bottom of things, either. 
Everywhere, "" People wish to be settled, "" Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded us, "" but only insofar as we are unsettled is there any hope for us. "" At this conference, we've been lucky enough to hear some exhilarating new ideas and discoveries and, really, about all the ways in which knowledge is being pushed excitingly forwards. 
But at some point, knowledge gives out. 
And that is the moment when your life is truly decided: you fall in love; you lose a friend; the lights go out. 
And it's then, when you're lost or uneasy or carried out of yourself, that you find out who you are. 
I don't believe that ignorance is bliss. 
Science has unquestionably made our lives brighter and longer and healthier. 
And I am forever grateful to the teachers who showed me the laws of physics and pointed out that three times three makes nine. 
I can count that out on my fingers any time of night or day. 
But when a mathematician tells me that minus three times minus three makes nine, that's a kind of logic that almost feels like trust. 
The opposite of knowledge, in other words, isn't always ignorance. 
It can be wonder. 
Or mystery. 
Possibility. 
And in my life, I've found it's the things I don't know that have lifted me up and pushed me forwards much more than the things I do know. 
It's also the things I don't know that have often brought me closer to everybody around me. 
For eight straight Novembers, recently, I traveled every year across Japan with the Dalai Lama. 
And the one thing he said every day that most seemed to give people reassurance and confidence was, "" I don't know. "" "What's going to happen to Tibet?" 
"When are we ever going to get world peace?" 
"What's the best way to raise children?" 
"" Frankly, "" says this very wise man, "I don't know." 
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman has spent more than 60 years now researching human behavior, and his conclusion is that we are always much more confident of what we think we know than we should be. 
We have, as he memorably puts it, an "" unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. "" We know — quote, unquote — our team is going to win this weekend, and we only remember that knowledge on the rare occasions when we're right. 
Most of the time, we're in the dark. 
And that's where real intimacy lies. 
Do you know what your lover is going to do tomorrow? 
Do you want to know? 
The parents of us all, as some people call them, Adam and Eve, could never die, so long as they were eating from the tree of life. 
But the minute they began nibbling from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they fell from their innocence. 
They grew embarrassed and fretful, self-conscious. 
And they learned, a little too late, perhaps, that there are certainly some things that we need to know, but there are many, many more that are better left unexplored. 
Now, when I was a kid, I knew it all, of course. 
I had been spending 20 years in classrooms collecting facts, and I was actually in the information business, writing articles for Time Magazine. 
And I took my first real trip to Japan for two-and-a-half weeks, and I came back with a 40-page essay explaining every last detail about Japan's temples, its fashions, its baseball games, its soul. 
But underneath all that, something that I couldn't understand so moved me for reasons I couldn't explain to you yet, that I decided to go and live in Japan. 
And now that I've been there for 28 years, I really couldn't tell you very much at all about my adopted home. 
Which is wonderful, because it means every day I'm making some new discovery, and in the process, looking around the corner and seeing the hundred thousand things I'll never know. 
Knowledge is a priceless gift. 
But the illusion of knowledge can be more dangerous than ignorance. 
Thinking that you know your lover or your enemy can be more treacherous than acknowledging you'll never know them. 
Every morning in Japan, as the sun is flooding into our little apartment, I take great pains not to consult the weather forecast, because if I do, my mind will be overclouded, distracted, even when the day is bright. 
I've been a full-time writer now for 34 years. 
And the one thing that I have learned is that transformation comes when I'm not in charge, when I don't know what's coming next, when I can't assume I am bigger than everything around me. 
And the same is true in love or in moments of crisis. 
Suddenly, we're back in that trishaw again and we're bumping off the broad, well-lit streets; and we're reminded, really, of the first law of travel and, therefore, of life: you're only as strong as your readiness to surrender. 
In the end, perhaps, being human is much more important than being fully in the know. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Applause) (Music) (Applause) 

(Guitar music starts) (Cheers) (Cheers) (Music ends) 

Here are two reasons companies fail: they only do more of the same, or they only do what's new. 
To me the real, real solution to quality growth is figuring out the balance between two activities: exploration and exploitation. 
Both are necessary, but it can be too much of a good thing. 
Consider Facit. 
I'm actually old enough to remember them. 
Facit was a fantastic company. 
They were born deep in the Swedish forest, and they made the best mechanical calculators in the world. 
Everybody used them. 
And what did Facit do when the electronic calculator came along? 
They continued doing exactly the same. 
In six months, they went from maximum revenue... 
and they were gone. 
Gone. 
To me, the irony about the Facit story is hearing about the Facit engineers, who had bought cheap, small electronic calculators in Japan that they used to double-check their calculators. 
(Laughter) Facit did too much exploitation. 
But exploration can go wild, too. 
A few years back, I worked closely alongside a European biotech company. 
Let's call them OncoSearch. 
The company was brilliant. 
They had applications that promised to diagnose, even cure, certain forms of blood cancer. 
Every day was about creating something new. 
They were extremely innovative, and the mantra was, "" When we only get it right, "" or even, "" We want it perfect. "" The sad thing is, before they became perfect — even good enough — they became obsolete. 
OncoSearch did too much exploration. 
I first heard about exploration and exploitation about 15 years ago, when I worked as a visiting scholar at Stanford University. 
The founder of the idea is Jim March. 
And to me the power of the idea is its practicality. 
Exploration. 
Exploration is about coming up with what's new. 
It's about search, it's about discovery, it's about new products, it's about new innovations. 
It's about changing our frontiers. 
Our heroes are people who have done exploration: Madame Curie, Picasso, Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary, etc. 
I come from Norway; all our heroes are explorers, and they deserve to be. 
We all know that exploration is risky. 
We don't know the answers, we don't know if we're going to find them, and we know that the risks are high. 
Exploitation is the opposite. 
Exploitation is taking the knowledge we have and making good, better. 
Exploitation is about making our trains run on time. 
It's about making good products faster and cheaper. 
Exploitation is not risky — in the short term. 
But if we only exploit, it's very risky in the long term. 
And I think we all have memories of the famous pop groups who keep singing the same songs again and again, until they become obsolete or even pathetic. 
That's the risk of exploitation. 
So if we take a long-term perspective, we explore. 
If we take a short-term perspective, we exploit. 
Small children, they explore all day. 
All day it's about exploration. 
As we grow older, we explore less because we have more knowledge to exploit on. 
The same goes for companies. 
Companies become, by nature, less innovative as they become more competent. 
And this is, of course, a big worry to CEOs. 
And I hear very often questions phrased in different ways. 
For example, "How can I both effectively run and reinvent my company?" 
Or, "" How can I make sure that our company changes before we become obsolete or are hit by a crisis? "" So, doing one well is difficult. 
Doing both well as the same time is art — pushing both exploration and exploitation. 
So one thing we've found is only about two percent of companies are able to effectively explore and exploit at the same time, in parallel. 
But when they do, the payoffs are huge. 
So we have lots of great examples. 
We have Nestlé creating Nespresso, we have Lego going into animated films, Toyota creating the hybrids, Unilever pushing into sustainability — there are lots of examples, and the benefits are huge. 
Why is balancing so difficult? 
I think it's difficult because there are so many traps that keep us where we are. 
So I'll talk about two, but there are many. 
So let's talk about the perpetual search trap. 
We discover something, but we don't have the patience or the persistence to get at it and make it work. 
So instead of staying with it, we create something new. 
But the same goes for that, then we're in the vicious circle of actually coming up with ideas but being frustrated. 
OncoSearch was a good example. 
A famous example is, of course, Xerox. 
But we don't only see this in companies. 
We see this in the public sector as well. 
We all know that any kind of effective reform of education, research, health care, even defense, takes 10, 15, maybe 20 years to work. 
But still, we change much more often. 
We really don't give them the chance. 
Another trap is the success trap. 
Facit fell into the success trap. 
They literally held the future in their hands, but they couldn't see it. 
They were simply so good at making what they loved doing, that they wouldn't change. 
We are like that, too. 
When we know something well, it's difficult to change. 
Bill Gates has said: "" Success is a lousy teacher. 
It seduces us into thinking we cannot fail. "" That's the challenge with success. 
So I think there are some lessons, and I think they apply to us. 
And they apply to our companies. 
The first lesson is: get ahead of the crisis. 
And any company that's able to innovate is actually able to also buy an insurance in the future. 
Netflix — they could so easily have been content with earlier generations of distribution, but they always — and I think they will always — keep pushing for the next battle. 
I see other companies that say, "I'll win the next innovation cycle, whatever it takes." 
Second one: think in multiple time scales. 
I'll share a chart with you, and I think it's a wonderful one. 
Any company we look at, taking a one-year perspective and looking at the valuation of the company, innovation typically accounts for only about 30 percent. 
So when we think one year, innovation isn't really that important. 
Move ahead, take a 10-year perspective on the same company — suddenly, innovation and ability to renew account for 70 percent. 
But companies can't choose. 
They need to fund the journey and lead the long term. 
Third: invite talent. 
I don't think it's possible for any of us to be able to balance exploration and exploitation by ourselves. 
I think it's a team sport. 
I think we need to allow challenging. 
I think the mark of a great company is being open to be challenged, and the mark of a good corporate board is to constructively challenge. 
I think that's also what good parenting is about. 
Last one: be skeptical of success. 
Maybe it's useful to think back at the old triumph marches in Rome, when the generals, after a big victory, were given their celebration. 
Riding into Rome on the carriage, they always had a companion whispering in their ear, "Remember, you're only human." 
So I hope I made the point: balancing exploration and exploitation has a huge payoff. 
But it's difficult, and we need to be conscious. 
I want to just point out two questions that I think are useful. 
First question is, looking at your own company: In which areas do you see that the company is at the risk of falling into success traps, of just going on autopilot? 
And what can you do to challenge? 
Second question is: When did I explore something new last, and what kind of effect did it have on me? 
Is that something I should do more of? 
In my case, yes. 
So let me leave you with this. 
Whether you're an explorer by nature or whether you tend to exploit what you already know, don't forget: the beauty is in the balance. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I want to tell you about the future of money. 
Let's start with a story about this culture that lived in Micronesia in the early 1900s, called the Yap. 
Now, I want to tell you about the Yap because their form of money is really interesting. 
They use these limestone discs called Rai stones. 
Now, the Yap don't actually move these Rai stones around or exchange them the way we do with our coins, because Rai stones can get to be pretty massive. 
The largest is about four tons and 12 feet across. 
So the Yap just keep track of who owns part of what stone. 
There's a story about these sailors that were transporting a stone across the ocean when they ran into some trouble and the stone actually fell in. 
The sailors got back to the main island and they told everyone what had happened. 
And everyone decided that, actually, yes, the sailors had the stone and — why not? — it still counted. 
Even though it was at the bottom of the ocean, it was still part of the Yap economy. 
You might think that this was just a small culture a hundred years ago. 
But things like this happen in the Western world as well, and the Yap actually still use a form of these stones. 
In 1932, the Bank of France asked the United States to convert their holdings from dollars into gold. 
But it was too inconvenient to think about actually shipping all of that gold over to Europe. 
So instead, someone went to where that gold was being stored and they just labeled it as belonging to France now. 
And everyone agreed that France owned the gold. 
It's just like those Rai stones. 
The point I want to make with these two examples is that there's nothing inherently valuable about a dollar or a stone or a coin. 
The only reason these things have any value is because we've all decided they should. 
And because we've decided that, they do. 
Money is about the exchanges and the transactions that we have with each other. 
Money isn't anything objective. 
It's about a collective story that we tell each other about value. 
A collective fiction. 
And that's a really powerful concept. 
In the past two decades, we've begun to use digital money. 
So I get paid via direct deposit, I pay my rent via bank transfer, I pay my taxes online. 
And every month, a small amount of money is deducted from my paycheck and invested in mutual funds in my retirement account. 
All of these interactions are literally just changing 1's and 0's on computers. 
There's not even anything physical, like a stone or a coin. 
Digital money makes it so that I can pay someone around the world in seconds. 
Now when this works, it's because there are large institutions underwriting every 1 or 0 that changes on a computer. 
And when it doesn't, it's often the fault of those large institutions. 
Or at least, it's up to them to fix the problem. 
And a lot of times, they don't. 
There's a lot of friction in the system. 
How long did it take the US credit card companies to implement chip and pin? 
Half my credit cards still don't work in Europe. 
That's friction. 
Transferring money across borders and across currencies is really expensive: friction. 
An entrepreneur in India can set up an online business in minutes, but it's hard for her to get loans and to get paid: friction. 
Our access to digital money and our ability to freely transact is being held captive by these gatekeepers. 
And there's a lot of impediments in the system slowing things down. 
That's because digital money isn't really mine, it's entries in databases that belong to my bank, my credit card company or my investment firm. 
And these companies have the right to say "" no. "" If I'm a PayPal merchant and PayPal wrongly flags me for fraud, that's it. 
My account gets frozen, and I can't get paid. 
These institutions are standing in the way of innovation. 
How many of you use Facebook photos, Google Photos, Instagram? 
My photos are everywhere. 
They are on my phone, they're on my laptop, they're on my old phone, they're in Dropbox. 
They're on all these different websites and services. 
And most of these services don't work together. 
They don't inter-operate. 
And as a result, my photo library is a mess. 
The same thing happens when institutions control the money supply. 
A lot of these services don't inter-operate, and as a result, this blocks what we can do with payment. 
And it makes transaction costs go up. 
So far, we've been through two phases of money. 
In an analog world, we had to deal with these physical objects, and money moved at a certain speed — the speed of humans. 
In a digital world, money can reach much farther and is much faster, but we're at the mercy of these gatekeeper institutions. 
Money only moves at the speed of banks. 
We're about to enter a new phase of money. 
The future of money is programmable. 
When we combine software and currency, money becomes more than just a static unit of value, and we don't have to rely on institutions for security. 
In a programmable world, we remove humans and institutions from the loop. 
And when this happens, we won't even feel like we're transacting anymore. 
Money will be directed by software, and it will just safely and securely flow. 
Cryptocurrencies are the first step of this evolution. 
Cryptocurrencies are digital money that isn't run by any government or bank. 
It's money designed to work in a world without intermediaries. 
Bitcoin is the most ubiquitous cryptocurrency, but there are hundreds of them. 
There's Ethereum, Litecoin, Stellar, Dogecoin, and those are just a few of the more popular ones. 
And these things are real money. 
The sushi restaurant down my street takes Bitcoin. 
I have an app on my phone that I can use to buy sashimi. 
But it's not just for small transactions. 
In March, there was a transaction that moved around 100,000 bitcoins. 
That's the equivalent of 40 million US dollars. 
Cryptocurrencies are based on a special field of mathematics called cryptography. 
Cryptography is the study of how to secure communication, and it's about two really important things: masking information so it can be hidden in plain sight, and verifying a piece of information's source. 
Cryptography underpins so many of the systems around us. 
And it's so powerful that at times the US government has actually classified it as a weapon. 
During World War II, breaking cryptosystems like Enigma was critical to decoding enemy transmissions and turning the tide of the war. 
Today, anyone with a modern web browser is running a pretty sophisticated cryptosystem. 
It's what we use to secure our interactions on the Internet. 
It's what makes it safe for us to type our passwords in and to send financial information to websites. 
So what the banks used to give us — trustworthy digital money transfer — we can now get with a clever application of cryptography. 
And this means that we don't have to rely on the banks anymore to secure our transactions. 
We can do it ourselves. 
Bitcoin is based on the very same idea that the Yap used, this collective global knowledge of transfers. 
In Bitcoin, I spend by transferring Bitcoin, and I get paid when someone transfers Bitcoin to me. 
Imagine that we had this magic paper. 
So the way that this paper works is I can give you a sheet of it and if you write something on it, it will magically appear on my piece as well. 
Let's say we just give everyone this paper and everyone writes down the transfers that they're doing in the Bitcoin system. 
All of these transfers get copied around to everyone else's pieces of paper. 
And I can look at mine and I'll have a list of all of the transfers that are happening in the entire Bitcoin economy. 
This is actually what's happening with the Bitcoin blockchain, which is a list of all of the transactions in Bitcoin. 
Except, it's not done through paper. 
It's done through computer code, running on thousands of networked computers around the world. 
All of these computers are collectively confirming who owns what Bitcoin. 
So the Bitcoin blockchain is core to how Bitcoin works. 
But where do bitcoins actually come from? 
Well, the code is designed to create new Bitcoin according to a schedule. 
And the way that it works is that to get those Bitcoin, I have to solve a puzzle — a random cryptographic puzzle. 
Imagine that we had 15 dice, and we were throwing these dice over and over again. 
Whenever the dice come up all sixes, we say that we win. 
This is very close to what these computers are all actually doing. 
They're trying over and over again to land on the right number. 
And when they do, we say that they've solved the puzzle. 
The computer that solves the puzzle publishes its solution to the rest of the network and collects its reward: new bitcoins. 
And in the act of solving this puzzle, these computers are actually helping to secure the Bitcoin blockchain and add to the list of transactions. 
There are actually people all over the world running this software, and we call them Bitcoin miners. 
Anyone can become a Bitcoin miner. 
You can go download the software right now and run it in your computer and try to collect some bitcoins. 
I can't say that I would recommend it, because right now, the puzzle is so hard and the network is so powerful, that if I tried to mine Bitcoin on my laptop, I probably wouldn't see any for about two million years. 
The miners, professional miners, use this special hardware that's designed to solve the puzzle really fast. 
Now, the Bitcoin network and all of this special hardware, there are estimates that the amount of energy it uses is equivalent to that of a small country. 
So, the first set of cryptocurrencies are a little bit slow and a little bit cumbersome. 
But the next generation is going to be so much better and so much faster. 
Cryptocurrencies are the first step to a world with a global programmable money. 
And in a world with programmable money, I can pay anyone else securely without having to sign up or ask permission, or do a conversion or worry about my money getting stuck. 
And I can send money around the world. 
This is a really amazing thing. 
It's the idea of permission-less innovation. 
The Internet caused an explosion of innovation, because it was built upon an open architecture. 
And just like the Internet changed the way we communicate, programmable money is going to change the way we pay, allocate and decide on value. 
Imagine a world where I can rent out my healthcare data to a pharmaceutical company. 
They can run large-scale data analysis and provide me with a cryptographic proof that shows they're only using my data in a way that we agreed. 
And they can pay me for what they find out. 
Instead of signing up for streaming services and getting a cable bill, what if my television analyzed my watching habits and recommended well-priced content that fit within my budget that I would enjoy? 
Imagine an Internet without ads, because instead of paying with our attention when we view content, we just pay. 
Interestingly, things like micro-payments are actually going to change the way security works in our world, because once we're better able to allocate value, people will use their money and their energies for more constructive things. 
If it cost a fraction of a cent to send an email, would we still have spam? 
We're not at this world yet, but it's coming. 
Right now, it's like we're in a world that is seeing the first automobile. 
The first cryptocurrency, like the first car, is slow and hard to understand and hard to use. 
Digital money, like the horse and carriage, works pretty well, and the whole world economy is built on it. 
If you were the first person on your block to get a car with an internal combustion engine, your neighbors would probably think you were crazy: "" Why would you want this large, clunky machine that breaks down all the time, that lights on fire, and is still slower than a horse? "" But we all know how that story turns out. 
We're entering a new era of programmable money. 
And it's very exciting, but it's also a little bit scary. 
Cryptocurrencies can be used for illegal transactions, just like cash is used for crime in the world today. 
When all of our transactions are online, what does that mean for surveillance — who can see what we do? 
Who's advantaged in this new world and who isn't? 
Will I have to start to pay for things that I didn't have to pay for before? 
Will we all become slaves to algorithms and utility functions? 
All new technology comes with trade-offs. 
The Internet brought us a lot of ways to waste time. 
But it also greatly increased productivity. 
Mobile phones are annoying because they make me feel like I have to stay connected to work all the time. 
But they also help me stay connected to friends and family. 
The new sharing economy is going to eliminate some jobs. 
But it's also going to create new, flexible forms of employment. 
With programmable money, we decouple the need for large, trusted institutions from the architecture of the network. 
And this pushes innovation in money out to the edges, where it belongs. 
And because of this, things are going to change and unfold in ways that we can't even predict. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi, kids. 
(Laughter) I'm 71. 
(Applause) My husband is 76. 
My parents are in their late 90s, and Olivia, the dog, is 16. 
So let's talk about aging. 
Let me tell you how I feel when I see my wrinkles in the mirror and I realize that some parts of me have dropped and I can't find them down there. 
(Laughter) Mary Oliver says in one of her poems, "" Tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? "" Me, I intend to live passionately. 
When do we start aging? 
Society decides when we are old, usually around 65, when we get Medicare, but we really start aging at birth. 
We are aging right now, and we all experience it differently. 
We all feel younger than our real age, because the spirit never ages. 
I am still 17. 
Sophia Loren. Look at her. 
She says that everything you see she owes to spaghetti. 
I tried it and gained 10 pounds in the wrong places. 
But attitude, aging is also attitude and health. 
But my real mentor in this journey of aging is Olga Murray. 
This California girl at 60 started working in Nepal to save young girls from domestic bondage. 
At 88, she has saved 12,000 girls, and she has changed the culture in the country. 
(Applause) Now it is illegal for fathers to sell their daughters into servitude. 
She has also founded orphanages and nutritional clinics. 
She is always happy and eternally young. 
What have I lost in the last decades? 
People, of course, places, and the boundless energy of my youth, and I'm beginning to lose independence, and that scares me. 
Ram Dass says that dependency hurts, but if you accept it, there is less suffering. 
After a very bad stroke, his ageless soul watches the changes in the body with tenderness, and he is grateful to the people who help him. 
What have I gained? 
Freedom: I don't have to prove anything anymore. 
I'm not stuck in the idea of who I was, who I want to be, or what other people expect me to be. 
I don't have to please men anymore, only animals. 
I keep telling my superego to back off and let me enjoy what I still have. 
My body may be falling apart, but my brain is not, yet. 
I love my brain. 
I feel lighter. 
I don't carry grudges, ambition, vanity, none of the deadly sins that are not even worth the trouble. 
It's great to let go. 
I should have started sooner. 
And I also feel softer because I'm not scared of being vulnerable. 
I don't see it as weakness anymore. 
And I've gained spirituality. 
I'm aware that before, death was in the neighborhood. 
Now, it's next door, or in my house. 
I try to live mindfully and be present in the moment. 
By the way, the Dalai Lama is someone who has aged beautifully, but who wants to be vegetarian and celibate? 
(Laughter) Meditation helps. 
(Video) Child: Ommm. Ommm. Ommm. 
Isabel Allende: Ommm. Ommm. There it is. 
And it's good to start early. 
You know, for a vain female like myself, it's very hard to age in this culture. 
Inside, I feel good, I feel charming, seductive, sexy. 
Nobody else sees that. (Laughter) I'm invisible. 
I want to be the center of attention. 
I hate to be invisible. 
(Laughter) (Applause) This is Grace Dammann. 
She has been in a wheelchair for six years after a terrible car accident. 
She says that there is nothing more sensual than a hot shower, that every drop of water is a blessing to the senses. 
She doesn't see herself as disabled. 
In her mind, she's still surfing in the ocean. 
Ethel Seiderman, a feisty, beloved activist in the place where I live in California. 
She wears red patent shoes, and her mantra is that one scarf is nice but two is better. 
She has been a widow for nine years, but she's not looking for another mate. 
She says that there is only a limited number of ways you can screw — well, she says it in another way — and she has tried them all. 
(Laughter) I, on the other hand, I still have erotic fantasies with Antonio Banderas — (Laughter) — and my poor husband has to put up with it. 
So how can I stay passionate? 
I cannot will myself to be passionate at 71. 
I have been training for some time, and when I feel flat and bored, I fake it. 
Attitude, attitude. 
How do I train? I train by saying yes to whatever comes my way: drama, comedy, tragedy, love, death, losses. 
Yes to life. 
And I train by trying to stay in love. 
It doesn't always work, but you cannot blame me for trying. 
And, on a final note, retirement in Spanish is jubilación. 
Jubilation. Celebration. 
We have paid our dues. 
We have contributed to society. 
Now it's our time, and it's a great time. 
Unless you are ill or very poor, you have choices. 
I have chosen to stay passionate, engaged with an open heart. 
I am working on it every day. 
Want to join me? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) June Cohen: So Isabel — IA: Thank you. 
JC: First of all, I never like to presume to speak for the TED community, but I would like to tell you that I have a feeling we can all agree that you are still charming, seductive and sexy. Yes? 
IA: Aww, thank you. (Applause) JC: Hands down. IA: No, it's makeup. 
Moderator: Now, would it be awkward if I asked you a follow-up question about your erotic fantasies? 
IA: Oh, of course. About what? 
(Laughter) Moderator: About your erotic fantasies. IA: With Antonio Banderas. 
Moderator: I was just wondering if you have anything more to share. 
IA: Well, one of them is that — (Laughter) One of them is that I place a naked Antonio Banderas on a Mexican tortilla, I slather him with guacamole and salsa, I roll him up, and I eat him. (Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Music) ♫ Here we stand ♫ ♫ Like an Adam and an Eve ♫ ♫ Waterfalls ♫ ♫ The Garden of Eden ♫ ♫ Two fools in love ♫ ♫ So beautiful and strong ♫ ♫ Birds in the trees ♫ ♫ Are smiling upon them ♫ ♫ From the age of the dinosaurs ♫ ♫ Cars would run on gasoline ♫ ♫ Where? Where have they gone? ♫ ♫ Now, there's nothing but flowers ♫ ♫ This was a factory ♫ ♫ Now there are mountains and rivers ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ We caught a rattlesnake ♫ 
♫ Now we've got something for dinner ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ This was a parking lot ♫ ♫ Now it's all covered with flowers ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ If this is paradise ♫ ♫ I wish I had a lawnmower ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ This was a shopping mall ♫ ♫ Now it's turned into corn field ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ Don't leave me stranded here ♫ ♫ I can't get used to this lifestyle ♫ (Applause) 
Thomas Dolby: David Byrne. 
(Applause) 

I'm standing in front of you today in all humility, wanting to share with you my journey of the last six years in the field of service and education. 
And I'm not a trained academic. 
Neither am I a veteran social worker. 
I was 26 years in the corporate world, trying to make organizations profitable. 
And then in 2003 I started Parikrma Humanity Foundation from my kitchen table. 
The first thing that we did was walk through the slums. 
You know, by the way, there are two million people in Bangalore, who live in 800 slums. 
We couldn't go to all the slums, but we tried to cover as much as we could. 
We walked through these slums, identified houses where children would never go to school. 
We talked to the parents, tried to convince them about sending their children to school. 
We played with the children, and came back home really tired, exhausted, but with images of bright faces, twinkling eyes, and went to sleep. 
We were all excited to start, but the numbers hit us then: 200 million children between four to 14 that should be going to school, but do not; 100 million children who go to school but cannot read; 125 million who cannot do basic maths. 
We also heard that 250 billion Indian rupees was dedicated for government schooling. 
Ninety percent of it was spent on teachers' salary and administrators' salary. 
And yet, India has nearly the highest teacher absenteeism in the world, with one out of four teachers not going to school at all the entire academic year. 
Those numbers were absolutely mind-boggling, overwhelming, and we were constantly asked, "" When will you start? How many schools will you start? 
How many children will you get? 
How are you going to scale? 
How are you going to replicate? "" It was very difficult not to get scared, not to get daunted. 
But we dug our heels and said, "" We're not in the number game. 
We want to take one child at a time and take the child right through school, sent to college, and get them prepared for better living, a high value job. "" So, we started Parikrma. 
The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line. 
Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums, a second story building, the only second story building inside the slums. 
And that rooftop did not have any ceiling, only half a tin sheet. 
That was our first school. One hundred sixty-five children. 
Indian academic year begins in June. 
So, June it rains, so many a times all of us would be huddled under the tin roof, waiting for the rain to stop. 
My God! What a bonding exercise that was. 
And all of us that were under that roof are still here together today. 
Then came the second school, the third school, the fourth school and a junior college. 
In six years now, we have four schools, one junior college, 1,100 children coming from 28 slums and four orphanages. 
(Applause) Our dream is very simple: to send each of these kids, get them prepared to be educated but also to live peacefully, contented in this conflict-ridden chaotic globalized world. 
Now, when you talk global you have to talk English. 
And so all our schools are English medium schools. 
But they know there is this myth that children from the slums cannot speak English well. 
No one in their family has spoken English. 
No one in their generation has spoken English. 
But how wrong it is. 
Girl: I like adventurous books, and some of my favorites are Alfred Hitchcock and [unclear] and Hardy Boys. 
Although they are like in different contexts, one is magical, the other two are like investigation, I like those books because they have something special in them. 
The vocabulary used in those books and the style of writing. 
I mean like once I pick up one book I cannot put it down until I finish the whole book. 
Even if it takes me four and a half hours, or three and half hours to finish my book, I do it. 
Boy: I did good research and I got the information [on the] world's fastest cars. 
I like Ducati ZZ143, because it is the fastest, the world's fastest bike, and I like Pulsar 220 DTSI because it is India's fastest bike. (Laughter) Shukla Bose: Well, that girl that you saw, her father sells flowers on the roadside. 
And this little boy has been coming to school for five years. 
But isn't it strange that little boys all over the world love fast bikes? (Laughter) He hasn't seen one, he hasn't ridden one, of course, but he has done a lot of research through Google search. 
You know, when we started with our English medium schools we also decided to adopt the best curriculum possible, the ICSE curriculum. 
And again, there were people who laughed at me and said, "" Don't be crazy choosing such a tough curriculum for these students. 
They'll never be able to cope. "" Not only do our children cope very well, but they excel in it. 
You should just come across to see how well our children do. 
There is also this myth that parents from the slums are not interested in their children going to school; they'd much rather put them to work. 
That's absolute hogwash. 
All parents all over the world want their children to lead a better life than themselves, but they need to believe that change is possible. 
Video: (Hindi) SB: We have 80 percent attendance for all our parents-teachers meeting. 
Sometimes it's even 100 percent, much more than many privileged schools. 
Fathers have started to attend. 
It's very interesting. When we started our school the parents would give thumbprints in the attendance register. 
Now they have started writing their signature. 
The children have taught them. 
It's amazing how much children can teach. 
We have, a few months ago, actually late last year, we had a few mothers who came to us and said, "" You know, we want to learn how to read and write. 
Can you teach us? "" So, we started an afterschool for our parents, for our mothers. 
We had 25 mothers who came regularly after school to study. 
We want to continue with this program and extend it to all our other schools. 
Ninety-eight percent of our fathers are alcoholics. 
So, you can imagine how traumatized and how dysfunctional the houses are where our children come from. 
We have to send the fathers to de-addiction labs and when they come back, most times sober, we have to find a job for them so that they don't regress. 
We have about three fathers who have been trained to cook. 
We have taught them nutrition, hygiene. 
We have helped them set up the kitchen and now they are supplying food to all our children. 
They do a very good job because their children are eating their food, but most importantly this is the first time they have got respect, and they feel that they are doing something worthwhile. 
More than 90 percent of our non-teaching staff are all parents and extended families. 
We've started many programs just to make sure that the child comes to school. 
Vocational skill program for the older siblings so the younger ones are not stopped from coming to school. 
There is also this myth that children from the slums cannot integrate with mainstream. 
Take a look at this little girl who was one of the 28 children from all privileged schools, best schools in the country that was selected for the Duke University talent identification program and was sent to IIM Ahmedabad. 
Video: Girl: Duke IIMA Camp. Whenever we see that IIMA, it was such a pride for us to go to that camp. 
Everybody was very friendly, especially I got a lot of friends. 
And I felt that my English has improved a lot going there and chatting with friends. 
There they met children who are with a different standard and a different mindset, a totally different society. 
I mingled with almost everyone. 
They were very friendly. 
I had very good friends there, who are from Delhi, who are from Mumbai. 
Even now we are in touch through Facebook. 
After this Ahmedabad trip I've been like a totally different mingling with people and all of those. 
Before that I feel like I wasn't like this. 
I don't even mingle, or start speaking with someone so quickly. 
My accent with English improved a lot. 
And I learned football, volleyball, Frisbee, lots of games. 
And I wouldn't want to go to Bangalore. Let me stay here. 
Such beautiful food, I enjoyed it. It was so beautiful. 
I enjoyed eating food like [unclear] would come and ask me, "" Yes ma'am, what you want? "" It was so good to hear! 
(Laughter) (Applause) SB: This girl was working as a maid before she came to school. 
And today she wants to be a neurologist. 
Our children are doing brilliantly in sports. 
They are really excelling. 
There is an inter-school athletic competition that is held every year in Bangalore, where 5,000 children participate from 140 best schools in the city. 
We've got the best school award for three years successively. 
And our children are coming back home with bags full of medals, with lots of admirers and friends. 
Last year there were a couple of kids from elite schools that came to ask for admissions in our school. 
We also have our very own dream team. 
Why is this happening? Why this confidence? 
Is it the exposure? We have professors from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Indian Institute of Science who come and teach our children lots of scientific formulas, experiments, much beyond the classroom. 
Art, music are considered therapy and mediums of expression. 
We also believe that it's the content that is more important. 
It is not the infrastructure, not the toilets, not the libraries, but it is what actually happens in this school that is more important. 
Creating an environment of learning, of inquiry, of exploration is what is true education. 
When we started Parikrma we had no idea which direction we were taking. 
We didn't hire McKinsey to do a business plan. 
But we know for sure that what we want to do today is take one child at a time, not get bogged with numbers, and actually see the child complete the circle of life, and unleash his total potential. 
We do not believe in scale because we believe in quality, and scale and numbers will automatically happen. 
We have corporates that have stood behind us, and we are able to, now, open more schools. 
But we began with the idea of one child at a time. 
This is five-year-old Parusharam. 
He was begging by a bus stop a few years ago, got picked up and is now in an orphanage, has been coming to school for the last four and a half months. 
He's in kindergarten. 
He has learned how to speak English. 
We have a model by which kids can speak English and understand English in three month's time. 
He can tell you stories in English of the thirsty crow, of the crocodile and of the giraffe. 
And if you ask him what he likes to do he will say, "" I like sleeping. 
I like eating. I like playing. "" And if you ask him what he wants to do, he will say, "" I want to horsing. "" Now, "" horsing "" is going for a horse ride. 
So, Parusharam comes to my office every day. 
He comes for a tummy rub, because he believes that will give me luck. (Laughter) When I started Parikrma I began with a great deal of arrogance of transforming the world. 
But today I have been transformed. 
I have been changed with my children. 
I've learned so much from them: love, compassion, imagination and such creativity. 
Parusharam is Parikrma with a simple beginning but a long way to go. 
I promise you, Parusharam will speak in the TED conference a few years from now. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Well, I'm involved in other things, besides physics. 
In fact, mostly now in other things. 
One thing is distant relationships among human languages. 
And the professional, historical linguists in the U.S. 
and in Western Europe mostly try to stay away from any long-distance relationships, big groupings, groupings that go back a long time, longer than the familiar families. 
They don't like that. They think it's crank. I don't think it's crank. 
And there are some brilliant linguists, mostly Russians, who are working on that, at Santa Fe Institute and in Moscow, and I would love to see where that leads. 
Does it really lead to a single ancestor some 20, 25,000 years ago? 
And what if we go back beyond that single ancestor, when there was presumably a competition among many languages? 
How far back does that go? How far back does modern language go? 
How many tens of thousands of years does it go back? 
Chris Anderson: Do you have a hunch or a hope for what the answer to that is? 
Murray Gell-Mann: Well, I would guess that modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. 
I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language. 
So, I would guess that the actual origin goes back at least that far and maybe further. 
But that doesn't mean that all, or many, or most of today's attested languages couldn't descend perhaps from one that's much younger than that, like say 20,000 years, or something of that kind. It's what we call a bottleneck. 
CA: Well, Philip Anderson may have been right. 
You may just know more about everything than anyone. 
So, it's been an honor. Thank you Murray Gell-Mann. 
(Applause) 

What's happening to the climate? 
It is unbelievably bad. 
This is, obviously, that famous view now of the Arctic, which is likely to be gone at this point in the next three or four or five years. Very, very, very scary. 
So we all look at what we can do. 
And when you look at the worldwide sources of CO2, 52 percent are tied to buildings. 
Only nine percent is passenger cars, interestingly enough. 
So we ran off to a sushi bar. 
And at that sushi bar we came up with a great idea. 
And it was something called EcoRock. 
And we said we could redesign the 115-year-old gypsum drywall process that generates 20 billion pounds of CO2 a year. 
So it was a big idea. We wanted to reduce that by 80 percent, which is exactly what we've done. 
We started R & D in 2006. 
Decided to use recycled content from cement and steel manufacturing. 
There is the inside of our lab. We haven't shown this before. 
But our people had to do some 5,000 different mixes to get this right, to hit our targets. 
And they worked absolutely very, very, very hard. 
So then we went forward and built our production line in China. 
We don't build this production equipment any longer in the U.S., unfortunately. 
We did the line install over the summer. 
We started right there, with absolutely nothing. 
You're seeing for the first time, a brand new drywall production line, not made using gypsum at all. 
That's the finished production line there. 
We got our first panel out on December third. 
That is the slurry being poured onto paper, basically. That's the line running. 
The exciting thing is, look at the faces of the people. 
These are people who worked this project for two to three years. 
And they are so excited. That's the first board off the line. 
Our Vice President of Operation kissing the board. Obviously very, very excited. 
But this has a huge, huge impact on the environment. 
We signed the first panel just a few weeks after that, had a great signing ceremony, leading to people hopefully using these products across the world. 
And we've got Cradle-to-Cradle Gold on this thing. 
We happened to win, just recently, the Green Product of the Year for "" The Re-Invention of Drywall, "" from Popular Science. 
Thank you. Thank you. 
So here is what we learned: 8,000 gallons of gas equivalent to build one house. 
You probably had no idea. It's like driving around the world six times. 
We must change everything. 
Look around the room: chairs, wood, everything around us has to change or we're not going to lick this problem. 
Don't listen to the people who say you can't do this, because anyone can. 
And these job losses, we can fix them with green-collar jobs. 
We've got four plants. We're building this stuff around the country. 
We're going as fast as we can. 
Two and a half million cars worth of gypsum, you know, CO2 generated. Right? 
So what will you do? I'll tell you what I did and why I did it. And I know my time's up. 
Those are my kids, Natalie and David. 
When they have their kids, 2050, they'd better look back at Grandpa and say, "" Hey, you gave it a good shot. You did the best you could with the team that you had. "" So my hope is that when you leave TED, you will look at reducing your carbon footprint in however you can do it. 
And if you don't know how, please find me — I will help you. 
Last but not least, Bill Gates, I know you invented Windows. 
Wait till you see, maybe next year, what kind of windows we've invented. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

So I've been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. 
The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé, which are the skills you bring to the marketplace. 
The eulogy virtues are the ones that get mentioned in the eulogy, which are deeper: who are you, in your depth, what is the nature of your relationships, are you bold, loving, dependable, consistency? 
And most of us, including me, would say that the eulogy virtues are the more important of the virtues. 
But at least in my case, are they the ones that I think about the most? And the answer is no. 
So I've been thinking about that problem, and a thinker who has helped me think about it is a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi who wrote a book called "" The Lonely Man Of Faith "" in 1965. 
Soloveitchik said there are two sides of our natures, which he called Adam I and Adam II. 
Adam I is the worldly, ambitious, external side of our nature. 
He wants to build, create, create companies, create innovation. 
Adam II is the humble side of our nature. 
Adam II wants not only to do good but to be good, to live in a way internally that honors God, creation and our possibilities. 
Adam I wants to conquer the world. 
Adam II wants to hear a calling and obey the world. 
Adam I savors accomplishment. 
Adam II savors inner consistency and strength. 
Adam I asks how things work. 
Adam II asks why we're here. 
Adam I's motto is "" success. "" Adam II's motto is "" love, redemption and return. "" And Soloveitchik argued that these two sides of our nature are at war with each other. 
We live in perpetual self-confrontation between the external success and the internal value. 
And the tricky thing, I'd say, about these two sides of our nature is they work by different logics. 
The external logic is an economic logic: input leads to output, risk leads to reward. 
The internal side of our nature is a moral logic and often an inverse logic. 
You have to give to receive. 
You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. 
You have to conquer the desire to get what you want. 
In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. 
In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself. 
We happen to live in a society that favors Adam I, and often neglects Adam II. 
And the problem is, that turns you into a shrewd animal who treats life as a game, and you become a cold, calculating creature who slips into a sort of mediocrity where you realize there's a difference between your desired self and your actual self. 
You're not earning the sort of eulogy you want, you hope someone will give to you. 
You don't have the depth of conviction. 
You don't have an emotional sonorousness. 
You don't have commitment to tasks that would take more than a lifetime to commit. 
I was reminded of a common response through history of how you build a solid Adam II, how you build a depth of character. 
Through history, people have gone back into their own pasts, sometimes to a precious time in their life, to their childhood, and often, the mind gravitates in the past to a moment of shame, some sin committed, some act of selfishness, an act of omission, of shallowness, the sin of anger, the sin of self-pity, trying to be a people-pleaser, a lack of courage. 
Adam I is built by building on your strengths. 
Adam II is built by fighting your weaknesses. 
You go into yourself, you find the sin which you've committed over and again through your life, your signature sin out of which the others emerge, and you fight that sin and you wrestle with that sin, and out of that wrestling, that suffering, then a depth of character is constructed. 
And we're often not taught to recognize the sin in ourselves, in that we're not taught in this culture how to wrestle with it, how to confront it, and how to combat it. 
We live in a culture with an Adam I mentality where we're inarticulate about Adam II. 
Finally, Reinhold Niebuhr summed up the confrontation, the fully lived Adam I and Adam II life, this way: "" Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. 
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. 
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. 
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint. 
Therefore we must be saved by that final form of love, which is forgiveness. ” Thanks. 
(Applause) 

I'm thrilled to be here tonight to share with you something we've been working on for over two years, and it's in the area of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing. 
You see this object here. 
It's a set of concentric geodesic structures with linkages between each one. 
You can't even manufacture it through milling. 
This is a job for a 3D printer, but most 3D printers would take between three and 10 hours to fabricate it, and we're going to take the risk tonight to try to fabricate it onstage during this 10-minute talk. 
Wish us luck. 
Now, 3D printing is actually a misnomer. 
It's actually 2D printing over and over again, and it in fact uses the technologies associated with 2D printing. 
In microelectronics, they use something called lithography to do the same sort of thing, to make the transistors and integrated circuits and build up a structure several times. 
These are all 2D printing technologies. 
Now, I'm a chemist, a material scientist too, and my co-inventors are also material scientists, one a chemist, one a physicist, and we began to be interested in 3D printing. 
And very often, as you know, new ideas are often simple connections between people with different experiences in different communities, and that's our story. 
Now, we were inspired by the "" Terminator 2 "" scene for T-1000, and we thought, why couldn't a 3D printer operate in this fashion, where you have an object arise out of a puddle in essentially real time with essentially no waste to make a great object? 
Okay, just like the movies. 
And could we be inspired by Hollywood and come up with ways to actually try to get this to work? 
And that was our challenge. 
And our approach would be, if we could do this, then we could fundamentally address the three issues holding back 3D printing from being a manufacturing process. 
One, 3D printing takes forever. 
There are mushrooms that grow faster than 3D printed parts. (Laughter) The layer by layer process leads to defects in mechanical properties, and if we could grow continuously, we could eliminate those defects. 
Our approach is to use some standard knowledge in polymer chemistry to harness light and oxygen to grow parts continuously. 
Light and oxygen work in different ways. 
Light can take a resin and convert it to a solid, can convert a liquid to a solid. 
Oxygen inhibits that process. 
So light and oxygen are polar opposites from one another from a chemical point of view, and if we can control spatially the light and oxygen, we could control this process. 
And we refer to this as CLIP. [Continuous Liquid Interface Production.] It has three functional components. 
One, it has a reservoir that holds the puddle, just like the T-1000. 
At the bottom of the reservoir is a special window. 
I'll come back to that. 
In addition, it has a stage that will lower into the puddle and pull the object out of the liquid. 
The third component is a digital light projection system underneath the reservoir, illuminating with light in the ultraviolet region. 
Now, the key is that this window in the bottom of this reservoir, it's a composite, it's a very special window. 
It's got characteristics like a contact lens. 
You can start to see that as you lower a stage in there, in a traditional process, with an oxygen-impermeable window, you make a two-dimensional pattern and you end up gluing that onto the window with a traditional window, and so in order to introduce the next layer, you have to separate it, introduce new resin, reposition it, and do this process over and over again. 
But with our very special window, what we're able to do is, with oxygen coming through the bottom as light hits it, that oxygen inhibits the reaction, and we form a dead zone. 
This dead zone is on the order of tens of microns thick, so that's two or three diameters of a red blood cell, right at the window interface that remains a liquid, and we pull this object up, and as we talked about in a Science paper, as we change the oxygen content, we can change the dead zone thickness. 
And so we have a number of key variables that we control: oxygen content, the light, the light intensity, the dose to cure, the viscosity, the geometry, and we use very sophisticated software to control this process. 
The result is pretty staggering. 
It's 25 to 100 times faster than traditional 3D printers, which is game-changing. 
In addition, as our ability to deliver liquid to that interface, we can go 1,000 times faster I believe, and that in fact opens up the opportunity for generating a lot of heat, and as a chemical engineer, I get very excited at heat transfer and the idea that we might one day have water-cooled 3D printers, because they're going so fast. 
In addition, because we're growing things, we eliminate the layers, and the parts are monolithic. 
You don't see the surface structure. 
And the mechanical properties of most parts made in a 3D printer are notorious for having properties that depend on the orientation with which how you printed it, because of the layer-like structure. 
But when you grow objects like this, the properties are invariant with the print direction. 
These look like injection-molded parts, which is very different than traditional 3D manufacturing. 
In addition, we're able to throw the entire polymer chemistry textbook at this, and we're able to design chemistries that can give rise to the properties you really want in a 3D-printed object. 
(Applause) There it is. That's great. 
For the first time, we can have elastomers that are high elasticity or high dampening. 
We can make materials that have incredible strength, high strength-to-weight ratio, really strong materials, really great elastomers, so throw that in the audience there. 
So great material properties. 
And so the opportunity now, if you actually make a part that has the properties to be a final part, and you do it in game-changing speeds, you can actually transform manufacturing. 
Right now, in manufacturing, what happens is, the so-called digital thread in digital manufacturing. 
Often, the digital thread is broken right at prototype, because you can't go all the way to manufacturing because most parts don't have the properties to be a final part. 
We now can connect the digital thread all the way from design to prototyping to manufacturing, and that opportunity really opens up all sorts of things, from better fuel-efficient cars dealing with great lattice properties with high strength-to-weight ratio, new turbine blades, all sorts of wonderful things. 
Think about if you need a stent in an emergency situation, instead of the doctor pulling off a stent out of the shelf that was just standard sizes, having a stent that's designed for you, for your own anatomy with your own tributaries, printed in an emergency situation in real time out of the properties such that the stent could go away after 18 months: really-game changing. 
Or digital dentistry, and making these kinds of structures even while you're in the dentist chair. 
And look at the structures that my students are making at the University of North Carolina. 
These are amazing microscale structures. 
We're really good at that, but it's actually very hard to make things from 10 microns to 1,000 microns, the mesoscale. 
And subtractive techniques from the silicon industry can't do that very well. 
They can't etch wafers that well. 
But this process is so gentle, we can grow these objects up from the bottom using additive manufacturing and make amazing things in tens of seconds, opening up new sensor technologies, new drug delivery techniques, new lab-on-a-chip applications, really game-changing stuff. 
So the opportunity of making a part in real time that has the properties to be a final part really opens up 3D manufacturing, and for us, this is very exciting, because this really is owning the intersection between hardware, software and molecular science, and I can't wait to see what designers and engineers around the world are going to be able to do with this great tool. 
Thanks for listening. 
(Applause) 

Two twin domes, two radically opposed design cultures. 
One is made of thousands of steel parts, the other of a single silk thread. 
One is synthetic, the other organic. 
One is imposed on the environment, the other creates it. 
One is designed for nature, the other is designed by her. 
Michelangelo said that when he looked at raw marble, he saw a figure struggling to be free. 
The chisel was Michelangelo's only tool. 
But living things are not chiseled. 
They grow. 
And in our smallest units of life, our cells, we carry all the information that's required for every other cell to function and to replicate. 
Tools also have consequences. 
At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. 
Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions. 
But you don't find homogenous material assemblies in nature. 
Take human skin, for example. 
Our facial skins are thin with large pores. 
Our back skins are thicker, with small pores. 
One acts mainly as filter, the other mainly as barrier, and yet it's the same skin: no parts, no assemblies. 
It's a system that gradually varies its functionality by varying elasticity. 
So here this is a split screen to represent my split world view, the split personality of every designer and architect operating today between the chisel and the gene, between machine and organism, between assembly and growth, between Henry Ford and Charles Darwin. 
These two worldviews, my left brain and right brain, analysis and synthesis, will play out on the two screens behind me. 
My work, at its simplest level, is about uniting these two worldviews, moving away from assembly and closer into growth. 
You're probably asking yourselves: Why now? 
Why was this not possible 10 or even five years ago? 
We live in a very special time in history, a rare time, a time when the confluence of four fields is giving designers access to tools we've never had access to before. 
These fields are computational design, allowing us to design complex forms with simple code; additive manufacturing, letting us produce parts by adding material rather than carving it out; materials engineering, which lets us design the behavior of materials in high resolution; and synthetic biology, enabling us to design new biological functionality by editing DNA. 
And at the intersection of these four fields, my team and I create. 
Please meet the minds and hands of my students. 
We design objects and products and structures and tools across scales, from the large-scale, like this robotic arm with an 80-foot diameter reach with a vehicular base that will one day soon print entire buildings, to nanoscale graphics made entirely of genetically engineered microorganisms that glow in the dark. 
Here we've reimagined the mashrabiya, an archetype of ancient Arabic architecture, and created a screen where every aperture is uniquely sized to shape the form of light and heat moving through it. 
In our next project, we explore the possibility of creating a cape and skirt — this was for a Paris fashion show with Iris van Herpen — like a second skin that are made of a single part, stiff at the contours, flexible around the waist. 
Together with my long-term 3D printing collaborator Stratasys, we 3D-printed this cape and skirt with no seams between the cells, and I'll show more objects like it. 
This helmet combines stiff and soft materials in 20-micron resolution. 
This is the resolution of a human hair. 
It's also the resolution of a CT scanner. 
That designers have access to such high-resolution analytic and synthetic tools, enables to design products that fit not only the shape of our bodies, but also the physiological makeup of our tissues. 
Next, we designed an acoustic chair, a chair that would be at once structural, comfortable and would also absorb sound. 
Professor Carter, my collaborator, and I turned to nature for inspiration, and by designing this irregular surface pattern, it becomes sound-absorbent. 
We printed its surface out of 44 different properties, varying in rigidity, opacity and color, corresponding to pressure points on the human body. 
Its surface, as in nature, varies its functionality not by adding another material or another assembly, but by continuously and delicately varying material property. 
But is nature ideal? 
Are there no parts in nature? 
I wasn't raised in a religious Jewish home, but when I was young, my grandmother used to tell me stories from the Hebrew Bible, and one of them stuck with me and came to define much of what I care about. 
As she recounts: "" On the third day of Creation, God commands the Earth to grow a fruit-bearing fruit tree. "" For this first fruit tree, there was to be no differentiation between trunk, branches, leaves and fruit. 
The whole tree was a fruit. 
Instead, the land grew trees that have bark and stems and flowers. 
The land created a world made of parts. 
I often ask myself, "" What would design be like if objects were made of a single part? 
Would we return to a better state of creation? "" So we looked for that biblical material, that fruit-bearing fruit tree kind of material, and we found it. 
The second-most abundant biopolymer on the planet is called chitin, and some 100 million tons of it are produced every year by organisms such as shrimps, crabs, scorpions and butterflies. 
We thought if we could tune its properties, we could generate structures that are multifunctional out of a single part. 
So that's what we did. 
We called Legal Seafood — (Laughter) we ordered a bunch of shrimp shells, we grinded them and we produced chitosan paste. 
By varying chemical concentrations, we were able to achieve a wide array of properties — from dark, stiff and opaque, to light, soft and transparent. 
In order to print the structures in large scale, we built a robotically controlled extrusion system with multiple nozzles. 
The robot would vary material properties on the fly and create these 12-foot-long structures made of a single material, 100 percent recyclable. 
When the parts are ready, they're left to dry and find a form naturally upon contact with air. 
So why are we still designing with plastics? 
The air bubbles that were a byproduct of the printing process were used to contain photosynthetic microorganisms that first appeared on our planet 3.5 billion year ago, as we learned yesterday. 
Together with our collaborators at Harvard and MIT, we embedded bacteria that were genetically engineered to rapidly capture carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into sugar. 
For the first time, we were able to generate structures that would seamlessly transition from beam to mesh, and if scaled even larger, to windows. 
A fruit-bearing fruit tree. 
Working with an ancient material, one of the first lifeforms on the planet, plenty of water and a little bit of synthetic biology, we were able to transform a structure made of shrimp shells into an architecture that behaves like a tree. 
And here's the best part: for objects designed to biodegrade, put them in the sea, and they will nourish marine life; place them in soil, and they will help grow a tree. 
The setting for our next exploration using the same design principles was the solar system. 
We looked for the possibility of creating life-sustaining clothing for interplanetary voyages. 
To do that, we needed to contain bacteria and be able to control their flow. 
So like the periodic table, we came up with our own table of the elements: new lifeforms that were computationally grown, additively manufactured and biologically augmented. 
I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. 
It's called microfluidics. 
We 3D-printed our own channels in order to control the flow of these liquid bacterial cultures. 
In our first piece of clothing, we combined two microorganisms. 
The first is cyanobacteria. 
It lives in our oceans and in freshwater ponds. 
And the second, E. coli, the bacterium that inhabits the human gut. 
One converts light into sugar, the other consumes that sugar and produces biofuels useful for the built environment. 
Now, these two microorganisms never interact in nature. 
In fact, they never met each other. 
They've been here, engineered for the first time, to have a relationship inside a piece of clothing. 
Think of it as evolution not by natural selection, but evolution by design. 
In order to contain these relationships, we've created a single channel that resembles the digestive tract, that will help flow these bacteria and alter their function along the way. 
We then started growing these channels on the human body, varying material properties according to the desired functionality. 
Where we wanted more photosynthesis, we would design more transparent channels. 
This wearable digestive system, when it's stretched end to end, spans 60 meters. 
This is half the length of a football field, and 10 times as long as our small intestines. 
And here it is for the first time unveiled at TED — our first photosynthetic wearable, liquid channels glowing with life inside a wearable clothing. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Mary Shelley said, "" We are unfashioned creatures, but only half made up. "" What if design could provide that other half? 
What if we could create structures that would augment living matter? 
What if we could create personal microbiomes that would scan our skins, repair damaged tissue and sustain our bodies? 
Think of this as a form of edited biology. 
This entire collection, Wanderers, that was named after planets, was not to me really about fashion per se, but it provided an opportunity to speculate about the future of our race on our planet and beyond, to combine scientific insight with lots of mystery and to move away from the age of the machine to a new age of symbiosis between our bodies, the microorganisms that we inhabit, our products and even our buildings. 
I call this material ecology. 
To do this, we always need to return back to nature. 
By now, you know that a 3D printer prints material in layers. 
You also know that nature doesn't. 
It grows. It adds with sophistication. 
This silkworm cocoon, for example, creates a highly sophisticated architecture, a home inside which to metamorphisize. 
No additive manufacturing today gets even close to this level of sophistication. 
It does so by combining not two materials, but two proteins in different concentrations. 
One acts as the structure, the other is the glue, or the matrix, holding those fibers together. 
And this happens across scales. 
The silkworm first attaches itself to the environment — it creates a tensile structure — and it then starts spinning a compressive cocoon. 
Tension and compression, the two forces of life, manifested in a single material. 
In order to better understand how this complex process works, we glued a tiny earth magnet to the head of a silkworm, to the spinneret. 
We placed it inside a box with magnetic sensors, and that allowed us to create this 3-dimensional point cloud and visualize the complex architecture of the silkworm cocoon. 
However, when we placed the silkworm on a flat patch, not inside a box, we realized it would spin a flat cocoon and it would still healthily metamorphisize. 
So we started designing different environments, different scaffolds, and we discovered that the shape, the composition, the structure of the cocoon, was directly informed by the environment. 
Silkworms are often boiled to death inside their cocoons, their silk unraveled and used in the textile industry. 
We realized that designing these templates allowed us to give shape to raw silk without boiling a single cocoon. 
(Applause) They would healthily metamorphisize, and we would be able to create these things. 
So we scaled this process up to architectural scale. 
We had a robot spin the template out of silk, and we placed it on our site. 
We knew silkworms migrated toward darker and colder areas, so we used a sun path diagram to reveal the distribution of light and heat on our structure. 
We then created holes, or apertures, that would lock in the rays of light and heat, distributing those silkworms on the structure. 
We were ready to receive the caterpillars. 
We ordered 6,500 silkworms from an online silk farm. 
And after four weeks of feeding, they were ready to spin with us. 
We placed them carefully at the bottom rim of the scaffold, and as they spin they pupate, they mate, they lay eggs, and life begins all over again — just like us but much, much shorter. 
Bucky Fuller said that tension is the great integrity, and he was right. 
As they spin biological silk over robotically spun silk, they give this entire pavilion its integrity. 
And over two to three weeks, 6,500 silkworms spin 6,500 kilometers. 
In a curious symmetry, this is also the length of the Silk Road. 
The moths, after they hatch, produce 1.5 million eggs. 
This could be used for 250 additional pavilions for the future. 
So here they are, the two worldviews. 
One spins silk out of a robotic arm, the other fills in the gaps. 
If the final frontier of design is to breathe life into the products and the buildings around us, to form a two-material ecology, then designers must unite these two worldviews. 
Which brings us back, of course, to the beginning. 
Here's to a new age of design, a new age of creation, that takes us from a nature-inspired design to a design-inspired nature, and that demands of us for the first time that we mother nature. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) 

This is the exact moment that I started creating something called Tinkering School. 
Tinkering School is a place where kids can pick up sticks and hammers and other dangerous objects, and be trusted. 
Trusted not to hurt themselves, and trusted not to hurt others. 
Tinkering School doesn't follow a set curriculum, and there are no tests. 
We're not trying to teach anybody any specific thing. 
When the kids arrive they're confronted with lots of stuff: wood and nails and rope and wheels, and lots of tools, real tools. 
It's a six-day immersive experience for the kids. 
And within that context, we can offer the kids time — something that seems in short supply in their over-scheduled lives. 
Our goal is to ensure that they leave with a better sense of how to make things than when they arrived, and the deep internal realization that you can figure things out by fooling around. 
Nothing ever turns out as planned... ever. 
(Laughter) And the kids soon learn that all projects go awry — (Laughter) and become at ease with the idea that every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success, or gleeful calamity. 
We start from doodles and sketches. 
And sometimes we make real plans. 
And sometimes we just start building. 
Building is at the heart of the experience: hands on, deeply immersed and fully committed to the problem at hand. 
Robin and I, acting as collaborators, keep the landscape of the projects tilted towards completion. 
Success is in the doing, and failures are celebrated and analyzed. 
Problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear. 
When faced with particularly difficult setbacks or complexities, a really interesting behavior emerges: decoration. 
(Laughter) Decoration of the unfinished project is a kind of conceptual incubation. 
From these interludes come deep insights and amazing new approaches to solving the problems that had them frustrated just moments before. 
All materials are available for use. 
Even those mundane, hateful, plastic grocery bags can become a bridge stronger than anyone imagined. 
And the things that they build amaze even themselves. 
Video: Three, two, one, go! 
Gever Tulley: A rollercoaster built by seven-year-olds. 
Video: Yay! 
(Applause) GT: Thank you. It's been a great pleasure. (Applause) 

This is my first trip, my first foreign trip as a first lady. 
Can you believe that? 
(Applause) And while this is not my first visit to the U.K., I have to say that I am glad that this is my first official visit. 
The special relationship between the United States and the U.K. 
is based not only on the relationship between governments, but the common language and the values that we share, and I'm reminded of that by watching you all today. 
During my visit I've been especially honored to meet some of Britain's most extraordinary women — women who are paving the way for all of you. 
And I'm honored to meet you, the future leaders of Great Britain and this world. 
And although the circumstances of our lives may seem very distant, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America, and you, just getting through school, I want you to know that we have very much in common. 
For nothing in my life's path would have predicted that I'd be standing here as the first African-American First Lady of the United States of America. 
There is nothing in my story that would land me here. 
I wasn't raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of. 
I was raised on the South Side of Chicago. 
That's the real part of Chicago. 
And I was the product of a working-class community. 
My father was a city worker all of his life, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. 
And she stayed at home to take care of me and my older brother. 
Neither of them attended university. 
My dad was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the prime of his life. 
But even as it got harder for him to walk and get dressed in the morning — I saw him struggle more and more — my father never complained about his struggle. 
He was grateful for what he had. 
He just woke up a little earlier and worked a little harder. 
And my brother and I were raised with all that you really need: love, strong values and a belief that with a good education and a whole lot of hard work, that there was nothing that we could not do. 
I am an example of what's possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by the people around them. 
I was surrounded by extraordinary women in my life: grandmothers, teachers, aunts, cousins, neighbors, who taught me about quiet strength and dignity. 
And my mother, the most important role model in my life, who lives with us at the White House and helps to care for our two little daughters, Malia and Sasha. 
She's an active presence in their lives, as well as mine, and is instilling in them the same values that she taught me and my brother: things like compassion, and integrity, and confidence, and perseverance — all of that wrapped up in an unconditional love that only a grandmother can give. 
I was also fortunate enough to be cherished and encouraged by some strong male role models as well, including my father, my brother, uncles and grandfathers. 
The men in my life taught me some important things, as well. 
They taught me about what a respectful relationship should look like between men and women. 
They taught me about what a strong marriage feels like: that it's built on faith and commitment and an admiration for each other's unique gifts. 
They taught me about what it means to be a father and to raise a family. 
And not only to invest in your own home but to reach out and help raise kids in the broader community. 
And these were the same qualities that I looked for in my own husband, Barack Obama. 
And when we first met, one of the things that I remember is that he took me out on a date. 
And his date was to go with him to a community meeting. 
(Laughter) I know, how romantic. (Laughter) 
But when we met, Barack was a community organizer. 
He worked, helping people to find jobs and to try to bring resources into struggling neighborhoods. 
As he talked to the residents in that community center, he talked about two concepts. 
He talked about "" the world as it is "" and "" the world as it should be. "" And I talked about this throughout the entire campaign. 
What he said, that all too often, is that we accept the distance between those two ideas. 
And sometimes we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn't reflect our values and aspirations. 
But Barack reminded us on that day, all of us in that room, that we all know what our world should look like. 
We know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. 
We all know. 
And he urged the people in that meeting, in that community, to devote themselves to closing the gap between those two ideas, to work together to try to make the world as it is and the world as it should be, one and the same. 
And I think about that today because I am reminded and convinced that all of you in this school are very important parts of closing that gap. 
You are the women who will build the world as it should be. 
You're going to write the next chapter in history. 
Not just for yourselves, but for your generation and generations to come. 
And that's why getting a good education is so important. 
That's why all of this that you're going through — the ups and the downs, the teachers that you love and the teachers that you don't — why it's so important. 
Because communities and countries and ultimately the world are only as strong as the health of their women. 
And that's important to keep in mind. 
Part of that health includes an outstanding education. 
The difference between a struggling family and a healthy one is often the presence of an empowered woman or women at the center of that family. 
The difference between a broken community and a thriving one is often the healthy respect between men and women who appreciate the contributions each other makes to society. 
The difference between a languishing nation and one that will flourish is the recognition that we need equal access to education for both boys and girls. 
And this school, named after the U.K. 's first female doctor, and the surrounding buildings named for Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, Mary Seacole, the Jamaican nurse known as the "" black Florence Nightingale, "" and the English author, Emily Bronte, honor women who fought sexism, racism and ignorance, to pursue their passions to feed their own souls. 
They allowed for no obstacles. 
As the sign said back there, "" without limitations. "" They knew no other way to live than to follow their dreams. 
And having done so, these women moved many obstacles. 
And they opened many new doors for millions of female doctors and nurses and artists and authors, all of whom have followed them. 
And by getting a good education, you too can control your own destiny. 
Please remember that. 
If you want to know the reason why I'm standing here, it's because of education. 
I never cut class. Sorry, I don't know if anybody is cutting class. 
I never did it. 
I loved getting As. 
I liked being smart. 
I liked being on time. I liked getting my work done. 
I thought being smart was cooler than anything in the world. 
And you too, with these same values, can control your own destiny. 
You too can pave the way. 
You too can realize your dreams, and then your job is to reach back and to help someone just like you do the same thing. 
History proves that it doesn't matter whether you come from a council estate or a country estate. 
Your success will be determined by your own fortitude, your own confidence, your own individual hard work. 
That is true. That is the reality of the world that we live in. 
You now have control over your own destiny. 
And it won't be easy — that's for sure. 
But you have everything you need. 
Everything you need to succeed, you already have, right here. 
My husband works in this big office. 
They call it the Oval Office. 
In the White House, there's the desk that he sits at — it's called the Resolute desk. 
It was built by the timber of Her Majesty's Ship Resolute and given by Queen Victoria. 
It's an enduring symbol of the friendship between our two nations. 
And its name, Resolute, is a reminder of the strength of character that's required not only to lead a country, but to live a life of purpose, as well. 
And I hope in pursuing your dreams, you all remain resolute, that you go forward without limits, and that you use your talents — because there are many; we've seen them; it's there — that you use them to create the world as it should be. 
Because we are counting on you. 
We are counting on every single one of you to be the very best that you can be. 
Because the world is big. 
And it's full of challenges. 
And we need strong, smart, confident young women to stand up and take the reins. 
We know you can do it. We love you. Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

As a little Hawaiian, my mom and auntie always told me stories about Kalaupapa — the Hawaiian leper colony surrounded by the highest sea cliffs in the world — and Father Damien, the Belgian missionary who gave his life for the Hawaiian community. 
As a young nurse, my aunt trained the nuns caring for the remaining lepers almost a 100 years after Father Damien died of leprosy. 
I remember stories she told about traveling down switchback cliff paths on a mule, while my uncle played her favorite hula songs on the ukulele all the way down to Kalaupapa. 
You see, as a youngster, I was always curious about a few things. 
First was why a Belgian missionary chose to live in complete isolation in Kalaupapa, knowing he would inevitably contract leprosy from the community of people he sought to help. 
And secondly, where did the leprosy bacteria come from? 
And why were Kānaka Maoli, the indigenous people of Hawaii, so susceptible to developing leprosy, or "" mai Pake? "" This got my curious about what makes us unique as Hawaiians — namely, our genetic makeup. 
But it wasn't until high school, through the Human Genome Project, that I realized I wasn't alone in trying to connect our unique genetic ancestry to our potential health, wellness and illness. 
You see, the 2.7 billion-dollar project promised an era of predictive and preventative medicine based on our unique genetic makeup. 
So to me it always seemed obvious that in order to achieve this dream, we would need to sequence a diverse cohort of people to obtain the full spectrum of human genetic variation on the planet. 
That's why 10 years later, it continues to shock me, knowing that 96 percent of genome studies associating common genetic variation with specific diseases have focused exclusively on individuals of European ancestry. 
Now you don't need a PhD to see that that leaves four percent for the rest of diversity. 
And in my own searching, I've discovered that far less than one percent have actually focused on indigenous communities, like myself. 
So that begs the question: Who is the Human Genome Project actually for? 
Just like we have different colored eyes and hair, we metabolize drugs differently based on the variation in our genomes. 
So how many of you would be shocked to learn that 95 percent of clinical trials have also exclusively featured individuals of European ancestry? 
This bias and systematic lack of engagement of indigenous people in both clinical trials and genome studies is partially the result of a history of distrust. 
For example, in 1989, researchers from Arizona State University obtained blood samples from Arizona's Havasupai tribe, promising to alleviate the burden of type 2 diabetes that was plaguing their community, only to turn around and use those exact same samples — without the Havasupai's consent — to study rates of schizophrenia, inbreeding, and challenge the Havasupai's origin story. 
When the Havasupai found out, they sued successfully for $700,000, and they banned ASU from conducting research on their reservation. 
This culminated in a sort of domino effect with local tribes in the Southwest — including the Navajo Nation, one of the largest tribes in the country — putting a moratorium on genetic research. 
Now despite this history of distrust, I still believe that indigenous people can benefit from genetic research. 
And if we don't do something soon, the gap in health disparities is going to continue to widen. 
Hawaii, for example, has the longest life expectancy on average of any state in the US, yet native Hawaiians like myself die a full decade before our non-native counterparts, because we have some of the highest rates of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and the number one and number two killers in the US: cardiovascular disease and cancer. 
So how do we ensure the populations of people that need genome sequencing the most are not the last to benefit? 
My vision is to make genetic research more native, to indigenize genome sequencing technology. 
Traditionally, genomes are sequenced in laboratories. 
Here's an image of your classic genome sequencer. 
It's huge. 
It's the size of a refrigerator. 
There's this obvious physical limitation. 
But what if you could sequence genomes on the fly? 
What if you could fit a genome sequencer in your pocket? 
This nanopore-based sequencer is one 10,000th the size of your traditional genome sequencer. 
It doesn't have the same physical limitations, in that it's not tethered to a lab bench with extraneous cords, large vats of chemicals or computer monitors. 
It allows us to de-black box genome sequencing technology development in a way that's immersive and collaborative, activating and empowering indigenous communities... 
as citizen scientists. 
100 years later in Kalaupapa, we now have the technology to sequence leprosy bacteria in real time, using mobile genome sequencers, remote access to the Internet and cloud computation. 
But only if that's what Hawaiian people want. 
In our space, on our terms. 
IndiGenomics is about science for the people by the people. 
We'll be starting with a tribal consultation resource, focused on educating indigenous communities on the potential use and misuse of genetic information. 
Eventually we'd like to have our own IndiGenomics research institute to conduct our own experiments and educate the next generation of indigenous scientists. 
In the end, indigenous people need to be partners in and not subjects of genetic research. 
And for those on the outside, just as Father Damien did, the research community needs to immerse itself in indigenous culture or die trying. 
Mahalo. 
(Applause) 

If you have a very good model of a language which is used, if you have a very good model of a document, how well they are structured. 

All right, I want to see a show of hands: how many of you have unfriended someone on Facebook because they said something offensive about politics or religion, childcare, food? 
(Laughter) And how many of you know at least one person that you avoid because you just don't want to talk to them? (Laughter) 
You know, it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in "" My Fair Lady "": Stick to the weather and your health. 
But these days, with climate change and anti-vaxxing, those subjects — (Laughter) are not safe either. 
So this world that we live in, this world in which every conversation has the potential to devolve into an argument, where our politicians can't speak to one another and where even the most trivial of issues have someone fighting both passionately for it and against it, it's not normal. 
Pew Research did a study of 10,000 American adults, and they found that at this moment, we are more polarized, we are more divided, than we ever have been in history. 
We're less likely to compromise, which means we're not listening to each other. 
And we make decisions about where to live, who to marry and even who our friends are going to be, based on what we already believe. 
Again, that means we're not listening to each other. 
A conversation requires a balance between talking and listening, and somewhere along the way, we lost that balance. 
Now, part of that is due to technology. 
The smartphones that you all either have in your hands or close enough that you could grab them really quickly. 
According to Pew Research, about a third of American teenagers send more than a hundred texts a day. 
And many of them, almost most of them, are more likely to text their friends than they are to talk to them face to face. 
There's this great piece in The Atlantic. 
It was written by a high school teacher named Paul Barnwell. 
And he gave his kids a communication project. 
He wanted to teach them how to speak on a specific subject without using notes. 
And he said this: "" I came to realize... "" (Laughter) "" I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single most overlooked skill we fail to teach. 
Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and each other through screens, but rarely do they have an opportunity to hone their interpersonal communications skills. 
It might sound like a funny question, but we have to ask ourselves: Is there any 21st-century skill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation? "" Now, I make my living talking to people: Nobel Prize winners, truck drivers, billionaires, kindergarten teachers, heads of state, plumbers. 
I talk to people that I like. I talk to people that I don't like. 
I talk to some people that I disagree with deeply on a personal level. 
But I still have a great conversation with them. 
So I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes or so teaching you how to talk and how to listen. 
Many of you have already heard a lot of advice on this, things like look the person in the eye, think of interesting topics to discuss in advance, look, nod and smile to show that you're paying attention, repeat back what you just heard or summarize it. 
So I want you to forget all of that. 
It is crap. 
(Laughter) There is no reason to learn how to show you're paying attention if you are in fact paying attention. (Laughter) 
(Applause) Now, I actually use the exact same skills as a professional interviewer that I do in regular life. 
So, I'm going to teach you how to interview people, and that's actually going to help you learn how to be better conversationalists. 
Learn to have a conversation without wasting your time, without getting bored, and, please God, without offending anybody. 
We've all had really great conversations. 
We've had them before. We know what it's like. 
The kind of conversation where you walk away feeling engaged and inspired, or where you feel like you've made a real connection or you've been perfectly understood. 
There is no reason why most of your interactions can't be like that. 
So I have 10 basic rules. I'm going to walk you through all of them, but honestly, if you just choose one of them and master it, you'll already enjoy better conversations. 
Number one: Don't multitask. 
And I don't mean just set down your cell phone or your tablet or your car keys or whatever is in your hand. 
I mean, be present. 
Be in that moment. 
Don't think about your argument you had with your boss. 
Don't think about what you're going to have for dinner. 
If you want to get out of the conversation, get out of the conversation, but don't be half in it and half out of it. 
Number two: Don't pontificate. 
If you want to state your opinion without any opportunity for response or argument or pushback or growth, write a blog. 
(Laughter) Now, there's a really good reason why I don't allow pundits on my show: Because they're really boring. 
If they're conservative, they're going to hate Obama and food stamps and abortion. 
If they're liberal, they're going to hate big banks and oil corporations and Dick Cheney. 
Totally predictable. 
And you don't want to be like that. 
You need to enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn. 
The famed therapist M. Scott Peck said that true listening requires a setting aside of oneself. 
And sometimes that means setting aside your personal opinion. 
He said that sensing this acceptance, the speaker will become less and less vulnerable and more and more likely to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. 
Again, assume that you have something to learn. 
Bill Nye: "" Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don't. "" I put it this way: Everybody is an expert in something. 
Number three: Use open-ended questions. 
In this case, take a cue from journalists. 
Start your questions with who, what, when, where, why or how. 
If you put in a complicated question, you're going to get a simple answer out. 
If I ask you, "" Were you terrified? "" you're going to respond to the most powerful word in that sentence, which is "" terrified, "" and the answer is "" Yes, I was "" or "" No, I wasn't. "" "Were you angry?" "Yes, I was very angry." 
Let them describe it. They're the ones that know. 
Try asking them things like, "" What was that like? "" "How did that feel?" 
Because then they might have to stop for a moment and think about it, and you're going to get a much more interesting response. 
Number four: Go with the flow. 
That means thoughts will come into your mind and you need to let them go out of your mind. 
We've heard interviews often in which a guest is talking for several minutes and then the host comes back in and asks a question which seems like it comes out of nowhere, or it's already been answered. 
That means the host probably stopped listening two minutes ago because he thought of this really clever question, and he was just bound and determined to say that. 
And we do the exact same thing. 
We're sitting there having a conversation with someone, and then we remember that time that we met Hugh Jackman in a coffee shop. 
(Laughter) And we stop listening. 
Stories and ideas are going to come to you. 
You need to let them come and let them go. 
Number five: If you don't know, say that you don't know. 
Now, people on the radio, especially on NPR, are much more aware that they're going on the record, and so they're more careful about what they claim to be an expert in and what they claim to know for sure. 
Do that. Err on the side of caution. 
Talk should not be cheap. 
Number six: Don't equate your experience with theirs. 
If they're talking about having lost a family member, don't start talking about the time you lost a family member. 
If they're talking about the trouble they're having at work, don't tell them about how much you hate your job. 
It's not the same. It is never the same. 
All experiences are individual. 
And, more importantly, it is not about you. 
You don't need to take that moment to prove how amazing you are or how much you've suffered. 
Somebody asked Stephen Hawking once what his IQ was, and he said, "I have no idea. People who brag about their IQs are losers." 
(Laughter) Conversations are not a promotional opportunity. 
Number seven: Try not to repeat yourself. 
It's condescending, and it's really boring, and we tend to do it a lot. 
Especially in work conversations or in conversations with our kids, we have a point to make, so we just keep rephrasing it over and over. 
Don't do that. 
Number eight: Stay out of the weeds. 
Frankly, people don't care about the years, the names, the dates, all those details that you're struggling to come up with in your mind. 
They don't care. What they care about is you. 
They care about what you're like, what you have in common. 
So forget the details. Leave them out. 
Number nine: This is not the last one, but it is the most important one. 
Listen. 
I cannot tell you how many really important people have said that listening is perhaps the most, the number one most important skill that you could develop. 
Buddha said, and I'm paraphrasing, "If your mouth is open, you're not learning." 
And Calvin Coolidge said, "" No man ever listened his way out of a job. "" (Laughter) Why do we not listen to each other? 
Number one, we'd rather talk. 
When I'm talking, I'm in control. 
I don't have to hear anything I'm not interested in. 
I'm the center of attention. 
I can bolster my own identity. 
But there's another reason: We get distracted. 
The average person talks at about 225 word per minute, but we can listen at up to 500 words per minute. 
So our minds are filling in those other 275 words. 
And look, I know, it takes effort and energy to actually pay attention to someone, but if you can't do that, you're not in a conversation. 
You're just two people shouting out barely related sentences in the same place. 
(Laughter) You have to listen to one another. 
Stephen Covey said it very beautifully. 
He said, "" Most of us don't listen with the intent to understand. 
We listen with the intent to reply. "" One more rule, number 10, and it's this one: Be brief. 
[A good conversation is like a miniskirt; short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject. — My Sister] (Laughter) (Applause) All of this boils down to the same basic concept, and it is this one: Be interested in other people. 
You know, I grew up with a very famous grandfather, and there was kind of a ritual in my home. 
People would come over to talk to my grandparents, and after they would leave, my mother would come over to us, and she'd say, "" Do you know who that was? 
She was the runner-up to Miss America. 
He was the mayor of Sacramento. 
She won a Pulitzer Prize. He's a Russian ballet dancer. "" And I kind of grew up assuming everyone has some hidden, amazing thing about them. 
And honestly, I think it's what makes me a better host. 
I keep my mouth shut as often as I possibly can, I keep my mind open, and I'm always prepared to be amazed, and I'm never disappointed. 
You do the same thing. 
Go out, talk to people, listen to people, and, most importantly, be prepared to be amazed. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them. 
And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. 
Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. 
In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats — tops out at 15, 16 percent. 
A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. 
And so I said, "" Did you just move into this office? "" And he said, "" No, we've been here about a year. "" And I said, "" Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year? "" And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom." 
I want to start out by saying, I talk about this — about keeping women in the workforce — because I really think that's the answer. 
In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top — Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries — the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. 
Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. 
What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? 
I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. 
I know no women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce, who don't feel that sometimes. 
So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone. 
My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. 
Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. 
He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table," and they sat on the side of the room. 
And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student — and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar — and my brother — smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore. 
The three of us take this class together. 
He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. 
If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. 
Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. 
A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. 
And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. 
If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, "" I'm awesome. 
Obviously. Why are you even asking? "" If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. 
Boy, it matters a lot. 
Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success. 
But it's not that simple. 
There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. 
And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. 
In 2002 — not so long ago — a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. 
And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. 
But that one word made a really big difference. 
The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. 
This is the complication. 
We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not. 
I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men. "" And I thought to myself, "" Wow, if it's me — who cares about this, obviously — giving this talk — and during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women? "" We've got to get women to sit at the table. 
The data shows this very clearly. 
If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. 
When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don't play with him. 
And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job, because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce. 
(Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. 
(Cheers) Message number three: Don't leave before you leave. 
I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking — and I see this all the time — with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving. 
Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy. 
And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. 
The problem is that — let's say she got pregnant that day, that day — nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath — Fast-forward two years, more often — and as I've seen it — women start thinking about this way earlier — when they get engaged, or married, when they start thinking about having a child, which can take a long time. 
And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. 
Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child — and then make your decisions. 

Guys, we have an issue. 
(Laughter) Growth is fading away, and it's a big deal. 
Our global economy stops growing. 
And it's not new. 
Growth has actually declined for the last 50 years. 
If we continue like this, we need to learn how to live in a world with no growth in the next decade. 
This is scary because when the economy doesn't grow, our children don't get better lives. 
What's even scarier is that when the pie does not grow, each of us get a smaller piece. 
We're then ready to fight for a bigger one. 
This creates tensions and serious conflicts. 
Growth matters a lot. 
If we look at the history of growth, times of big growth have always been fueled by big manufacturing revolutions. 
It happened three times, every 50-60 years. 
The steam engine in the middle of the 19th century, the mass-production model in the beginning of the 20th century — thanks, Mr. Ford. 
And the first automation wave in the 1970s. 
Why did these manufacturing revolutions create huge growth in our economies? 
Because they have injected huge productivity improvement. 
It's rather simple: in order to grow, you need to be producing more, putting more into our economy. 
This means either more labor or more capital or more productivity. 
Each time, productivity has been the growth lever. 
I'm here today to tell you that we are on the verge of another huge change, and that this change, surprisingly enough, is going to come from manufacturing, again. 
It will get us out of our growth slump and it will change radically the way globalization has been shaped over the last decade. 
I'm here to tell you about the amazing fourth manufacturing revolution that is currently underway. 
It's not as if we've done nothing with manufacturing since the last revolution. 
Actually, we've made some pretty lame attempts to try to revitalize it. 
But none of them have been the big overhaul we really need to get us growing again. 
For example, we've tried to relocate our factories offshore in order to reduce cost and take advantage of cheap labor. 
Not only did this not inspire productivity, but it only saved money for a short period of time, because cheap labor didn't stay cheap for long. 
Then, we've tried to make our factories larger and we specialized them by product. 
The idea was that we can make a lot of one product and stockpile it to be sold with demand. 
This did help productivity for a while. 
But it introduced a lot of rigidities in our supply chain. 
Let's take fashion retail. 
Traditional clothing companies have built offshore, global, rigid supply chains. 
When fast-fashion competitors like Zara started replenishing their stocks faster from two collections a year to one collection a month, none of them have been able to keep up with the pace. 
Most of them are in great difficulties today. 
Yet, with all of their shortcomings, those are the factories we know today. 
When you open the doors, they look the same as they did 50 years ago. 
We've just changed the location, the size, the way they operate. 
Can you name anything else that looks the same as it did 50 years ago? 
It's crazy. 
We've made all the tweaks to the model that we could, and now we hit its limits. 
After all of our attempts to fix the manufacturing model failed, we thought growth could come from elsewhere. 
We turned to the tech sector — there's been quite a lot of innovations there. 
Just to name one: the Internet. 
We hoped it could produce growth. 
And indeed, it changed our lives. 
It made big waves in the media, the service, the entertainment spaces. 
But it hasn't done much for productivity. 
Actually, what's surprising is that productivity is on the decline despite all of those innovation efforts. 
Imagine that — sitting at work, scrolling through Facebook, watching videos on YouTube has made us less productive. 
Weird. 
(Laughter) This is why we are not growing. 
We failed at reinventing the manufacturing space, and large technological innovations have played away from it. 
But what if we could combine those forces? 
What if the existing manufacturing and large technological innovation came together to create the next big manufacturing reinvention. 
Bingo! 
This is the fourth manufacturing revolution, and it's happening right now. 
Major technologies are entering the manufacturing space, big time. 
They will boost industrial productivity by more than a third. 
This is massive, and it will do a lot in creating growth. 
Let me tell you about some of them. 
Have you already met advanced manufacturing robots? 
They are the size of humans, they actually collaborate with them, and they can be programmed in order to perform complex, non-repetitive tasks. 
Today in our factories, only 8 percent of the tasks are automated. 
The less complex, the more repetitive ones. 
It will be 25 percent in 10 years. 
It means that by 2025, advanced robots will complement workers to be, together, 20 percent more productive, to manufacture 20 percent more outputs, to achieve 20 percent additional growth. 
This isn't some fancy, futuristic idea. 
These robots are working for us right now. 
Last year in the US, they helped Amazon prepare and ship all the products required for Cyber Monday, the annual peak of online retail. Last year in the US, 
it was the biggest online shopping day of the year and of history. 
Consumers spent 3 billion dollars on electronics that day. 
That's real economic growth. 
Then there's additive manufacturing, 3D printing. 
3D printing has already improved plastic manufacturing and it's now making its way through metal. 
Those are not small industries. 
Plastic and metals represent 25 percent of global manufacturing production. 
Let's take a real example. 
In the aerospace industry, fuel nozzles are some of the most complex parts to manufacture, for one reason: they are made up of 20 different parts that need to be separately produced and then painstakingly assembled. 
Aerospace companies are now using 3D printing, which allows them to turn those 20 different parts into just one. 
The results? 
40 percent more productivity, 40 percent more output produced, 40 percent more growth for this specific industry. 
But actually, the most exciting part of this new manufacturing revolution goes much beyond productivity. 
It's about producing better, smarter products. 
It's about scale customization. 
Imagine a world where you can buy the exact products you want with the functionalities you need, with the design you want, with the same cost and lead time as a product that's been mass produced, like your car, or your clothes or your cell phone. 
The new manufacturing revolution makes it possible. 
Advanced robots can be programmed in order to perform any product configuration without any setup time or ramp up. 
3D printers instantaneously produce any customized design. 
We are now able to produce a batch of one product, your product, at the same cost and lead time as a batch of many. 
Those are only a few examples of the manufacturing revolution at play. 
Not only will manufacturing become more productive, it will also become more flexible, and those were exactly the elements of growth that we are missing. 
But actually, there are even some bigger implications for all of us when manufacturing will find its way back into the limelight. 
It will create a huge macroeconomic shift. 
First, our factories will be relocated into our home markets. 
In the world of scale customization, consumer proximity is the new norm. 
Then, our factories will be smaller, agile. 
Scale does not matter anymore, flexibility does. 
They will be operating on a multi-product, made-to-order basis. 
The change will be drastic. 
Globalization will enter a new era. 
The East-to-West trade flows will be replaced by regional trade flows. 
East for East, West for West. 
When you think about that, the old model was pretty much insane. 
Piling up stocks, making products travel the whole world before they reach their end consumers. 
The new model, producing just next to the consumer market, will be much cleaner, much better for our environment. 
In mature economies, manufacturing will be back home, creating more employment, more productivity and more growth. 
Good news, isn't it? 
But here's the thing with growth — it does not come automatically. 
Mature economies will have to seize it. 
We'll have to massively re-train our workforce. 
In most countries, like in my country, France, we've told our children that manufacturing had no future. 
That it was something happening far away. 
We need to reverse that and teach manufacturing again at university. 
Only the countries that will boldly transform will be able to seize this growth. 
It's also a chance for developing economies. 
Of course China and other emerging economies won't be the factory of the world anymore. 
Actually, it was not a sustainable model in the long term, as those countries are becoming richer. 
Last year, it was already as expensive to produce in Brazil as to produce in France. 
By 2018, manufacturing costs in China will be on par with the US. 
The new manufacturing revolution will accelerate the transition of those emerging economies towards a model driven by domestic consumption. 
And this is good, because this is where growth will be created. 
In the next five years, the next billion consumers in China will inject more growth in our economies than the top five European markets together. 
This fourth manufacturing revolution is a chance for all of us. 
If we play it right, we'll see sustainable growth in all of our economies. 
This means more wealth distributed to all of us and a better future for our children. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a lexicographer. 
I make dictionaries. 
And my job as a lexicographer is to try to put all the words possible into the dictionary. 
My job is not to decide what a word is; that is your job. 
Everybody who speaks English decides together what's a word and what's not a word. 
Every language is just a group of people who agree to understand each other. 
Now, sometimes when people are trying to decide whether a word is good or bad, they don't really have a good reason. 
So they say something like, "" Because grammar! "" (Laughter) I don't actually really care about grammar too much — don't tell anybody. 
But the word "" grammar, "" actually, there are two kinds of grammar. 
There's the kind of grammar that lives inside your brain, and if you're a native speaker of a language or a good speaker of a language, it's the unconscious rules that you follow when you speak that language. 
And this is what you learn when you learn a language as a child. 
And here's an example: This is a wug, right? 
It's a wug. 
Now there is another one. 
There are two of these. 
There are two... 
Audience: Wugs. 
Erin McKean: Exactly! You know how to make the plural of wug. 
That rule lives in your brain. 
You never had to be taught this rule, you just understand it. 
This is an experiment that was invented by a professor at [Boston University] named Jean Berko Gleason back in 1958. 
So we've been talking about this for a long time. 
Now, these kinds of natural rules that exist in your brain, they're not like traffic laws, they're more like laws of nature. 
And nobody has to remind you to obey a law of nature, right? 
When you leave the house in the morning, your mom doesn't say, "" Hey, honey, I think it's going to be cold, take a hoodie, don't forget to obey the law of gravity. "" Nobody says this. 
Now, there are other rules that are more about manners than they are about nature. 
So you can think of a word as like a hat. 
Once you know how hats work, nobody has to tell you, "" Don't wear hats on your feet. "" What they have to tell you is, "" Can you wear hats inside? 
Who gets to wear a hat? 
What are the kinds of hats you get to wear? "" Those are more of the second kind of grammar, which linguists often call usage, as opposed to grammar. 
Now, sometimes people use this kind of rules-based grammar to discourage people from making up words. 
And I think that is, well, stupid. 
So, for example, people are always telling you, "Be creative, make new music, do art, invent things, science and technology." 
But when it comes to words, they're like, "Don't! No. Creativity stops right here, whippersnappers. Give it a rest." 
(Laughter) But that makes no sense to me. 
Words are great. We should have more of them. 
I want you to make as many new words as possible. 
And I'm going to tell you six ways that you can use to make new words in English. 
The first way is the simplest way. 
Basically, steal them from other languages. 
["" Go rob other people ""] (Laughter) Linguists call this borrowing, but we never give the words back, so I'm just going to be honest and call it stealing. 
We usually take words for things that we like, like delicious food. 
We took "" kumquat "" from Chinese, we took "" caramel "" from French. 
We also take words for cool things like "" ninja, "" right? 
We took that from Japanese, which is kind of a cool trick because ninjas are hard to steal from. 
(Laughter) So another way that you can make words in English is by squishing two other English words together. 
This is called compounding. 
Words in English are like Lego: If you use enough force, you can put any two of them together. 
(Laughter) We do this all the time in English: Words like "" heartbroken, "" "" bookworm, "" "" sandcastle "" all are compounds. 
So go ahead and make words like "" duckface, "" just don't make duckface. 
(Laughter) Another way that you can make words in English is kind of like compounding, but instead you use so much force when you squish the words together that some parts fall off. 
So these are blend words, like "" brunch "" is a blend of "" breakfast "" and "" lunch. "" "Motel" is a blend of "motor" and "hotel." 
Who here knew that "" motel "" was a blend word? 
Yeah, that word is so old in English that lots of people don't know that there are parts missing. 
"Edutainment" is a blend of "education" and "entertainment." 
And of course, "" electrocute "" is a blend of "" electric "" and "" execute. "" (Laughter) You can also make words by changing how they operate. 
This is called functional shift. 
You take a word that acts as one part of speech, and you change it into another part of speech. 
Okay, who here knew that "" friend "" hasn't always been a verb? 
"" Friend "" used to be noun and then we verbed it. 
Almost any word in English can be verbed. 
You can also take adjectives and make them into nouns. 
"" Commercial "" used to be an adjective and now it's a noun. 
And of course, you can "" green "" things. 
Another way to make words in English is back-formation. 
You can take a word and you can kind of squish it down a little bit. 
So for example, in English we had the word "" editor "" before we had the word "" edit. "" "Edit" was formed from "editor." 
Sometimes these back-formations sound a little silly: Bulldozers bulldoze, butlers butle and burglers burgle. 
(Laughter) Another way to make words in English is to take the first letters of something and squish them together. 
So National Aeronautics and Space Administration becomes NASA. 
And of course you can do this with anything, OMG! 
So it doesn't matter how silly the words are. 
They can be really good words of English. 
"" Absquatulate "" is a perfectly good word of English. 
"" Mugwump "" is a perfectly good word of English. 
So the words don't have have to sound normal, they can sound really silly. 
Why should you make words? 
You should make words because every word is a chance to express your idea and get your meaning across. 
And new words grab people's attention. 
They get people to focus on what you're saying and that gives you a better chance to get your meaning across. 
A lot of people on this stage today have said, "" In the future, you can do this, you can help with this, you can help us explore, you can help us invent. "" You can make a new word right now. 
English has no age limit. 
Go ahead, start making words today, send them to me, and I will put them in my online dictionary, Wordnik. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

Do you ever feel completely overwhelmed when you're faced with a complex problem? 
So, I hope to convince you that complex doesn't always equal complicated. 
So for me, a well-crafted baguette, fresh out of the oven, is complex, but a curry onion green olive poppy cheese bread is complicated. 
So here's a food web, or a map of feeding links between species that live in Alpine Lakes in the mountains of California. 
And this is what happens to that food web when it's stocked with non-native fish that never lived there before. 
These effects were all unanticipated, and yet we're discovering they're predictable. 
So I want to share with you a couple key insights about complexity we're learning from studying nature that maybe are applicable to other problems. 
First is the simple power of good visualization tools to help untangle complexity and just encourage you to ask questions you didn't think of before. 
For example, you could plot the flow of carbon through corporate supply chains in a corporate ecosystem, or the interconnections of habitat patches for endangered species in Yosemite National Park. 
The next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another, if you focus only on that link, and then you black box the rest, it's actually less predictable than if you step back, consider the entire system — all the species, all the links — and from that place, hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most. 
And we're discovering, with our research, that's often very local to the node you care about within one or two degrees. 
So the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers, and it's often different than the simple answer that you started with. 
And the stated goal was to increase popular support for the Afghan government. 
Clearly a complex problem, but is it complicated? 
Well, when I saw this in the front page of the Times, I thought, "" Great. Finally something I can relate to. 
I can sink my teeth into this. "" So let's do it. So here we go for the first time ever, a world premiere view of this spaghetti diagram as an ordered network. 
The circled node is the one we're trying to influence — popular support for the government. 
And so now we can look one degrees, two degrees, three degrees away from that node and eliminate three-quarters of the diagram outside that sphere of influence. 
Within that sphere, most of those nodes are not actionable, like the harshness of the terrain, and a very small minority are actual military actions. 
Most are non-violent and they fall into two broad categories: active engagement with ethnic rivalries and religious beliefs and fair, transparent economic development and provisioning of services. 
I don't know about this, but this is what I can decipher from this diagram in 24 seconds. 
Because simple answers may emerge. 
We're discovering in nature that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity. 
So for any problem, the more you can zoom out and embrace complexity, the better chance you have of zooming in on the simple details that matter most. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

As a lover of human anatomy, I'm so excited that we're finally putting our bodies at the center of focus. 
Through practices such as preventive medicine, patient empowerment and self-monitoring — down to now obsessing over every single step we take in a day. 
All of this works to promote a healthy connection between ourselves and our bodies. 
Despite all this focus on the healthy self, general public knowledge of the anatomical self is lacking. 
Many people don't know the location of their vital organs, or even how they function. 
And that's because human anatomy is a difficult and time-intensive subject to learn. 
How many of you here made it through anatomy? 
Wow, good — most of you are in medicine. 
I, like you, spent countless hours memorizing hundreds of structures. 
Something no student of anatomy could do without the help of visuals. 
Because at the end of the day, whether you remember every little structure or not, these medical illustrations are what makes studying anatomy so intriguing. 
In looking at them, we're actually viewing a manual of our very selves. 
But what happens when we're done studying? 
These beautiful illustrations are then shut back into the pages of a medical textbook, or an app, referenced only when needed. 
And for the public, medical illustrations may only be encountered passively on the walls of a doctor's office. 
From the beginnings of modern medicine, medical illustration, and therefore anatomy, have existed primarily within the realm of medical education. 
Yet there's something fascinating happening right now. 
Artists are breaking anatomy out of the confines of the medical world and are thrusting it into the public space. 
For the past nine years, I have been cataloguing and sharing this rise in anatomical art with the public — all from my perspective as a medical illustrator. 
But before I get into showing you how artists are reclaiming anatomy today, it's important to understand how art influenced anatomy in the past. 
Now, anatomy is by its very nature a visual science, and the first anatomists to understand this lived during the Renaissance. 
They relied on artists to help advertise their discoveries to their peers in the public. 
And this drive to not only teach but also to entertain resulted in some of the strangest anatomical illustrations. 
Anatomy was caught in a struggle between science, art and culture that lasted for over 500 years. 
Artists rendered dissected cadavers as alive, posed in these humorous anatomical stripteases. 
Imagine seeing that in your textbooks today. 
They also showed them as very much dead — unwillingly stripped of their skin. 
Disembodied limbs were often posed in literal still lives. 
And some illustrations even included pop culture references. 
This is Clara, a famous rhinoceros that was traveling Europe in the mid-1700s, at a time when seeing a rhino was an exciting rarity. 
Including her in this illustration was akin to celebrity sponsorship today. 
The introduction of color then brought a whole new depth and clarity to anatomy that made it stunning. 
By the early 20th century, the perfect balance of science and art had finally been struck with the emergence of medical illustrators. 
They created a universal representation of anatomy — something that was neither alive nor dead, that was free from those influences of artistic culture. 
And this focus on no-frills accuracy was precisely for the benefit of medical education. 
And this is what we get to study from today. 
But why is it that medical illustration — both past and present — captures our imaginations? 
Now, we are innately tuned into the beauty of the human body. 
And medical illustration is still art. 
Nothing can elicit an emotional response — from joy to complete disgust — more than the human body. 
And today, artists armed with that emotion, are grasping anatomy from the medical world, and are reinvigorating it through art in the most imaginative ways. 
A perfect example of this is Spanish contemporary artist Fernando Vicente. 
He takes 19th century anatomical illustrations of the male body and envelops them in a female sensuality. 
The women in his paintings taunt us to view beyond their surface anatomy, thereby introducing a strong femininity that was previously lacking in the history of anatomical representation. 
Artistry can also be seen in the repair and recovery of the human body. 
This is an X-ray of a woman who fractured and dislocated her ankle in a roller-skating accident. 
As a tribute to her trauma, she commissioned Montreal-based architect Federico Carbajal to construct a wire sculpture of her damaged lower leg. 
Now, notice those bright red screws magnified in the sculpture. 
These are the actual surgical screws used in reconstructing her ankle. 
It's medical hardware that's been repurposed as art. 
People often ask me how I choose the art that I showcase online or feature in gallery shows. 
And for me it's a balance between the technique and a concept that pushes the boundaries of anatomy as a way to know thyself, which is why the work of Michael Reedy struck me. 
His serious figure drawings are often layered in elements of humor. 
For instance, take a look at her face. 
Notice those red marks. 
Michael manifests the consuming insecurity of a skin condition as these maniacal cartoon monsters annoying and out of control in the background. 
On the mirrored figure, he renders the full anatomy and covers it in glitter, making it look like candy. 
By doing this, Michael downplays the common perception of anatomy so closely tied to just disease and death. 
Now, this next concept might not make much sense, but human anatomy is no longer limited to humans. 
When you were a child, did you ever wish that your toys could come to life? 
Well, Jason Freeny makes those dreams come true with his magical toy dissections. 
(Laughter) One might think that this would bring a morbid edge to one's innocent childhood characters, but Jason says of his dissections, "One thing I've never seen in a child's reaction to my work is fear." 
It's always wonder, amazement and wanting to explore. 
Fear of anatomy and guts is a learned reaction. 
This anatomization also extends to politically and socially charged objects. 
In Noah Scalin's "" Anatomy of War, "" we see a gun dissected to reveal human organs. 
But if you look closely, you'll notice that it lacks a brain. 
And if you keep looking, you might also notice that Noah has so thoughtfully placed the rectum at the business end of that gun barrel. 
Now, this next artist I've been following for many years, watching him excite the public about anatomy. 
Danny Quirk is a young artist who paints his subjects in the process of self-dissection. 
He bends the rules of medical illustration by inserting a very dramatic light and shadow. 
And this creates a 3-D illusion that lends itself very well to painting directly on the human skin. 
Danny makes it look as if a person's skin has actually been removed. 
And this effect — also cool and tattoo-like — easily transitions into a medical illustration. 
Now Danny is currently traveling the world, teaching anatomy to the public via his body paintings, which is why it was so shocking to find out that he was rejected from medical illustration programs. 
But he's doing just fine. 
Then there are artists who are extracting anatomy from both the medical world and the art world and are placing it directly on the streets. 
London-based SHOK-1 paints giant X-rays of pop culture icons. 
His X-rays show how culture can come to have an anatomy of its own, and conversely how culture can become part of the anatomy of a person. 
You come to admire his work because reproducing X-rays by hand, let alone with spray paint, is extremely difficult. 
But then again this is a street artist, who also happens to hold a degree in applied chemistry. 
Nychos, an Austrian street artist, takes the term "" exploded view "" to a whole new level, splattering human and animal dissections on walls all over the world. 
Influenced by comics and heavy metal, Nychos inserts a very youthful and enticing energy into anatomy that I just love. 
Street artists believe that art belongs to the public. 
And this street anatomy is so captivating because it is the furthest removed from the medical world. 
It forces you to look at it, and confront your own perceptions about anatomy, whether you find it beautiful, gross, morbid or awe-inspiring, like I do. 
That it elicits these responses at all is due to our intimate and often changing relationship with it. 
All of the artists that I showed you here today referenced medical illustrations for their art. 
But for them, anatomy isn't just something to memorize, but a base from which to understand the human body on a meaningful level; to depict it in ways that we can relate, whether it be through cartoons, body painting or street art. 
Anatomical art has the power to reach far beyond the pages of a medical textbook, to ignite an excitement in the public, and reinvigorate an enthusiasm in the medical world, ultimately connecting our innermost selves with our bodies through art. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'd like to start, if I may, with the story of the Paisley snail. 
On the evening of the 26th of August, 1928, May Donoghue took a train from Glasgow to the town of Paisley, seven miles east of the city, and there at the Wellmeadow Café, she had a Scots ice cream float, a mix of ice cream and ginger beer bought for her by a friend. 
The ginger beer came in a brown, opaque bottle labeled "" D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley. "" She drank some of the ice cream float, but as the remaining ginger beer was poured into her tumbler, a decomposed snail floated to the surface of her glass. 
Three days later, she was admitted to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis and shock. 
The case of Donoghue vs. Stevenson that followed set a very important legal precedent: Stevenson, the manufacturer of the ginger beer, was held to have a clear duty of care towards May Donoghue, even though there was no contract between them, and, indeed, she hadn't even bought the drink. 
One of the judges, Lord Atkin, described it like this: You must take care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbor. 
Indeed, one wonders that without a duty of care, how many people would have had to suffer from gastroenteritis before Stevenson eventually went out of business. 
Now please hang on to that Paisley snail story, because it's an important principle. 
Last year, the Hansard Society, a nonpartisan charity which seeks to strengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics published, alongside their annual audit of political engagement, an additional section devoted entirely to politics and the media. 
Here are a couple of rather depressing observations from that survey. 
Tabloid newspapers do not appear to advance the political citizenship of their readers, relative even to those who read no newspapers whatsoever. 
Tabloid-only readers are twice as likely to agree with a negative view of politics than readers of no newspapers. 
They're not just less politically engaged. 
They are consuming media that reinforces their negative evaluation of politics, thereby contributing to a fatalistic and cynical attitude to democracy and their own role within it. 
Little wonder that the report concluded that in this respect, the press, particularly the tabloids, appear not to be living up to the importance of their role in our democracy. 
Now I doubt if anyone in this room would seriously challenge that view. 
But if Hansard are right, and they usually are, then we've got a very serious problem on our hands, and it's one that I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes focusing upon. 
Since the Paisley snail, and especially over the past decade or so, a great deal of thinking has been developed around the notion of a duty of care as it relates to a number of aspects of civil society. 
Generally a duty of care arises when one individual or a group of individuals undertakes an activity which has the potential to cause harm to another, either physically, mentally or economically. 
This is principally focused on obvious areas, such as our empathetic response to children and young people, to our service personnel, and to the elderly and infirm. 
It is seldom, if ever, extended to equally important arguments around the fragility of our present system of government, to the notion that honesty, accuracy and impartiality are fundamental to the process of building and embedding an informed, participatory democracy. 
And the more you think about it, the stranger that is. 
A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of opening a brand new school in the northeast of England. 
It had been renamed by its pupils as Academy 360. 
As I walked through their impressive, glass-covered atrium, in front of me, emblazoned on the wall in letters of fire was Marcus Aurelius's famous injunction: If it's not true, don't say it; if it's not right, don't do it. 
The head teacher saw me staring at it, and he said, "" Oh, that's our school motto. "" On the train back to London, I couldn't get it out of my mind. 
I kept thinking, can it really have taken us over 2,000 years to come to terms with that simple notion as being our minimum expectation of each other? 
Isn't it time that we develop this concept of a duty of care and extended it to include a care for our shared but increasingly endangered democratic values? 
After all, the absence of a duty of care within many professions can all too easily amount to accusations of negligence, and that being the case, can we be really comfortable with the thought that we're in effect being negligent in respect of the health of our own societies and the values that necessarily underpin them? 
Could anyone honestly suggest, on the evidence, that the same media which Hansard so roundly condemned have taken sufficient care to avoid behaving in ways which they could reasonably have foreseen would be likely to undermine or even damage our inherently fragile democratic settlement. 
Now there will be those who will argue that this could all too easily drift into a form of censorship, albeit self-censorship, but I don't buy that argument. 
It has to be possible to balance freedom of expression with wider moral and social responsibilities. 
Let me explain why by taking the example from my own career as a filmmaker. 
Throughout that career, I never accepted that a filmmaker should set about putting their own work outside or above what he or she believed to be a decent set of values for their own life, their own family, and the future of the society in which we all live. 
I'd go further. 
A responsible filmmaker should never devalue their work to a point at which it becomes less than true to the world they themselves wish to inhabit. 
As I see it, filmmakers, journalists, even bloggers are all required to face up to the social expectations that come with combining the intrinsic power of their medium with their well-honed professional skills. 
Obviously this is not a mandated duty, but for the gifted filmmaker and the responsible journalist or even blogger, it strikes me as being utterly inescapable. 
We should always remember that our notion of individual freedom and its partner, creative freedom, is comparatively new in the history of Western ideas, and for that reason, it's often undervalued and can be very quickly undermined. 
It's a prize easily lost, and once lost, once surrendered, it can prove very, very hard to reclaim. 
And its first line of defense has to be our own standards, not those enforced on us by a censor or legislation, our own standards and our own integrity. 
Our integrity as we deal with those with whom we work and our own standards as we operate within society. 
And these standards of ours need to be all of a piece with a sustainable social agenda. 
They're part of a collective responsibility, the responsibility of the artist or the journalist to deal with the world as it really is, and this, in turn, must go hand in hand with the responsibility of those governing society to also face up to that world, and not to be tempted to misappropriate the causes of its ills. 
Yet, as has become strikingly clear over the last couple of years, such responsibility has to a very great extent been abrogated by large sections of the media. 
And as a consequence, across the Western world, the over-simplistic policies of the parties of protest and their appeal to a largely disillusioned, older demographic, along with the apathy and obsession with the trivial that typifies at least some of the young, taken together, these and other similarly contemporary aberrations are threatening to squeeze the life out of active, informed debate and engagement, and I stress active. 
The most ardent of libertarians might argue that Donoghue v. Stevenson should have been thrown out of court and that Stevenson would eventually have gone out of business if he'd continued to sell ginger beer with snails in it. 
But most of us, I think, accept some small role for the state to enforce a duty of care, and the key word here is reasonable. 
Judges must ask, did they take reasonable care and could they have reasonably foreseen the consequences of their actions? 
Far from signifying overbearing state power, it's that small common sense test of reasonableness that I'd like us to apply to those in the media who, after all, set the tone and the content for much of our democratic discourse. 
Democracy, in order to work, requires that reasonable men and women take the time to understand and debate difficult, sometimes complex issues, and they do so in an atmosphere which strives for the type of understanding that leads to, if not agreement, then at least a productive and workable compromise. 
Politics is about choices, and within those choices, politics is about priorities. 
It's about reconciling conflicting preferences wherever and whenever possibly based on fact. 
But if the facts themselves are distorted, the resolutions are likely only to create further conflict, with all the stresses and strains on society that inevitably follow. 
The media have to decide: Do they see their role as being to inflame or to inform? 
Because in the end, it comes down to a combination of trust and leadership. 
Fifty years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy made two epoch-making speeches, the first on disarmament and the second on civil rights. 
The first led almost immediately to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the second led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, both of which represented giant leaps forward. 
Democracy, well-led and well-informed, can achieve very great things, but there's a precondition. 
We have to trust that those making those decisions are acting in the best interest not of themselves but of the whole of the people. 
We need factually-based options, clearly laid out, not those of a few powerful and potentially manipulative corporations pursuing their own frequently narrow agendas, but accurate, unprejudiced information with which to make our own judgments. 
If we want to provide decent, fulfilling lives for our children and our children's children, we need to exercise to the very greatest degree possible that duty of care for a vibrant, and hopefully a lasting, democracy. 
Thank you very much for listening to me. 
(Applause) 

I've come here today to talk to you about a problem. 
It's a very simple yet devastating problem, one that spans the globe and is affecting all of us. 
The problem is anonymous companies. 
It sounds like a really dry and technical thing, doesn't it? 
But anonymous companies are making it difficult and sometimes impossible to find out the actual human beings responsible sometimes for really terrible crimes. 
So, why am I here talking to all of you? 
Well, I guess I am a lifelong troublemaker and when my parents taught my twin brother and I to question authority, I don't think they knew where it might lead. 
(Laughter) And, they probably really regretted it during my stroppy teenage years when, predictably, I questioned their authority a lot. 
And a lot of my school teachers didn't appreciate it much either. 
You see, since the age of about five I've always asked the question, but why? 
But why does the Earth go around the sun? 
But why is blood red? 
But why do I have to go to school? 
But why do I have to respect the teachers and authority? 
And little did I realize that this question would become the basis of everything I would do. 
And so it was in my twenties, a long time ago, that one rainy Sunday afternoon in North London I was sitting with Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley and we were busy stuffing envelopes for a mail out in the office of the campaign group where we worked at the time. 
And as usual, we were talking about the world's problems. 
And in particular, we were talking about the civil war in Cambodia. 
And we had talked about that many, many times before. 
But then suddenly we stopped and looked at each other and said, but why don't we try and change this? 
And from that slightly crazy question, over two decades and many campaigns later, including alerting the world to the problem of blood diamonds funding war, from that crazy question, Global Witness is now an 80-strong team of campaigners, investigators, journalists and lawyers. 
And we're all driven by the same belief, that change really is possible. 
So, what exactly does Global Witness do? 
We investigate, we report, to uncover the people really responsible for funding conflict — for stealing millions from citizens around the world, also known as state looting, and for destroying the environment. 
And then we campaign hard to change the system itself. 
And we're doing this because so many of the countries rich in natural resources like oil or diamonds or timber are home to some of the poorest and most dispossessed people on the planet. 
And much of this injustice is made possible by currently accepted business practices. 
And one of these is anonymous companies. 
Now we've come up against anonymous companies in lots of our investigations, like in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where we exposed how secretive deals involving anonymous companies had deprived the citizens of one of the poorest countries on the planet of well over a billion dollars. 
That's twice the country's health and education budget combined. 
Or in Liberia, where an international predatory logging company used front companies as it attempted to grab a really huge chunk of Liberia's unique forests. 
Or political corruption in Sarawak, Malaysia, which has led to the destruction of much of its forests. 
Well, that uses anonymous companies too. 
We secretly filmed some of the family of the former chief minister and a lawyer as they told our undercover investigator exactly how these dubious deals are done using such companies. 
And the awful thing is, there are so many other examples out there from all walks of life. 
This truly is a scandal of epic proportions hidden in plain sight. 
Whether it's the ruthless Mexican drugs cartel, the Zetas, who use anonymous companies to launder profits while their drugs-related violence is tearing communities apart across the Americas. 
Or the anonymous company, which bought up Americans' tax debts, piled on the legal fees and then gave homeowners a choice: Pay up or lose your home. 
Imagine being threatened with losing your home sometimes over a debt of just a few hundred dollars, and not being able to find out who you were really up against. 
Now anonymous companies are great for sanctions busting too. 
As the Iranian government found out when, through a series of front companies, it owned a building in the very heart of Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue, despite American sanctions. 
And Juicy Couture, home of of the velvet track suit, and other companies were the unwitting, unknowing tenants there. 
There are just so many examples, the horesemeat scandal in Europe, the Italian mafia, they've used these companies for decades. 
The $100 million American Medicare fraud, the supply of weapons to wars around the world including those in Eastern Europe in the early '90s. 
Anonymous companies have even come to light in the recent revolution in the Ukraine. 
But, for every case that we and others expose there are so many more that will remain hidden away because of the current system. 
And it's just a simple truth that some of the people responsible for outrageous crimes, for stealing from you and me and millions of others, they are remaining faceless and they are escaping accountability and they're doing this with ease, and they're doing it using legal structures. 
And really, that is unfair. 
Well, you might well ask, what exactly is an anonymous company, and can I really set one up, and use it, without anyone knowing who I am? 
Well, the answer is, yes you can. 
But if you're anything like me, you'll want to see some of that for yourself, so let me show you. 
Well first you need to work out where you want to set it up. 
Now, at this point you might be imagining one of those lovely tropical island tax havens but here's the thing, shockingly, my own hometown, London, and indeed the U.K., is one of the best places in the world to set up an anonymous company. 
And the other, even better, I'm afraid that's America. 
Do you know, in some states across America you need less identification to open up a company than you do to get a library card, like Delaware, which is one of the easiest places in the world to set up an anonymous company. 
Okay, so let's say it's America, and let's say it's Delaware, and now you can simply go online and find yourself a company service provider. 
These are the companies that can set your one up for you, and remember, it's all legal, routine business practice. 
So, here's one, but there are plenty of others to choose from. 
And having made your choice, you then pick what type of company you want and then fill in a contact, name and address. 
But don't worry, it doesn't have to be your name. 
It can be your lawyer's or your service provider's, and it's not for the public record anyway. 
And then you add the owner of the company. 
Now this is the key part, and again it doesn't have to be you, because you can get creative, because there is a whole universe out there of nominees to choose from. 
And nominees are the people that you can legally pay to be your company's owner. 
And if you don't want to involve anyone else, it doesn't even have to be an actual human being. 
It could be another company. 
And then finally, give your company a name add a few more details and make your payment. 
And then the service provider will take a few hours or more to process it. 
But there you are, in 10 minutes of online shopping you can create yourself an anonymous company. 
And not only is it easy, really, really easy and cheap, it's totally legal too. 
But the fun doesn't have to end there, maybe you want to be even more anonymous. 
Well, that's no problem either. 
You can simply keep adding layers, companies owned by companies. 
You can have hundreds of layers with hundreds of companies spread across lots of different countries, like a giant web, each layer adds anonymity. 
Each layer makes it more difficult for law enforcement and others to find out who the real owner is. 
But whose interests is this all serving? 
It might be in the interests of the company or a particular individual, but what about all of us, the public? 
There hasn't even been a global conversation yet about whether it's okay to misuse companies in this way. 
And what does it all mean for us? 
Well, an example that really haunts me is one I came across recently. 
And it's that of a horrific fire in a nightclub in Buenos Aires about a decade ago. 
It was the night before New Year's Eve. 
Three thousand very happy revelers, many of them teenagers, were crammed into a space meant for 1,000. 
And then tragedy struck, a fire broke out plastic decorations were melting from the ceiling and toxic smoke filled the club. 
So people tried to escape only to find that some of the fire doors had been chained shut. 
Over 200 people died. 
Seven hundred were injured trying to get out. 
And as the victims' families and the city and the country reeled in shock, investigators tried to find out who was responsible. 
And as they looked for the owners of the club, they found instead anonymous companies, and confusion surrounded the identities of those involved with the companies. 
Now ultimately, a range of people were charged and some went to jail. 
But this was an awful tragedy, and it shouldn't have been so difficult just to try and find out who was responsible for those deaths. 
Because in an age when there is so much information out there in the open, why should this crucial information about company ownership stay hidden away? 
Why should tax evaders, corrupt government officials, arms traders and more, be able to hide their identities from us, the public? 
Why should this secrecy be such an accepted business practice? 
Anonymous companies might be the norm right now but it wasn't always this way. 
Companies were created to give people a chance to innovate and not have to put everything on the line. 
Companies were created to limit financial risk, they were never intended to be used as a moral shield. 
Companies were never intended to be anonymous, and they don't have to be. 
And so I come to my wish. 
My wish is for us to know who owns and controls companies so that they can no longer be used anonymously against the public good. 
Together let's ignite world opinion, change the law, and launch a new era of openness in business. 
So what might this look like? 
Well, imagine if you could go online and look up the real owner of a company. 
Imagine if this data were open and free, accessible across borders for citizens and businesses and law enforcement alike. 
Imagine what a game changer that would be. 
So how are we going to do this? 
Well, there is only one way. 
Together, we have to change the law globally to create public registries which list the true owners of companies and can be accessed by all with no loopholes. 
And yes, this is ambitious, but there is momentum on this issue, and over the years I have seen the sheer power of momentum, and it's just starting on this issue. 
There is such an opportunity right now. 
And the TED community of creative and innovative thinkers and doers across all of society could make the crucial difference. 
You really can make this change happen. 
Now, a simple starting point is the address behind me for a Facebook page that you can join now to support the campaign and spread the word. 
It's going to be a springboard for our global campaigning. 
And the techies among you, you could really help us create a prototype public registry to demonstrate what a powerful tool this could be. 
Campaign groups from around the world have come together to work on this issue. 
The U.K. government is already on board; it supports these public registries. 
And just last week, the European Parliament came on board with a vote 600 to 30 in favor of public registries. 
That is momentum. 
(Applause) But it's early days. 
America still needs to come on board, as do so many other countries. 
And to succeed we will all together need to help and push our politicians, because without that, real far-reaching, world-shifting change just isn't going to happen. 
Because this isn't just about changing the law, this is about starting a conversation about what it's okay for companies to do, and in what ways is it acceptable to use company structures. 
This isn't just a dry policy issue. 
This is a human issue which affects us all. 
This is about being on the right side of history. 
Global citizens, innovators, business leaders, individuals, we need you. 
Together, let's kickstart this global movement. 
Let's just do it, let's end anonymous companies. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So as a fashion designer, I've always tended to think of materials something like this, or this, or maybe this. 
But then I met a biologist, and now I think of materials like this — green tea, sugar, a few microbes and a little time. 
I'm essentially using a kombucha recipe, which is a symbiotic mix of bacteria, yeasts and other micro-organisms, which spin cellulose in a fermentation process. 
Over time, these tiny threads form in the liquid into layers and produce a mat on the surface. 
So we start by brewing the tea. 
I brew up to about 30 liters of tea at a time, and then while it's still hot, add a couple of kilos of sugar. 
We stir this in until it's completely dissolved and then pour it into a growth bath. 
We need to check that the temperature has cooled to below 30 degrees C. 
And then we're ready to add the living organism. 
And along with that, some acetic acid. 
And once you get this process going, you can actually recycle your previous fermented liquid. 
We need to maintain an optimum temperature for the growth. 
And I use a heat mat to sit the bath on and a thermostat to regulate it. 
And actually, in hot weather, I can just grow it outside. 
So this is my mini fabric farm. 
After about three days, the bubbles will appear on the surface of the liquid. 
So this is telling us that the fermentation is in full swing. 
And the bacteria are feeding on the sugar nutrients in the liquid. 
So they're spinning these tiny nano fibers of pure cellulose. 
And they're sticking together, forming layers and giving us a sheet on the surface. 
After about two to three weeks, we're looking at something which is about an inch in thickness. 
So the bath on the left is after five days, and on the right, after 10. 
And this is a static culture. 
You don't have to do anything to it; you just literally watch it grow. 
It doesn't need light. 
And when it's ready to harvest, you take it out of the bath and you wash it in cold, soapy water. 
At this point, it's really heavy. 
It's over 90 percent water, so we need to let that evaporate. 
So I spread it out onto a wooden sheet. 
Again, you can do that outside and just let it dry in the air. 
And as it's drying, it's compressing, so what you're left with, depending on the recipe, is something that's either like a really light-weight, transparent paper, or something which is much more like a flexible vegetable leather. 
And then you can either cut that out and sew it conventionally, or you can use the wet material to form it around a three-dimensional shape. 
And as it evaporates, it will knit itself together, forming seams. 
So the color in this jacket is coming purely from green tea. 
I guess it also looks a little bit like human skin, which intrigues me. 
Since it's organic, I'm really keen to try and minimize the addition of any chemicals. 
I can make it change color without using dye by a process of iron oxidation. 
Using fruit and vegetable staining, create organic patterning. 
And using indigo, make it anti-microbial. 
And in fact, cotton would take up to 18 dips in indigo to achieve a color this dark. 
And because of the super-absorbency of this kind of cellulose, it just takes one, and a really short one at that. 
What I can't yet do is make it water-resistant. 
So if I was to walk outside in the rain wearing this dress today, I would immediately start to absorb huge amounts of water. 
The dress would get really heavy, and eventually the seams would probably fall apart — leaving me feeling rather naked. 
Possibly a good performance piece, but definitely not ideal for everyday wear. 
What I'm looking for is a way to give the material the qualities that I need. 
So what I want to do is say to a future bug, "" Spin me a thread. 
Align it in this direction. 
Make it hydrophobic. 
And while you're at it, just form it around this 3D shape. "" Bacterial cellulose is actually already being used for wound healing, and possibly in the future for biocompatible blood vessels, possibly even replacement bone tissue. 
But with synthetic biology, we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality, quantity and shape of material that we desire. 
Obviously, as a designer, that's really exciting because then I start to think, wow, we could actually imagine growing consumable products. 
What excites me about using microbes is their efficiency. 
So we only grow what we need. 
There's no waste. 
And in fact, we could make it from a waste stream — so for example, a waste sugar stream from a food processing plant. 
Finally, at the end of use, we could biodegrade it naturally along with your vegetable peelings. 
What I'm not suggesting is that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton, leather or other textile materials. 
But I do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources. 
Ultimately, maybe it won't even be fashion where we see these microbes have their impact. 
We could, for example, imagine growing a lamp, a chair, a car or maybe even a house. 
So I guess what my question to you is: in the future, what would you choose to grow? 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Suzanne, just a curiosity, what you're wearing is not random. (Suzanne Lee: No.) This is one of the jackets you grew? 
SL: Yes, it is. 
It's probably — part of the project's still in process because this one is actually biodegrading in front of your eyes. 
(Laughter) It's absorbing my sweat, and it's feeding on it. 
BG: Okay, so we'll let you go and save it, and rescue it. 
Suzanne Lee. (SL: Thank you.) (Applause) 

Why grow homes? Because we can. 
Right now, America is in an unremitting state of trauma. 
And there's a cause for that, all right. 
We've got McPeople, McCars, McHouses. 
As an architect, I have to confront something like this. 
So what's a technology that will allow us to make ginormous houses? 
Well, it's been around for 2,500 years. 
It's called pleaching, or grafting trees together, or grafting inosculate matter into one contiguous, vascular system. 
And we do something different than what we did in the past; we add kind of a modicum of intelligence to that. 
We use CNC to make scaffolding to train semi-epithetic matter, plants, into a specific geometry that makes a home that we call a Fab Tree Hab. 
It fits into the environment. It is the environment. 
It is the landscape, right? 
And you can have a hundred million of these homes, and it's great because they suck carbon. 
They're perfect. 
You can have 100 million families, or take things out of the suburbs, because these are homes that are a part of the environment. 
Imagine pre-growing a village — it takes about seven to 10 years — and everything is green. 
So not only do we do the veggie house, we also do the in-vitro meat habitat, or homes that we're doing research on now in Brooklyn, where, as an architecture office, we're for the first of its kind to put in a molecular cell biology lab and start experimenting with regenerative medicine and tissue engineering and start thinking about what the future would be if architecture and biology became one. 
So we've been doing this for a couple of years, and that's our lab. 
And what we do is we grow extracellular matrix from pigs. 
We use a modified inkjet printer, and we print geometry. 
We print geometry where we can make industrial design objects like, you know, shoes, leather belts, handbags, etc., where no sentient creature is harmed. 
It's victimless. It's meat from a test tube. 
So our theory is that eventually we should be doing this with homes. 
So here is a typical stud wall, an architectural construction, and this is a section of our proposal for a meat house, where you can see we use fatty cells as insulation, cilia for dealing with wind loads and sphincter muscles for the doors and windows. 
(Laughter) And we know it's incredibly ugly. 
It could have been an English Tudor or Spanish Colonial, but we kind of chose this shape. 
And there it is kind of grown, at least one particular section of it. 
We had a big show in Prague, and we decided to put it in front of the cathedral so religion can confront the house of meat. 
That's why we grow homes. Thanks very much. 
(Applause) 

In 2012, when I painted the minaret of Jara Mosque in my hometown of Gabés, in the south of Tunisia, I never thought that graffiti would bring so much attention to a city. 
At the beginning, I was just looking for a wall in my hometown, and it happened that the minaret was built in '94. 
And for 18 years, those 57 meters of concrete stayed grey. 
When I met the imam for the first time, and I told him what I wanted to do, he was like, "" Thank God you finally came, "" and he told me that for years he was waiting for somebody to do something on it. 
The most amazing thing about this imam is that he didn't ask me anything — neither a sketch, or what I was going to write. 
In every work that I create, I write messages with my style of calligraffiti — a mix of calligraphy and graffiti. 
I use quotes or poetry. 
For the minaret, I thought that the most relevant message to be put on a mosque should come from the Quran, so I picked this verse: "" Oh humankind, we have created you from a male and a female, and made you people and tribe, so you may know each other. "" It was a universal call for peace, tolerance, and acceptance coming from the side that we don't usually portray in a good way in the media. 
I was amazed to see how the local community reacted to the painting, and how it made them proud to see the minaret getting so much attention from international press all around the world. 
For the imam, it was not just the painting; it was really deeper than that. 
He hoped that this minaret would become a monument for the city, and attract people to this forgotten place of Tunisia. 
The universality of the message, the political context of Tunisia at this time, and the fact that I was writing Quran in a graffiti way were not insignificant. 
It reunited the community. 
Bringing people, future generations, together through Arabic calligraphy is what I do. 
Writing messages is the essence of my artwork. 
What is funny, actually, is that even Arabic-speaking people really need to focus a lot to decipher what I'm writing. 
You don't need to know the meaning to feel the piece. 
I think that Arabic script touches your soul before it reaches your eyes. 
There is a beauty in it that you don't need to translate. 
Arabic script speaks to anyone, I believe; to you, to you, to you, to anybody, and then when you get the meaning, you feel connected to it. 
I always make sure to write messages that are relevant to the place where I'm painting, but messages that have a universal dimension, so anybody around the world can connect to it. 
I was born and raised in France, in Paris, and I started learning how to write and read Arabic when I was 18. 
Today I only write messages in Arabic. 
One of the reasons this is so important to me, is because of all the reaction that I've experienced all around the world. 
In Rio de Janeiro, I translated this Portuguese poem from Gabriela Tôrres Barbosa, who was giving an homage to the poor people of the favela, and then I painted it on the rooftop. 
The local community were really intrigued by what I was doing, but as soon as I gave them the meaning of the calligraphy, they thanked me, as they felt connected to the piece. 
In South Africa, in Cape Town, the local community of Philippi offered me the only concrete wall of the slum. 
It was a school, and I wrote on it a quote from Nelson Mandela, saying, "" [in Arabic], "" which means, "" It seems impossible until it's done. "" Then this guy came to me and said, "" Man, why you don't write in English? "" and I replied to him, "" I would consider your concern legit if you asked me why I didn't write in Zulu. "" In Paris, once, there was this event, and someone gave his wall to be painted. 
And when he saw I was painting in Arabic, he got so mad — actually, hysterical — and he asked for the wall to be erased. 
I was mad and disappointed. 
But a week later, the organizer of the event asked me to come back, and he told me that there was a wall right in front of this guy's house. 
So, this guy — (Laughter) like, was forced to see it every day. 
At the beginning, I was going to write, "" [In Arabic], "" which means, "" In your face, "" but — (Laughter) I decided to be smarter and I wrote, "" [In Arabic], "" which means, "" Open your heart. "" I'm really proud of my culture, and I'm trying to be an ambassador of it through my artwork. 
And I hope that I can break the stereotypes we all know, with the beauty of Arabic script. 
Today, I don't write the translation of the message anymore on the wall. 
I don't want the poetry of the calligraphy to be broken, as it's art and you can appreciate it without knowing the meaning, as you can enjoy any music from other countries. 
Some people see that as a rejection or a closed door, but for me, it's more an invitation — to my language, to my culture, and to my art. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'd like you to imagine the world anew. 
I'd like to show you some maps, which have been drawn by Ben Hennig, of the planet in a way that most of you will never have seen the planet depicted before. 
Here's an image that you're very familiar with. 
I'm old enough that I was actually born before we saw this image. 
Apparently some of my first words were "" moona, moona, "" but I think that's my mom having a particular fantasy about what her baby boy could see on the flickering black and white TV screen. 
It's only been a few centuries since we've actually, most of us, thought of our planet as spherical. 
When we first saw these images in the 1960s, the world was changing at an incredible rate. 
In my own little discipline of human geography, a cartographer called Waldo Tobler was drawing new maps of the planet, and these maps have now spread, and I'm going to show you one of them now. 
This map is a map of the world, but it's a map which looks to you a little bit strange. 
It's a map in which we stretched places, so that those areas which contain many people are drawn larger, and those areas, like the Sahara and the Himalayas, in which there are few people, have been shrunk away. 
Everybody on the planet is given an equal amount of space. 
The cities are shown shining bright. 
The lines are showing you submarine cables and trade routes. 
And there's one particular line that goes from the Chinese port of Dalian through past Singapore, through the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean and round to Rotterdam. 
And it's showing you the route of what was the world's largest ship just a year ago, a ship which was taking so many containers of goods that when they were unloaded, if the lorries had all gone in convoy, they would have been 100 kilometers long. 
This is how our world is now connected. 
This is the quantity of stuff we are now moving around the world, just on one ship, on one voyage, in five weeks. 
We've lived in cities for a very long time, but most of us didn't live in cities. 
This is Çatalhöyük, one of the world's first cities. 
At its peak 9,000 years ago, people had to walk over the roofs of others' houses to get to their home. 
If you look carefully at the map of the city, you'll see it has no streets, because streets are something we invented. 
The world changes. 
It changes by trial and error. 
We work out slowly and gradually how to live in better ways. 
And the world has changed incredibly quickly most recently. 
It's only within the last six, seven, or eight generations that we have actually realized that we are a species. 
It's only within the last few decades that a map like this could be drawn. 
Again, the underlying map is the map of world population, but over it, you're seeing arrows showing how we spread out of Africa with dates showing you where we think we arrived at particular times. 
I have to redraw this map every few months, because somebody makes a discovery that a particular date was wrong. 
We are learning about ourselves at an incredible speed. 
A lot of change is gradual. 
It's accretion. 
We don't notice the change because we only have short lives, 70, 80, if you're lucky 90 years. 
This graph is showing you the annual rate of population growth in the world. 
It was very low until around about 1850, and then the rate of population growth began to rise so that around the time I was born, when we first saw those images from the moon of our planet, our global population was growing at two percent a year. 
If it had carried on growing at two percent a year for just another couple of centuries, the entire planet would be covered with a seething mass of human bodies all touching each other. 
And people were scared. 
They were scared of population growth and what they called "" the population bomb "" in 1968. 
But then, if you look at the end of the graph, the growth began to slow. 
The decade — the '70s, the' 80s, the '90s, the noughties, and in this decade, even faster — our population growth is slowing. 
We are heading towards nine, 10, or 11 billion people by the end of the century. 
Within that change, you can see tumult. 
You can see the Second World War. 
You can see the pandemic in 1918 from influenza. 
You can see the great Chinese famine. 
These are the events we tend to concentrate on. 
We tend to concentrate on the terrible events in the news. 
We don't tend to concentrate on the gradual change and the good news stories. 
We worry about how many people there are. 
We worry about how you can get away from people. 
But this is the map of the world changed again to make area large, the further away people are from each area. 
So if you want to know where to go to get away from everybody, here's the best places to go. 
And every year, these areas get bigger, because every year, we are coming off the land globally. 
There are wolves again in Europe, and the wolves are moving west across the continent. 
Our world is changing. 
You have worries. 
This is a map showing where the water falls on our planet. 
We now know that. 
And you can look at where Çatalhöyük was, where three continents meet, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and you can see there are a large number of people living there in areas with very little water. 
And you can see areas in which there is a great deal of rainfall as well. 
And we can get a bit more sophisticated. 
Instead of making the map be shaped by people, we can shape the map by water, and then we can change it every month to show the amount of water falling on every small part of the globe. 
And you see the monsoons moving around the planet, and the planet almost appears to have a heartbeat. 
And all of this only became possible within my lifetime to see this is where we are living. 
This is a map of where we grow our food in the world. 
This is the areas that we will rely on most for rice and maize and corn. 
People worry that there won't be enough food, but we know, if we just ate less meat and fed less of the crops to animals, there is enough food for everybody as long as we think of ourselves as one group of people. 
And we also know about what we do so terribly badly nowadays. 
You will have seen this map of the world before. 
This is the map produced by taking satellite images, if you remember those satellites around the planet in the very first slide I showed, and producing an image of what the Earth looks like at night. 
When you normally see that map, on a normal map, the kind of map that most of you will be used to, you think you are seeing a map of where people live. 
Where the lights are shining up is where people live. 
But here, on this image of the world, remember we've stretched the map again. 
Everywhere has the same density of people on this map. 
If an area doesn't have people, we've shrunk it away to make it disappear. 
So we're showing everybody with equal prominence. 
Now, the lights no longer show you where people are, because people are everywhere. 
Now the lights on the map, the lights in London, the lights in Cairo, the lights in Tokyo, the lights on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, the lights show you where people live who are so profligate with energy that they can afford to spend money powering lights to shine up into the sky, so satellites can draw an image like this. 
And the areas that are dark on the map are either areas where people do not have access to that much energy, or areas where people do, but they have learned to stop shining the light up into the sky. 
And if I could show you this map animated over time, you would see that Tokyo has actually become darker, because ever since the tsunami in Japan, Japan has had to rely on a quarter less electricity because it turned the nuclear power stations off. 
You just shone less light up into the sky. 
There are a huge number of good news stories in the world. 
Infant mortality is falling and has been falling at an incredible rate. 
A few years ago, the number of babies dying in their first year of life in the world fell by five percent in just one year. 
More children are going to school and learning to read and write and getting connected to the Internet and going on to go to university than ever before at an incredible rate, and the highest number of young people going to university in the world are women, not men. 
I can give you good news story after good news story about what is getting better in the planet, but we tend to concentrate on the bad news that is immediate. 
Rebecca Solnit, I think, put it brilliantly, when she explained: "" The accretion of incremental, imperceptible changes which can constitute progress and which render our era dramatically different from the past "" — the past was much more stable — "" a contrast obscured by the undramatic nature of gradual transformation, punctuated by occasional tumult. "" Occasionally, terrible things happen. 
You are not told about the population slowing down. 
You are not told about the world becoming more connected. 
You are not told about the incredible improvements in understanding. 
You are not told about how we are learning to begin to waste less and consume less. 
This is my last map. 
On this map, we have taken the seas and the oceans out. 
Now you are just looking at about 7.4 billion people with the map drawn in proportion to those people. 
You're looking at over a billion in China, and you can see the largest city in the world in China, but you do not know its name. 
You can see that India is in the center of this world. 
You can see that Europe is on the edge. 
And we in Exeter today are on the far edge of the planet. 
We are on a tiny scrap of rock off Europe which contains less than one percent of the world's adults, and less than half a percent of the world's children. 
We are living in a stabilizing world, an urbanizing world, an aging world, a connecting world. 
There are many, many things to be frightened about, but there is no need for us to fear each other as much as we do, and we need to see that we are now living in a new world. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

A computer is an incredibly powerful means of creative expression, but for the most part, that expression is confined to the screens of our laptops and mobile phones. 
And I'd like to tell you a story about bringing this power of the computer to move things around and interact with us off of the screen and into the physical world in which we live. 
A few years ago, I got a call from a luxury fashion store called Barneys New York, and the next thing I knew, I was designing storefront kinetic sculptures for their window displays. 
This one's called "" The Chase. "" There are two pairs of shoes, a man's pair and a woman's pair, and they play out this slow, tense chase around the window in which the man scoots up behind the woman and gets in her personal space, and then she moves away. 
Each of the shoes has magnets in it, and there are magnets underneath the table that move the shoes around. 
My friend Andy Cavatorta was building a robotic harp for Bjork's Biophilia tour and I wound up building the electronics and motion control software to make the harps move and play music. 
The harp has four separate pendulums, and each pendulum has 11 strings, so the harp swings on its axis and also rotates in order to play different musical notes, and the harps are all networked together so that they can play the right notes at the right time in the music. 
I built an interactive chemistry exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and this exhibit lets people use physical objects to grab chemical elements off of the periodic table and bring them together to cause chemical reactions to happen. 
And the museum noticed that people were spending a lot of time with this exhibit, and a researcher from a science education center in Australia decided to study this exhibit and try to figure out what was going on. 
And she found that the physical objects that people were using were helping people understand how to use the exhibit, and were helping people learn in a social way. 
And when you think about it, this makes a lot of sense, that using specialized physical objects would help people use an interface more easily. 
I mean, our hands and our minds are optimized to think about and interact with tangible objects. 
But the thing that struck me about all of these different projects is that they really had to be built from scratch, down to the level of the electronics and the printed circuit boards and all the mechanisms all the way up to the software. 
I wanted to create something where we could move objects under computer control and create interactions around that idea without having to go through this process of building something from scratch every single time. 
So my first attempt at this was at the MIT Media Lab with Professor Hiroshi Ishii, and we built this array of 512 different electromagnets, and together they were able to move objects around on top of their surface. 
But the problem with this was that these magnets cost over 10,000 dollars. 
So I wanted to build something where you could have this kind of interaction on any tabletop surface. 
So to explore this idea, I built an army of small robots, and each of these robots has what are called omni wheels. 
They're these special wheels that can move equally easily in all directions, and when you couple these robots with a video projector, you have these physical tools for interacting with digital information. 
This is a video editing application where all of the controls for manipulating the video are physical. 
So if we want to tweak the color, we just enter the color mode, and then we get three different dials for tweaking the color, or if we want to adjust the audio, then we get two different dials for that, these physical objects. 
So here the left and right channel stay in sync, but if we want to, we can override that by grabbing both of them at the same time. 
So the idea is that we get the speed and efficiency benefits of using these physical dials together with the flexibility and versatility of a system that's designed in software. 
And this is a mapping application for disaster response. 
So you have these physical objects that represent police, fire and rescue, and a dispatcher can grab them and place them on the map to tell those units where to go, and then the position of the units on the map gets synced up with the position of those units in the real world. 
It's amazing how much emotion you can convey with just a few simple movements of a physical object. 
With this interface, we open up a huge array of possibilities in between traditional board games and arcade games, where the physical possibilities of interaction make so many different styles of play possible. 
But one of the areas that I'm most excited about using this platform for is applying it to problems that are difficult for computers or people to solve alone. 
One example of those is protein folding. 
So here we have an interface where we have physical handles onto a protein, and we can grab those handles and try to move the protein and try to fold it in different ways. 
And if we move it in a way that doesn't really make sense with the underlying molecular simulation, we get this physical feedback where we can actually feel these physical handles pulling back against us. 
So feeling what's going on inside a molecular simulation is a whole different level of interaction. 
So we're just beginning to explore what's possible when we use software to control the movement of objects in our environment. 
Maybe this is the computer of the future. 
There's no touchscreen. 
There's no technology visible at all. 
But when we want to have a video chat or play a game or lay out the slides to our next TED Talk, the objects on the table come alive. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, if you're in the audience today, or maybe you're watching this talk in some other time or place, you are a participant in the digital rights ecosystem. 
Whether you're an artist, a technologist, a lawyer or a fan, the handling of copyright directly impacts your life. 
Rights management is no longer simply a question of ownership, it's a complex web of relationships and a critical part of our cultural landscape. 
YouTube cares deeply about the rights of content owners, but in order to give them choices about what they can do with copies, mashups and more, we need to first identify when copyrighted material is uploaded to our site. 
Let's look at a specific video so you can see how it works. 
Two years ago, recording artist Chris Brown released the official video of his single "" Forever. "" A fan saw it on TV, recorded it with her camera phone, and uploaded it to YouTube. 
Because Sony Music had registered Chris Brown's video in our Content ID system, within seconds of attempting to upload the video, the copy was detected, giving Sony the choice of what to do next. 
But how do we know that the user's video was a copy? 
Well, it starts with content owners delivering assets into our database, along with a usage policy that tells us what to do when we find a match. 
We compare each upload against all of the reference files in our database. 
This heat map is going to show you how the brain of the system works. 
Here we can see the original reference file being compared to the user generated content. 
The system compares every moment of one to the other to see if there's a match. 
This means that we can identify a match even if the copy used is just a portion of the original file, plays it in slow motion and has degraded audio and video quality. 
And we do this every time that a video is uploaded to YouTube. 
And that's over 20 hours of video every minute. 
When we find a match, we apply the policy that the rights owner has set down. 
And the scale and the speed of this system is truly breathtaking. 
We're not just talking about a few videos, we're talking about over 100 years of video every day, between new uploads and the legacy scans we regularly do across all of the content on the site. 
When we compare those hundred years of video, we're comparing it against millions of reference files in our database. 
It would be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000 monitors each and every day, without so much as a coffee break. 
Now, what do we do when we find a match? 
Well, most rights owners, instead of blocking, will allow the copy to be published. 
And then they benefit through the exposure, advertising and linked sales. 
Remember Chris Brown's video "" Forever ""? 
Well, it had its day in the sun and then it dropped off the charts, and that looked like the end of the story, but sometime last year, a young couple got married. 
This is their wedding video. 
You may have seen it. 
(Music) What's amazing about this is, if the processional of the wedding was this much fun, can you imagine how much fun the reception must have been? 
I mean, who are these people? 
I totally want to go to that wedding. 
So their little wedding video went on to get over 40 million views. 
And instead of Sony blocking, they allowed the upload to occur. 
And they put advertising against it and linked from it to iTunes. 
And the song, 18 months old, went back to number four on the iTunes charts. 
So Sony is generating revenue from both of these. 
And Jill and Kevin, the happy couple, they came back from their honeymoon and found that their video had gone crazy viral. 
And they've ended up on a bunch of talk shows, and they've used it as an opportunity to make a difference. 
The video's inspired over 26,000 dollars in donations to end domestic violence. 
The "" JK Wedding [Entrance] Dance "" became so popular that NBC parodied it on the season finale of "" The Office, "" which just goes to show, it's truly an ecosystem of culture. 
Because it's not just amateurs borrowing from big studios, but sometimes big studios borrowing back. 
By empowering choice, we can create a culture of opportunity. 
And all it took to change things around was to allow for choice through rights identification. 
So why has no one ever solved this problem before? 
It's because it's a big problem, and it's complicated and messy. 
It's not uncommon for a single video to have multiple rights owners. 
There's musical labels. 
There's multiple music publishers. 
And each of these can vary by country. 
There's lots of cases where we have more than one work mashed together. 
So we have to manage many claims to the same video. 
YouTube's Content ID system addresses all of these cases. 
But the system only works through the participation of rights owners. 
If you have content that others are uploading to YouTube, you should register in the Content ID system, and then you'll have the choice about how your content is used. 
And think carefully about the policies that you attach to that content. 
By simply blocking all reuse, you'll miss out on new art forms, new audiences, new distribution channels and new revenue streams. 
But it's not just about dollars and impressions. 
Just look at all the joy that was spread through progressive rights management and new technology. 
And I think we can all agree that joy is definitely an idea worth spreading. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Design is a slippery and elusive phenomenon, which has meant different things at different times. 
But all truly inspiring design projects have one thing in common: they began with a dream. 
And the bolder the dream, the greater the design feat that will be required to achieve it. 
And this is why the greatest designers are almost always the biggest dreamers and rebels and renegades. 
This has been the case throughout history, all the way back to the year 300 BC, when a 13-year-old became the king of a remote, very poor and very small Asian country. 
He dreamt of acquiring land, riches and power through military conquest. 
And his design skills — improbable though it sounds — would be essential in enabling him to do so. 
At the time, all weapons were made by hand to different specifications. 
So if an archer ran out of arrows during a battle, they wouldn't necessarily be able to fire another archer's arrows from their bow. 
This of course meant that they would be less effective in combat and very vulnerable, too. 
Ying solved this problem by insisting that all bows and arrows were designed identically, so they were interchangeable. 
And he did the same for daggers, axes, spears, shields and every other form of weaponry. 
His formidably equipped army won batter after battle, and within 15 years, his tiny kingdom had succeeded in conquering all its larger, richer, more powerful neighbors, to found the mighty Chinese Empire. 
Now, no one, of course, would have thought of describing Ying Zheng as a designer at the time — why would they? 
And yet he used design unknowingly and instinctively but with tremendous ingenuity to achieve his ends. 
And so did another equally improbable, accidental designer, who was also not above using violence to get what he wanted. 
This was Edward Teach, better known as the British pirate, Blackbeard. 
This was the golden age of piracy, where pirates like Teach were terrorizing the high seas. 
Colonial trade was flourishing, and piracy was highly profitable. 
And the smarter pirates like him realized that to maximize their spoils, they needed to attack their enemies so brutally that they would surrender on sight. 
So in other words, they could take the ships without wasting ammunition, or incurring casualties. 
So Edward Teach redesigned himself as Blackbeard by playing the part of a merciless brute. 
He wore heavy jackets and big hats to accentuate his height. 
He grew the bushy black beard that obscured his face. 
He slung braces of pistols on either shoulder. 
He even attached matches to the brim of his hat and set them alight, so they sizzled menacingly whenever his ship was poised to attack. 
And like many pirates of that era, he flew a flag that bore the macabre symbols of a human skull and a pair of crossed bones, because those motifs had signified death in so many cultures for centuries, that their meaning was instantly recognizable, even in the lawless, illiterate world of the high seas: surrender or you'll suffer. 
So of course, all his sensible victims surrendered on sight. 
Put like that, it's easy to see why Edward Teach and his fellow pirates could be seen as pioneers of modern communications design, and why their deadly symbol — (Laughter) there's more — why their deadly symbol of the skull and crossbones was a precursor of today's logos, rather like the big red letters standing behind me, but of course with a different message. (Laughter) 
Yet design was also used to nobler ends by an equally brilliant and equally improbable designer, the 19th-century British nurse, Florence Nightingale. 
Her mission was to provide decent healthcare for everyone. 
Nightingale was born into a rather grand, very wealthy British family, who were horrified when she volunteered to work in military hospitals during the Crimean War. 
Once there, she swiftly realized that more patients were dying of infections that they caught there, in the filthy, fetid wards, than they were of battle wounds. 
So she campaigned for cleaner, lighter, airier clinics to be designed and built. 
Back in Britain, she mounted another campaign, this time for civilian hospitals, and insisted that the same design principles were applied to them. 
The Nightingale ward, as it is called, dominated hospital design for decades to come, and elements of it are still used today. 
But by then, design was seen as a tool of the Industrial Age. 
It was formalized and professionalized, but it was restricted to specific roles and generally applied in pursuit of commercial goals rather than being used intuitively, as Florence Nightingale, Blackbeard and Ying Zheng had done. 
By the 20th century, this commercial ethos was so powerful, that any designers who deviated from it risked being seen as cranks or subversives. 
Now among them is one of my great design heroes, the brilliant László Moholy-Nagy. 
He was the Hungarian artist and designer whose experiments with the impact of technology on daily life were so powerful that they still influence the design of the digital images we see on our phone and computer screens. 
He radicalized the Bauhaus Design School in 1920s Germany, and yet some of his former colleagues shunned him when he struggled to open a new Bauhaus in Chicago years later. 
Moholy's ideas were as bold and incisive as ever, but his approach to design was too experimental, as was his insistence on seeing it, as he put it, as an attitude, not a profession to be in tune with the times. 
And sadly, the same applied to another design maverick: Richard Buckminster Fuller. 
He was yet another brilliant design visionary and design activist, who was completely committed to designing a sustainable society in such a forward-thinking way that he started talking about the importance of environmentalism in design in the 1920s. 
Now he, despite his efforts, was routinely mocked as a crank by many in the design establishment, and admittedly, some of his experiments failed, like the flying car that never got off the ground. 
And yet, the geodesic dome, his design formula to build an emergency shelter from scraps of wood, metal, plastic, bits of tree, old blankets, plastic sheeting — just about anything that's available at the time — is one of the greatest feats of humanitarian design, and has provided sorely needed refuge to many, many people in desperate circumstances ever since. 
Now, it was the courage and verve of radical designers like Bucky and Moholy that drew me to design. 
I began my career as a news journalist and foreign correspondent. 
I wrote about politics, economics and corporate affairs, and I could have chosen to specialize in any of those fields. 
But I picked design, because I believe it's one of the most powerful tools at our disposal to improve our quality of life. 
Thank you, fellow TED design buffs. 
(Applause) And greatly as I admire the achievements of professional designers, which have been extraordinary and immense, I also believe that design benefits hugely from the originality, the lateral thinking and the resourcefulness of its rebels and renegades. 
And we're living at a remarkable moment in design, because this is a time when the two camps are coming closer together. 
Because even very basic advances in digital technology have enabled them to operate increasingly independently, in or out of a commercial context, to pursue ever more ambitious and eclectic objectives. 
So in theory, basic platforms like crowdfunding, cloud computing, social media are giving greater freedom to professional designers and giving more resources for the improvisational ones, and hopefully, a more receptive response to their ideas. 
Now, some of my favorite examples of this are in Africa, where a new generation of designers are developing incredible Internet of Things technologies to fulfill Florence Nightingale's dream of improving healthcare in countries where more people now have access to cell phones than to clean, running water. 
And among them is Arthur Zang. 
He's a young, Cameroonian design engineer who has a adapted a tablet computer into the Cardiopad, a mobile heart-monitoring device. 
It can be used to monitor the hearts of patients in remote, rural areas. 
The data is then sent on a cellular network to well-equipped hospitals hundreds of miles away for analysis. 
And if any problems are spotted by the specialists there, a suitable course of treatment is recommended. 
And this of course saves many patients from making long, arduous, expensive and often pointless journeys to those hospitals, and makes it much, much likelier that their hearts will actually be checked. 
Arthur Zang started working on the Cardiopad eight years ago, in his final year at university. 
But he failed to persuade any conventional sources to give him investment to get the project off the ground. 
He posted the idea on Facebook, where a Cameroonian government official saw it and managed to secure a government grant for him. 
He's now developing not only the Cardiopad, but other mobile medical devices to treat different conditions. 
And he isn't alone, because there are many other inspiring and enterprising designers who are also pursuing extraordinary projects of their own. 
And I'm going to finish by looking at just a few of them. 
One is Peek Vision. 
This is a group of doctors and designers in Kenya, who've developed an Internet of Things technology of their own, as a portable eye examination kit. 
Then there's Gabriel Maher, who is developing a new design language to enable us to articulate the subtleties of our changing gender identities, without recourse to traditional stereotypes. 
All of these designers and many more are pursuing their dreams, by the making the most of their newfound freedom, with the discipline of professional designers and the resourcefulness of rebels and renegades. 
And we all stand to benefit. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Music) Amanda Palmer (singing): Ground Control to Major Tom, Ground Control to Major Tom, Take your protein pills and put your helmet on. 
Al Gore: Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six... 
AP: Ground Control to Major Tom, AG: Five, Four, Three, Two, One... AP: Commencing countdown, engines on. 
Check ignition and may God's love be with you. 
AG: Liftoff. 
AP: This is Ground Control to Major Tom, You've really made the grade And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear. 
Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare. 
"" This is Major Tom to Ground Control, I'm stepping through the door And I'm floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today. 
For here am I floating round my tin can. 
Far above the world, Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do. "" (Music) "" Though I'm past 100,000 miles, I'm feeling very still, and I think my spaceship knows which way to go. 
Tell my wife I love her very much she knows. "" Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit's dead, there's something wrong. 
Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? 
Can you... "" Here am I floating round my tin can, far above the Moon. Planet Earth is blue 
and there's nothing I can do. 
(Music) ["" I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man, just a mortal with the potential of a superman... 
... I'm living on. "" David Bowie, 1947-2016] (Applause) 

The goal in my life has always been to make more and more products in the least amount of time and resources. 
While working at Toyota, all I knew was how to make cars until I met Dr. Akira Miyawaki, who came to our factory to make a forest in it in order to make it carbon-neutral. 
I was so fascinated that I decided to learn this methodology by joining his team as a volunteer. 
Soon, I started making a forest in the backyard of my own house, and this is how it looks after three years. 
These forests, compared to a conventional plantation, grow 10 times faster, they're 30 times more dense, and 100 times more biodiverse. 
Within two years of having this forest in our backyard, I could observe that the groundwater didn't dry during summers, the number of bird species I spotted in this area doubled. 
Quality of air became better, and we started harvesting seasonal fruits growing effortlessly right in the backyard of our house. 
I was so moved by these results that I wanted to make these forests with the same acumen with which we make cars or write software or do any mainstream business, so I founded a company which is an end-to-end service provider to create these native natural forests. 
For an example, the core of TPS, Toyota Production System, lies in heijunka, which is making manufacturing of different models of cars on a single assembly line. 
These forests utilize 100 percent vertical space. 
For an example, we can make a 300-tree forest in an area as small as the parking spaces of six cars. 
For example, coconut shells crushed in a machine mixed with rice straw, powder of rice husk mixed with organic manure is finally dumped in soil on which our forest is planted. 
Once planted, we use grass or rice straw to cover the soil so that all the water which goes into irrigation doesn't get evaporated back into the atmosphere. 
And using these simple improvisations, today we can make a forest for a cost as low as the cost of an iPhone. 
Today, we are making forests in houses, in schools, even in factories with the corporates. 
But that's not enough. 
There is a huge number of people who want to take matters into their own hands. 
So we let it happen. 
Today, we are working on an Internet-based platform where we are going to share our methodology on an open source using which anyone and everyone can make their own forest without our physical presence being there, using our methodology. 
By installing a small hardware probe on site, we can do remote soil testing, using which we can give step-by-step instructions on forest-making remotely. 
Also we can monitor the growth of this forest without being on site. 
By sharing, we can actually bring back our native forests. 
Now, when you go back home, if you see a barren piece of land, do remember that it can be a potential forest. 
Thank you very much. Thanks. 
(Applause) 

When I was a kid, my parents would tell me, "You can make a mess, but you have to clean up after yourself." 
So freedom came with responsibility. 
But my imagination would take me to all these wonderful places, where everything was possible. 
So I grew up in a bubble of innocence — or a bubble of ignorance, I should say, because adults would lie to us to protect us from the ugly truth. 
And growing up, I found out that adults make a mess, and they're not very good at cleaning up after themselves. 
Fast forward, I am an adult now, and I teach citizen science and invention at the Hong Kong Harbour School. 
And it doesn't take too long before my students walk on a beach and stumble upon piles of trash. 
So as good citizens, we clean up the beaches — and no, he is not drinking alcohol, and if he is, I did not give it to him. 
(Laughter) And so it's sad to say, but today more than 80 percent of the oceans have plastic in them. 
It's a horrifying fact. 
And in past decades, we've been taking those big ships out and those big nets, and we collect those plastic bits that we look at under a microscope, and we sort them, and then we put this data onto a map. 
But that takes forever, it's very expensive, and so it's quite risky to take those big boats out. 
So with my students, ages six to 15, we've been dreaming of inventing a better way. 
So we've transformed our tiny Hong Kong classroom into a workshop. 
And so we started building this small workbench, with different heights, so even really short kids can participate. 
And let me tell you, kids with power tools are awesome and safe. 
(Laughter) Not really. 
And so, back to plastic. 
We collect this plastic and we grind it to the size we find it in the ocean, which is very small because it breaks down. 
And so this is how we work. 
I let the imaginations of my students run wild. 
And my job is to try to collect the best of each kid's idea and try to combine it into something that hopefully would work. 
And so we have agreed that instead of collecting plastic bits, we are going to collect only the data. 
So we're going to get an image of the plastic with a robot — so robots, kids get very excited. 
And the next thing we do — we do what we call "" rapid prototyping. "" We are so rapid at prototyping that the lunch is still in the lunchbox when we're hacking it. 
(Laughter) And we hack table lamps and webcams, into plumbing fixtures and we assemble that into a floating robot that will be slowly moving through water and through the plastic that we have there — and this is the image that we get in the robot. 
So we see the plastic pieces floating slowly through the sensor, and the computer on board will process this image, and measure the size of each particle, so we have a rough estimate of how much plastic there is in the water. 
So we documented this invention step by step on a website for inventors called Instructables, in the hope that somebody would make it even better. 
What was really cool about this project was that the students saw a local problem, and boom — they are trying to immediately address it. 
[I can investigate my local problem] But my students in Hong Kong are hyperconnected kids. 
And they watch the news, they watch the Internet, and they came across this image. 
This was a child, probably under 10, cleaning up an oil spill bare-handed, in the Sundarbans, which is the world's largest mangrove forest in Bangladesh. 
So they were very shocked, because this is the water they drink, this is the water they bathe in, this is the water they fish in — this is the place where they live. 
And also you can see the water is brown, the mud is brown and oil is brown, so when everything is mixed up, it's really hard to see what's in the water. 
But, there's a technology that's rather simple, that's called spectrometry, that allows you see what's in the water. 
So we built a rough prototype of a spectrometer, and you can shine light through different substances that produce different spectrums, so that can help you identify what's in the water. 
So we packed this prototype of a sensor, and we shipped it to Bangladesh. 
So what was cool about this project was that beyond addressing a local problem, or looking at a local problem, my students used their empathy and their sense of being creative to help, remotely, other kids. 
[I can investigate a remote problem] So I was very compelled by doing the second experiments, and I wanted to take it even further — maybe addressing an even harder problem, and it's also closer to my heart. 
So I'm half Japanese and half French, and maybe you remember in 2011 there was a massive earthquake in Japan. 
It was so violent that it triggered several giant waves — they are called tsunami — and those tsunami destroyed many cities on the eastern coast of Japan. 
More than 14,000 people died in an instant. 
Also, it damaged the nuclear power plant of Fukushima, the nuclear power plant just by the water. 
And today, I read the reports and an average of 300 tons are leaking from the nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. 
And today the whole Pacific Ocean has traces of contamination of cesium-137. 
If you go outside on the West Coast, you can measure Fukushima everywhere. 
But if you look at the map, it can look like most of the radioactivity has been washed away from the Japanese coast, and most of it is now — it looks like it's safe, it's blue. 
Well, reality is a bit more complicated than this. 
So I've been going to Fukushima every year since the accident, and I measure independently and with other scientists, on land, in the river — and this time we wanted to take the kids. 
So of course we didn't take the kids, the parents wouldn't allow that to happen. 
(Laughter) But every night we would report to "" Mission Control "" — different masks they're wearing. 
It could look like they didn't take the work seriously, but they really did because they're going to have to live with radioactivity their whole life. 
And so what we did with them is that we'd discuss the data we collected that day, and talk about where we should be going next — strategy, itinerary, etc... 
And to do this, we built a very rough topographical map of the region around the nuclear power plant. 
And so we built the elevation map, we sprinkled pigments to represent real-time data for radioactivity, and we sprayed water to simulate the rainfall. 
And with this we could see that the radioactive dust was washing from the top of the mountain into the river system, and leaking into the ocean. 
So it was a rough estimate. 
But with this in mind, we organized this expedition, which was the closest civilians have been to the nuclear power plant. 
We are sailing 1.5 kilometers away from the nuclear power plant, and with the help of the local fisherman, we are collecting sediment from the seabed with a custom sediment sampler we've invented and built. 
We pack the sediment into small bags, we then dispatch them to hundreds of small bags that we send to different universities, and we produce the map of the seabed radioactivity, especially in estuaries where the fish will reproduce, and I will hope that we will have improved the safety of the local fishermen and of your favorite sushi. 
(Laughter) You can see a progression here — we've gone from a local problem to a remote problem to a global problem. 
And it's been super exciting to work at these different scales, with also very simple, open-source technologies. 
But at the same time, it's been increasingly frustrating because we have only started to measure the damage that we have done. 
We haven't even started to try to solve the problems. 
And so I wonder if we should just take a leap and try to invent better ways to do all these things. 
And so the classroom started to feel a little bit small, so we found an industrial site in Hong Kong, and we turned it into the largest mega-space focused on social and environmental impact. 
It's in central Hong Kong, and it's a place we can work with wood, metal, chemistry, a bit of biology, a bit of optics, basically you can build pretty much everything there. 
And its a place where adults and kids can play together. 
It's a place where kids' dreams can come true, with the help of adults, and where adults can be kids again. 
Student: Acceleration! Acceleration! 
Cesar Harada: We're asking questions such as, can we invent the future of mobility with renewable energy? 
For example. 
Or, can we help the mobility of the aging population by transforming very standard wheelchairs into cool, electric vehicles? 
So plastic, oil and radioactivity are horrible, horrible legacies, but the very worst legacy that we can leave our children is lies. 
We can no longer afford to shield the kids from the ugly truth because we need their imagination to invent the solutions. 
So citizen scientists, makers, dreamers — we must prepare the next generation that cares about the environment and people, and that can actually do something about it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a multitasking person, and I push my students to fly through a very creative, multitasking design process. 
But how efficient is, really, this multitasking? 
Let's consider for a while the option of monotasking. 
A couple of examples. 
Look at that. 
This is my multitasking activity result. (Laughter) So trying to cook, answering the phone, writing SMS, and maybe uploading some pictures about this awesome barbecue. 
So someone tells us the story about supertaskers, so this two percent of people who are able to control multitasking environment. 
But what about ourselves, and what about our reality? 
When's the last time you really enjoyed just the voice of your friend? 
So this is a project I'm working on, and this is a series of front covers to downgrade our super, hyper — (Laughter) (Applause) to downgrade our super, hyper-mobile phones into the essence of their function. 
Another example: Have you ever been to Venice? 
How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streets on the island. 
But our multitasking reality is pretty different, and full of tons of information. 
So what about something like that to rediscover our sense of adventure? 
I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about mono when the number of possibilities is so huge, but I push you to consider the option of focusing on just one task, or maybe turning your digital senses totally off. 
So nowadays, everyone could produce his mono product. 
Why not? So find your monotask spot within the multitasking world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Recording of crowd roaring) Hysterical teenagers, crying, screaming, pandemonium. (Recording of crowd roaring) 
Sports mania: deafening crowds, all for one idea — get the ball in the net. 
Okay, religious mania: there's rapture, there's weeping, there's visions. 
Manias can be good. 
(Recording of crowd cheering) The world has a new mania. 
Listen as Chinese students practice their English, by screaming it: Teacher:... change my life! 
T: I don't ever want to let my country down! 
T: Most importantly... S: Most importantly... 
If you're a Chinese student, you start learning English in the third grade, by law. 
T: I want to speak perfect English! 
S (yelling more loudly): I want to change my life! 
Is English a tsunami, washing away other languages? 
But with English you can become part of a wider conversation — a global conversation about global problems, like climate change or poverty, or hunger or disease. 
The world has other universal languages. 
Not because America is pushing it, but because the world is pulling it. 
Like the harnessing of electricity in our cities, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, English represents hope for a better future — a future where the world has a common language to solve its common problems. 

I dedicated the past two years to understanding how people achieve their dreams. 
Your overnight success story is always a result of everything you've done in your life through that moment. 
Even if I did little, sales would be OK. 
Yes, it may be hard to find talent. 
Once I saw an ad, and it was a lot of friends, they were going up a mountain, it was a very high mountain, and it was a lot of work. 

Some people are obsessed by French wines. 
Others love playing golf or devouring literature. 
One of my greatest pleasures in life is, I have to admit, a bit special. 
I cannot tell you how much I enjoy watching cities from the sky, from an airplane window. 
Some cities are calmly industrious, like Dusseldorf or Louisville. 
Others project an energy that they can hardly contain, like New York or Hong Kong. 
And then you have Paris or Istanbul, and their patina full of history. 
I see cities as living beings. 
And when I discover them from far above, I like to find those main streets and highways that structure their space. 
Especially at night, when commuters make these arteries look dramatically red and golden: the city's vascular system performing its vital function right before your eyes. 
But when I'm sitting in my car after an hour and a half of commute every day, that reality looks very different. 
(Laughter) Nothing — not public radio, no podcast — (Laughter) Not even mindfulness meditation makes this time worth living. (Laughter) 
Isn't it absurd that we created cars that can reach 130 miles per hour and we now drive them at the same speed as 19th-century horse carriages? (Laughter) 
In the US alone, we spent 29.6 billion hours commuting in 2014. 
With that amount of time, ancient Egyptians could have built 26 Pyramids of Giza. 
(Laughter) We do that in one year. 
For decades, our remedy for congestion was simple: build new roads or enlarge existing ones. 
And it worked. 
It worked admirably for Paris, when the city tore down hundreds of historical buildings to create 85 miles of transportation-friendly boulevards. 
And it still works today in fast-growing emerging cities. 
But in more established urban centers, significant network expansions are almost impossible: habitat is just too dense, real estate, too expensive and public finances, too fragile. 
Our city's vascular system is getting clogged, it's getting sick, and we should pay attention. 
For our transportation to flow, we need a new source of inspiration. 
So after 16 years working in transportation, my "" aha moment "" happened when speaking with a biotech customer. 
She was telling me how her treatment was leveraging specific properties of our vascular system. 
"" Wow, "" I thought, "" Our vascular system — all the veins and arteries in our body making miracles of logistics every day. "" This is the moment I realized that biology has been in the transportation business for billions of years. 
It has been testing countless solutions to move nutrients, gases and proteins. 
It really is the world's most sophisticated transportation laboratory. 
So, what if the solution to our traffic challenges was inside us? 
I wanted to know: Why is it that blood flows in our veins most of our lives, when our big cities get clogged on a daily basis? 
And the reality is that you're looking at two very different networks. 
I don't know if you realize, but each of us has 60,000 miles of blood vessels in our bodies — 60,000 miles. 
That's two-and-a-half times the Earth's circumference, inside you. 
What it means is that blood vessels are everywhere inside us, not just under the surface of our skin. 
But if you look at our cities, yes, we have some underground subway systems and some tunnels and bridges, and also some helicopters in the sky. 
But the vast majority of our traffic is focused on the ground, on the surface. 
So in other words, while our vascular system uses the three dimensions inside us, our urban transportation is mostly two-dimensional. 
And so what we need is to embrace that verticality. 
If our surface grid is saturated, well, let's elevate our traffic. 
This Chinese concept of a bus that can straddle traffic jams — that was an eye-opener on new ways to think about space and movement inside our cities. 
And we can go higher, and suspend our transportation like we did with our electrical grid. 
Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi are talking about testing these futuristic networks of suspended magnetic pods. 
And we can keep climbing, and fly. 
The fact that a company like Airbus is now seriously working on flying urban taxis is telling us something. 
Flying cars are finally moving from science-fiction déjà vu to attractive business-case territory. 
And that's an exciting moment. 
So building this 3-D transportation network is one of the ways we can mitigate and solve traffic jams. 
But it's not the only one. 
We have to question other fundamental choices that we made, like the vehicles we use. 
Just imagine a very familiar scene: You've been driving for 42 minutes. 
The two kids behind you are getting restless. 
And you're late. 
Do you see that slow car in front of you? 
Always comes when you're late, right? 
(Laughter) That driver is looking for parking. 
There is no parking spot available in the area, but how would he know? 
It is estimated that up to 30 percent of urban traffic is generated by drivers looking for parking. 
Do you see the 100 cars around you? 
Eighty-five of them only have one passenger. 
Those 85 drivers could all fit in one Londonian red bus. 
So the question is: Why are we wasting so much space if it is what we need the most? 
Why are we doing this to ourselves? 
Biology would never do this. 
Space inside our arteries is fully utilized. 
At every heartbeat, a higher blood pressure literally compacts millions of red blood cells into massive trains of oxygen that quickly flow throughout our body. 
And the tiny space inside our red blood cells is not wasted, either. 
In healthy conditions, more than 95 percent of their oxygen capacity is utilized. 
Can you imagine if the vehicles we used in our cities were 95 percent full, all the additional space you would have to walk, to bike and to enjoy our cities? 
The reason blood is so incredibly efficient is that our red blood cells are not dedicated to specific organs or tissues; otherwise, we would probably have traffic jams in our veins. 
No, they're shared. 
They're shared by all the cells of our body. 
And because our network is so extensive, each one of our 37 trillion cells gets its own deliveries of oxygen precisely when it needs them. 
Blood is both a collective and individual form of transportation. 
But for our cities, we've been stuck. 
We've been stuck in an endless debate between creating a car-centric society or extensive mass-transit systems. 
I think we should transcend this. 
I think we can create vehicles that combine the convenience of cars and the efficiencies of trains and buses. 
Just imagine. 
You're comfortably sitting in a fast and smooth urban train, along with 1,200 passengers. 
The problem with urban trains is that sometimes you have to stop five, ten, fifteen times before your final destination. 
What if in this train you didn't have to stop? 
In this train, wagons can detach dynamically while you're moving and become express, driverless buses that move on a secondary road network. 
And so without a single stop, nor a lengthy transfer, you are now sitting in a bus that is headed toward your suburb. 
And when you get close, the section you're sitting in detaches and self-drives you right to your doorstep. 
It is collective and individual at the same time. 
This could be one of the shared, modular, driverless vehicles of tomorrow. 
Now... 
as if walking in a city buzzing with drones, flying taxis, modular buses and suspended magnetic pods was not exotic enough, I think there is another force in action that will make urban traffic mesmerizing. 
If you think about it, the current generation of driverless cars is just trying to earn its way into a traffic grid made by and for humans. 
They're trying to learn traffic rules, which is relatively simple, and coping with human unpredictability, which is more challenging. 
But what would happen when whole cities become driverless? 
Would we need traffic lights? 
Would we need lanes? 
How about speed limits? 
Red blood cells are not flowing in lanes. 
They never stop at red lights. 
In the first driverless cities, you would have no red lights and no lanes. 
And when all the cars are driverless and connected, everything is predictable and reaction time, minimum. 
They can drive much faster and can take any rational initiative that can speed them up or the cars around them. 
So instead of rigid traffic rules, flow will be regulated by a mesh of dynamic and constantly self-improving algorithms. 
The result: a strange traffic that mixes the fast and smooth rigor of German autobahns and the creative vitality of the intersections of Mumbai. 
And by a strange paradox, the more robotized our traffic grid will be, the more organic and alive its movement will feel. 
So yes, biology has all the attributes of a transportation genius today. 
But this process has taken billions of years, and went through all sorts of iterations and mutations. 
We can't wait billions of years to evolve our transportation system. 
We now have the dreams, the concepts and the technology to create 3-D transportation networks, invent new vehicles and change the flow in our cities. 
Let's do it. 
Thank you. 

So why do we learn mathematics? 
Essentially, for three reasons: calculation, application, and last, and unfortunately least in terms of the time we give it, inspiration. 
Mathematics is the science of patterns, and we study it to learn how to think logically, critically and creatively, but too much of the mathematics that we learn in school is not effectively motivated, and when our students ask, "Why are we learning this?" 
then they often hear that they'll need it in an upcoming math class or on a future test. 
But wouldn't it be great if every once in a while we did mathematics simply because it was fun or beautiful or because it excited the mind? 
Now, I know many people have not had the opportunity to see how this can happen, so let me give you a quick example with my favorite collection of numbers, the Fibonacci numbers. (Applause) Yeah! I already have Fibonacci fans here. 
That's great. 
Now these numbers can be appreciated in many different ways. 
From the standpoint of calculation, they're as easy to understand as one plus one, which is two. 
Then one plus two is three, two plus three is five, three plus five is eight, and so on. 
Indeed, the person we call Fibonacci was actually named Leonardo of Pisa, and these numbers appear in his book "" Liber Abaci, "" which taught the Western world the methods of arithmetic that we use today. 
In terms of applications, Fibonacci numbers appear in nature surprisingly often. 
The number of petals on a flower is typically a Fibonacci number, or the number of spirals on a sunflower or a pineapple tends to be a Fibonacci number as well. 
In fact, there are many more applications of Fibonacci numbers, but what I find most inspirational about them are the beautiful number patterns they display. 
Let me show you one of my favorites. 
Suppose you like to square numbers, and frankly, who doesn't? (Laughter) Let's look at the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. 
So one squared is one, two squared is four, three squared is nine, five squared is 25, and so on. 
Now, it's no surprise that when you add consecutive Fibonacci numbers, you get the next Fibonacci number. Right? 
That's how they're created. 
But you wouldn't expect anything special to happen when you add the squares together. 
But check this out. 
One plus one gives us two, and one plus four gives us five. 
And four plus nine is 13, nine plus 25 is 34, and yes, the pattern continues. 
In fact, here's another one. 
Suppose you wanted to look at adding the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. 
Let's see what we get there. 
So one plus one plus four is six. 
Add nine to that, we get 15. 
Add 25, we get 40. 
Add 64, we get 104. 
Now look at those numbers. 
Those are not Fibonacci numbers, but if you look at them closely, you'll see the Fibonacci numbers buried inside of them. 
Do you see it? I'll show it to you. 
Six is two times three, 15 is three times five, 40 is five times eight, two, three, five, eight, who do we appreciate? 
(Laughter) Fibonacci! Of course. 
Now, as much fun as it is to discover these patterns, it's even more satisfying to understand why they are true. 
Let's look at that last equation. 
Why should the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 13? 
I'll show you by drawing a simple picture. 
We'll start with a one-by-one square and next to that put another one-by-one square. 
Together, they form a one-by-two rectangle. 
Beneath that, I'll put a two-by-two square, and next to that, a three-by-three square, beneath that, a five-by-five square, and then an eight-by-eight square, creating one giant rectangle, right? 
Now let me ask you a simple question: what is the area of the rectangle? 
Well, on the one hand, it's the sum of the areas of the squares inside it, right? 
Just as we created it. 
It's one squared plus one squared plus two squared plus three squared plus five squared plus eight squared. Right? 
That's the area. 
On the other hand, because it's a rectangle, the area is equal to its height times its base, and the height is clearly eight, and the base is five plus eight, which is the next Fibonacci number, 13. Right? 
So the area is also eight times 13. 
Since we've correctly calculated the area two different ways, they have to be the same number, and that's why the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 13. 
Now, if we continue this process, we'll generate rectangles of the form 13 by 21, 21 by 34, and so on. 
Now check this out. 
If you divide 13 by eight, you get 1.625. 
And if you divide the larger number by the smaller number, then these ratios get closer and closer to about 1.618, known to many people as the Golden Ratio, a number which has fascinated mathematicians, scientists and artists for centuries. 
Now, I show all this to you because, like so much of mathematics, there's a beautiful side to it that I fear does not get enough attention in our schools. 
We spend lots of time learning about calculation, but let's not forget about application, including, perhaps, the most important application of all, learning how to think. 
If I could summarize this in one sentence, it would be this: Mathematics is not just solving for x, it's also figuring out why. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So I'd like you to imagine for a moment that you're a soldier in the heat of battle. 
Maybe you're a Roman foot soldier or a medieval archer or maybe you're a Zulu warrior. 
Regardless of your time and place, there are some things that are constant. 
Your adrenaline is elevated, and your actions are stemming from these deeply ingrained reflexes, reflexes rooted in a need to protect yourself and your side and to defeat the enemy. 
So now, I'd like you to imagine playing a very different role, that of the scout. 
The scout's job is not to attack or defend. 
The scout's job is to understand. 
The scout is the one going out, mapping the terrain, identifying potential obstacles. 
And the scout may hope to learn that, say, there's a bridge in a convenient location across a river. 
But above all, the scout wants to know what's really there, as accurately as possible. 
And in a real, actual army, both the soldier and the scout are essential. 
But you can also think of each of these roles as a mindset — a metaphor for how all of us process information and ideas in our daily lives. 
What I'm going to argue today is that having good judgment, making accurate predictions, making good decisions, is mostly about which mindset you're in. 
To illustrate these mindsets in action, I'm going to take you back to 19th-century France, where this innocuous-looking piece of paper launched one of the biggest political scandals in history. 
It was discovered in 1894 by officers in the French general staff. 
It was torn up in a wastepaper basket, but when they pieced it back together, they discovered that someone in their ranks had been selling military secrets to Germany. 
So they launched a big investigation, and their suspicions quickly converged on this man, Alfred Dreyfus. 
He had a sterling record, no past history of wrongdoing, no motive as far as they could tell. 
But Dreyfus was the only Jewish officer at that rank in the army, and unfortunately at this time, the French Army was highly anti-Semitic. 
They compared Dreyfus's handwriting to that on the memo and concluded that it was a match, even though outside professional handwriting experts were much less confident in the similarity, but never mind that. 
They went and searched Dreyfus's apartment, looking for any signs of espionage. 
They went through his files, and they didn't find anything. 
This just convinced them more that Dreyfus was not only guilty, but sneaky as well, because clearly he had hidden all of the evidence before they had managed to get to it. 
Next, they went and looked through his personal history for any incriminating details. 
They talked to his teachers, they found that he had studied foreign languages in school, which clearly showed a desire to conspire with foreign governments later in life. 
His teachers also said that Dreyfus was known for having a good memory, which was highly suspicious, right? 
You know, because a spy has to remember a lot of things. 
So the case went to trial, and Dreyfus was found guilty. 
Afterwards, they took him out into this public square and ritualistically tore his insignia from his uniform and broke his sword in two. 
This was called the Degradation of Dreyfus. 
And they sentenced him to life imprisonment on the aptly named Devil's Island, which is this barren rock off the coast of South America. 
So there he went, and there he spent his days alone, writing letters and letters to the French government begging them to reopen his case so they could discover his innocence. 
But for the most part, France considered the matter closed. 
One thing that's really interesting to me about the Dreyfus Affair is this question of why the officers were so convinced that Dreyfus was guilty. 
I mean, you might even assume that they were setting him up, that they were intentionally framing him. 
But historians don't think that's what happened. 
As far as we can tell, the officers genuinely believed that the case against Dreyfus was strong. 
Which makes you wonder: What does it say about the human mind that we can find such paltry evidence to be compelling enough to convict a man? 
Well, this is a case of what scientists call "" motivated reasoning. "" It's this phenomenon in which our unconscious motivations, our desires and fears, shape the way we interpret information. 
Some information, some ideas, feel like our allies. 
We want them to win. We want to defend them. 
And other information or ideas are the enemy, and we want to shoot them down. 
So this is why I call motivated reasoning, "" soldier mindset. "" Probably most of you have never persecuted a French-Jewish officer for high treason, I assume, but maybe you've followed sports or politics, so you might have noticed that when the referee judges that your team committed a foul, for example, you're highly motivated to find reasons why he's wrong. 
But if he judges that the other team committed a foul — awesome! 
That's a good call, let's not examine it too closely. 
Or, maybe you've read an article or a study that examined some controversial policy, like capital punishment. 
And, as researchers have demonstrated, if you support capital punishment and the study shows that it's not effective, then you're highly motivated to find all the reasons why the study was poorly designed. 
But if it shows that capital punishment works, it's a good study. 
And vice versa: if you don't support capital punishment, same thing. 
Our judgment is strongly influenced, unconsciously, by which side we want to win. 
And this is ubiquitous. 
This shapes how we think about our health, our relationships, how we decide how to vote, what we consider fair or ethical. 
What's most scary to me about motivated reasoning or soldier mindset, is how unconscious it is. 
We can think we're being objective and fair-minded and still wind up ruining the life of an innocent man. 
However, fortunately for Dreyfus, his story is not over. 
This is Colonel Picquart. 
He's another high-ranking officer in the French Army, and like most people, he assumed Dreyfus was guilty. 
Also like most people in the army, he was at least casually anti-Semitic. 
But at a certain point, Picquart began to suspect: "What if we're all wrong about Dreyfus?" 
What happened was, he had discovered evidence that the spying for Germany had continued, even after Dreyfus was in prison. 
And he had also discovered that another officer in the army had handwriting that perfectly matched the memo, much closer than Dreyfus's handwriting. 
So he brought these discoveries to his superiors, but to his dismay, they either didn't care or came up with elaborate rationalizations to explain his findings, like, "" Well, all you've really shown, Picquart, is that there's another spy who learned how to mimic Dreyfus's handwriting, and he picked up the torch of spying after Dreyfus left. 
But Dreyfus is still guilty. "" Eventually, Picquart managed to get Dreyfus exonerated. 
But it took him 10 years, and for part of that time, he himself was in prison for the crime of disloyalty to the army. 
A lot of people feel like Picquart can't really be the hero of this story because he was an anti-Semite and that's bad, which I agree with. 
But personally, for me, the fact that Picquart was anti-Semitic actually makes his actions more admirable, because he had the same prejudices, the same reasons to be biased as his fellow officers, but his motivation to find the truth and uphold it trumped all of that. 
So to me, Picquart is a poster child for what I call "" scout mindset. "" It's the drive not to make one idea win or another lose, but just to see what's really there as honestly and accurately as you can, even if it's not pretty or convenient or pleasant. 
This mindset is what I'm personally passionate about. 
And I've spent the last few years examining and trying to figure out what causes scout mindset. 
Why are some people, sometimes at least, able to cut through their own prejudices and biases and motivations and just try to see the facts and the evidence as objectively as they can? 
And the answer is emotional. 
So, just as soldier mindset is rooted in emotions like defensiveness or tribalism, scout mindset is, too. 
It's just rooted in different emotions. 
For example, scouts are curious. 
They're more likely to say they feel pleasure when they learn new information or an itch to solve a puzzle. 
They're more likely to feel intrigued when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations. 
Scouts also have different values. 
They're more likely to say they think it's virtuous to test your own beliefs, and they're less likely to say that someone who changes his mind seems weak. 
And above all, scouts are grounded, which means their self-worth as a person isn't tied to how right or wrong they are about any particular topic. 
So they can believe that capital punishment works. 
If studies come out showing that it doesn't, they can say, "Huh. Looks like I might be wrong. Doesn't mean I'm bad or stupid." 
This cluster of traits is what researchers have found — and I've also found anecdotally — predicts good judgment. 
And the key takeaway I want to leave you with about those traits is that they're primarily not about how smart you are or about how much you know. 
In fact, they don't correlate very much with IQ at all. 
They're about how you feel. 
There's a quote that I keep coming back to, by Saint-Exupéry. 
He's the author of "" The Little Prince. "" He said, "" If you want to build a ship, don't drum up your men to collect wood and give orders and distribute the work. 
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. "" In other words, I claim, if we really want to improve our judgment as individuals and as societies, what we need most is not more instruction in logic or rhetoric or probability or economics, even though those things are quite valuable. 
But what we most need to use those principles well is scout mindset. 
We need to change the way we feel. 
We need to learn how to feel proud instead of ashamed when we notice we might have been wrong about something. 
We need to learn how to feel intrigued instead of defensive when we encounter some information that contradicts our beliefs. 
So the question I want to leave you with is: What do you most yearn for? 
Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs? 
Or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Aquatic noises) So this video was taken at Aquarius undersea laboratory four miles off the coast of Key Largo, about 60 feet below the surface. 
NASA uses this extreme environment to train astronauts and aquanauts, and last year, they invited us along for the ride. 
All the footage was taken from our open ROV, which is a robot that we built in our garage. 
So ROV stands for Remote Operated Vehicle, which in our case means our little robot sends live video across that ultra-thin tether back to the computer topside. 
It's open source, meaning we publish and share all of our design files and all of our code online, allowing anyone to modify or improve or change the design. 
It's built with mostly off-the-shelf parts and costs about 1,000 times cheaper than the ROVs James Cameron used to explore the Titanic. 
So ROVs aren't new. 
They've been around for decades. 
Scientists use ROVs to explore the oceans. 
Oil and gas companies use them for exploration and construction. 
What we've built isn't unique. 
It's how we've built it that's really unique. 
So I want to give you a quick story of how it got started. 
So a few years ago, my friend Eric and I decided we wanted to explore this underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierras. 
We had heard this story about lost gold from a Gold Rush-era robbery, and we wanted to go up there. 
Unfortunately, we didn't have any money and we didn't have any tools to do it. 
So Eric had an initial design idea for a robot, but we didn't have all the parts figured out, so we did what anybody would do in our situation: we asked the Internet for help. 
More specifically, we created this website, openROV.com, and shared our intentions and our plans For the first few months, it was just Eric and I talking back to each other on the forums, but pretty soon, we started to get feedback from makers and hobbyists, and then actually professional ocean engineers who had some suggestions for what we should do. 
We kept working on it. We learned a lot. 
We kept prototyping, and eventually, we decided we wanted to go to the cave. We were ready. 
So about that time, our little expedition became quite a story, and it got picked up in The New York Times. 
And we were pretty much just overwhelmed with interest from people who wanted a kit that they could build this open ROV themselves. 
So we decided to put the project on Kickstarter, and when we did, we raised our funding goal in about two hours, and all of a sudden, had this money to make these kits. 
But then we had to learn how to make them. 
I mean, we had to learn small batch manufacturing. 
So we quickly learned that our garage was not big enough to hold our growing operation. 
But we were able to do it, we got all the kits made, thanks a lot to TechShop, which was a big help to us, and we shipped these kits all over the world just before Christmas of last year, so it was just a few months ago. 
But we're already starting to get video and photos back from all over the world, including this shot from under the ice in Antarctica. 
We've also learned the penguins love robots. 
(Laughter) So we're still publishing all the designs online, encouraging anyone to build these themselves. 
That's the only way that we could have done this. 
By being open source, we've created this distributed R & D network, and we're moving faster than any venture-backed counterpart. 
But the actual robot is really only half the story. 
The real potential, the long term potential, is with this community of DIY ocean explorers that are forming all over the globe. 
What can we discover when there's thousands of these devices roaming the seas? 
So you're probably all wondering: the cave. 
Did you find the gold? 
Well, we didn't find any gold, but we decided that what we found was much more valuable. 
It was the glimpse into a potential future for ocean exploration. 
It's something that's not limited to the James Camerons of the world, but something that we're all participating in. 
It's an underwater world we're all exploring together. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Daffodil Hudson: Hello? 
Yeah, this is she. 
What? 
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I accept. 
What are the dates again? 
Pen. Pen. Pen. 
March 17 through 21. 
Okay, all right, great. Thanks. 
Lab Partner: Who was that? 
DH: It was TED. 
LP: Who's TED? 
DH: I've got to prepare. 
["" Give Your Talk: A Musical ""] (Music) ["" My Talk ""] ♪ Procrastination. ♪ What do you think? 
(Doorbell) Can I help you? 
(Music) Speaker Coach 1: ♪ Let's prepare for main stage. ♪ ♪ It's your time to shine. ♪ ♪ If you want to succeed then ♪ ♪ you must be primed. ♪ Speaker Coach 2: ♪ Your slides are bad ♪ ♪ but your idea is good ♪ ♪ so you can bet before we're through, ♪ ♪ speaker, we'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ Speaker Coach 3: ♪ We know about climate change, ♪ ♪ but what can you say that's new? ♪ ♪ SC 1: Once you find your focus ♪ ♪ then the talk comes into view. ♪ 
SC 2: ♪ Don't ever try to sell something ♪ ♪ from up on that stage ♪ ♪ or we won't post your talk online. ♪ All: ♪ Somehow we'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ (Music) SC 1: Ready to practice one more time? 
DH: Right now? 
Stagehand: Break a leg. 
DH: ♪ I'll never remember all this. ♪ ♪ Will the clicker work when I press it? ♪ ♪ Why must Al Gore go right before me? ♪ ♪ Oh man, I'm scared to death. ♪ ♪ I hope I don't pass out onstage ♪ ♪ and now I really wish I wasn't wearing green. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 1: ♪ You must be be sweet like Brené Brown. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 2: ♪ You must be funny like Ken Robinson. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 3: ♪ You must be cool like Reggie Watts ♪ 
All: ♪ and bring out a prop like Jill Bolte Taylor. ♪ DH: ♪ My time is running over. The clock now says nil. ♪ ♪ I'm saying my words faster. Understand me still. ♪ ♪ I'm too nervous to give this TED Talk. ♪ All: ♪ Don't give up. Rehearse. You're good. ♪ ♪ We'll edit out the mistakes that you make. ♪ ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will be big like Amy Cuddy. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will inspire like Liz Gilbert. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will engage like Hans Rosling ♪ 
♪ and release mosquitos ♪ ♪ like Bill Gates. ♪ SC 2: ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ (Applause) ["" Brought to you by TED staff and friends ""] (Music) 

I consider it my life's mission to convey the urgency of climate change through my work. 
I've traveled north to the Arctic to the capture the unfolding story of polar melt, and south to the Equator to document the subsequent rising seas. 
Most recently, I visited the icy coast of Greenland and the low-lying islands of the Maldives, connecting two seemingly disparate but equally endangered parts of our planet. 
My drawings explore moments of transition, turbulence and tranquility in the landscape, allowing viewers to emotionally connect with a place you might never have the chance to visit. 
I choose to convey the beauty as opposed to the devastation. 
If you can experience the sublimity of these landscapes, perhaps you'll be inspired to protect and preserve them. 
Behavioral psychology tells us that we take action and make decisions based on our emotions above all else. 
And studies have shown that art impacts our emotions more effectively than a scary news report. 
Experts predict ice-free Arctic summers as early as 2020. 
And sea levels are likely to rise between two and ten feet by century's end. 
I have dedicated my career to illuminating these projections with an accessible medium, one that moves us in a way that statistics may not. 
My process begins with traveling to the places at the forefront of climate change. 
On-site, I take thousands of photographs. 
Back in the studio, I work from both my memory of the experience and the photographs to create very large-scale compositions, sometimes over 10 feet wide. 
I draw with soft pastel, which is dry like charcoal, but colors. 
I consider my work drawings but others call them painting. 
I cringe, though, when I'm referred to as a "" finger painter. "" (Laughter) But I don't use any tools and I have always used my fingers and palms to manipulate the pigment on the paper. 
Drawing is a form of meditation for me. 
It quiets my mind. 
I don't perceive what I'm drawing as ice or water. 
Instead, the image is stripped down to its most basic form of color and shape. 
Once the piece is complete, I can finally experience the composition as a whole, as an iceberg floating through glassy water, or a wave cresting with foam. 
On average, a piece this size takes me about, as you can see, 10 seconds. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Really, more like 200 hours, 250 hours for something that size. 
But I've been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon, really. 
My mom was an artist, and growing up, we always had art supplies all over the house. 
My mother's love of photography propelled her to the most remote regions of the earth, and my family and I were fortunate enough to join and support her on these adventures. 
We rode camels in Northern Africa and mushed on dog sleds near the North Pole. 
In August of 2012, I led my first expedition, taking a group of artists and scholars up the northwest coast of Greenland. 
My mother was originally supposed to lead this trip. 
She and I were in the early stages of planning, as we had intended to go together, when she fell victim to a brain tumor. 
The cancer quickly took over her body and mind, and she passed away six months later. 
During the months of her illness, though, her dedication to the expedition never wavered, and I made a promise to carry out her final journey. 
My mother's passion for the Arctic echoed through my experience in Greenland, and I felt the power and the fragility of the landscape. 
The sheer size of the icebergs is humbling. 
The ice fields are alive with movement and sound in a way that I never expected. 
I expanded the scale of my compositions to give you that same sense of awe that I experienced. 
Yet, while the grandeur of the ice is evident, so, too, is its vulnerability. 
From our boat, I could see the ice sweating under the unseasonably warm sun. 
We had a chance to visit many of the Inuit communities in Greenland that now face huge challenges. 
The locals spoke to me of vast areas of sea ice that are no longer freezing over as they once did. 
And without ice, their hunting and harvesting grounds are severely diminished, threatening their way of life and survival. 
The melting glaciers in Greenland are one of the largest contributing factors to rising sea levels, which have already begun to drown some of our world's lowest-lying islands. 
One year after my trip to Greenland, I visited the Maldives, the lowest and flattest country in the entire world. 
While I was there, I collected images and inspiration for a new body of work: drawings of waves lapping on the coast of a nation that could be entirely underwater within this century. 
Devastating events happen every day on scales both global and personal. 
When I was in Greenland, I scattered my mother's ashes amidst the melting ice. 
Now she remains a part of the landscape she loved so much, even as it, too, passes and takes on new form. 
Among the many gifts my mother gave me was the ability to focus on the positive, rather than the negative. 
My drawings celebrate the beauty of what we all stand to lose. 
I hope they can serve as records of sublime landscapes in flux, documenting the transition and inspiring our global community to take action for the future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Everyone is both a learner and a teacher. 
This is me being inspired by my first tutor, my mom, and this is me teaching Introduction to Artificial Intelligence to 200 students at Stanford University. 
Now the students and I enjoyed the class, but it occurred to me that while the subject matter of the class is advanced and modern, the teaching technology isn't. 
In fact, I use basically the same technology as this 14th-century classroom. 
Note the textbook, the sage on the stage, and the sleeping guy in the back. (Laughter) Just like today. 
So my co-teacher, Sebastian Thrun, and I thought, there must be a better way. 
We challenged ourselves to create an online class that would be equal or better in quality to our Stanford class, but to bring it to anyone in the world for free. 
We announced the class on July 29th, and within two weeks, 50,000 people had signed up for it. 
And that grew to 160,000 students from 209 countries. 
We were thrilled to have that kind of audience, and just a bit terrified that we hadn't finished preparing the class yet. (Laughter) So we got to work. 
We studied what others had done, what we could copy and what we could change. 
Benjamin Bloom had showed that one-on-one tutoring works best, so that's what we tried to emulate, like with me and my mom, even though we knew it would be one-on-thousands. 
Here, an overhead video camera is recording me as I'm talking and drawing on a piece of paper. 
A student said, "" This class felt like sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who's explaining something you haven't grasped, but are about to. "" And that's exactly what we were aiming for. 
Now, from Khan Academy, we saw that short 10-minute videos worked much better than trying to record an hour-long lecture and put it on the small-format screen. 
We decided to go even shorter and more interactive. 
Our typical video is two minutes, sometimes shorter, never more than six, and then we pause for a quiz question, to make it feel like one-on-one tutoring. 
Here, I'm explaining how a computer uses the grammar of English to parse sentences, and here, there's a pause and the student has to reflect, understand what's going on and check the right boxes before they can continue. 
Students learn best when they're actively practicing. 
We wanted to engage them, to have them grapple with ambiguity and guide them to synthesize the key ideas themselves. 
We mostly avoid questions like, "" Here's a formula, now tell me the value of Y when X is equal to two. "" We preferred open-ended questions. 
One student wrote, "" Now I'm seeing Bayes networks and examples of game theory everywhere I look. "" And I like that kind of response. 
That's just what we were going for. 
We didn't want students to memorize the formulas; we wanted to change the way they looked at the world. 
And we succeeded. 
Or, I should say, the students succeeded. 
And it's a little bit ironic that we set about to disrupt traditional education, and in doing so, we ended up making our online class much more like a traditional college class than other online classes. 
Most online classes, the videos are always available. 
You can watch them any time you want. 
But if you can do it any time, that means you can do it tomorrow, and if you can do it tomorrow, well, you may not ever get around to it. (Laughter) So we brought back the innovation of having due dates. (Laughter) You could watch the videos any time you wanted during the week, but at the end of the week, you had to get the homework done. 
This motivated the students to keep going, and it also meant that everybody was working on the same thing at the same time, so if you went into a discussion forum, you could get an answer from a peer within minutes. 
Now, I'll show you some of the forums, most of which were self-organized by the students themselves. 
From Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, we learned the concept of "" flipping "" the classroom. 
Students watched the videos on their own, and then they come together to discuss them. 
From Eric Mazur, I learned about peer instruction, that peers can be the best teachers, because they're the ones that remember what it's like to not understand. 
Sebastian and I have forgotten some of that. 
Of course, we couldn't have a classroom discussion with tens of thousands of students, so we encouraged and nurtured these online forums. 
And finally, from Teach For America, I learned that a class is not primarily about information. 
More important is motivation and determination. 
It was crucial that the students see that we're working hard for them and they're all supporting each other. 
Now, the class ran 10 weeks, and in the end, about half of the 160,000 students watched at least one video each week, and over 20,000 finished all the homework, putting in 50 to 100 hours. 
They got this statement of accomplishment. 
So what have we learned? 
Well, we tried some old ideas and some new and put them together, but there are more ideas to try. 
Sebastian's teaching another class now. 
I'll do one in the fall. 
Stanford Coursera, Udacity, MITx and others have more classes coming. 
It's a really exciting time. 
But to me, the most exciting part of it is the data that we're gathering. 
We're gathering thousands of interactions per student per class, billions of interactions altogether, and now we can start analyzing that, and when we learn from that, do experimentations, that's when the real revolution will come. 
And you'll be able to see the results from a new generation of amazing students. 
(Applause) 

I got up this morning at 6: 10 a.m. 
after going to sleep at 12: 45 a.m. 
I was awakened once during the night. 
My heart rate was 61 beats per minute — my blood pressure, 127 over 74. 
I had zero minutes of exercise yesterday, so my maximum heart rate during exercise wasn't calculated. 
I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine, zero of alcohol. 
And my score on the Narcissism Personality Index, or the NPI-16, is a reassuring 0.31. 
We know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise, manage, govern, search. 
I'm going to talk about how they're useful when we reflect, learn, remember and want to improve. 
A few years ago, Kevin Kelly, my partner, and I noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary, familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day. 
People were tracking their food via Twitter, their kids' diapers on their iPhone. 
They were making detailed journals of their spending, their mood, their symptoms, their treatments. 
Now, we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle — the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices, the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing, and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors. 
This little black dot there is a 3D accelerometer. 
It tracks your movement through space. 
It is, as you can see, very small and also very cheap. 
They're now down to well under a dollar a piece, and they're going into all kinds of devices. 
But what's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this. 
This kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device — among early adopters at the moment — the Fitbit. 
This tracks your activity and also your sleep. 
It has just that sensor in it. 
You're probably familiar with the Nike + system. 
I just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor. 
It's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that's in a doorbell. 
And Nike knows how to get your pace and distance from just that sensor. 
This is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their Nike + system. 
This is a beautiful, new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data, not just whether you're asleep or awake, but also your phase of sleep — deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep. 
The sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there. 
The rest of it is the bedside console; just for reference, this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago — I mean, really until now. 
And this is the sleep tracking system of today. 
This just was presented at a health care conference in D.C. 
Most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler, but the top is a very small GPS transceiver, which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident, giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors. 
Now, we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world — these tiny sensors that gather data in nature, the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used, and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute. 
But we think of these tools as pointing outward, as windows and I'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors. 
So that when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement, we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement, for self-discovery, self-awareness, self-knowledge. 
Here's a biometric device: a pair of Apple Earbuds. 
Last year, Apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation, heart rate and body temperature via the Earbuds. 
What is this for? 
What should it be for? 
Some people will say it's for biometric security. 
Some people will say it's for public health research. 
Some people will say it's for avant-garde marketing research. 
I'd like to tell you that it's also for self-knowledge. 
And the self isn't the only thing; it's not even most things. 
The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. 
So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better. 
Thank you. 

I'm driven by pure passion to create photographs that tell stories. 
Photography can be described as the recording of a single moment frozen within a fraction of time. 
Each moment or photograph represents a tangible piece of our memories as time passes. 
But what if you could capture more than one moment in a photograph? 
What if a photograph could actually collapse time, compressing the best moments of the day and the night seamlessly into one single image? 
I've created a concept called "" Day to Night "" and I believe it's going to change the way you look at the world. 
I know it has for me. 
My process begins by photographing iconic locations, places that are part of what I call our collective memory. 
I photograph from a fixed vantage point, and I never move. 
I capture the fleeting moments of humanity and light as time passes. 
Photographing for anywhere from 15 to 30 hours and shooting over 1,500 images, I then choose the best moments of the day and night. 
Using time as a guide, I seamlessly blend those best moments into one single photograph, visualizing our conscious journey with time. 
I can take you to Paris for a view from the Tournelle Bridge. 
And I can show you the early morning rowers along the River Seine. 
And simultaneously, I can show you Notre Dame aglow at night. 
And in between, I can show you the romance of the City of Light. 
I am essentially a street photographer from 50 feet in the air, and every single thing you see in this photograph actually happened on this day. 
Day to Night is a global project, and my work has always been about history. 
I'm fascinated by the concept of going to a place like Venice and actually seeing it during a specific event. 
And I decided I wanted to see the historical Regata, an event that's actually been taking place since 1498. 
The boats and the costumes look exactly as they did then. 
And an important element that I really want you guys to understand is: this is not a timelapse, this is me photographing throughout the day and the night. 
I am a relentless collector of magical moments. 
And the thing that drives me is the fear of just missing one of them. 
The entire concept came about in 1996. 
LIFE Magazine commissioned me to create a panoramic photograph of the cast and crew of Baz Luhrmann's film Romeo + Juliet. 
I got to the set and realized: it's a square. 
So the only way I could actually create a panoramic was to shoot a collage of 250 single images. 
So I had DiCaprio and Claire Danes embracing. 
And as I pan my camera to the right, I noticed there was a mirror on the wall and I saw they were actually reflecting in it. 
And for that one moment, that one image I asked them, "" Would you guys just kiss for this one picture? "" And then I came back to my studio in New York, and I hand-glued these 250 images together and stood back and went, "" Wow, this is so cool! 
I'm changing time in a photograph. "" And that concept actually stayed with me for 13 years until technology finally has caught up to my dreams. 
This is an image I created of the Santa Monica Pier, Day to Night. 
And I'm going to show you a little video that gives you an idea of what it's like being with me when I do these pictures. 
To start with, you have to understand that to get views like this, most of my time is spent up high, and I'm usually in a cherry picker or a crane. 
So this is a typical day, 12-18 hours, non-stop capturing the entire day unfold. 
One of the things that's great is I love to people-watch. 
And trust me when I tell you, this is the greatest seat in the house to have. 
But this is really how I go about creating these photographs. 
So once I decide on my view and the location, I have to decide where day begins and night ends. 
And that's what I call the time vector. 
Einstein described time as a fabric. 
Think of the surface of a trampoline: it warps and stretches with gravity. 
I see time as a fabric as well, except I take that fabric and flatten it, compress it into single plane. 
One of the unique aspects of this work is also, if you look at all my pictures, the time vector changes: sometimes I'll go left to right, sometimes front to back, up or down, even diagonally. 
I am exploring the space-time continuum within a two-dimensional still photograph. 
Now when I do these pictures, it's literally like a real-time puzzle going on in my mind. 
I build a photograph based on time, and this is what I call the master plate. 
This can take us several months to complete. 
The fun thing about this work is I have absolutely zero control when I get up there on any given day and capture photographs. 
So I never know who's going to be in the picture, if it's going to be a great sunrise or sunset — no control. 
It's at the end of the process, if I've had a really great day and everything remained the same, that I then decide who's in and who's out, and it's all based on time. 
I'll take those best moments that I pick over a month of editing and they get seamlessly blended into the master plate. 
I'm compressing the day and night as I saw it, creating a unique harmony between these two very discordant worlds. 
Painting has always been a really important influence in all my work and I've always been a huge fan of Albert Bierstadt, the great Hudson River School painter. 
He inspired a recent series that I did on the National Parks. 
This is Bierstadt's Yosemite Valley. 
So this is the photograph I created of Yosemite. 
This is actually the cover story of the 2016 January issue of National Geographic. 
I photographed for over 30 hours in this picture. 
I was literally on the side of a cliff, capturing the stars and the moonlight as it transitions, the moonlight lighting El Capitan. 
And I also captured this transition of time throughout the landscape. 
The best part is obviously seeing the magical moments of humanity as time changed — from day into night. 
And on a personal note, I actually had a photocopy of Bierstadt's painting in my pocket. 
And when that sun started to rise in the valley, I started to literally shake with excitement because I looked at the painting and I go, "" Oh my god, I'm getting Bierstadt's exact same lighting 100 years earlier. "" Day to Night is about all the things, it's like a compilation of all the things I love about the medium of photography. 
It's about landscape, it's about street photography, it's about color, it's about architecture, perspective, scale — and, especially, history. 
This is one of the most historical moments I've been able to photograph, the 2013 Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama. 
And if you look closely in this picture, you can actually see time changing in those large television sets. 
You can see Michelle waiting with the children, the president now greets the crowd, he takes his oath, and now he's speaking to the people. 
There's so many challenging aspects when I create photographs like this. 
For this particular photograph, I was in a 50-foot scissor lift up in the air and it was not very stable. 
So every time my assistant and I shifted our weight, our horizon line shifted. 
So for every picture you see, and there were about 1,800 in this picture, we both had to tape our feet into position every time I clicked the shutter. 
(Applause) I've learned so many extraordinary things doing this work. 
I think the two most important are patience and the power of observation. 
When you photograph a city like New York from above, I discovered that those people in cars that I sort of live with everyday, they don't look like people in cars anymore. 
They feel like a giant school of fish, it was a form of emergent behavior. 
And when people describe the energy of New York, I think this photograph begins to really capture that. 
When you look closer in my work, you can see there's stories going on. 
You realize that Times Square is a canyon, it's shadow and it's sunlight. 
So I decided, in this photograph, I would checkerboard time. 
So wherever the shadows are, it's night and wherever the sun is, it's actually day. 
Time is this extraordinary thing that we never can really wrap our heads around. 
But in a very unique and special way, I believe these photographs begin to put a face on time. 
They embody a new metaphysical visual reality. 
When you spend 15 hours looking at a place, you're going to see things a little differently than if you or I walked up with our camera, took a picture, and then walked away. 
This was a perfect example. 
I call it "" Sacré-Coeur Selfie. "" I watched over 15 hours all these people not even look at Sacré-Coeur. 
They were more interested in using it as a backdrop. 
They would walk up, take a picture, and then walk away. 
And I found this to be an absolutely extraordinary example, a powerful disconnect between what we think the human experience is versus what the human experience is evolving into. 
The act of sharing has suddenly become more important than the experience itself. 
(Applause) And finally, my most recent image, which has such a special meaning for me personally: this is the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. 
And this is photographed in the middle of the Seronera, this is not a reserve. 
I went specifically during the peak migration to hopefully capture the most diverse range of animals. 
Unfortunately, when we got there, there was a drought going on during the peak migration, a five-week drought. 
So all the animals were drawn to the water. 
I found this one watering hole, and felt if everything remained the same way it was behaving, I had a real opportunity to capture something unique. 
We spent three days studying it, and nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed during our shoot day. 
I photographed for 26 hours in a sealed crocodile blind, 18 feet in the air. 
What I witnessed was unimaginable. 
Frankly, it was Biblical. 
We saw, for 26 hours, all these competitive species share a single resource called water. 
The same resource that humanity is supposed to have wars over during the next 50 years. 
The animals never even grunted at each other. 
They seem to understand something that we humans don't. 
That this precious resource called water is something we all have to share. 
When I created this picture, I realized that Day to Night is really a new way of seeing, compressing time, exploring the space-time continuum within a photograph. 
As technology evolves along with photography, photographs will not only communicate a deeper meaning of time and memory, but they will compose a new narrative of untold stories, creating a timeless window into our world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This means, "" I'm smiling. "" So does that. 
This means "" mouse. "" "Cat." 
Here we have a story. 
The start of the story, where this means guy, and that is a ponytail on a passer-by. 
Here's where it happens. 
These are when. 
This is a cassette tape the girl puts into her cassette-tape player. 
She wears it every day. 
It's not considered vintage — she just likes certain music to sound a certain way. 
Look at her posture; it's remarkable. 
That's because she dances. 
Now he, the guy, takes all of this in, figuring, "Honestly, geez, what are my chances?" 
(Laughter) And he could say, "" Oh my God! "" or "" I heart you! "" "I'm laughing out loud." 
"I want to give you a hug." 
But he comes up with that, you know. 
He tells her, "" I'd like to hand-paint your portrait on a coffee mug. "" (Laughter) Put a crab inside it. 
Add some water. 
Seven different salts. 
He means he's got this sudden notion to stand on dry land, but just panhandle at the ocean. 
He says, "" You look like a mermaid, but you walk like a waltz. "" And the girl goes, "" Wha '? "" So, the guy replies, "" Yeah, I know, I know. 
I think my heartbeat might be the Morse code for inappropriate. 
At least, that's how it seems. 
I'm like a junior varsity cheerleader sometimes — for swearing, awkward silences, and very simple rhyme schemes. 
Right now, talking to you, I'm not even really a guy. 
I'm a monkey — (Laughter) — blowing kisses at a butterfly. 
But I'm still suggesting you and I should meet. 
First, soon, and then a lot. 
I'm thinking the southwest corner of 5th and 42nd at noon tomorrow, but I'll stay until you show up, ponytail or not. 
Hell, ponytail alone. 
I don't know what else to tell you. 
I got a pencil you can borrow. 
You can put it in your phone. "" But the girl does not budge, does not smile, does not frown. 
She just says, "" No thank you. "" You know? 
["" i don't need 2 write it down. ""] (Applause) 

An image is worth more than a thousand words, so I'm going to start my talk by stop talking and show you a few images that I recently captured. 
So by now, my talk is already 6,000 words long, and I feel like I should stop here. 
(Laughter) At the same time, I probably owe you some explanation about the images that you just saw. 
What I am trying to do as a photographer, as an artist, is to bring the world of art and science together. 
Whether it is an image of a soap bubble captured at the very moment where it's bursting, as you can see in this image, whether it's a universe made of tiny little beads of oil paint, strange liquids that behave in very peculiar ways, or paint that is modeled by centrifugal forces, I'm always trying to link those two fields together. 
What I find very intriguing about those two is that they both look at the same thing: They are a response to their surroundings. 
And yet, they do it in a very different way. 
If you look at science on one hand, science is a very rational approach to its surroundings, whereas art on the other hand is usually an emotional approach to its surroundings. 
What I am trying to do is I'm trying to bring those two views into one so that my images both speak to the viewer's heart but also to the viewer's brain. 
Let me demonstrate this based on three projects. 
The first one has to do with making sound visible. 
Now as you may know, sound travels in waves, so if you have a speaker, a speaker actually does nothing else than taking the audio signal, transform it into a vibration, which is then transported through the air, is captured by our ear, and transformed into an audio signal again. 
Now I was thinking, how can I make those sound waves visible? 
So I came up with the following setup. 
I took a speaker, I placed a thin foil of plastic on top of that speaker, and then I added tiny little crystals on top of that speaker. 
And now, if I would play a sound through that speaker, it would cause the crystals to move up and down. 
Now this happens very fast, in the blink of an eye, so, together with LG, we captured this motion with a camera that is able to capture more than 3,000 frames per second. 
Let me show you what this looks like. 
(Music: "" Teardrop "" by Massive Attack) (Applause) Thank you very much. 
I agree, it looks pretty amazing. 
But I have to tell you a funny story. 
I got an indoor sunburn doing this while shooting in Los Angeles. 
Now in Los Angeles, you could get a decent sunburn just on any of the beaches, but I got mine indoors, and what happened is that, if you're shooting at 3,000 frames per second, you need to have a silly amount of light, lots of lights. 
So we had this speaker set up, and we had the camera facing it, and lots of lights pointing at the speaker, and I would set up the speaker, put the tiny little crystals on top of that speaker, and we would do this over and over again, and it was until midday that I realized that I had a completely red face because of the lights pointing at the speaker. 
What was so funny about it was that the speaker was only coming from the right side, so the right side of my face was completely red and I looked like the Phantom of the Opera for the rest of the week. 
Let me now turn to another project which involves less harmful substances. 
Has anyone of you heard of ferrofluid? 
Ah, some of you have. Excellent. 
Should I skip that part? 
(Laughter) Ferrofluid has a very strange behavior. 
It's a liquid that is completely black. 
It's got an oily consistency. 
And it's got tiny little particles of metal in it, which makes it magnetic. 
So if I now put this liquid into a magnetic field, it would change its appearance. 
Now I've got a live demonstration over here to show this to you. 
So I've got a camera pointing down at this plate, and underneath that plate, there is a magnet. 
Now I'm going to add some of that ferrofluid to that magnet. 
Let's just slightly move it to the right and maybe focus it a little bit more. Excellent. 
So what you can see now is that the ferrofluid has formed spikes. 
This is due to the attraction and the repulsion of the individual particles inside the liquid. 
Now this looks already quite interesting, but let me now add some watercolors to it. 
Those are just standard watercolors that you would paint with. 
You wouldn't paint with syringes, but it works just the same. 
So what happened now is, when the watercolor was flowing into the structure, the watercolors do not mix with the ferrofluid. 
That's because the ferrofluid itself is hydrophobic. 
That means it doesn't mix with the water. 
And at the same time, it tries to maintain its position above the magnet, and therefore, it creates those amazing-looking structures of channels and tiny little ponds of colorful water paint. 
So that was the second project. 
Let me now turn to the last project, which involves the national beverage of Scotland. 
(Laughter) This image, and also this one, were made using whiskey. 
Now you might ask yourself, how did he do that? 
Did he drink half a bottle of whiskey and then draw the hallucination he got from being drunk onto paper? 
I can assure you I was fully conscious while I was taking those pictures. 
Now, whiskey contains 40 percent of alcohol, and alcohol has got some very interesting properties. 
Maybe you have experienced some of those properties before, but I am talking about the physical properties, not the other ones. 
So when I open the bottle, the alcohol molecules would spread in the air, and that's because alcohol is a very volatile substance. 
And at the same time, alcohol is highly flammable. 
Let me demonstrate this over here. 
And what I have here is an empty glass vessel. 
It's got nothing in it. 
And now I'm going to fill it with oxygen and whiskey. 
Add some more. 
Now we just wait for a few seconds for the molecules to spread inside the bottle. 
And now, let's set that on fire. 
(Laughter) So that's all that happens. 
It goes really fast, and it's not that impressive. 
I could do it again to show it one more time, but some would argue that this is a complete waste of the whiskey, and that I should rather drink it. 
But let me show you a slow motion in a completely darkened room of what I just showed you in this live demonstration. 
So what happened is that the flame traveled through the glass vessel from top to bottom, burning the mix of the air molecules and the alcohol. 
So the images that you saw at the beginning, they are actually a flame stopped in time while it is traveling through the bottle, and you have to imagine it was flipped around 180 degrees. 
So that's how those images were made. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So, I have now showed you three projects, and you might ask yourself, what is it good for? 
What's the idea behind it? 
Is it just a waste of whiskey? 
Is it just some strange materials? 
Those three projects, they're based on very simple scientific phenomena, such as magnetism, the sound waves, or over here, the physical properties of a substance, and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to use these phenomena and show them in a poetic and unseen way, and therefore invite the viewer to pause for a moment and think about all the beauty that is constantly surrounding us. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So my name is Taylor Wilson. 
I am 17 years old and I am a nuclear physicist, which may be a little hard to believe, but I am. 
And I would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be that point, that the bridge that T. Boone Pickens talked about will get us to. 
So nuclear fusion is our energy future. 
And the second point, making the case that kids can really change the world. 
So you may ask — (Applause) You may ask me, well how do you know what our energy future is? 
Well I built a fusion reactor when I was 14 years old. 
That is the inside of my nuclear fusion reactor. 
I started building this project when I was about 12 or 13 years old. 
I decided I wanted to make a star. 
Now most of you are probably saying, well there's no such thing as nuclear fusion. 
I don't see any nuclear power plants with fusion energy. 
Well it doesn't break even. 
It doesn't produce more energy out than I put in, but it still does some pretty cool stuff. 
And I assembled this in my garage, and it now lives in the physics department of the University of Nevada, Reno. 
And it slams together deuterium, which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron in it. 
So this is similar to the reaction of the proton chain that's going on inside the Sun. 
And I'm slamming it together so hard that that hydrogen fuses together, and in the process it has some byproducts, and I utilize those byproducts. 
So this previous year, I won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. 
I developed a detector that replaces the current detectors that Homeland Security has. 
For hundreds of dollars, I've developed a system that exceeds the sensitivity of detectors that are hundreds of thousands of dollars. 
I built this in my garage. 
(Applause) And I've developed a system to produce medical isotopes. 
Instead of requiring multi-million-dollar facilities I've developed a device that, on a very small scale, can produce these isotopes. 
So that's my fusion reactor in the background there. 
That is me at the control panel of my fusion reactor. 
Oh, by the way, I make yellowcake in my garage, so my nuclear program is as advanced as the Iranians. 
So maybe I don't want to admit to that. 
This is me at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, which is the preeminent particle physics laboratory in the world. 
And this is me with President Obama, showing him my Homeland Security research. 
(Applause) So in about seven years of doing nuclear research, I started out with a dream to make a "" star in a jar, "" a star in my garage, and I ended up meeting the president and developing things that I think can change the world, and I think other kids can too. 
So thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

It's funny the things you forget. 
I went to see my mother the other day, and she told me this story that I'd completely forgotten about how, when we were driving together, she would pull the car over, and by the time she had gotten out of the car, and gone around the car to let me out of the car, I would have already gotten out of the car and pretended to have died. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Because that's how you die. (Laughter) 
And I remember, that was a game I used to play with myself to entertain myself whenever I was bored or frustrated. (Laughter) 
Settle down. (Laughter) 
People say we live in an age of information overload. Right? 
I don't know about that, but I just know that I get too many marketing emails. 
I got a marketing email from a supermarket firm, which will remain nameless for predominantly legal reasons, but which I'm going to call "" SafeMart. "" (Laughter) I got an email from them, and it went like this, it said: "Just three weeks until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!" 
And I resented this, because not only do I not remember signing up to that, but I resent the fact that they appear to think that I should be excited about a shop opening. 
So what I did was I scrolled down to the bottom of the email, and I pressed, "" Unsubscribe. "" And I thought that'd be the end of it. 
But a week later, I got another one that said, "" Just two weeks until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!! "" And I thought, obviously, I haven't clicked hard enough. 
So I tried it again. Right? 
Lo and behold, a week passes, you guessed it, "Just one week until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!" 
And here's the problem: The internet gave us access to everything; but it also gave everything access to us. 
It's hard enough to discriminate between the things that genuinely matter in this world and the minutiae of life, without having emails about supermarket chains and Candy Crush Saga. 
And I was really annoyed with them, and I thought, OK, I was about to write a strongly worded email, which I can do quite well. 
(Laughter) And I thought, no — I'm going to find the game. 
So I replied to it, and I said, "I literally cannot wait!!!!" 
(Laughter) "What do you need from me?" 
They got back to me; a guy called Dan said, "Hi James. I've asked a colleague to help me with your query." 
(Laughter) Like it needs help. 
And I said, "" What's the plan, Dan? 
I'm thinking fireworks, bouncy castle... "" (Laughter) "I'm not sure what you mean." (Laughter) 
I said, "" I'm just tremendously excited about the opening! "" (Laughter) "Do you want to book the bouncy castle or shall I?" 
He said, "" I think you have misunderstood. "" (Laughter) "A new store is opening, but there is no celebration planned." 
I said, "" But what was all the 'Three weeks until,' 'Two weeks until' emails? 
I was getting excited. "" (Laughter) "I'm sorry you're disappointed." (Laughter) 
I said, "" Not to worry. 
Let's do something anyway! 
Besides, the deposit on the bouncy castle was non-refundable. "" (Laughter) "If we don't use it, we're out a few hundred quid, Dan." (Laughter) 
He said, "" Mr. Veitch, I'm not responsible for anything you have ordered. "" I said, "" Let's not get into who did what. 
Bottom line: you and I are in this together. "" (Laughter) (Applause) "Question: Will you be there to make sure people take their shoes off?" (Laughter) 
I'll be honest, then my relationship with Dan deteriorated somewhat, because the next email I got was this: "Thanks for your email - your Case Number is..." (Laughter) 
That's outrageous. 
I said, "" Dan? "" (Laughter) And I got — and I was just like, this is... — and I, I.... 
And I said, "" Danny? "" And I thought, this is terrible. All I'm doing is collecting case numbers. 
I said, "" D-Dog? "" (Laughter) "The store is now open." (Laughter) 
I said, "" But Dan, they must have wondered why there was no bouncy castle. "" And then we were back to this. 
And that might have been the end of the story, but I remembered that anything — everything — even something as mundane as getting out of a car, can be fun if you find the right game. 
So, this is what I replied: [Thanks for your email - your Case Number is # 0000001.] (Laughter) (Applause) And we just, uh... (Laughter) 
It was like we were dancing. 
It was just a beautiful relationship. 
We just kept going. 
It was lovely. 
But to be honest, guys, it was quite labor-intensive, and I had other stuff to do, believe it or not. 
So what I did is I have a little email auto-replier program. 
And I set it up so every time it receives an email from SafeMart, it just pings one back. 
So I set it up, and it says, "Thanks for your email - your Case Number is..." 
Then it has a little formula that I wrote to up the case number every time. 
And I put it on the server and set it running. 
(Laughter) I'll be honest, guys — then I forgot about it. (Laughter) 
I checked back on it the other day, and it appears there have been a number of emails going back and forth. 
We're on 21,439. 
(Applause) It gives me an immense sense of satisfaction to know that these computer programs are just going to be pinging one another for eternity. 
And as legacies go, I don't think that's bad. 
So guys, just remember: if ever you feel weighed down by the bureaucracy and often mundanity of modern life, don't fight the frustration. 
Let it be the catalyst for whimsy. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination. 

I have a daughter, Mulan. 
And when she was eight, last year, she was doing a report for school or she had some homework about frogs. 
And we were at this restaurant, and she said, "" So, basically, frogs lay eggs and the eggs turn into tadpoles, and tadpoles turn into frogs. "" And I said, "" Yeah. You know, I'm not really up on my frog reproduction that much. 
It's the females, I think, that lay the eggs, and then the males fertilize them. 
And then they become tadpoles and frogs. "" And she says, "" What? Only the females have eggs? "" And I said, "" Yeah. "" And she goes, "" And what's this fertilizing? "" So I kind of said, "" Oh, it's this extra ingredient, you know, that you need to create a new frog from the mom and dad frog. "" (Laughter) And she said, "" Oh, so is that true for humans too? "" And I thought, "" Okay, here we go. "" I didn't know it would happen so quick, at eight. 
I was trying to remember all the guidebooks, and all I could remember was, "" Only answer the question they're asking. 
Don't give any more information. "" (Laughter) So I said, "" Yes. "" And she said, "" And where do, um, where do human women, like, where do women lay their eggs? "" And I said, "" Well, funny you should ask. (Laughter) We have evolved to have our own pond. 
We have our very own pond inside our bodies. 
And we lay our eggs there, we don't have to worry about other eggs or anything like that. 
It's our own pond. And that's how it happens. "" And she goes, "" Then how do they get fertilized? "" And I said, "" Well, Men, through their penis, they fertilize the eggs by the sperm coming out. 
And you go through the woman's vagina. "" And so we're just eating, and her jaw just drops, and she goes, "" Mom! 
Like, where you go to the bathroom? "" And I said, "" I know. 
I know. "" (Laughter) That's how we evolved. It does seem odd. 
It is a little bit like having a waste treatment plant right next to an amusement park... 
Bad zoning, but... "" (Laughter) She's like, "" What? "" And she goes, "" But Mom, but men and women can't ever see each other naked, Mom. 
So how could that ever happen? "" And then I go, "" Well, "" and then I put my Margaret Mead hat on. 
"" Human males and females develop a special bond, and when they're much older, much, much older than you, and they have a very special feeling, then they can be naked together. "" And she said, "" Mom, have you done this before? "" And I said, "" Yes. "" And she said, "" But Mom, you can't have kids. "" Because she knows that I adopted her and that I can't have kids. And I said, "" Yes. "" 
And she said, "" Well, you don't have to do that again. "" And I said, ""... "" And then she said, "" But how does it happen when a man and woman are together? 
Mom, does the man just say, 'Is now the time to take off my pants?' "" (Laughter) And I said, "" Yes. "" (Laughter) "" That is exactly right. 
That's exactly how it happens. "" So we're driving home and she's looking out the window, and she goes, "" Mom. What if two just people saw each other on the street, like a man and a woman, they just started doing it. Would that ever happen? "" And I said, "" Oh, no. Humans are so private. 
Oh... "" And then she goes, "" What if there was like a party, and there was just like a whole bunch of girls and a whole bunch of boys, and there was a bunch of men and women and they just started doing it, Mom? 
Would that ever happen? "" And I said, "" Oh, no, no. 
That's not how we do it. "" Then we got home and we see the cat. And she goes, "Mom, how do cats do it?" 
I don't understand the legs. "" She goes, "" Mom, everyone can't do the splits. "" And I go, "" I know, but the legs... "" and I'm probably like, "" The legs get worked out. "" And she goes, "" But I just can't understand it. "" So I go, "" You know, why don't we go on the Internet, and maybe we can see... like on Wikipedia. "" (Laughter) So we go online, and we put in "" cats mating. "" And, unfortunately, on YouTube, there's many cats mating videos. 
And we watched them and I'm so thankful, because she's just like, "" Wow! This is so amazing. "" She goes, "" What about dogs? "" So we put in dogs mating, and, you know, we're watching it, and she's totally absorbed. 
And then she goes, "" Mom, do you think they would have, on the Internet, any humans mating? "" (Laughter) And then I realized that I had taken my little eight year old's hand, and taken her right into Internet porn. (Laughter) And I looked into this trusting, loving face, and I said, "" Oh, no. 
That would never happen. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. 

(Music) Dannielle Hadley: Life in Pennsylvania means just that: life without the possibility of parole. 
For us lifers, as we call ourselves, our only chance for release is through commutation, which has only been granted to two women since 1989, close to 30 years ago. 
Our song, "" This Is Not Our Home, "" it tells of our experiences while doing life without the possibility of parole. 
(Music) Brenda Watkins: I'm a woman. 
I'm a grandmother. 
I'm a daughter. 
I have a son. 
I'm not an angel. 
I'm not the devil. 
I came to jail when I was so young. 
I spend my time here inside these prison walls. 
Lost friends to death, saw some go home. 
Watch years pass, people come and go, while I do life without parole. 
I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done. 
I'm doing time here. 
This is not my home. 
Dream of freedom, hope for mercy. 
Will I see my family or die alone? 
As the years go by, I hold back my tears, because if I cry I'd give in to fear. 
I must be strong, have to hold on. 
Gotta get through another year. 
I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done. 
I'm doing time here. This is not my home. 
Dream of freedom, hope for mercy. 
Will I see my family or die alone? 
I'm not saying that I'm not guilty, I'm not saying that I shouldn't pay. 
All I'm asking is for forgiveness. 
Gotta have hope I'll be free someday. 
Is there a place for me in the world out there? 
Will they ever know or care that I'm chained? 
Is there redemption for the sin of my younger days? 
Because I've changed. 
Lord knows I've changed. 
I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done. 
I'm doing time here. This is not my home. 
Dream of freedom, hope for mercy. 
Will I see my family or die alone? Will I see my family or die alone? 
I'm known to you as Inmate 008106. Incarcerated 29 years. My name is Brenda Watkins. I was born and raised in Hoffman, North Carolina. This is not my home. (Applause) 
Thelma Nichols: Inmate number 0B2472. 
I've been incarcerated for 27 years. 
My name is Thelma Nichols. 
I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A. 
This is not my home. 
(Applause) DH: 008494. 
I've been incarcerated for 27 years. 
My name is Dannielle Hadley. 
I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A, and this is not my home. 
(Applause) Theresa Battles: Inmate 008309. 
I've been incarcerated for 27 years. 
My name is Theresa Battles. 
I'm from Norton, New Jersey, and this is not my home. 
(Applause) Debra Brown: I am known as Inmate 007080. 
I've been incarcerated for 30 years. 
My name is Debra Brown. 
I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 
This is not my home. 
(Applause) Joann Butler: 005961. 
I've been incarcerated for 37 years. 
My name is Joann Butler, and I was born and raised in Philadelphia. 
This is not my home. 
(Applause) Diane Hamill Metzger: Number 005634. 
I've been incarcerated for 39 and one half years. 
My name is Diane Hamill Metzger. 
I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home. 
(Applause) Lena Brown: I am 004867. 
Incarcerated 40 years. 
My name is Lena Brown, and I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home. 
(Applause) Trina Garnett: My number is 005545. 
My name is Trina Garnett, I've been incarcerated for 37 years, since I was 14 years old. 
Born and raised in Chester, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home. 
(Applause) Will I see my family or die alone? 
Or die alone? 
(Applause) 

By raising your hand, how many of you know at least one person on the screen? 
Wow, it's almost a full house. 
It's true, they are very famous in their fields. 
And do you know what all of them have in common? 
They all died of pancreatic cancer. 
However, although it's very, very sad this news, it's also thanks to their personal stories that we have raised awareness of how lethal this disease can be. 
It's become the third cause of cancer deaths, and only eight percent of the patients will survive beyond five years. 
That's a very tiny number, especially if you compare it with breast cancer, where the survival rate is almost 90 percent. 
So it doesn't really come as a surprise that being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer means facing an almost certain death sentence. 
What's shocking, though, is that in the last 40 years, this number hasn't changed a bit, while much more progress has been made with other types of tumors. 
So how can we make pancreatic cancer treatment more effective? 
As a biomedical entrepreneur, I like to work on problems that seem impossible, understanding their limitations and trying to find new, innovative solutions that can change their outcome. 
The first piece of bad news with pancreatic cancer is that your pancreas is in the middle of your belly, literally. 
It's depicted in orange on the screen. 
But you can barely see it until I remove all the other organs in front. 
It's also surrounded by many other vital organs, like the liver, the stomach, the bile duct. 
And the ability of the tumor to grow into those organs is the reason why pancreatic cancer is one of the most painful tumor types. 
The hard-to-reach location also prevents the doctor from surgically removing it, as is routinely done for breast cancer, for example. 
So all of these reasons leave chemotherapy as the only option for the pancreatic cancer patient. 
This brings us to the second piece of bad news. 
Pancreatic cancer tumors have very few blood vessels. 
Why should we care about the blood vessel of a tumor? 
Let's think for a second how chemotherapy works. 
The drug is injected in the vein and it navigates throughout the body until it reaches the tumor site. 
It's like driving on a highway, trying to reach a destination. 
But what if your destination doesn't have an exit on the highway? 
You will never get there. 
And that's exactly the same problem for chemotherapy and pancreatic cancer. 
The drugs navigate throughout all of your body. 
They will reach healthy organs, resulting in high toxic effect for the patients overall, but very little will go to the tumor. 
Therefore, the efficacy is very limited. 
To me, it seems very counterintuitive to have a whole-body treatment to target a specific organ. 
However, in the last 40 years, a lot of money, research and effort have gone towards finding new, powerful drugs to treat pancreatic cancer, but nothing has been done in changing the way we deliver them to the patient. 
So after two pieces of bad news, I'm going to give you good news, hopefully. 
With a collaborator at MIT and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, we have revolutionized the way we treat cancer by making localized drug delivery a reality. 
We are basically parachuting you on top of your destination, avoiding your having to drive all around the highway. 
We have embedded the drug into devices that look like this one. 
They are flexible enough that they can be folded to fit into the catheter, so the doctor can implant it directly on top of the tumor with minimally invasive surgery. 
But they are solid enough that once they are positioned on top of the tumor, they will act as a cage. 
They will actually physically prevent the tumor from entering other organs, controlling the metastasis. 
The devices are also biodegradable. 
That means that once in the body, they start dissolving, delivering the drug only locally, slowly and more effectively than what is done with the current whole-body treatment. 
In pre-clinical study, we have demonstrated that this localized approach is able to improve by 12 times the response to treatment. 
So we took a drug that is already known and by just delivering it locally where it's needed the most, we allow a response that is 12 times more powerful, reducing the systemic toxic effect. 
We are working relentlessly to bring this technology to the next level. 
We are finalizing the pre-clinical testing and the animal model required prior to asking the FDA for approval for clinical trials. 
Currently, the majority of patients will die from pancreatic cancer. 
We are hoping that one day, we can reduce their pain, extend their life and potentially make pancreatic cancer a curable disease. 
By rethinking the way we deliver the drug, we don't only make it more powerful and less toxic, we are also opening the door to finding new innovative solutions for almost all other impossible problems in pancreatic cancer patients and beyond. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Code is the next universal language. 
In the seventies, it was punk music that drove the whole generation. 
In the eighties, it was probably money. 
But for my generation of people, software is the interface to our imagination and our world. 
And that means that we need a radically, radically more diverse set of people to build those products, to not see computers as mechanical and lonely and boring and magic, to see them as things that they can tinker and turn around and twist, and so forth. 
My personal journey into the world of programming and technology started at the tender age of 14. 
I had this mad teenage crush on an older man, and the older man in question just happened to be the then Vice President of the United States, Mr. Al Gore. 
And I did what every single teenage girl would want to do. 
I wanted to somehow express all of this love, so I built him a website, it's over here. 
And in 2001, there was no Tumblr, there was no Facebook, there was no Pinterest. 
So I needed to learn to code in order to express all of this longing and loving. 
And that is how programming started for me. 
It started as a means of self-expression. 
Just like when I was smaller, I would use crayons and legos. 
And when I was older, I would use guitar lessons and theater plays. 
But then, there were other things to get excited about, like poetry and knitting socks and conjugating French irregular verbs and coming up with make-believe worlds and Bertrand Russell and his philosophy. 
And I started to be one of those people who felt that computers are boring and technical and lonely. 
Here's what I think today. 
Little girls don't know that they are not supposed to like computers. 
Little girls are amazing. 
They are really, really good at concentrating on things and being exact and they ask amazing questions like, "What?" and "Why?" and "How?" and "What if?" 
And they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers. 
It's the parents who do. 
It's us parents who feel like computer science is this esoteric, weird science discipline that only belongs to the mystery makers. 
That it's almost as far removed from everyday life as, say, nuclear physics. 
And they are partly right about that. 
There's a lot of syntax and controls and data structures and algorithms and practices, protocols and paradigms in programming. 
And we as a community, we've made computers smaller and smaller. 
We've built layers and layers of abstraction on top of each other between the man and the machine to the point that we no longer have any idea how computers work or how to talk to them. 
And we do teach our kids how the human body works, we teach them how the combustion engine functions and we even tell them that if you want to really be an astronaut you can become one. 
But when the kid comes to us and asks, "So, what is a bubble sort algorithm?" 
Or, "" How does the computer know what happens when I press' play, 'how does it know which video to show? "" Or, "" Linda, is Internet a place? "" We adults, we grow oddly silent. 
"" It's magic, "" some of us say. 
"" It's too complicated, "" the others say. 
Well, it's neither. 
It's not magic and it's not complicated. 
It all just happened really, really, really fast. 
Computer scientists built these amazing, beautiful machines, but they made them very, very foreign to us, and also the language we speak to the computers so that we don't know how to speak to the computers anymore without our fancy user interfaces. 
And that's why no one recognized that when I was conjugating French irregular verbs, I was actually practicing my pattern recognition skills. 
And when I was excited about knitting, I actually was following a sequence of symbolic commands that included loops inside of them. 
And that Bertrand Russell's lifelong quest to find an exact language between English and mathematics found its home inside of a computer. 
I was a programmer, but no one knew it. 
The kids of today, they tap, swipe and pinch their way through the world. 
But unless we give them tools to build with computers, we are raising only consumers instead of creators. 
This whole quest led me to this little girl. 
Her name is Ruby, she is six years old. 
She is completely fearless, imaginative and a little bit bossy. 
And every time I would run into a problem in trying to teach myself programming like, "" What is object-oriented design or what is garbage collection? "", I would try to imagine how a six-year-old little girl would explain the problem. 
And I wrote a book about her and I illustrated it and the things Ruby taught me go like this. 
Ruby taught me that you're not supposed to be afraid of the bugs under your bed. 
And even the biggest of the problems are a group of tiny problems stuck together. 
And Ruby also introduced me to her friends, the colorful side of the Internet culture. 
She has friends like the Snow Leopard, who is beautiful but doesn't want to play with the other kids. 
And she has friends like the green robots that are really friendly but super messy. 
And she has friends like Linux the penguin who's really ruthlessly efficient, but somewhat hard to understand. 
And idealistic foxes, and so on. 
In Ruby's world, you learn technology through play. 
And, for instance, computers are really good at repeating stuff, so the way Ruby would teach loops goes like this. 
This is Ruby's favorite dance move, it goes, "" Clap, clap, stomp, stomp clap, clap and jump. "" And you learn counter loops by repeating that four times. 
And you learn while loops by repeating that sequence while I'm standing on one leg. 
And you learn until loops by repeating that sequence until mom gets really mad. 
(Laughter) And most of all, you learn that there are no ready answers. 
When coming up with the curriculum for Ruby's world, I needed to really ask the kids how they see the world and what kind of questions they have and I would organize play testing sessions. 
I would start by showing the kids these four pictures. 
I would show them a picture of a car, a grocery store, a dog and a toilet. 
And I would ask, "" Which one of these do you think is a computer? "" And the kids would be very conservative and go, "" None of these is a computer. 
I know what a computer is: it's that glowing box in front of which mom or dad spends way too much time. "" But then we would talk and we would discover that actually, a car is a computer, it has a navigation system inside of it. 
And a dog — a dog might not be a computer, but it has a collar and the collar might have a computer inside of it. 
And grocery stores, they have so many different kinds of computers, like the cashier system and the burglar alarms. 
And kids, you know what? 
In Japan, toilets are computers and there's even hackers who hack them. 
(Laughter) And we go further and I give them these little stickers with an on / off button on them. 
And I tell the kids, "" Today you have this magic ability to make anything in this room into a computer. "" And again, the kids go, "Sounds really hard, I don't know the right answer for this." 
But I tell them, "" Don't worry, your parents don't know the right answer, either. 
They've just started to hear about this thing called The Internet of Things. 
But you kids, you are going to be the ones who are really going to live up in a world where everything is a computer. "" And then I had this little girl who came to me and took a bicycle lamp and she said, "" This bicycle lamp, if it were a computer, it would change colors. "" And I said, "" That's a really good idea, what else could it do? "" And she thinks and she thinks, and she goes, "" If this bicycle lamp were a computer, we could go on a biking trip with my father and we would sleep in a tent 
and this biking lamp could also be a movie projector. "" And that's the moment I'm looking for, the moment when the kid realizes that the world is definitely not ready yet, that a really awesome way of making the world more ready is by building technology and that each one of us can be a part of that change. 
Final story, we also built a computer. 
And we got to know the bossy CPU and the helpful RAM and ROM that help it remember things. 
And after we've assembled our computer together, we also design an application for it. 
And my favorite story is this little boy, he's six years old and his favorite thing in the world is to be an astronaut. 
And the boy, he has these huge headphones on and he's completely immersed in his tiny paper computer because you see, he's built his own intergalactic planetary navigation application. 
And his father, the lone astronaut in the Martian orbit, is on the other side of the room and the boy's important mission is to bring the father safely back to earth. 
And these kids are going to have a profoundly different view of the world and the way we build it with technology. 
Finally, the more approachable, the more inclusive, and the more diverse we make the world of technology, the more colorful and better the world will look like. 
So, imagine with me, for a moment, a world where the stories we tell about how things get made don't only include the twentysomething-year-old Silicon Valley boys, but also Kenyan schoolgirls and Norwegian librarians. 
Imagine a world where the little Ada Lovelaces of tomorrow, who live in a permanent reality of 1s and 0s, they grow up to be very optimistic and brave about technology. 
They embrace the powers and the opportunities and the limitations of the world. 
A world of technology that is wonderful, whimsical and a tiny bit weird. 
When I was a girl, I wanted to be a storyteller. 
I loved make-believe worlds and my favorite thing to do was to wake up in the mornings in Moominvalley. 
In the afternoons, I would roam around the Tatooines. 
And in the evenings, I would go to sleep in Narnia. 
And programming turned out to be the perfect profession for me. 
I still create worlds. 
Instead of stories, I do them with code. 
Programming gives me this amazing power to build my whole little universe with its own rules and paradigms and practices. 
Create something out of nothing with the pure power of logic. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Your company launches a search for an open position. 
The applications start rolling in, and the qualified candidates are identified. 
Now the choosing begins. 
Person A: Ivy League, 4.0, flawless resume, great recommendations. 
All the right stuff. 
Person B: state school, fair amount of job hopping, and odd jobs like cashier and singing waitress. 
But remember — both are qualified. 
So I ask you: who are you going to pick? 
My colleagues and I created very official terms to describe two distinct categories of candidates. 
We call A "" the Silver Spoon, "" the one who clearly had advantages and was destined for success. 
And we call B "" the Scrapper, "" the one who had to fight against tremendous odds to get to the same point. 
You just heard a human resources director refer to people as Silver Spoons and Scrappers — (Laughter) which is not exactly politically correct and sounds a bit judgmental. 
But before my human resources certification gets revoked — (Laughter) let me explain. 
A resume tells a story. 
And over the years, I've learned something about people whose experiences read like a patchwork quilt, that makes me stop and fully consider them before tossing their resumes away. 
A series of odd jobs may indicate inconsistency, lack of focus, unpredictability. 
Or it may signal a committed struggle against obstacles. 
At the very least, the Scrapper deserves an interview. 
To be clear, I don't hold anything against the Silver Spoon; getting into and graduating from an elite university takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice. 
But if your whole life has been engineered toward success, how will you handle the tough times? 
One person I hired felt that because he attended an elite university, there were certain assignments that were beneath him, like temporarily doing manual labor to better understand an operation. 
Eventually, he quit. 
But on the flip side, what happens when your whole life is destined for failure and you actually succeed? 
I want to urge you to interview the Scrapper. 
I know a lot about this because I am a Scrapper. 
Before I was born, my father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he couldn't hold a job in spite of his brilliance. 
Our lives were one part "" Cuckoo's Nest, "" one part "" Awakenings "" and one part "" A Beautiful Mind. "" (Laughter) I'm the fourth of five children raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. 
We never owned a home, a car, a washing machine, and for most of my childhood, we didn't even have a telephone. 
So I was highly motivated to understand the relationship between business success and Scrappers, because my life could easily have turned out very differently. 
As I met successful business people and read profiles of high-powered leaders, I noticed some commonality. 
Many of them had experienced early hardships, anywhere from poverty, abandonment, death of a parent while young, to learning disabilities, alcoholism and violence. 
The conventional thinking has been that trauma leads to distress, and there's been a lot of focus on the resulting dysfunction. 
But during studies of dysfunction, data revealed an unexpected insight: that even the worst circumstances can result in growth and transformation. 
A remarkable and counterintuitive phenomenon has been discovered, which scientists call Post Traumatic Growth. 
In one study designed to measure the effects of adversity on children at risk, among a subset of 698 children who experienced the most severe and extreme conditions, fully one-third grew up to lead healthy, successful and productive lives. 
In spite of everything and against tremendous odds, they succeeded. 
One-third. 
Take this resume. 
This guy's parents give him up for adoption. 
He never finishes college. 
He job-hops quite a bit, goes on a sojourn to India for a year, and to top it off, he has dyslexia. 
Would you hire this guy? 
His name is Steve Jobs. 
In a study of the world's most highly successful entrepreneurs, it turns out a disproportionate number have dyslexia. 
In the US, 35 percent of the entrepreneurs studied had dyslexia. 
What's remarkable — among those entrepreneurs who experience post traumatic growth, they now view their learning disability as a desirable difficulty which provided them an advantage because they became better listeners and paid greater attention to detail. 
They don't think they are who they are in spite of adversity, they know they are who they are because of adversity. 
They embrace their trauma and hardships as key elements of who they've become, and know that without those experiences, they might not have developed the muscle and grit required to become successful. 
One of my colleagues had his life completely upended as a result of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966. 
At age 13, his parents were relocated to the countryside, the schools were closed and he was left alone in Beijing to fend for himself until 16, when he got a job in a clothing factory. 
But instead of accepting his fate, he made a resolution that he would continue his formal education. 
Eleven years later, when the political landscape changed, he heard about a highly selective university admissions test. 
He had three months to learn the entire curriculum of middle and high school. 
So, every day he came home from the factory, took a nap, studied until 4am, went back to work and repeated this cycle every day for three months. 
He did it, he succeeded. 
His commitment to his education was unwavering, and he never lost hope. 
Today, he holds a master's degree, and his daughters each have degrees from Cornell and Harvard. 
Scrappers are propelled by the belief that the only person you have full control over is yourself. 
When things don't turn out well, Scrappers ask, "" What can I do differently to create a better result? "" Scrappers have a sense of purpose that prevents them from giving up on themselves, kind of like if you've survived poverty, a crazy father and several muggings, you figure, "" Business challenges? — (Laughter) Really? 
Piece of cake. I got this. "" (Laughter) And that reminds me — humor. 
Scrappers know that humor gets you through the tough times, and laughter helps you change your perspective. 
And finally, there are relationships. 
People who overcome adversity don't do it alone. 
Somewhere along the way, they find people who bring out the best in them and who are invested in their success. 
Having someone you can count on no matter what is essential to overcoming adversity. 
I was lucky. 
In my first job after college, I didn't have a car, so I carpooled across two bridges with a woman who was the president's assistant. 
She watched me work and encouraged me to focus on my future and not dwell on my past. 
Along the way I've met many people who've provided me brutally honest feedback, advice and mentorship. 
These people don't mind that I once worked as a singing waitress to help pay for college. 
(Laughter) I'll leave you with one final, valuable insight. 
Companies that are committed to diversity and inclusive practices tend to support Scrappers and outperform their peers. 
According to DiversityInc, a study of their top 50 companies for diversity outperformed the S & P 500 by 25 percent. 
So back to my original question. 
Who are you going to bet on: Silver Spoon or Scrapper? 
I say choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose. 
Hire the Scrapper. 
(Applause) 

I ’ d like to dedicate this next song to Carmelo, who was put to sleep a couple of days ago, because he got too old. 
But apparently he was a very nice dog and he always let the cat sleep in the dog bed. 
♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫ ♫ I'm just a'walking my dog, singing my song, strolling along. ♫ ♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, catching some sun. We can't go wrong. ♫ ♫ My life was lonely and blue. ♫ ♫ Yeah, I was sad as a sailor, ♫ ♫ I was an angry 'un too. ♫ ♫ Then there was you — appeared when I was entangled with youth and fear, ♫ ♫ and nerves jingle jangled, vermouth and beer were getting me mangled up. ♫ ♫ But then I looked in your eyes ♫ 
♫ and I was no more a failure. ♫ ♫ You looked so wacky and wise. ♫ ♫ And I said, "" Lord, I'm happy, 'cause I'm just a'walking my dog, ♫ ♫ catching some sun. We can't go wrong. "" ♫ ♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, singing our song, strolling along. ♫ ♫' Cause I don't care about your hating and your doubt, ♫ ♫ and I don't care what the politicians spout. ♫ ♫ If you need a companion, why, just go out to the pound, ♫ ♫ and find yourself a hound, and make that doggie proud, ♫ 
♫ 'cause that's what it's all about. ♫ ♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫ ♫ My life was tragic and sad. ♫ ♫ I was the archetypal loser. ♫ ♫ I was a pageant gone bad. ♫ ♫ And then there was you — on time, and wagging your tail ♫ ♫ in the cutest mime that you was in jail. ♫ ♫ I said, "" Woof, be mine! "" and you gave a wail and then ♫ ♫ I was no longer alone. ♫ ♫ And I was no more a boozer. ♫ 
♫ We'll make the happiest home. ♫ ♫ And I said, "" Lord, I'm happy, 'cause I ’ m just a'walking my dog, ♫ ♫ singing my song, strolling along. "" ♫ ♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, catching some sun. We can't go wrong, ♫ ♫' cause I don't care about your hating and your doubt, ♫ ♫ and I don ’ t care what the politicians spout. ♫ ♫ If you need a companion, why, just go out to the pound, ♫ ♫ and find yourself a hound, and make that doggie proud, ♫ ♫ 'cause that's what it's all about, ♫ ♫ that's what it's all about, ♫ 
♫ that's what it's all abou-BOW-WOW-WOW-WOW ♫ ♫ that's what it's all about. ♫ ♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫ Good dog! 
Thank you. 

I'm used to thinking of the TED audience as a wonderful collection of some of the most effective, intelligent, intellectual, savvy, worldly and innovative people in the world. 
And I think that's true. 
However, I also have reason to believe that many, if not most, of you are actually tying your shoes incorrectly. 
(Laughter) Now I know that seems ludicrous. I know that seems ludicrous. 
And believe me, I lived the same sad life until about three years ago. And what happened to me 
was I bought, what was for me, a very expensive pair of shoes. 
But those shoes came with round nylon laces, and I couldn't keep them tied. 
So I went back to the store and said to the owner, "I love the shoes, but I hate the laces." 
He took a look and said, "" Oh, you're tying them wrong. "" Now up until that moment, I would have thought that, by age 50, one of the life skills that I had really nailed was tying my shoes. 
(Laughter) But not so — let me demonstrate. 
This is the way that most of us were taught to tie our shoes. 
Now as it turns out — thank you. 
(Applause) Wait, there's more. 
As it turns out — (Laughter) there's a strong form and a weak form of this knot, and we were taught the weak form. 
And here's how to tell. 
If you pull the strands at the base of the knot, you will see that the bow will orient itself down the long axis of the shoe. 
That's the weak form of the knot. 
But not to worry. 
If we start over and simply go the other direction around the bow, we get this, the strong form of the knot. 
And if you pull the cords under the knot, you will see that the bow orients itself along the transverse axis of the shoe. 
This is a stronger knot. 
It will come untied less often. 
It will let you down less, and not only that, it looks better. 
We're going to do this one more time. 
(Applause) Start as usual — (Applause) go the other way around the loop. 
This is a little hard for children, but I think you can handle it. 
Pull the knot. 
There it is: the strong form of the shoe knot. 
Now, in keeping with today's theme, I'd like to point out — something you already know — that sometimes a small advantage someplace in life can yield tremendous results someplace else. 
(Laughter) Live long and prosper. 
(Applause) 

I believe that there are new, hidden tensions that are actually happening between people and institutions — institutions that are the institutions that people inhabit in their daily life: schools, hospitals, workplaces, factories, offices, etc. 
And something that I see happening is something that I would like to call a sort of "" democratization of intimacy. "" And what do I mean by that? 
I mean that what people are doing is, in fact, they are sort of, with their communication channels, they are breaking an imposed isolation that these institutions are imposing on them. 
How are they doing this? They're doing it in a very simple way, by calling their mom from work, by IMing from their office to their friends, by texting under the desk. 
The pictures that you're seeing behind me are people that I visited in the last few months. 
And I asked them to come along with the person they communicate with most. 
And somebody brought a boyfriend, somebody a father. 
One young woman brought her grandfather. 
For 20 years, I've been looking at how people use channels such as email, the mobile phone, texting, etc. 
What we're actually going to see is that, fundamentally, people are communicating on a regular basis with five, six, seven of their most intimate sphere. 
Now, lets take some data. Facebook. 
Recently some sociologists from Facebook — Facebook is the channel that you would expect is the most enlargening of all channels. 
And an average user, said Cameron Marlow, from Facebook, has about 120 friends. 
But he actually talks to, has two-way exchanges with, about four to six people on a regular base, depending on his gender. 
Academic research on instant messaging also shows 100 people on buddy lists, but fundamentally people chat with two, three, four — anyway, less than five. 
My own research on cellphones and voice calls shows that 80 percent of the calls are actually made to four people. 80 percent. 
And when you go to Skype, it's down to two people. 
A lot of sociologists actually are quite disappointed. 
I mean, I've been a bit disappointed sometimes when I saw this data and all this deployment, just for five people. 
And some sociologists actually feel that it's a closure, it's a cocooning, that we're disengaging from the public. 
And I would actually, I would like to show you that if we actually look at who is doing it, and from where they're doing it, actually there is an incredible social transformation. 
There are three stories that I think are quite good examples. 
The first gentleman, he's a baker. 
And so he starts working every morning at four o'clock in the morning. 
And around eight o'clock he sort of sneaks away from his oven, cleans his hands from the flour and calls his wife. 
He just wants to wish her a good day, because that's the start of her day. 
And I've heard this story a number of times. 
A young factory worker who works night shifts, who manages to sneak away from the factory floor, where there is CCTV by the way, and find a corner, where at 11 o'clock at night he can call his girlfriend and just say goodnight. 
Or a mother who, at four o'clock, suddenly manages to find a corner in the toilet to check that her children are safely home. 
Then there is another couple, there is a Brazilian couple. 
They've lived in Italy for a number of years. 
They Skype with their families a few times a week. 
But once a fortnight, they actually put the computer on their dining table, pull out the webcam and actually have dinner with their family in Sao Paulo. And they have a big event of it. 
And I heard this story the first time a couple of years ago from a very modest family of immigrants from Kosovo in Switzerland. 
They had set up a big screen in their living room, and every morning they had breakfast with their grandmother. 
But Danny Miller, who is a very good anthropologist who is working on Filipina migrant women who leave their children back in the Philippines, was telling me about how much parenting is going on through Skype, and how much these mothers are engaged with their children through Skype. 
And then there is the third couple. They are two friends. 
They chat to each other every day, a few times a day actually. 
And finally, finally, they've managed to put instant messaging on their computers at work. 
And now, obviously, they have it open. 
Whenever they have a moment they chat to each other. 
And this is exactly what we've been seeing with teenagers and kids doing it in school, under the table, and texting under the table to their friends. 
So, none of these cases are unique. 
I mean, I could tell you hundreds of them. 
But what is really exceptional is the setting. 
So, think of the three settings I've talked to you about: factory, migration, office. 
But it could be in a school, it could be an administration, it could be a hospital. 
Three settings that, if we just step back 15 years, if you just think back 15 years, when you clocked in, when you clocked in to an office, when you clocked in to a factory, there was no contact for the whole duration of the time, there was no contact with your private sphere. 
If you were lucky there was a public phone hanging in the corridor or somewhere. 
If you were in management, oh, that was a different story. 
Maybe you had a direct line. 
If you were not, you maybe had to go through an operator. 
But basically, when you walked into those buildings, the private sphere was left behind you. 
And this has become such a norm of our professional lives, such a norm and such an expectation. 
And it had nothing to do with technical capability. 
The phones were there. But the expectation was once you moved in there your commitment was fully to the task at hand, fully to the people around you. 
That was where the focus had to be. 
And this has become such a cultural norm that we actually school our children for them to be capable to do this cleavage. 
If you think nursery, kindergarten, first years of school are just dedicated to take away the children, to make them used to staying long hours away from their family. 
And then the school enacts perfectly well. 
It mimics perfectly all the rituals that we will find in offices: rituals of entry, rituals of exit, the schedules, the uniforms in this country, things that identify you, team-building activities, team building that will allow you to basically be with a random group of kids, or a random group of people that you will have to be with for a number of time. 
And of course, the major thing: learn to pay attention, to concentrate and focus your attention. 
This only started about 150 years ago. 
It only started with the birth of modern bureaucracy, and of industrial revolution. 
When people basically had to go somewhere else to work and carry out the work. 
And when with modern bureaucracy there was a very rational approach, where there was a clear distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere. 
So, until then, basically people were living on top of their trades. 
They were living on top of the land they were laboring. 
They were living on top of the workshops where they were working. 
And if you think, it's permeated our whole culture, even our cities. 
If you think of medieval cities, medieval cities the boroughs all have the names of the guilds and professions that lived there. 
Now we have sprawling residential suburbias that are well distinct from production areas and commercial areas. 
And actually, over these 150 years, there has been a very clear class system that also has emerged. 
So the lower the status of the job and of the person carrying out, the more removed he would be from his personal sphere. 
People have taken this amazing possibility of actually being in contact all through the day or in all types of situations. 
And they are doing it massively. 
The Pew Institute, which produces good data on a regular basis on, for instance, in the States, says that — and I think that this number is conservative — 50 percent of anybody with email access at work is actually doing private email from his office. 
I really think that the number is conservative. 
In my own research, we saw that the peak for private email is actually 11 o'clock in the morning, whatever the country. 
75 percent of people admit doing private conversations from work on their mobile phones. 
100 percent are using text. 
The point is that this re-appropriation of the personal sphere is not terribly successful with all institutions. 
I'm always surprised the U.S. Army sociologists are discussing of the impact for instance, of soldiers in Iraq having daily contact with their families. 
But there are many institutions that are actually blocking this access. 
And every day, every single day, I read news that makes me cringe, like a $15 fine to kids in Texas, for using, every time they take out their mobile phone in school. 
Immediate dismissal to bus drivers in New York, if seen with a mobile phone in a hand. 
Companies blocking access to IM or to Facebook. 
Behind issues of security and safety, which have always been the arguments for social control, in fact what is going on is that these institutions are trying to decide who, in fact, has a right to self determine their attention, to decide, whether they should, or not, be isolated. 
And they are actually trying to block, in a certain sense, this movement of a greater possibility of intimacy. 

Photography has been my passion ever since I was old enough to pick up a camera, but today I want to share with you the 15 most treasured photos of mine, and I didn't take any of them. 
There were no art directors, no stylists, no chance for reshoots, not even any regard for lighting. 
In fact, most of them were taken by random tourists. 
My story begins when I was in New York City for a speaking engagement, and my wife took this picture of me holding my daughter on her first birthday. We're on the corner of 57th and 5th. 
We happened to be back in New York exactly a year later, so we decided to take the same picture. 
Well you can see where this is going. 
Approaching my daughter's third birthday, my wife said, "" Hey, why don't you take Sabina back to New York and make it a father-daughter trip, and continue the ritual? "" This is when we started asking passing tourists to take the picture. 
You know, it's remarkable how universal the gesture is of handing your camera to a total stranger. 
No one's ever refused, and luckily no one's ever run off with our camera. 
Back then, we had no idea how much this trip would change our lives. 
It's really become sacred to us. 
This one was taken just weeks after 9 / 11, and I found myself trying to explain what had happened that day in ways a five-year-old could understand. 
So these photos are far more than proxies for a single moment, or even a specific trip. 
They're also ways for us to freeze time for one week in October and reflect on our times and how we change from year to year, and not just physically, but in every way. 
Because while we take the same photo, our perspectives change, and she reaches new milestones, and I get to see life through her eyes, and how she interacts with and sees everything. 
This very focused time we get to spend together is something we cherish and anticipate the entire year. 
Recently, on one trip, we were walking, and she stops dead in her tracks, and she points to a red awning of the doll store that she loved when she was little on our earlier trips. 
And she describes to me the feeling she felt as a five-year-old standing in that exact spot. 
She said she remembers her heart bursting out of her chest when she saw that place for the very first time nine years earlier. 
And now what she's looking at in New York are colleges, because she's determined to go to school in New York. 
And it hit me: One of the most important things we all make are memories. 
So I want to share the idea of taking an active role in consciously creating memories. 
I don't know about you, but aside from these 15 shots, I'm not in many of the family photos. 
I'm always the one taking the picture. 
So I want to encourage everyone today to get in the shot, and don't hesitate to go up to someone and ask, "Will you take our picture?" 
Thank you. (Applause) 

When people find out I write about time management, they assume two things. 
One is that I'm always on time, and I'm not. 
The second thing they assume is that I have lots of tips and tricks for saving bits of time here and there. 
Sometimes I'll hear from magazines that are doing a story along these lines, generally on how to help their readers find an extra hour in the day. 
And the idea is that we'll shave bits of time off everyday activities, add it up, and we'll have time for the good stuff. 
That way, you save eight minutes every half hour, so in the course of two hours of watching TV, you find 32 minutes to exercise. 
(Laughter) Which is true. 
Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right? 
(Laughter) Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there, add it up, we will finally get to everything we want to do. 
But after studying how successful people spend their time and looking at their schedules hour by hour, I think this idea has it completely backward. 
We don't build the lives we want by saving time. 
They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses, kids to care for, maybe parents to care for, community commitments — busy, busy people. 
I had them keep track of their time for a week so I could add up how much they worked and slept, and I interviewed them about their strategies, for my book. 
One of the women whose time log I studied goes out on a Wednesday night for something. 
She comes home to find that her water heater has broken, and there is now water all over her basement. 
If you've ever had anything like this happen to you, you know it is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess. 
So she's dealing with the immediate aftermath that night, next day she's got plumbers coming in, day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet. 
All this is being recorded on her time log. 
Winds up taking seven hours of her week. 
Seven hours. 
That's like finding an extra hour in the day. 
But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week, "Could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon?" 
"Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people?" 
I'm sure she would've said what most of us would've said, which is, "" No — can't you see how busy I am? "" Yet when she had to find seven hours because there is water all over her basement, she found seven hours. 
And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. 
We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it. 
And so the key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. 
By busy, I mean she was running a small business with 12 people on the payroll, she had six children in her spare time. 
I was getting in touch with her to set up an interview on how she "" had it all "" — that phrase. 
I remember it was a Thursday morning, and she was not available to speak with me. 
But the reason she was unavailable to speak with me is that she was out for a hike, because it was a beautiful spring morning, and she wanted to go for a hike. 
She says, "" Listen Laura, everything I do, every minute I spend, is my choice. "" And rather than say, "I don't have time to do x, y or z," she'd say, "" I don't do x, y or z because it's not a priority. "" "I don't have time," often means "It's not a priority." 
If you offered to pay me $100,000 to dust my blinds, I would get to it pretty quickly. 
(Laughter) Since that is not going to happen, I can acknowledge this is not a matter of lacking time; it's that I don't want to do it. 
Using this language reminds us that time is a choice. 
But we are smart people, and certainly over the long run, we have the power to fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there. 
How do we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater? 
You look back over your successes over the year, your "" opportunities for growth. "" And this serves its purpose, but I find it's more effective to do this looking forward. 
So I want you to pretend it's the end of next year. 
What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? 
I'm sure many of you, like me, come December, get cards that contain these folded up sheets of colored paper, on which is written what is known as the family holiday letter. 
(Laughter) Bit of a wretched genre of literature, really, going on about how amazing everyone in the household is, or even more scintillating, how busy everyone in the household is. 
But these letters serve a purpose, which is that they tell your friends and family what you did in your personal life that mattered to you over the year. 
So this year's kind of done, but I want you to pretend it's the end of next year, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you and the people you care about. 
What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? 
So you can write next year's family holiday letter now. 
Don't send it. 
(Laughter) Please, don't send it. 
But you can write it. 
And now, between the performance review and the family holiday letter, we have a list of six to ten goals we can work on in the next year. 
Then maybe think about the questions you want to ask your relatives, set up appointments to interview them. 
And then — this is key — we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater, by putting them into our schedules first. 
We do this by thinking through our weeks before we are in them. 
I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoons. 
Friday afternoon is what an economist might call a "" low opportunity cost "" time. 
Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoons saying, "" I am excited to make progress toward my personal and professional priorities right now. "" (Laughter) But we are willing to think about what those should be. 
So take a little bit of time Friday afternoon, make yourself a three-category priority list: career, relationships, self. 
Making a three-category list reminds us that there should be something in all three categories. 
Career, we think about; relationships, self — not so much. 
But anyway, just a short list, two to three items in each. 
Then look out over the whole of the next week, and see where you can plan them in. 
Where you plan them in is up to you. 
I know this is going to be more complicated for some people than others. 
I mean, some people's lives are just harder than others. 
It is not going to be easy to find time to take that poetry class if you are caring for multiple children on your own. 
There are 168 hours in a week. 
Twenty-four times seven is 168 hours. 
That is a lot of time. 
If you are working a full-time job, so 40 hours a week, sleeping eight hours a night, so 56 hours a week — that leaves 72 hours for other things. 
That is a lot of time. 
You say you're working 50 hours a week, maybe a main job and a side hustle. 
Well, that leaves 62 hours for other things. 
You say you're working 60 hours. 
Well, that leaves 52 hours for other things. 
You say you're working more than 60 hours. 
Well, are you sure? 
(Laughter) There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks with time diaries. 
They found that people claiming 75-plus-hour work weeks were off by about 25 hours. 
(Laughter) You can guess in which direction, right? 
Anyway, in 168 hours a week, I think we can find time for what matters to you. 
If you want to spend more time with your kids, you want to study more for a test you're taking, you want to exercise for three hours and volunteer for two, you can. 
And that's even if you're working way more than full-time hours. 
So we have plenty of time, which is great, because guess what? 
We don't even need that much time to do amazing things. 
But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do? 
Pull out the phone, right? 
Start deleting emails. 
Otherwise, we're puttering around the house or watching TV. 
But small moments can have great power. 
You can use your bits of time for bits of joy. 
I know when I had a job that required two bus rides and a subway ride every morning, I used to go to the library on weekends to get stuff to read. 
If family dinner is out because of your crazy work schedule, maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute. 
It's about looking at the whole of one's time and seeing where the good stuff can go. 
I truly believe this. 
There is time. 
Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters. 
And when we focus on what matters, we can build the lives we want in the time we've got. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Pat Mitchell: So I was thinking about female friendship a lot, and by the way, these two women, I'm very honored to say, have been my friends for a very long time, too. 
Jane Fonda: Yes we have. 
PM: And one of the things that I read about female friendship is something that Cervantes said. 
He said, "" You can tell a lot about someone, "" in this case a woman, "by the company that she keeps." 
So let's start with — (Laughter) JF: We're in big trouble. 
Lily Tomlin: Hand me one of those waters, I'm extremely dry. 
(Laughter) JF: You're taking up our time. 
We have a very limited — LT: Just being with her sucks the life out of me. 
(Laughter) JF: You ain't seen nothing yet. 
Anyway — sorry. 
PM: So tell me, what do you look for in a friend? 
LT: I look for someone who has a sense of fun, who's audacious, who's forthcoming, who has politics, who has even a small scrap of passion for the planet, someone who's decent, has a sense of justice and who thinks I'm worthwhile. 
(Laughter) (Applause) JF: You know, I was thinking this morning, I don't even know what I would do without my women friends. 
I mean it's, "" I have my friends, therefore I am. "" LT: (Laughter) JF: No, it's true. 
I exist because I have my women friends. They — You're one of them. 
I don't know about you. But anyway — (Laughter) You know, they make me stronger, they make me smarter, they make me braver. 
They tap me on the shoulder when I might be in need of course-correcting. 
And most of them are a good deal younger than me, too. 
You know? I mean, it's nice — LT: Thank you. 
(Laughter) JF: No, I do, I include you in that, because listen, you know — it's nice to have somebody still around to play with and learn from when you're getting toward the end. 
I'm approaching — I'll be there sooner than you. 
LT: No, I'm glad to have you parallel aging alongside me. 
(Laughter) JF: I'm showing you the way. (Laughter) 
LT: Well, you are and you have. 
PM: Well, as we grow older, and as we go through different kinds of life's journeys, what do you do to keep your friendships vital and alive? 
LT: Well you have to use a lot of — JF: She doesn't invite me over much, I'll tell you that. 
LT: I have to use a lot of social media — You be quiet now. And so — (Laughter) LT: And I look through my emails, I look through my texts to find my friends, so I can answer them as quickly as possible, because I know they need my counsel. (Laughter) 
They need my support, because most of my friends are writers, or activists, or actors, and you're all three... 
and a long string of other descriptive phrases, and I want to get to you as soon as possible, I want you to know that I'm there for you. 
JF: Do you do emojis? 
LT: Oh... JF: No? 
LT: That's embarrassing. JF: I'm really into emojis. 
LT: No, I spell out my — I spell out my words of happiness and congratulations, and sadness. 
JF: You spell it right out — LT: I spell it, every letter. 
(Laughter) JF: Such a purist. 
You know, as I've gotten older, I've understood more the importance of friendships, and so, I really make an effort to reach out and make play dates — not let too much time go by. 
I read a lot so, as Lily knows all too well, my books that I like, I send to my friends. 
LT: When we knew we would be here today you sent me a lot of books about women, female friendships, and I was so surprised to see how many books, how much research has been done recently — JF: And were you grateful? LT: I was grateful. 
(Laughter) PM: And — LT: Wait, no, it's really important because this is another example of how women are overlooked, put aside, marginalized. 
There's been very little research done on us, even though we volunteered lots of times. 
JF: That's for sure. 
(Laughter) LT: This is really exciting, and you all will be interested in this. 
The Harvard Medical School study has shown that women who have close female friendships are less likely to develop impairments — physical impairments as they age, and they are likely to be seen to be living much more vital, exciting — JF: And longer — LT: Joyful lives. 
JF: We live five years longer than men. 
LT: I think I'd trade the years for joy. 
(Laughter) LT: But the most important part is they found — the results were so exciting and so conclusive — the researchers found that not having close female friends is detrimental to your health, as much as smoking or being overweight. 
JF: And there's something else, too — LT: I've said my part, so... 
(Laughter) JF: OK, well, listen to my part, because there's an additional thing. 
Because they only — for years, decades — they only researched men when they were trying to understand stress, only very recently have they researched what happens to women when we're stressed, and it turns out that when we're stressed — women, our bodies get flooded by oxytocin. 
Which is a feel-good, calming, stress-reducing hormone. 
Which is also increased when we're with our women friends. 
And I do think that's one reason why we live longer. 
And I feel so bad for men because they don't have that. 
Testosterone in men diminishes the effects of oxytocin. 
LT: Well, when you and I and Dolly made "" 9 to 5 ""... 
JF: Oh — LT: We laughed, we did, we laughed so much, we found we had so much in common and we're so different. 
Here she is, like Hollywood royalty, I'm like a tough kid from Detroit, [Dolly's] a Southern kid from a poor town in Tennessee, and we found we were so in sync as women, and we must have — we laughed — we must have added at least a decade onto our lifespans. 
JF: I think — we sure crossed our legs a lot. 
(Laughter) If you know what I mean. 
LT: I think we all know what you mean. 
(Laughter) PM: You're adding decades to our lives right now. 
So among the books that Jane sent us both to read on female friendship was one by a woman we admire greatly, Sister Joan Chittister, who said about female friendship that women friends are not just a social act, they're a spiritual act. 
Do you think of your friends as spiritual? 
Do they add something spiritual to your lives? 
LT: Spiritual — I absolutely think that. 
Because — especially people you've known a long time, people you've spent time with — I can see the spiritual essence inside them, the tenderness, the vulnerability. 
There's actually kind of a love, an element of love in the relationship. 
I just see deeply into your soul. 
PM: Do you think that, Jane — LT: But I have special powers. 
JF: Well, there's all kinds of friends. 
There's business friends, and party friends, I've got a lot of those. 
(Laughter) But the oxytocin-producing friendships have... 
They feel spiritual because it's a heart opening, right? 
You know, we go deep. And — I find that I shed tears a lot with my intimate friends. 
Not because I'm sad but because I'm so touched and inspired by them. 
LT: And you know one of you is going to go soon. 
(Laughter) PM: Well, two of us are sitting here, Lily, which one are you talking about? (Laughter) 
And I always think, when women talk about their friendships, that men always look a little mystified. 
What are the differences, in your opinion, between men friendships and women friendships? 
JF: There's a lot of difference, and I think we have to have a lot of empathy for men — (Laughter) that they don't have what we have. 
Which I think may be why they die sooner. 
(Laughter) I have a lot of compassion for men, because women, no kidding, we — women's relationships, our friendships are full disclosure, we go deep. 
They're revelatory. 
We risk vulnerability — this is something men don't do. 
I mean how many times have I asked you, "" Am I doing OK? "" "Did I really screw up there?" 
PM: You're doing great. 
(Laughter) JF: But I mean, we ask questions like that of our women friends, and men don't. 
You know, people describe women's relationships as face-to-face, whereas men's friendships are more side-by-side. 
LT: I mean most of the time men don't want to reveal their emotions, they want to bury deeper feelings. 
I mean, that's the general, conventional thought. 
They would rather go off in their man cave and watch a game or hit golf balls, or talk about sports, or hunting, or cars or have sex. 
I mean, it's just the kind of — it's a more manly behavior. 
JF: You meant — LT: They talk about sex. 
I meant they might have sex if they could get somebody in their man cave to — (Laughter) JF: You know something, though, that I find very interesting — and again, psychologists didn't know this until relatively recently — is that men are born every bit as relational as women are. 
If you look at films of newborn baby boys and girls, you'll see the baby boys just like the girls, gazing into their mother's eyes, you know, needing that relational exchange of energy. 
When the mother looks away, they could see the dismay on the child, even the boy would cry. 
They need relationship. 
So the question is why, as they grow older, does that change? 
And the answer is patriarchal culture, which says to boys and young men that to be needing of relationship, to be emotional with someone is girly. 
That a real man doesn't ask directions or express a need, they don't go to doctors if they feel bad. 
They don't ask for help. 
There's a quote that I really like, "Men fear that becoming 'we' will erase his' I '." 
You know, his sense of self. 
Whereas women's sense of self has always been kind of porous. 
But our "" we "" is our saving grace, it's what makes us strong. 
It's not that we're better than men, we just don't have our masculinity to prove. 
LT: And, well — JF: That's a Gloria Steinem quote. 
So we can express our humanity — LT: I know who Gloria Steinem is. 
JF: I know you know who she is, but I think it's a — (Laughter) No, but it's a great quote, I think. 
We're not better than men, we just don't have our masculinity to prove. 
And that's really important. 
LT: But men are so inculcated in the culture to be comfortable in the patriarchy. 
And we've got to make something different happen. 
JF: Women's friendships are like a renewable source of power. 
LT: Well, that's what's exciting about this subject. 
It's because our friendships — female friendships are just a hop to our sisterhood, and sisterhood can be a very powerful force, to give the world — to make it what it should be — the things that humans desperately need. 
PM: It is why we're talking about it, because women's friendships are, as you said, Jane, a renewable source of power. 
So how do we use that power? 
JF: Well, women are the fastest growing demographic in the world, especially older women. 
And if we harness our power, we can change the world. 
And guess what? We need to. 
(Applause) And we need to do it soon. 
And one of the things that we need to do — and we can do it as women — for one thing, we kind of set the consumer standards. 
We need to consume less. 
We in the Western world need to consume less and when we buy things, we need to buy things that are made locally, when we buy food, we need to buy food that's grown locally. 
We are the ones that need to get off the grid. 
We need to make ourselves independent from fossil fuels. 
And the fossil fuel companies — the Exxons and the Shell Oils and those bad guys — cause they are — are going to tell us that we can't do it without going back to the Stone Age. 
You know, that the alternatives just aren't quite there yet, and that's not true. 
There are countries in the world right now that are living mostly on renewable energy and doing just fine. 
And they tell us that if we do wean ourselves from fossil fuel that we're going to be back in the Stone Age, and in fact, if we begin to use renewable energy, and not drill in the Arctic, and not drill — LT: Oh, boy. 
JF: And not drill in the Alberta tar sands — Right. 
That we will be — there will be more democracy and more jobs and more well-being, and it's women that are going to lead the way. 
LT: Maybe we have the momentum to start a third-wave feminist movement with our sisterhood around the world, with women we don't see, women we may never meet, but we join together that way, because — Aristotle said — most people — people would die without male friendships. 
And the operative word here was "" male. "" Because they thought that friendships should be between equals and women were not considered equal — JF: They didn't think we had souls even, the Greeks. 
LT: No, exactly. That shows you just how limited Aristotle was. 
(Laughter) And wait, no, here's the best part. 
It's like, you know, men do need women now. 
The planet needs women. 
The US Constitution needs women. 
We are not even in the Constitution. 
JF: You're talking about the Equal Rights Amendment. 
LT: Right. 
Justice Ginsberg said something like — every constitution that's been written since the end of World War II included a provision that made women citizens of equal stature, but ours does not. 
So that would be a good place to start. 
Very, very mild — JF: Right. 
(Applause) And gender equality, it's like a tide, it would lift all boats, not just women. 
PM: Needing new role models on how to do that. 
How to be friends, how to think about our power in different ways, as consumers, as citizens of the world, and this is what makes Jane and Lily a role model of how women can be friends — for a very long time, and even if they occasionally disagree. 
Thank you. 
Thank you both. 
(Applause) JF: Thanks. 
LT: Thank you. 
JF: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Melati Wijsen: Bali — island of gods. 
Isabel Wijsen: A green paradise. 
MW: Or... 
a paradise lost. 
Bali: island of garbage. 
IW: In Bali, we generate 680 cubic meters of plastic garbage a day. 
That's about a 14-story building. 
And when it comes to plastic bags, less than five percent gets recycled. 
MW: We know that changes the image you may have of our island. 
It changed ours, too, when we learned about it, when we learned that almost all plastic bags in Bali end up in our drains and then in our rivers and then in our ocean. 
And those that don't even make it to the ocean, they're either burned or littered. 
IW: So we decided to do something about it. 
And we've been working for almost three years now to try to say no to plastic bags on our home island. 
And we have had some significant successes. 
MW: We are sisters, and we go to the best school on earth: Green School, Bali. 
Green School is not only different in the way that it is built out of bamboo, but also in the way that it teaches. 
We are taught to become leaders of today, something a normal textbook cannot match. 
IW: One day we had a lesson in class where we learned about significant people, like Nelson Mandela, Lady Diana and Mahatma Gandhi. 
Walking home that day, we agreed that we also wanted to be significant. 
Why should we wait until we were grown up to be significant? 
We wanted to do something now. 
MW: Sitting on the sofa that night, we brainstormed and thought of all the issues facing Bali. 
And one thing that stood out to us the most was the plastic garbage. 
But that is a huge problem. 
So we looked into what was a realistic target for us kids: plastic bags. 
And the idea was born. 
IW: We started researching, and let's just say, the more we learned, there was nothing good about plastic bags. 
And you know what? 
We don't even need them. 
MW: We were really inspired by the efforts to say no to plastic bags in many other places, from Hawaii to Rwanda and to severals cities like Oakland and Dublin. 
IW: And so the idea turned into the launch of "" Bye Bye Plastic Bags. "" MW: In the years that we have been campaigning, we have learned a lot. 
Lesson number one: you cannot do it all by yourself. 
You need a big team of like-minded kids, and so we formed the Bye Bye Plastic Bags crew. 
The volunteer team includes children from all over the island, from both international and local schools. 
And together with them, we started a multi-layered approach, based on an on- and off-line signature petition, educational and inspirational presentations at schools and we raise general awareness at markets, festivals, beach clean-ups. 
And last but not least, we distribute alternative bags, bags like net bags, recycled newspaper bags or 100 percent organic material bags, all made by local initiatives on the island. 
IW: We run a pilot village, home of 800 families. 
The village mayor was our first friend and he loved our T-shirts, so that helped. 
We focused on making the customers aware, because that's where the change needs to happen. 
The village is already two-thirds along the way of becoming plastic bag free. 
Our first attempts to get the government of Bali on board failed. 
So we thought, "" Hmm... a petition with one million signatures. 
They can't ignore us, right? "" MW: Right! 
IW: But, who would have guessed one million signatures is, like, a thousand times a thousand? 
(Laughter) We got stuck — till we learned lesson number two: think outside the box. 
Someone mentioned that the Bali airport handles 16 million arrivals and departures a year. 
MW: But how do we get into the airport? 
And here comes lesson number three: persistence. 
Off we headed to the airport. 
We got past the janitor. 
And then it was his boss's boss, and then the assistant office manager, and then the office manager, and then... 
we got shuffled down two levels and thought, well, here comes the janitor again. 
And after several days knocking on doors and just being kids on a mission, we finally got to the commercial manager of Bali airports. 
And we gave him the "" Bali of plastic bags "" speech, and being a very nice man, he said, [imitating the man's voice] "" I cannot believe what I'm about say, but I'm going to give authorization to collect signatures behind customs and immigrations. "" (Laughter) (Applause) IW: In our first hour and a half there, we got almost 1,000 signatures. 
How cool is that? 
Lesson number four: you need champions at all levels of society, from students to commercial managers to famous people. 
And thanks to the attraction of Green School, we had access to a steady stream of celebrities. 
Ban Ki Moon taught us that Secretary-Generals of the United Nations don't sign petitions — (Laughter) even if kids ask nicely. 
But he promised to spread the word, and now we work closely with the United Nations. 
MW: Jane Goodall taught us the power of a people's network. 
She started with just one Roots & Shoots group and now she has 4,000 groups around the world. 
We are one of them. 
She's a real inspiration. 
If you're a fellow Rotarian, nice to meet you. 
We're Interactors, the youngest department of Rotary International. 
IW: But we have also learned much about patience, MW: how to deal with frustrations, IW: leadership, MW: teamwork, IW: friendship, MW: we learned more about the Balinese and their culture IW: and we learned about the importance of commitment. 
MW: It's not always easy. 
Sometimes it does get a little bit hard to walk your talk. 
IW: But last year, we did exactly that. 
We went to India to give a talk, and our parents took us to visit the former private house of Mahatma Gandhi. 
We learned about the power of hunger strikes he did to reach his goals. 
Yes, by the end of the tour, when we met our parents again, we both made a decision and said, "We're going on a hunger strike!" 
(Laughter) MW: And you can probably imagine their faces. 
It took a lot of convincing, and not only to our parents but to our friends and to our teachers as well. 
Isabel and I were serious about doing this. 
So we met with a nutritionist, and we came up with a compromise of not eating from sunrise to sunset every day until the governor of Bali would agree to meet with us to talk about how to stop plastic bags on Bali. 
IW: Our "" mogak makan, "" as it is called in Bahasa Indonesia, started. 
We used social media to support our goal and already on day two, police started to come to our home and school. 
What were these two girls doing? 
We knew we weren't making the governor look his best by doing this food strike — we could have gone to jail. 
But, hey, it worked. 
Twenty-four hours later, we were picked up from school and escorted to the office of the governor. 
MW: And there he was — (Applause) waiting for us to meet and speak, being all supportive and thankful for our willingness to care for the beauty and the environment of Bali. 
He signed a promise to help the people of Bali say no to plastic bags. 
And we are now friends, and on a regular basis, we remind him and his team of the promises he has made. 
And indeed, recently he stated and committed that Bali will be plastic bag free by 2018. 
(Applause) IW: Also, at the International Airport of Bali, one of our supporters is planning to start a plastic bag-free policy by 2016. 
MW: Stop handing out free plastic bags and bring in your own reusable bag is our next message to change that mindset of the public. 
IW: Our short-term campaign, "One Island / One Voice," is all about this. 
We check and recognize the shops and restaurants that have declared themselves a plastic bag-free zone, and we put this sticker at their entrance and publish their names on social media and some important magazines on Bali. 
And conversely, that highlights those who do not have the sticker. 
(Laughter) MW: So, why are we actually telling you all of this? 
Well, partly, it is because we are proud of the results that, together with our team, we have been able to reach. 
But also because along the way, we have learned that kids can do things. 
We can make things happen. 
Isabel and I were only 10 and 12 years old when we started this. 
We never had a business plan, nor a fixed strategy, nor any hidden agendas — just the idea in front of us and a group of friends working with us. 
All we wanted to do was stop those plastic bags from wrapping and suffocating our beautiful home. 
Kids have a boundless energy and a motivation to be the change the world needs. 
IW: So to all the kids of this beautiful but challenging world: go for it! 
Make that difference. 
We're not telling you it's going to be easy. 
We're telling you it's going to be worth it. 
Us kids may only be 25 percent of the world's population, but we are 100 percent of the future. 
MW: We still have a lot of work to do, but know that we still not stop until the first question asked when arriving at the Bali airports will be Both: "" Welcome to Bali, do you have nay plastic bags to declare? "" (Laughter) Om shanti shanti shanti om. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Do you know that we have 1.4 million cellular radio masts deployed worldwide? 
And these are base stations. 
And we also have more than five billion of these devices here. 
These are cellular mobile phones. 
And with these mobile phones, we transmit more than 600 terabytes of data every month. 
This is a 6 with 14 zeroes — a very large number. 
And wireless communications has become a utility like electricity and water. 
We use it everyday. We use it in our everyday lives now — in our private lives, in our business lives. 
And we even have to be asked sometimes, very kindly, to switch off the mobile phone at events like this for good reasons. 
And it's this importance why I decided to look into the issues that this technology has, because it's so fundamental to our lives. 
And one of the issues is capacity. 
The way we transmit wireless data is by using electromagnetic waves — in particular, radio waves. 
And radio waves are limited. 
They are scarce; they are expensive; and we only have a certain range of it. 
And it's this limitation that doesn't cope with the demand of wireless data transmissions and the number of bytes and data which are transmitted every month. 
And we are simply running out of spectrum. 
There's another problem. 
That is efficiency. 
These 1.4 million cellular radio masts, or base stations, consume a lot of energy. 
And mind you, most of the energy is not used to transmit the radio waves, it is used to cool the base stations. 
Then the efficiency of such a base station is only at about five percent. 
And that creates a big problem. 
Then there's another issue that you're all aware of. 
You have to switch off your mobile phone during flights. 
In hospitals, they are security issues. 
And security is another issue. 
These radio waves penetrate through walls. 
They can be intercepted, and somebody can make use of your network if he has bad intentions. 
So these are the main four issues. 
But on the other hand, we have 14 billion of these: light bulbs, light. 
And light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. 
So let's look at this in the context of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, where we have gamma rays. 
You don't want to get close to gamma rays, it could be dangerous. 
X-rays, useful when you go to hospitals. 
Then there's ultraviolet light. 
it's good for a nice suntan, but otherwise dangerous for the human body. 
Infrared — due to eye safety regulations, can be only used with low power. 
And then we have the radio waves, they have the issues I've just mentioned. 
And in the middle there, we have this visible light spectrum. 
It's light, and light has been around for many millions of years. 
And in fact, it has created us, has created life, has created all the stuff of life. 
So it's inherently safe to use. 
And wouldn't it be great to use that for wireless communications? 
Not only that, I compared [it to] the entire spectrum. 
I compared the radio waves spectrum — the size of it — with the size of the visible light spectrum. 
And guess what? 
We have 10,000 times more of that spectrum, which is there for us to use. 
So not only do we have this huge amount of spectrum, let's compare that with a number I've just mentioned. 
We have 1.4 million expensively deployed, inefficient radio cellular base stations. 
And multiply that by 10,000, then you end up at 14 billion. 
14 billion is the number of light bulbs installed already. 
So we have the infrastructure there. 
Look at the ceiling, you see all these light bulbs. 
Go to the main floor, you see these light bulbs. 
Can we use them for communications? 
Yes. 
What do we need to do? 
The one thing we need to do is we have to replace these inefficient incandescent light bulbs, florescent lights, with this new technology of LED, LED light bulbs. 
An LED is a semiconductor. It's an electronic device. 
And it has a very nice acute property. 
Its intensity can be modulated at very high speeds, and it can be switched off at very high speeds. 
And this is a fundamental basic property that we exploit with our technology. 
So let's show how we do that. 
Let's go to the closest neighbor to the visible light spectrum — go to remote controls. 
You all know remote controls have an infrared LED — basically you switch on the LED, and if it's off, you switch it off. 
And it creates a simple, low-speed data stream in 10,000 bits per second, 20,000 bits per second. 
Not usable for a YouTube video. 
What we have done is we have developed a technology with which we can furthermore replace the remote control of our light bulb. 
We transmit with our technology, not only a single data stream, we transmit thousands of data streams in parallel, at even higher speeds. 
And the technology we have developed — it's called SIM OFDM. 
And it's spacial modulation — these are the only technical terms, I'm not going into details — but this is how we enabled that light source to transmit data. 
You will say, "" Okay, this is nice — a slide created in 10 minutes. "" But not only that. 
What we've done is we have also developed a demonstrator. 
And I'm showing for the first time in public this visible light demonstrator. 
And what we have here is no ordinary desk lamp. 
We fit in an LED light bulb, worth three U.S. dollars, put in our signal processing technology. 
And then what we have here is a little hole. 
And the light goes through that hole. 
There's a receiver. 
The receiver will convert these little, subtle changes in the amplitude that we create there into an electrical signal. 
And that signal is then converted back to a high-speed data stream. 
In the future we hope that we can integrate this little hole into these smart phones. 
And not only integrate a photo detector here, but maybe use the camera inside. 
So what happens when I switch on that light? 
As you would expect, it's a light, a desk lamp. 
Put your book beneath it and you can read. 
It's illuminating the space. 
But at the same time, you see this video coming up here. 
And that's a video, a high-definition video that is transmitted through that light beam. 
You're critical. 
You think, "" Ha, ha, ha. 
This is a smart academic doing a little bit of tricks here. "" But let me do this. 
(Applause) Once again. 
Still don't believe? 
It is this light that transmits this high-definition video in a split stream. 
And if you look at the light, it is illuminating as you would expect. 
You don't notice with your human eye. 
You don't notice the subtle changes in the amplitude that we impress onto this light bulb. 
It's serving the purpose of illumination, but at the same time, we are able to transmit this data. 
And you see, even light from the ceiling comes down here to the receiver. 
It can ignore that constant light, because all the receiver's interested in are subtle changes. 
You also have a critical question now, and you say, "" Okay, do I have to have the light on all the time to have this working? "" And the answer is yes. 
But, you can dim down the light to a level that it appears to be off. 
And you are still able to transmit data — that's possible. 
So I've mentioned to you the four challenges. 
Capacity: We have 10,000 times more spectrum, 10,000 times more LEDs installed already in the infrastructure there. 
You would agree with me, hopefully, there's no issue of capacity anymore. 
Efficiency: This is data through illumination — it's first of all an illumination device. 
And if you do the energy budget, the data transmission comes for free — highly energy efficient. 
I don't mention the high energy efficiency of these LED light bulbs. 
If the whole world would deploy them, you would save hundreds of power plants. 
That's aside. 
And then I've mentioned the availability. 
You will agree with me that we have lights in the hospital. 
You need to see what to do. 
You have lights in an aircraft. 
So it's everywhere in a day there is light. 
Look around. Everywhere. Look at your smart phone. 
It has a flashlight, an LED flashlight. 
These are potential sources for high-speed data transmission. 
And then there's security. 
You would agree with me that light doesn't penetrate through walls. 
So no one, if I have a light here, if I have secure data, no one on the other side of this room through that wall would be able to read that data. 
And there's only data where there is light. 
So if I don't want that receiver to receive the data, then what I could do, turn it away. 
So the data goes in that direction, not there anymore. 
Now we can in fact see where the data is going to. 
So for me, the applications of it, to me, are beyond imagination at the moment. 
We have had a century of very nice, smart application developers. 
And you only have to notice, where we have light, there is a potential way to transmit data. 
But I can give you a few examples. 
Well you may see the impact already now. 
This is a remote operated vehicle beneath the ocean. 
And they use light to illuminate space down there. 
And this light can be used to transmit wireless data that these things [use] to communicate with each other. 
Intrinsically safe environments like this petrochemical plant — you can't use RF, it may generate antenna sparks, but you can use light — you see plenty of light there. 
In hospitals, for new medical instruments; in streets for traffic control. 
Cars have LED-based headlights, LED-based back lights, and cars can communicate with each other and prevent accidents in the way that they exchange information. 
Traffic lights can communicate to the car and so on. 
And then you have these millions of street lamps deployed around the world. 
And every street lamp could be a free access point. 
We call it, in fact, a Li-Fi, light-fidelity. 
And then we have these aircraft cabins. 
There are hundreds of lights in an aircraft cabin, and each of these lights could be a potential transmitter of wireless data. 
So you could enjoy your most favorite TED video on your long flight back home. 
Online life. So that is a vision, I think, that is possible. 
So, all we would need to do is to fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device. 
And this would then combine two basic functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission. 
And it's this symbiosis that I personally believe could solve the four essential problems that face us in wireless communication these days. 
And in the future, you would not only have 14 billion light bulbs, you may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide — for a cleaner, a greener, and even a brighter future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So I know TED is about a lot of things that are big, but I want to talk to you about something very small. 
So small, it's a single word. 
The word is "" misfit. "" It's one of my favorite words, because it's so literal. 
I mean, it's a person who sort of missed fitting in. 
Or a person who fits in badly. 
Or this: "" a person who is poorly adapted to new situations and environments. "" I'm a card-carrying misfit. 
And I'm here for the other misfits in the room, because I'm never the only one. 
I'm going to tell you a misfit story. 
Somewhere in my early 30s, the dream of becoming a writer came right to my doorstep. 
Actually, it came to my mailbox in the form of a letter that said I'd won a giant literary prize for a short story I had written. 
The short story was about my life as a competitive swimmer and about my crappy home life, and a little bit about how grief and loss can make you insane. 
The prize was a trip to New York City to meet big-time editors and agents and other authors. 
So kind of it was the wannabe writer's dream, right? 
You know what I did the day the letter came to my house? 
Because I'm me, I put the letter on my kitchen table, I poured myself a giant glass of vodka with ice and lime, and I sat there in my underwear for an entire day, just staring at the letter. 
I was thinking about all the ways I'd already screwed my life up. 
Who the hell was I to go to New York City and pretend to be a writer? 
Who was I? 
I'll tell you. 
I was a misfit. 
Like legions of other children, I came from an abusive household that I narrowly escaped with my life. 
I already had two epically failed marriages underneath my belt. 
I'd flunked out of college not once but twice and maybe even a third time that I'm not going to tell you about. 
(Laughter) And I'd done an episode of rehab for drug use. 
And I'd had two lovely staycations in jail. 
So I'm on the right stage. 
(Laughter) But the real reason, I think, I was a misfit, is that my daughter died the day she was born, and I hadn't figured out how to live with that story yet. 
After my daughter died I also spent a long time homeless, living under an overpass in a kind of profound state of zombie grief and loss that some of us encounter along the way. 
Maybe all of us, if you live long enough. 
You know, homeless people are some of our most heroic misfits, because they start out as us. 
So you see, I'd missed fitting in to just about every category out there: daughter, wife, mother, scholar. 
And the dream of being a writer was really kind of like a small, sad stone in my throat. 
It was pretty much in spite of myself that I got on that plane and flew to New York City, where the writers are. 
Fellow misfits, I can almost see your heads glowing. 
I can pick you out of a room. 
At first, you would've loved it. 
You got to choose the three famous writers you wanted to meet, and these guys went and found them for you. 
You got set up at the Gramercy Park Hotel, where you got to drink Scotch late in the night with cool, smart, swank people. 
And you got to pretend you were cool and smart and swank, too. 
And you got to meet a bunch of editors and authors and agents at very, very fancy lunches and dinners. 
Ask me how fancy. 
Audience: How fancy? 
Lidia Yuknavitch: I'm making a confession: I stole three linen napkins — (Laughter) from three different restaurants. 
And I shoved a menu down my pants. 
(Laughter) I just wanted some keepsakes so that when I got home, I could believe it had really happened to me. 
You know? 
The three writers I wanted to meet were Carole Maso, Lynne Tillman and Peggy Phelan. 
These were not famous, best-selling authors, but to me, they were women-writer titans. 
Carole Maso wrote the book that later became my art bible. 
Lynne Tillman gave me permission to believe that there was a chance my stories could be part of the world. 
And Peggy Phelan reminded me that maybe my brains could be more important than my boobs. 
They weren't mainstream women writers, but they were cutting a path through the mainstream with their body stories, I like to think, kind of the way water cut the Grand Canyon. 
It nearly killed me with joy to hang out with these three over-50-year-old women writers. 
And the reason it nearly killed me with joy is that I'd never known a joy like that. 
I'd never been in a room like that. 
My mother never went to college. 
And my creative career to that point was a sort of small, sad, stillborn thing. 
So kind of in those first nights in New York I wanted to die there. 
I was just like, "" Kill me now. I'm good. This is beautiful. "" Some of you in the room will understand what happened next. 
First, they took me to the offices of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux was like my mega-dream press. 
I mean, T.S. Eliot and Flannery O'Connor were published there. 
The main editor guy sat me down and talked to me for a long time, trying to convince me I had a book in me about my life as a swimmer. 
You know, like a memoir. 
The whole time he was talking to me, I sat there smiling and nodding like a numb idiot, with my arms crossed over my chest, while nothing, nothing, nothing came out of my throat. 
So in the end, he patted me on the shoulder like a swim coach might. 
And he wished me luck and he gave me some free books and he showed me out the door. 
Next, they took me to the offices of W.W. Norton, where I was pretty sure I'd be escorted from the building just for wearing Doc Martens. 
But that didn't happen. 
Being at the Norton offices felt like reaching up into the night sky and touching the moon while the stars stitched your name across the cosmos. 
I mean, that's how big a deal it was to me. 
You get it? 
Their lead editor, Carol Houck Smith, leaned over right in my face with these beady, bright, fierce eyes and said, "" Well, send me something then, immediately! "" See, now most people, especially TED people, would have run to the mailbox, right? 
It took me over a decade to even imagine putting something in an envelope and licking a stamp. 
On the last night, I gave a big reading at the National Poetry Club. 
And at the end of the reading, Katharine Kidde of Kidde, Hoyt & Picard Literary Agency, walked straight up to me and shook my hand and offered me representation, like, on the spot. 
I stood there and I kind of went deaf. 
Has this ever happened to you? 
And I almost started crying because all the people in the room were dressed so beautifully, and all that came out of my mouth was: "I don't know. I have to think about it." 
And she said, "" OK, then, "" and walked away. 
All those open hands out to me, that small, sad stone in my throat... 
You see, I'm trying to tell you something about people like me. 
Misfit people — we don't always know how to hope or say yes or choose the big thing, even when it's right in front of us. 
It's a shame we carry. 
It's the shame of wanting something good. 
It's the shame of feeling something good. 
It's the shame of not really believing we deserve to be in the room with the people we admire. 
If I could, I'd go back and I'd coach myself. 
I'd be exactly like those over-50-year-old women who helped me. 
I'd teach myself how to want things, how to stand up, how to ask for them. 
I'd say, "" You! Yeah, you! You belong in the room, too. "" The radiance falls on all of us, and we are nothing without each other. 
Instead, I flew back to Oregon, and as I watched the evergreens and rain come back into view, I just drank many tiny bottles of airplane "" feel sorry for yourself. "" I thought about how, if I was a writer, I was some kind of misfit writer. 
What I'm saying is, I flew back to Oregon without a book deal, without an agent, and with only a headful and heart-ful of memories of having sat so near the beautiful writers. 
Memory was the only prize I allowed myself. 
And yet, at home in the dark, back in my underwear, I could still hear their voices. 
They said, "" Don't listen to anyone who tries to get you to shut up or change your story. "" They said, "" Give voice to the story only you know how to tell. "" They said, "" Sometimes telling the story is the thing that saves your life. "" Now I am, as you can see, the woman over 50. 
And I'm a writer. 
And I'm a mother. 
And I became a teacher. 
Guess who my favorite students are. 
Although it didn't happen the day that dream letter came through my mailbox, I did write a memoir, called "" The Chronology of Water. "" In it are the stories of how many times I've had to reinvent a self from the ruins of my choices, the stories of how my seeming failures were really just weird-ass portals to something beautiful. 
All I had to do was give voice to the story. 
There's a myth in most cultures about following your dreams. 
It's called the hero's journey. 
But I prefer a different myth, that's slightly to the side of that or underneath it. 
It's called the misfit's myth. 
And it goes like this: even at the moment of your failure, right then, you are beautiful. 
You don't know it yet, but you have the ability to reinvent yourself endlessly. 
That's your beauty. 
You can be a drunk, you can be a survivor of abuse, you can be an ex-con, you can be a homeless person, you can lose all your money or your job or your husband or your wife, or the worst thing of all, a child. 
You can even lose your marbles. 
You can be standing dead center in the middle of your failure and still, I'm only here to tell you, you are so beautiful. 
Your story deserves to be heard, because you, you rare and phenomenal misfit, you new species, are the only one in the room who can tell the story the way only you would. 
And I'd be listening. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Isadora Duncan — (Music) — crazy, long-legged woman from San Francisco, got tired of this country, and she wanted to get out. 
Isadora was famous somewhere around 1908 for putting up a blue curtain, and she would stand with her hands over her solar plexus and she would wait, and she would wait, and then, she would move. 
(Music) Josh and I and Somi call this piece "The Red Circle and the Blue Curtain." 
Red circle. 
Blue curtain. 
But, this is not the beginning of the 20th century. 
This is a morning in Vancouver in 2015. 
(Music) (Singing) Come on, Josh! (Music) (Singing) 
Go! 
Are we there yet? 
I don't think so. 
Hey, yeah! 
(Music) What time is it? (Music) 
Where are we? 
Josh. 
Somi. 
Bill T. 
Josh. 
Somi. 
Bill T. 
(Applause) Yeah, yeah! 

This is the Bop. 
The Bop is a type of social dance. 
Dance is a language, and social dance is an expression that emerges from a community. 
A social dance isn't choreographed by any one person. 
It can't be traced to any one moment. 
Each dance has steps that everyone can agree on, but it's about the individual and their creative identity. 
Because of that, social dances bubble up, they change and they spread like wildfire. 
They are as old as our remembered history. 
In African-American social dances, we see over 200 years of how African and African-American traditions influenced our history. 
The present always contains the past. 
And the past shapes who we are and who we will be. 
(Clapping) The Juba dance was born from enslaved Africans' experience on the plantation. 
Brought to the Americas, stripped of a common spoken language, this dance was a way for enslaved Africans to remember where they're from. 
It may have looked something like this. 
Slapping thighs, shuffling feet and patting hands: this was how they got around the slave owners' ban on drumming, improvising complex rhythms just like ancestors did with drums in Haiti or in the Yoruba communities of West Africa. 
It was about keeping cultural traditions alive and retaining a sense of inner freedom under captivity. 
It was the same subversive spirit that created this dance: the Cakewalk, a dance that parodied the mannerisms of Southern high society — a way for the enslaved to throw shade at the masters. 
The crazy thing about this dance is that the Cakewalk was performed for the masters, who never suspected they were being made fun of. 
Now you might recognize this one. 
1920s — the Charleston. 
The Charleston was all about improvisation and musicality, making its way into Lindy Hop, swing dancing and even the Kid n Play, originally called the Funky Charleston. 
Started by a tight-knit Black community near Charleston, South Carolina, the Charleston permeated dance halls where young women suddenly had the freedom to kick their heels and move their legs. 
Now, social dance is about community and connection; if you knew the steps, it meant you belonged to a group. 
But what if it becomes a worldwide craze? 
Enter the Twist. 
It's no surprise that the Twist can be traced back to the 19th century, brought to America from the Congo during slavery. 
But in the late '50s, right before the Civil Rights Movement, the Twist is popularized by Chubby Checker and Dick Clark. 
Suddenly, everybody's doing the Twist: white teenagers, kids in Latin America, making its way into songs and movies. 
Through social dance, the boundaries between groups become blurred. 
The story continues in the 1980s and '90s. 
Along with the emergence of hip-hop, African-American social dance took on even more visibility, borrowing from its long past, shaping culture and being shaped by it. 
Today, these dances continue to evolve, grow and spread. 
Why do we dance? 
To move, to let loose, to express. 
Why do we dance together? 
To heal, to remember, to say: "" We speak a common language. 
We exist and we are free. "" 

I didn't know when I agreed to do this whether I was expected to talk or to sing. 
But when I was told that the topic was language, I felt that I had to speak about something for a moment. 
I have a problem. 
It's not the worst thing in the world. 
I'm fine. 
I'm not on fire. 
I know that other people in the world have far worse things to deal with, but for me, language and music are inextricably linked through this one thing. 
And the thing is that I have a stutter. 
It might seem curious given that I spend a lot of my life on the stage. 
One would assume that I'm comfortable in the public sphere and comfortable here, speaking to you guys. 
But the truth is that I've spent my life up until this point and including this point, living in mortal dread of public speaking. 
Public singing, whole different thing. (Laughter) But we'll get to that in a moment. 
I've never really talked about it before so explicitly. 
I think that that's because I've always lived in hope that when I was a grown-up, I wouldn't have one. 
I sort of lived with this idea that when I'm grown, I'll have learned to speak French, and when I'm grown, I'll learn how to manage my money, and when I'm grown, I won't have a stutter, and then I'll be able to public speak and maybe be the prime minister and anything's possible and, you know. 
(Laughter) So I can talk about it now because I've reached this point, where — I mean, I'm 28. 
I'm pretty sure that I'm grown now. 
(Laughter) And I'm an adult woman who spends her life as a performer, with a speech impediment. 
So, I might as well come clean about it. 
There are some interesting angles to having a stutter. 
For me, the worst thing that can happen is meeting another stutterer. 
(Laughter) This happened to me in Hamburg, when this guy, we met and he said, "Hello, m-m-m-my name is Joe," and I said, "" Oh, hello, m-m-m-my name is Meg. "" Imagine my horror when I realized he thought I was making fun of him. (Laughter) 
People think I'm drunk all the time. (Laughter) 
People think that I've forgotten their name when I hesitate before saying it. 
And it is a very weird thing, because proper nouns are the worst. 
If I'm going to use the word "" Wednesday "" in a sentence, and I'm coming up to the word, and I can feel that I'm going to stutter or something, I can change the word to "" tomorrow, "" or "" the day after Tuesday, "" or something else. 
It's clunky, but you can get away with it, because over time I've developed this loophole method of using speech where right at the last minute you change the thing and you trick your brain. 
But with people's names, you can't change them. 
(Laughter) When I was singing a lot of jazz, I worked a lot with a pianist whose name was Steve. 
As you can probably gather, S's and T's, together or independently, are my kryptonite. 
But I would have to introduce the band over this rolling vamp, and when I got around to Steve, I'd often find myself stuck on the "" St. "" And it was a bit awkward and uncomfortable and it totally kills the vibe. 
So after a few instances of this, Steve happily became "" Seve, "" and we got through it that way. (Laughter) I've had a lot of therapy, and a common form of treatment is to use this technique that's called smooth speech, which is where you almost sing everything that you say. 
You kind of join everything together in this very singsong, kindergarten teacher way, and it makes you sound very serene, like you've had lots of Valium, and everything is calm. (Laughter) That's not actually me. 
And I do use that. I do. 
I use it when I have to be on panel shows, or when I have to do radio interviews, when the economy of airtime is paramount. 
(Laughter) I get through it that way for my job. 
But as an artist who feels that their work is based solely on a platform of honesty and being real, that feels often like cheating. 
Which is why before I sing, I wanted to tell you what singing means to me. 
It's more than making nice sounds, and it's more than making nice songs. 
It's more than feeling known, or understood. 
It's more than making you feel the things that I feel. 
It's not about mythology, or mythologizing myself to you. 
Somehow, through some miraculous synaptic function of the human brain, it's impossible to stutter when you sing. 
And when I was younger, that was a method of treatment that worked very well for me, singing, so I did it a lot. 
And that's why I'm here today. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Singing for me is sweet relief. 
It is the only time when I feel fluent. 
It is the only time when what comes out of my mouth is comprehensively exactly what I intended. 
(Laughter) So I know that this is a TED Talk, but now i'm going to TED sing. 
This is a song that I wrote last year. 
Thank you very much. Thank you. 
(Applause) (Piano) ♪ I would be a beauty ♪ ♪ but my nose ♪ ♪ is slightly too big ♪ ♪ for my face ♪ ♪ And I would be a dreamer ♪ ♪ but my dream ♪ ♪ is slightly too big ♪ ♪ for this space ♪ ♪ And I would be an angel ♪ ♪ but my halo ♪ ♪ it pales in the glow ♪ ♪ of your grace ♪ ♪ And I would be a joker ♪ ♪ but that card looks silly when you play ♪ ♪ your ace ♪ ♪ I'd like to know ♪ 
♪ Are there stars in hell? ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ know if you can tell ♪ ♪ that you make me lose everything I know ♪ ♪ That I cannot choose to or not let go ♪ ♪ And I'd stay forever ♪ ♪ but my home ♪ ♪ is slightly too far ♪ ♪ from this place ♪ ♪ And I swear I tried to ♪ ♪ slow it down ♪ ♪ when I am walking at your pace ♪ ♪ But all I could think ♪ ♪ idling through the cities ♪ ♪ do I look pretty in the rain? ♪ 
♪ And I don't know how someone ♪ ♪ quite so lovely ♪ ♪ makes me feel ugly ♪ ♪ So much shame ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ Are there stars in hell? ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ know if you can tell ♪ ♪ that you make me lose everything I know ♪ ♪ that I cannot choose to or not let go ♪ Thank you very much. (Applause) 

When I graduated UCLA, I moved to northern California, and I lived in a little town called Elk on the Mendocino coast, and I didn't have a phone or TV, but I had U.S. mail, and life was good back then, if you could remember it. 
I'd go to the general store for a cup of coffee and a brownie, and I'd ship my film to San Francisco, and lo and behold, two days later, it would end up on my front door, which was way better than having to fight the traffic of Hollywood. (Music) I didn't have much money, but I had time and a sense of wonder. (Music) So I started shooting time-lapse photography. 
It would take me a month to shoot a four-minute roll of film, because that's all I could afford. 
I've been shooting time-lapse flowers continuously, non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 30 years, and to see them move is a dance I'll never get tired of. 
Their beauty immerses us with color, taste, touch. 
It also provides a third of the food we eat. 
(Music) Beauty and seduction is nature's tools for survival, because we protect what we fall in love with. 
It opens our hearts, and makes us realize we are a part of nature and we're not separate from it. 
When we see ourselves in nature, it also connects us to every one of us, because it's clear that it's all connected in one. 
When people see my images, a lot of times they'll say, "" Oh my God. "" Have you ever wondered what that meant? 
The "" oh "" means it caught your attention, makes you present, makes you mindful. 
The "" my "" means it connects with something deep inside your soul. 
It creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard. And "" God ""? 
God is that personal journey we all want to be on, to be inspired, to feel like we're connected to a universe that celebrates life. 
Did you know that 80 percent of the information we receive comes through our eyes? 
And if you compare light energy to musical scales, it would only be one octave that the naked eye could see, which is right in the middle? 
And aren't we grateful for our brains that can, you know, take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy to create images in order for us to explore our world? 
And aren't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and the beauty of nature? 
(Music) Nature's beauty is a gift that cultivates appreciation and gratitude. (Music) 
So I have a gift I want to share with you today, a project I'm working on called Happiness Revealed, and it'll give us a glimpse into that perspective from the point of view of a child and an elderly man of that world. 
Child: When I watch TV, it's just some shows that you just — that are pretend, and when you explore, you get more imagination than you already had, and when you get more imagination, it makes you want to go deeper in so you can get more and see beautifuller things, like the path, if it's a path, it could lead you to a beach, or something, and it could be beautiful. 
(Music) Elderly Man: You think this is just another day in your life? 
It's not just another day. It's the one day that is given to you today. 
It's given to you. It's a gift. 
It's the only gift that you have right now, and the only appropriate response is gratefulness. 
If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day in your life and the very last day, then you will have spent this day very well. 
Begin by opening your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open, that incredible array of colors that is constantly offered to us for pure enjoyment. 
Look at the sky. 
We so rarely look at the sky. 
We so rarely note how different it is from moment to moment, with clouds coming and going. 
We just think of the weather, and even with the weather, we don't think of all the many nuances of weather. 
We just think of good weather and bad weather. 
This day, right now, has unique weather, maybe a kind that will never exactly in that form come again. 
That formation of clouds in the sky will never be the same as it is right now. 
Open your eyes. Look at that. 
Look at the faces of people whom you meet. 
Each one has an incredible story behind their face, a story that you could never fully fathom, not only their own story, but the story of their ancestors. 
We all go back so far, and in this present moment, on this day, all the people you meet, all that life from generations and from so many places all over the world flows together and meets you here like a life-giving water, if you only open your heart and drink. 
(Music) Open your heart to the incredible gifts that civilization gives to us. 
You flip a switch and there is electric light. 
You turn a faucet and there is warm water and cold water, and drinkable water. 
It's a gift that millions and millions in the world will never experience. 
So these are just a few of an enormous number of gifts to which we can open your heart. 
And so I wish you that you will open your heart to all these blessings, and let them flow through you, that everyone whom you will meet on this day will be blessed by you, just by your eyes, by your smile, by your touch, just by your presence. 
Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you, and then it will really be a good day. (Music) (Applause) Louie Schwartzberg: Thank you. 
Thank you very much. (Applause) 

I want you to look around the room for a minute and try to find the most paranoid person here — (Laughter) And then I want you to point at that person for me. (Laughter) 
OK, don't actually do it. (Laughter) 
But, as an organizational psychologist, I spend a lot of time in workplaces, and I find paranoia everywhere. 
Paranoia is caused by people that I call "" takers. "" Takers are self-serving in their interactions. 
It's all about what can you do for me. 
The opposite is a giver. 
It's somebody who approaches most interactions by asking, "What can I do for you?" 
I wanted to give you a chance to think about your own style. 
We all have moments of giving and taking. 
Your style is how you treat most of the people most of the time, your default. 
I have a short test you can take to figure out if you're more of a giver or a taker, and you can take it right now. 
[The Narcissist Test] [Step 1: Take a moment to think about yourself.] (Laughter) [Step 2: If you made it to Step 2, you are not a narcissist.] (Laughter) This is the only thing I will say today that has no data behind it, but I am convinced the longer it takes for you to laugh at this cartoon, the more worried we should be that you're a taker. (Laughter) 
Of course, not all takers are narcissists. 
Some are just givers who got burned one too many times. 
Then there's another kind of taker that we won't be addressing today, and that's called a psychopath. 
(Laughter) I was curious, though, about how common these extremes are, and so I surveyed over 30,000 people across industries around the world's cultures. 
And I found that most people are right in the middle between giving and taking. 
They choose this third style called "" matching. "" If you're a matcher, you try to keep an even balance of give and take: quid pro quo — I'll do something for you if you do something for me. 
And that seems like a safe way to live your life. 
But is it the most effective and productive way to live your life? 
The answer to that question is a very definitive... 
maybe. 
(Laughter) I studied dozens of organizations, thousands of people. 
I had engineers measuring their productivity. 
(Laughter) I looked at medical students' grades — even salespeople's revenue. (Laughter) 
And, unexpectedly, the worst performers in each of these jobs were the givers. 
The engineers who got the least work done were the ones who did more favors than they got back. 
They were so busy doing other people's jobs, they literally ran out of time and energy to get their own work completed. 
In medical school, the lowest grades belong to the students who agree most strongly with statements like, "I love helping others," which suggests the doctor you ought to trust is the one who came to med school with no desire to help anybody. 
(Laughter) And then in sales, too, the lowest revenue accrued in the most generous salespeople. 
I actually reached out to one of those salespeople who had a very high giver score. 
And I asked him, "" Why do you suck at your job — "" I didn't ask it that way, but — (Laughter) "What's the cost of generosity in sales?" 
And he said, "" Well, I just care so deeply about my customers that I would never sell them one of our crappy products. "" (Laughter) So just out of curiosity, how many of you self-identify more as givers than takers or matchers? 
Raise your hands. 
OK, it would have been more before we talked about these data. 
But actually, it turns out there's a twist here, because givers are often sacrificing themselves, but they make their organizations better. 
We have a huge body of evidence — many, many studies looking at the frequency of giving behavior that exists in a team or an organization — and the more often people are helping and sharing their knowledge and providing mentoring, the better organizations do on every metric we can measure: higher profits, customer satisfaction, employee retention — even lower operating expenses. 
So givers spend a lot of time trying to help other people and improve the team, and then, unfortunately, they suffer along the way. 
I want to talk about what it takes to build cultures where givers actually get to succeed. 
So I wondered, then, if givers are the worst performers, who are the best performers? 
Let me start with the good news: it's not the takers. 
Takers tend to rise quickly but also fall quickly in most jobs. 
And they fall at the hands of matchers. 
If you're a matcher, you believe in "" An eye for an eye "" — a just world. 
And so when you meet a taker, you feel like it's your mission in life to just punish the hell out of that person. 
(Laughter) And that way justice gets served. 
Well, most people are matchers. 
And that means if you're a taker, it tends to catch up with you eventually; what goes around will come around. 
And so the logical conclusion is: it must be the matchers who are the best performers. 
But they're not. 
In every job, in every organization I've ever studied, the best results belong to the givers again. 
Take a look at some data I gathered from hundreds of salespeople, tracking their revenue. 
What you can see is that the givers go to both extremes. 
They make up the majority of people who bring in the lowest revenue, but also the highest revenue. 
The same patterns were true for engineers' productivity and medical students' grades. 
Givers are overrepresented at the bottom and at the top of every success metric that I can track. 
Which raises the question: How do we create a world where more of these givers get to excel? 
I want to talk about how to do that, not just in businesses, but also in nonprofits, schools — even governments. 
Are you ready? 
(Cheers) I was going to do it anyway, but I appreciate the enthusiasm. 
(Laughter) The first thing that's really critical is to recognize that givers are your most valuable people, but if they're not careful, they burn out. 
So you have to protect the givers in your midst. 
And I learned a great lesson about this from Fortune's best networker. 
It's the guy, not the cat. 
(Laughter) His name is Adam Rifkin. 
He's a very successful serial entrepreneur who spends a huge amount of his time helping other people. 
And his secret weapon is the five-minute favor. 
Adam said, "" You don't have to be Mother Teresa or Gandhi to be a giver. 
You just have to find small ways to add large value to other people's lives. "" That could be as simple as making an introduction between two people who could benefit from knowing each other. 
It could be sharing your knowledge or giving a little bit of feedback. 
Or It might be even something as basic as saying, "" You know, I'm going to try and figure out if I can recognize somebody whose work has gone unnoticed. "" And those five-minute favors are really critical to helping givers set boundaries and protect themselves. 
The second thing that matters if you want to build a culture where givers succeed, is you actually need a culture where help-seeking is the norm; where people ask a lot. 
This may hit a little too close to home for some of you. 
[So in all your relationships, you always have to be the giver?] (Laughter) What you see with successful givers is they recognize that it's OK to be a receiver, too. 
If you run an organization, we can actually make this easier. 
We can make it easier for people to ask for help. 
A couple colleagues and I studied hospitals. 
We found that on certain floors, nurses did a lot of help-seeking, and on other floors, they did very little of it. 
The factor that stood out on the floors where help-seeking was common, where it was the norm, was there was just one nurse whose sole job it was to help other nurses on the unit. 
When that role was available, nurses said, "" It's not embarrassing, it's not vulnerable to ask for help — it's actually encouraged. "" Help-seeking isn't important just for protecting the success and the well-being of givers. 
It's also critical to getting more people to act like givers, because the data say that somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of all giving in organizations starts with a request. 
But a lot of people don't ask. 
They don't want to look incompetent, they don't know where to turn, they don't want to burden others. 
Yet if nobody ever asks for help, you have a lot of frustrated givers in your organization who would love to step up and contribute, if they only knew who could benefit and how. 
But I think the most important thing, if you want to build a culture of successful givers, is to be thoughtful about who you let onto your team. 
I figured, you want a culture of productive generosity, you should hire a bunch of givers. 
But I was surprised to discover, actually, that that was not right — that the negative impact of a taker on a culture is usually double to triple the positive impact of a giver. 
Think about it this way: one bad apple can spoil a barrel, but one good egg just does not make a dozen. 
I don't know what that means — (Laughter) But I hope you do. 
No — let even one taker into a team, and you will see that the givers will stop helping. 
They'll say, "" I'm surrounded by a bunch of snakes and sharks. 
Why should I contribute? "" Whereas if you let one giver into a team, you don't get an explosion of generosity. 
More often, people are like, "Great! That person can do all our work." 
So, effective hiring and screening and team building is not about bringing in the givers; it's about weeding out the takers. 
If you can do that well, you'll be left with givers and matchers. 
The givers will be generous because they don't have to worry about the consequences. 
And the beauty of the matchers is that they follow the norm. 
So how do you catch a taker before it's too late? 
We're actually pretty bad at figuring out who's a taker, especially on first impressions. 
There's a personality trait that throws us off. 
It's called agreeableness, one the major dimensions of personality across cultures. 
Agreeable people are warm and friendly, they're nice, they're polite. 
You find a lot of them in Canada — (Laughter) Where there was actually a national contest to come up with a new Canadian slogan and fill in the blank, "As Canadian as..." 
I thought the winning entry was going to be, "As Canadian as maple syrup," or, "... ice hockey." 
But no, Canadians voted for their new national slogan to be — I kid you not — "As Canadian as possible under the circumstances." 
(Laughter) Now for those of you who are highly agreeable, or maybe slightly Canadian, you get this right away. 
How could I ever say I'm any one thing when I'm constantly adapting to try to please other people? 
Disagreeable people do less of it. 
They're more critical, skeptical, challenging, and far more likely than their peers to go to law school. 
(Laughter) That's not a joke, that's actually an empirical fact. (Laughter) 
So I always assumed that agreeable people were givers and disagreeable people were takers. 
But then I gathered the data, and I was stunned to find no correlation between those traits, because it turns out that agreeableness-disagreeableness is your outer veneer: How pleasant is it to interact with you? 
Whereas giving and taking are more of your inner motives: What are your values? What are your intentions toward others? 
If you really want to judge people accurately, you have to get to the moment every consultant in the room is waiting for, and draw a two-by-two. 
(Laughter) The agreeable givers are easy to spot: they say yes to everything. 
The disagreeable takers are also recognized quickly, although you might call them by a slightly different name. 
(Laughter) We forget about the other two combinations. 
There are disagreeable givers in our organizations. 
There are people who are gruff and tough on the surface but underneath have others' best interests at heart. 
Or as an engineer put it, "" Oh, disagreeable givers — like somebody with a bad user interface but a great operating system. "" (Laughter) If that helps you. (Laughter) 
Disagreeable givers are the most undervalued people in our organizations, because they're the ones who give the critical feedback that no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear. 
We need to do a much better job valuing these people as opposed to writing them off early, and saying, "" Eh, kind of prickly, must be a selfish taker. "" The other combination we forget about is the deadly one — the agreeable taker, also known as the faker. 
This is the person who's nice to your face, and then will stab you right in the back. 
(Laughter) And my favorite way to catch these people in the interview process is to ask the question, "" Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved? "" The takers will give you four names, and they will all be more influential than them, because takers are great at kissing up and then kicking down. 
Givers are more likely to name people who are below them in a hierarchy, who don't have as much power, who can do them no good. 
And let's face it, you all know you can learn a lot about character by watching how someone treats their restaurant server or their Uber driver. 
So if we do all this well, if we can weed takers out of organizations, if we can make it safe to ask for help, if we can protect givers from burnout and make it OK for them to be ambitious in pursuing their own goals as well as trying to help other people, we can actually change the way that people define success. 
Instead of saying it's all about winning a competition, people will realize success is really more about contribution. 
I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed. 
And if we can spread that belief, we can actually turn paranoia upside down. 
There's a name for that. 
It's called "" pronoia. "" Pronoia is the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being. 
(Laughter) That they're going around behind your back and saying exceptionally glowing things about you. 
The great thing about a culture of givers is that's not a delusion — it's reality. 
I want to live in a world where givers succeed, and I hope you will help me create that world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We have a global health challenge in our hands today, and that is that the way we currently discover and develop new drugs is too costly, takes far too long, and it fails more often than it succeeds. 
It really just isn't working, and that means that patients that badly need new therapies are not getting them, and diseases are going untreated. 
We seem to be spending more and more money. 
So for every billion dollars we spend in R & D, we're getting less drugs approved into the market. 
More money, less drugs. Hmm. 
So what's going on here? 
Well, there's a multitude of factors at play, but I think one of the key factors is that the tools that we currently have available to test whether a drug is going to work, whether it has efficacy, or whether it's going to be safe before we get it into human clinical trials, are failing us. They're not predicting what's going to happen in humans. 
And we have two main tools available at our disposal. 
They are cells in dishes and animal testing. 
Now let's talk about the first one, cells in dishes. 
So, cells are happily functioning in our bodies. 
We take them and rip them out of their native environment, throw them in one of these dishes, and expect them to work. 
Guess what. They don't. 
They don't like that environment because it's nothing like what they have in the body. 
What about animal testing? 
Well, animals do and can provide extremely useful information. 
They teach us about what happens in the complex organism. 
We learn more about the biology itself. 
However, more often than not, animal models fail to predict what will happen in humans when they're treated with a particular drug. 
So we need better tools. 
We need human cells, but we need to find a way to keep them happy outside the body. 
Our bodies are dynamic environments. 
We're in constant motion. 
Our cells experience that. 
They're in dynamic environments in our body. 
They're under constant mechanical forces. 
So if we want to make cells happy outside our bodies, we need to become cell architects. 
We need to design, build and engineer a home away from home for the cells. 
And at the Wyss Institute, we've done just that. 
We call it an organ-on-a-chip. 
And I have one right here. 
It's beautiful, isn't it? But it's pretty incredible. 
Right here in my hand is a breathing, living human lung on a chip. 
And it's not just beautiful. 
It can do a tremendous amount of things. 
We have living cells in that little chip, cells that are in a dynamic environment interacting with different cell types. 
There's been many people trying to grow cells in the lab. 
They've tried many different approaches. 
They've even tried to grow little mini-organs in the lab. 
We're not trying to do that here. 
We're simply trying to recreate in this tiny chip the smallest functional unit that represents the biochemistry, the function and the mechanical strain that the cells experience in our bodies. 
So how does it work? Let me show you. 
We use techniques from the computer chip manufacturing industry to make these structures at a scale relevant to both the cells and their environment. 
We have three fluidic channels. 
In the center, we have a porous, flexible membrane on which we can add human cells from, say, our lungs, and then underneath, they had capillary cells, the cells in our blood vessels. 
And we can then apply mechanical forces to the chip that stretch and contract the membrane, so the cells experience the same mechanical forces that they did when we breathe. 
And they experience them how they did in the body. 
There's air flowing through the top channel, and then we flow a liquid that contains nutrients through the blood channel. 
Now the chip is really beautiful, but what can we do with it? 
We can get incredible functionality inside these little chips. 
Let me show you. 
We could, for example, mimic infection, where we add bacterial cells into the lung. 
then we can add human white blood cells. 
White blood cells are our body's defense against bacterial invaders, and when they sense this inflammation due to infection, they will enter from the blood into the lung and engulf the bacteria. 
Well now you're going to see this happening live in an actual human lung on a chip. 
We've labeled the white blood cells so you can see them flowing through, and when they detect that infection, they begin to stick. 
They stick, and then they try to go into the lung side from blood channel. 
And you can see here, we can actually visualize a single white blood cell. 
It sticks, it wiggles its way through between the cell layers, through the pore, comes out on the other side of the membrane, and right there, it's going to engulf the bacteria labeled in green. 
In that tiny chip, you just witnessed one of the most fundamental responses our body has to an infection. 
It's the way we respond to — an immune response. 
It's pretty exciting. 
Now I want to share this picture with you, not just because it's so beautiful, but because it tells us an enormous amount of information about what the cells are doing within the chips. 
It tells us that these cells from the small airways in our lungs, actually have these hairlike structures that you would expect to see in the lung. 
These structures are called cilia, and they actually move the mucus out of the lung. 
Yeah. Mucus. Yuck. 
But mucus is actually very important. 
Mucus traps particulates, viruses, potential allergens, and these little cilia move and clear the mucus out. 
When they get damaged, say, by cigarette smoke for example, they don't work properly, and they can't clear that mucus out. 
And that can lead to diseases such as bronchitis. 
Cilia and the clearance of mucus are also involved in awful diseases like cystic fibrosis. 
But now, with the functionality that we get in these chips, we can begin to look for potential new treatments. 
We didn't stop with the lung on a chip. 
We have a gut on a chip. 
You can see one right here. 
And we've put intestinal human cells in a gut on a chip, and they're under constant peristaltic motion, this trickling flow through the cells, and we can mimic many of the functions that you actually would expect to see in the human intestine. 
Now we can begin to create models of diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome. 
This is a disease that affects a large number of individuals. 
It's really debilitating, and there aren't really many good treatments for it. 
Now we have a whole pipeline of different organ chips that we are currently working on in our labs. 
Now, the true power of this technology, however, really comes from the fact that we can fluidically link them. 
There's fluid flowing across these cells, so we can begin to interconnect multiple different chips together to form what we call a virtual human on a chip. 
Now we're really getting excited. 
We're not going to ever recreate a whole human in these chips, but what our goal is is to be able to recreate sufficient functionality so that we can make better predictions of what's going to happen in humans. 
For example, now we can begin to explore what happens when we put a drug like an aerosol drug. 
Those of you like me who have asthma, when you take your inhaler, we can explore how that drug comes into your lungs, how it enters the body, how it might affect, say, your heart. 
Does it change the beating of your heart? 
Does it have a toxicity? 
Does it get cleared by the liver? 
Is it metabolized in the liver? 
We can begin to study the dynamic response of the body to a drug. 
This could really revolutionize and be a game changer for not only the pharmaceutical industry, but a whole host of different industries, including the cosmetics industry. 
We can potentially use the skin on a chip that we're currently developing in the lab to test whether the ingredients in those products that you're using are actually safe to put on your skin without the need for animal testing. 
We could test the safety of chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis in our environment, such as chemicals in regular household cleaners. 
We could also use the organs on chips for applications in bioterrorism or radiation exposure. 
We could use them to learn more about diseases such as ebola or other deadly diseases such as SARS. 
Organs on chips could also change the way we do clinical trials in the future. 
Right now, the average participant in a clinical trial is that: average. 
Tends to be middle aged, tends to be female. 
You won't find many clinical trials in which children are involved, yet every day, we give children medications, and the only safety data we have on that drug is one that we obtained from adults. 
Children are not adults. 
They may not respond in the same way adults do. 
There are other things like genetic differences in populations that may lead to at-risk populations that are at risk of having an adverse drug reaction. 
Now imagine if we could take cells from all those different populations, put them on chips, and create populations on a chip. 
This could really change the way we do clinical trials. 
And this is the team and the people that are doing this. 
We have engineers, we have cell biologists, we have clinicians, all working together. 
We're really seeing something quite incredible at the Wyss Institute. 
It's really a convergence of disciplines, where biology is influencing the way we design, the way we engineer, the way we build. 
It's pretty exciting. 
We're establishing important industry collaborations such as the one we have with a company that has expertise in large-scale digital manufacturing. 
They're going to help us make, instead of one of these, millions of these chips, so that we can get them into the hands of as many researchers as possible. 
And this is key to the potential of that technology. 
Now let me show you our instrument. 
This is an instrument that our engineers are actually prototyping right now in the lab, and this instrument is going to give us the engineering controls that we're going to require in order to link 10 or more organ chips together. 
It does something else that's very important. 
It creates an easy user interface. 
So a cell biologist like me can come in, take a chip, put it in a cartridge like the prototype you see there, put the cartridge into the machine just like you would a C.D., and away you go. 
Plug and play. Easy. 
Now, let's imagine a little bit what the future might look like if I could take your stem cells and put them on a chip, or your stem cells and put them on a chip. 
It would be a personalized chip just for you. 
Now all of us in here are individuals, and those individual differences mean that we could react very differently and sometimes in unpredictable ways to drugs. 
I myself, a couple of years back, had a really bad headache, just couldn't shake it, thought, "" Well, I'll try something different. "" I took some Advil. Fifteen minutes later, I was on my way to the emergency room with a full-blown asthma attack. 
Now, obviously it wasn't fatal, but unfortunately, some of these adverse drug reactions can be fatal. 
So how do we prevent them? 
Well, we could imagine one day having Geraldine on a chip, having Danielle on a chip, having you on a chip. 
Personalized medicine. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Welcome to Bayeku, a riverine community in Ikorodu, Lagos — a vivid representation of several riverine communities across Nigeria, communities whose waterways have been infested by an invasive aquatic weed; communities where economic livelihoods have been hampered: fishing, marine transportation and trading; communities where fish yields have diminished; communities where schoolchildren are unable to go to school for days, sometimes weeks, on end. 
Who would have thought that this plant with round leaves, inflated stems, and showy, lavender flowers would cause such havoc in these communities. 
The plant is known as water hyacinth and its botanical name, Eichhornia crassipes. 
Interestingly, in Nigeria, the plant is also known by other names, names associated with historical events, as well as myths. 
In some places, the plant is called Babangida. 
When you hear Babangida, you remember the military and military coups. 
And you think: fear, restraint. 
In parts of Nigeria in the Niger Delta, the plant is also known as Abiola. 
When you hear Abiola, you remember annulled elections and you think: dashed hopes. 
In the southwestern part of Nigeria, the plant is known as Gbe'borun. 
Gbe'borun is a Yoruba phrase which translates to "" gossip, "" or "" talebearer. "" When you think of gossip, you think: rapid reproduction, destruction. 
And in the Igala-speaking part of Nigeria, the plant is known as A Kp'iye Kp'oma, And when you hear that, you think of death. 
It literally translates to "" death to mother and child. "" I personally had my encounter with this plant in the year 2009. 
It was shortly after I had relocated from the US to Nigeria. 
I'd quit my job in corporate America and decided to take this big leap of faith, a leap of faith that came out of a deep sense of conviction that there was a lot of work to do in Nigeria in the area of sustainable development. 
And so here I was in the year 2009, actually, at the end of 2009, in Lagos on the Third Mainland Bridge. 
And I looked to my left and saw this very arresting image. 
It was an image of fishing boats that had been hemmed in by dense mats of water hyacinth. 
And I was really pained by what I saw because I thought to myself, "" These poor fisherfolk, how are they going to go about their daily activities with these restrictions. "" And then I thought, "" There's got to be a better way. "" A win-win solution whereby the environment is taken care of by the weeds being cleared out of the way and then this being turned into an economic benefit for the communities whose lives are impacted the most by the infestation of the weed. 
That, I would say, was my spark moment. 
And so I did further research to find out more about the beneficial uses of this weed. 
Out of the several, one struck me the most. 
It was the use of the plant for handicrafts. 
And I thought, "" What a great idea. "" Personally, I love handicrafts, especially handicrafts that are woven around a story. 
And so I thought, "" This could be easily deployed within the communities without the requirement of technical skills. "" And I thought to myself, "" Three simple steps to a mega solution. "" First step: Get out into the waterways and harvest the water hyacinth. 
That way, you create access. 
Secondly, you dry the water hyacinth stems. 
And thirdly, you weave the water hyacinth into products. 
The third step was a challenge. 
See, I'm a computer scientist by background and not someone in the creative arts. 
And so I began my quest to find out how I can learn how to weave. 
And this quest took me to a community in Ibadan, where I lived, called Sabo. 
Sabo translates to "" strangers' quarters. "" And the community is predominantly made up of people from the northern part of the country. 
So I literally took my dried weeds in hand, there were several more of them, and went knocking from door to door to find out who could teach me how to weave these water hyacinth stems into ropes. 
And I was directed to the shed of Malam Yahaya. 
The problem, though, is that Malam Yahaya doesn't speak English and neither did I speak Hausa. 
But some little kids came to the rescue and helped translate. 
And that began my journey of learning how to weave and transform these dried water hyacinth stems into long ropes. 
With my long ropes in hand, I was now equipped to make products. 
And that was the beginning of partnerships. 
Working with rattan basket makers to come up with products. 
So with this in hand, I felt confident that I would be able to take this knowledge back into the riverine communities and help them to transform their adversity into prosperity. 
So taking these weeds and actually weaving them into products that can be sold. 
So we have pens, we have tableware, we have purses, we have tissue boxes. 
Thereby, helping the communities to see water hyacinth in a different light. 
Seeing water hyacinth as being valuable, being aesthetic, being durable, tough, resilient. 
Changing names, changing livelihoods. 
From Gbe'borun, gossip, to Olusotan, storyteller. 
And from A Kp'iye Kp'oma, which is "" killer of mother and child, "" to Ya du j'ewn w'Iye kp'Oma, "provider of food for mother and child." 
And I'd like to end with a quote by Michael Margolis. 
He said, "" If you want to learn about a culture, listen to the stories. 
And if you want to change a culture, change the stories. "" And so, from Makoko community, to Abobiri, to Ewoi, to Kolo, to Owahwa, Esaba, we have changed the story. 
Thank you for listening. 
(Applause) 

I'm five years old, and I am very proud. 
My father has just built the best outhouse in our little village in Ukraine. 
Inside, it's a smelly, gaping hole in the ground, but outside, it's pearly white formica and it literally gleams in the sun. 
This makes me feel so proud, so important, that I appoint myself the leader of my little group of friends and I devise missions for us. 
So we prowl from house to house looking for flies captured in spider webs and we set them free. 
Four years earlier, when I was one, after the Chernobyl accident, the rain came down black, and my sister's hair fell out in clumps, and I spent nine months in the hospital. 
There were no visitors allowed, so my mother bribed a hospital worker. 
She acquired a nurse's uniform, and she snuck in every night to sit by my side. 
Five years later, an unexpected silver lining. 
I am six years old, and I don't cry when we leave home and we come to America, because I expect it to be a place filled with rare and wonderful things like bananas and chocolate and Bazooka bubble gum, Bazooka bubble gum with the little cartoon wrappers inside, Bazooka that we'd get once a year in Ukraine and we'd have to chew one piece for an entire week. 
So the first day we get to New York, my grandmother and I find a penny in the floor of the homeless shelter that my family's staying in. 
And I hold this penny in the palm of my hand, and it's sticky and rusty, but it feels like I'm holding a fortune. 
About a year later, I get to feel that way again when we find a bag full of stuffed animals in the trash, and suddenly I have more toys than I've ever had in my whole life. 
And again, I get that feeling when we get a knock on the door of our apartment in Brooklyn, and my sister and I find a deliveryman with a box of pizza that we didn't order. 
My mother comes out, and he asks her for money, but she doesn't have enough. 
She walks 50 blocks to and from work every day just to avoid spending money on bus fare. 
Then our neighbor pops her head in, and she turns red with rage when she realizes that those immigrants from downstairs have somehow gotten their hands on her pizza. 
Everyone's upset. 
But the pizza is delicious. 
On our 10 year anniversary of being in the U.S., we decided to celebrate by reserving a room at the hotel that we first stayed in when we got to the U.S. 
His family lost everything, and at age 11, he had to live in motels with his dad, motels that would round up all of their food and keep it hostage until they were able to pay the bill. 
And one time, when he finally got his box of Frosted Flakes back, it was crawling with roaches. 
But he did have one thing. 
He had this shoebox that he carried with him everywhere containing nine comic books, two G.I. Joes painted to look like Spider-Man and five Gobots. And this was his treasure. 
This was his own assembly of heroes that kept him from drugs and gangs and from giving up on his dreams. 
I'm going to tell you about one more formerly homeless member of our family. 
She was tied up and thrown into the ring for other dogs to attack so they'd get more aggressive before the fight. 
And now, these days, she eats organic food and she sleeps on an orthopedic bed with her name on it, but when we pour water for her in her bowl, she still looks up and she wags her tail in gratitude. 
Sometimes Brian and I walk through the park with Scarlett, and she rolls through the grass, and we just look at her and then we look at each other and we feel gratitude. 
We forget about all of our new middle-class frustrations and disappointments, and we feel like millionaires. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Welcome to "" Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do. "" I don't have children. 
I borrow my friends' children, so — (Laughter) take all this advice with a grain of salt. 
We put suffocation warnings on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States, or for sale with an item in the United States. 
So, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety zone grow ever smaller, we cut off our children from valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them. 
And despite all of our best efforts and intentions, kids are always going to figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can, in whatever environment they can. 
The book is called "" 50 Dangerous Things. "" This is "" Five Dangerous Things. "" Thing number one: Play with fire. 
These are the three working elements of fire that you have to have for a good, controlled fire. 
You know, it's a spatula, it's a pry bar, it's a screwdriver and it's a blade, yeah. 
And it's a powerful and empowering tool. 
And it shows that kids can develop an extended sense of self through a tool at a very young age. 
You lay down a couple of very simple rules — always cut away from your body, keep the blade sharp, never force it — and these are things kids can understand and practice with. 
And throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skill, so it's very good for that kind of whole-body training. 
Next time you're about to throw out an appliance, don't throw it out. 
So these black boxes that we live with and take for granted are actually complex things made by other people, and you can understand them. 
It's a very simple exercise: Buy a song on iTunes, write it to a CD, then rip the CD to an MP3, and play it on your very same computer. 
Driving a car is a really empowering act for a young child, so this is the alternate — (Laughter) For those of you who aren't comfortable actually breaking the law, you can drive a car with your child. 
It's very safe actually. 

My name is Art Benjamin, and I am a "" mathemagician. "" What that means is, I combine my loves of math and magic to do something I call "" mathemagics. "" But before I get started, I have a quick question for the audience. 
By any chance, did anyone happen to bring with them this morning a calculator? 
You sir, that's three. 
And anybody on this side here? 
Would somebody get us started by giving us a two-digit number, please? 
AB: 22. And another two-digit number, sir? 
AB: Multiply 22 times 47, make sure you get 1,034, or the calculators are not working. 
AB: 594. Let's give three of them a nice round of applause there. 
(Applause) Would you like to try a more standard calculator, just in case? 
There is something called the square of a number, which most of you know is taking a number and multiplying it by itself. 
Audience: 25. 
What I'm going to try and do now is to square, in my head, four two-digit numbers faster than they can do on their calculators, even using the shortcut method. 
What I'll use is the second row this time, and I'll get four of you to each yell out a two-digit number, and if you would square the first number, and if you would square the second, the third and the fourth, I will try and race you to the answer. OK? 
AB: 23 squared, OK. 
Volunteer: 529. AB: 529. 
Volunteer: 3481. AB: 3481. 
Volunteer: 8649. 
I won't even write these down — I'll just call them out as they're called out to me. 
Anyone on our panel, verify the answer. 
AB: 987 squared is 974,169. 
(Applause ends) Let me try to take this one step further. 
(Laughter) I'm going to try to square a four-digit number this time. 
You can all take your time on this; I will not beat you to the answer on this one, but I will try to get the answer right. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Now, I would attempt to square a five-digit number — and I can — but unfortunately, most calculators cannot. 
In the meanwhile, let me conclude the first part of my show by doing something a little trickier. 
And instead of squaring it this time, I want you to take that number and multiply it by any three-digit number that you want, but don't tell me what you're multiplying by — just multiply it by any random three-digit number. 
What I'd like each of you to do is to call out for me any six of your seven digits, any six of them, in any order you'd like. 
You have a seven-digit number, call out any six of them please. 
Did you leave out the number 7? 
(Applause) (Applause ends) For my next number — (Laughter) while I mentally recharge my batteries, I have one more question for the audience. 
By any chance, does anybody here happen to know the day of the week that they were born on? 
Audience: 1953. 
November what? 
Fifth — was that a Wednesday? 
Good, how about the person behind her? 
Audience: 1947. AB: 1947, and the month? 
Audience: 1966. 
AB: I'll tell you what, Chris: as long as you have that book in front of you, do me a favor, turn to a year outside of the 1900s, either into the 1800s or way into the 2000s — that'll be a much greater challenge for me. 
AB: 1824, OK. 
There was a gentleman up here who had a 10-digit calculator. 
OK, stand up for me just for a second, so I can see where you are. 
You have a 10-digit calculator, sir, as well? 
But to make my job more interesting for you, as well as for me, I'm going to do this problem thinking out loud. 
Oh, I did this row already. 
57,683 — squared. 
I'm going to break the problem down into three parts. 
I'll do 57,000 squared, plus 683 squared, plus 57,000 times 683 times two. 
Now, let me recap. 
Let me explain what that is. 
(Laughter) If you want to talk to me about ADHD afterwards, you can talk to me then. 
By the way, one last instruction, for my judges with the calculators — you know who you are — there is at least a 50 percent chance that I will make a mistake here. 
If I do, don't tell me what the mistake is; just say, "" you're close, "" or something like that, and I'll try and figure out the answer — which could be pretty entertaining in itself. 
If, however, I am right, whatever you do, don't keep it to yourself, OK? 
(Laughter) Make sure everybody knows that I got the answer right, because this is my big finish, OK. 
77,862 becomes cookie fission, cookie fission is 77,822. 
That seems right, I'll go on. Cookie fission, OK. 
Take the 249, add that to cookie, 249, oops, but I see a carry coming — 249 — add that to cookie, 250 plus 77, is 327 million — fission, fission, OK, finally, we do 683 squared, that's 700 times 666, plus 17 squared is 466,489, rev up if I need it, rev up, take the 466, add that to fission, to get, oh gee — 328,489. 
Audience: Yeah! AB: Good. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) I hope you enjoyed mathemagics. 

I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 14 years old, and when I was 13, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products. 
So allow me to tell you about it. 
So I have a brother, Gavin. 
When this whole shebang happened, he was four. 
He loved to cook. 
He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these, needless to say, uneatable concoctions, or making invisible macaroni and cheese. 
He wanted to be a chef really badly. 
And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven. Right? 
I mean, we all had those when we were little. 
And he wanted one so badly. 
But then he started to realize something. 
In the commercials, and on the boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens, Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls. 
And the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials, and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple, very gender-specific colors to females, right? 
So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook; boys aren't. 
And this discouraged my brother a lot. 
He thought that he wasn't supposed to want to be a chef, because that was something that girls did. 
Girls cooked; boys didn't, or so was the message that Hasbro was sending. 
And this got me thinking, God, I wish there was a way that I could change this, that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it. 
And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change.org. 
Change.org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever you can think of. 
And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it, in featuring boys in the commercials, on the boxes, and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors. 
So this petition started to take off — humongously fast, you have no idea. 
I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets, and it was amazing. 
In three weeks, maybe three and a half, I had 46,000 signatures on this petition. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So, needless to say, it was crazy. 
Eventually, Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black, silver and blue. 
It was literally one of the best moments of my life. 
It was like "" Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. "" That thing was amazing. 
What I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I had become an activist, I could change something, that even as a kid, or maybe even especially as a kid, my voice mattered, and your voice matters too. 
I want to let you know it's not going to be easy, and it wasn't easy for me, because I faced a lot of obstacles. 
People online, and sometimes even in real life, were disrespectful to me and my family, and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time, and it really discouraged me. 
And actually, I have some examples, because what's better revenge than displaying their idiocy? 
So, let's see. 
From user name Liquidsore29 — interesting user names we have here — "Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay." 
Liquidsore29, really? Really? Okay. 
How about from Whiteboy77AGS: "People always need something to (female dog) about." 
From Jeffrey Gutierrez: "OMG, shut up. You just want money and attention." 
So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family. 
It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future? 
But then I started to realize something. 
Haters gonna hate. 
Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. 
So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. 
I look out into this crowd, and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. 
And you can make that change. 
You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. 
And that spark that you've been hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I study ants in the desert, in the tropical forest and in my kitchen, and in the hills around Silicon Valley where I live. 
I've recently realized that ants are using interactions differently in different environments, and that got me thinking that we could learn from this about other systems, like brains and data networks that we engineer, and even cancer. 
So what all these systems have in common is that there's no central control. 
So here you see a lot of ants moving around and interacting in a lab arena that's connected by tubes to two other arenas. 
So this is the network of the ants that you just saw moving around in the arena, and it's this constantly shifting network that produces the behavior of the colony, like whether all the ants are hiding inside the nest, or how many are going out to forage. 
There are more than 12,000 species of ants, in every conceivable environment, and they're using interactions differently to meet different environmental challenges. 
So one important environmental challenge that every system has to deal with is operating costs, just what it takes to run the system. 
And another environmental challenge is resources, finding them and collecting them. 
In the desert, operating costs are high because water is scarce, and the seed-eating ants that I study in the desert have to spend water to get water. 
So an ant outside foraging, searching for seeds in the hot sun, just loses water into the air. 
An outgoing forager doesn't go out unless it gets enough interactions with returning foragers, and what you see are the returning foragers going into the tunnel, into the nest, and meeting outgoing foragers on their way out. 
This makes sense for the ant colony, because the more food there is out there, the more quickly the foragers find it, the faster they come back, and the more foragers they send out. 
The system works to stay stopped, unless something positive happens. 
So interactions function to activate foragers. 
And we've been studying the evolution of this system. 
First of all, there's variation. 
On dry days, some colonies forage less, so colonies are different in how they manage this trade-off between spending water to search for seeds and getting water back in the form of seeds. 
And we're trying to understand why some colonies forage less than others by thinking about ants as neurons, using models from neuroscience. 
So just as a neuron adds up its stimulation from other neurons to decide whether to fire, an ant adds up its stimulation from other ants to decide whether to forage. 
And what we're looking for is whether there might be small differences among colonies in how many interactions each ant needs before it's willing to go out and forage, because a colony like that would forage less. 
And this raises an analogous question about brains. 
We talk about the brain, but of course every brain is slightly different, and maybe there are some individuals or some conditions in which the electrical properties of neurons are such that they require more stimulus to fire, and that would lead to differences in brain function. 
This is a map of the study site where I have been tracking this population of harvester ant colonies for 28 years, which is about as long as a colony lives. 
Each symbol is a colony, and the size of the symbol is how many offspring it had, because we were able to use genetic variation to match up parent and offspring colonies, that is, to figure out which colonies were founded by a daughter queen produced by which parent colony. 
And this was amazing for me, after all these years, to find out, for example, that colony 154, whom I've known well for many years, is a great-grandmother. 
Here's her daughter colony, here's her granddaughter colony, and these are her great-granddaughter colonies. 
And by doing this, I was able to learn that offspring colonies resemble parent colonies in their decisions about which days are so hot that they don't forage, and the offspring of parent colonies live so far from each other that the ants never meet, so the ants of the offspring colony can't be learning this from the parent colony. 
And so our next step is to look for the genetic variation underlying this resemblance. 
Over the time of the study, and especially in the past 10 years, there's been a very severe and deepening drought in the Southwestern U.S., and it turns out that the colonies that conserve water, that stay in when it's really hot outside, and thus sacrifice getting as much food as possible, are the ones more likely to have offspring colonies. 
So all this time, I thought that colony 154 was a loser, because on really dry days, there'd be just this trickle of foraging, while the other colonies were out foraging, getting lots of food, but in fact, colony 154 is a huge success. 
She's one of the rare great-grandmothers on the site. 
To my knowledge, this is the first time that we've been able to track the ongoing evolution of collective behavior in a natural population of animals and find out what's actually working best. 
Now, the Internet uses an algorithm to regulate the flow of data that's very similar to the one that the harvester ants are using to regulate the flow of foragers. 
And guess what we call this analogy? 
(Applause) So data doesn't leave the source computer unless it gets a signal that there's enough bandwidth for it to travel on. 
In the early days of the Internet, when operating costs were really high and it was really important not to lose any data, then the system was set up for interactions to activate the flow of data. 
It's interesting that the ants are using an algorithm that's so similar to the one that we recently invented, but this is only one of a handful of ant algorithms that we know about, and ants have had 130 million years to evolve a lot of good ones, and I think it's very likely that some of the other 12,000 species are going to have interesting algorithms for data networks that we haven't even thought of yet. 
Operating costs are low in the tropics, because it's very humid, and it's easy for the ants to be outside walking around. 
But the ants are so abundant and diverse in the tropics that there's a lot of competition. 
Whatever resource one species is using, another species is likely to be using that at the same time. 
So in this environment, interactions are used in the opposite way. 
The system keeps going unless something negative happens, and one species that I study makes circuits in the trees of foraging ants going from the nest to a food source and back, just round and round, unless something negative happens, like an interaction with ants of another species. 
So here's an example of ant security. 
In the middle, there's an ant plugging the nest entrance with its head in response to interactions with another species. 
But as soon as the threat is passed, the entrance is open again, and maybe there are situations in computer security where operating costs are low enough that we could just block access temporarily in response to an immediate threat, and then open it again, instead of trying to build a permanent firewall or fortress. 
And to do this, ants solve the problem of collective search, and this is a problem that's of great interest right now in robotics, because we've understood that, rather than sending a single, sophisticated, expensive robot out to explore another planet or to search a burning building, that instead, it may be more effective to get a group of cheaper robots exchanging only minimal information, and that's the way that ants do it. 
They're good at dealing with the main problem of collective search, which is the trade-off between searching very thoroughly and covering a lot of ground. 
And what they do is, when there are many ants in a small space, then each one can search very thoroughly because there will be another ant nearby searching over there, but when there are a few ants in a large space, then they need to stretch out their paths to cover more ground. 
I think they use interactions to assess density, so when they're really crowded, they meet more often, and they search more thoroughly. 
Different ant species must use different algorithms, because they've evolved to deal with different resources, and it could be really useful to know about this, and so we recently asked ants to solve the collective search problem in the extreme environment of microgravity in the International Space Station. 
When I first saw this picture, I thought, Oh no, they've mounted the habitat vertically, but then I realized that, of course, it doesn't matter. 
So the idea here is that the ants are working so hard to hang on to the wall or the floor or whatever you call it that they're less likely to interact, and so the relationship between how crowded they are and how often they meet would be messed up. 
We're still analyzing the data. 
But it would be interesting to know how other species solve this problem in different environments on Earth, and so we're setting up a program to encourage kids around the world to try this experiment with different species. 
It can be done with cheap materials. 
And that way, we could make a global map of ant collective search algorithms. 
And I think it's pretty likely that the invasive species, the ones that come into our buildings, are going to be really good at this, because they're in your kitchen because they're really good at finding food and water. 
When there's one piece of fruit, there's likely to be another piece of fruit nearby, and the ants that specialize on clustered resources use interactions for recruitment. 
So when one ant meets another, or when it meets a chemical deposited on the ground by another, then it changes direction to follow in the direction of the interaction, and that's how you get the trail of ants sharing your picnic. 
Now this is a place where I think we might be able to learn something from ants about cancer. 
I mean, first, it's obvious that we could do a lot to prevent cancer by not allowing people to spread around or sell the toxins that promote the evolution of cancer in our bodies, but I don't think the ants can help us much with this because ants never poison their own colonies. 
But we might be able to learn something from ants about treating cancer. 
Each one originates in a particular part of the body, and then some kinds of cancer will spread or metastasize to particular other tissues where they must be getting resources that they need. 
So if you think from the perspective of early metastatic cancer cells as they're out searching around for the resources that they need, if those resources are clustered, they're likely to use interactions for recruitment, and if we can figure out how cancer cells are recruiting, then maybe we could set traps to catch them before they become established. 
So ants are using interactions in different ways in a huge variety of environments, and we could learn from this about other systems that operate without central control. 
Using only simple interactions, ant colonies have been performing amazing feats for more than 130 million years. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. 
That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water. 
When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel. 
Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this. 
Instead, it looks like this. 
If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. 
Not missiles, but microbes. 
Now, part of the reason for this is that we've invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents. 
We're not ready for the next epidemic. 
Let's look at Ebola. 
I'm sure all of you read about it in the newspaper, lots of tough challenges. 
I followed it carefully through the case analysis tools we use to track polio eradication. 
And as you look at what went on, the problem wasn't that there was a system that didn't work well enough, the problem was that we didn't have a system at all. 
In fact, there's some pretty obvious key missing pieces. 
We didn't have a group of epidemiologists ready to go, who would have gone, seen what the disease was, seen how far it had spread. 
The case reports came in on paper. 
It was very delayed before they were put online and they were extremely inaccurate. 
We didn't have a way of preparing people. 
But even so, we were far slower than we should have been getting the thousands of workers into these countries. 
No one to look at the diagnostics. 
But that was never tried. 
So there was a lot that was missing. 
And these things are really a global failure. 
Now, in the movies it's quite different. 
There's a group of handsome epidemiologists ready to go, they move in, they save the day, but that's just pure Hollywood. 
The failure to prepare could allow the next epidemic to be dramatically more devastating than Ebola Let's look at the progression of Ebola over this year. 
About 10,000 people died, and nearly all were in the three West African countries. 
There's three reasons why it didn't spread more. 
The first is that there was a lot of heroic work by the health workers. 
The second is the nature of the virus. 
Ebola does not spread through the air. 
And by the time you're contagious, most people are so sick that they're bedridden. 
And that was just luck. 
If it had gotten into a lot more urban areas, the case numbers would have been much larger. 
So next time, we might not be so lucky. 
You can have a virus where people feel well enough while they're infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market. 
The source of the virus could be a natural epidemic like Ebola, or it could be bioterrorism. 
In fact, let's look at a model of a virus spread through the air, like the Spanish Flu back in 1918. 
So here's what would happen: It would spread throughout the world very, very quickly. 
And you can see over 30 million people died from that epidemic. 
So this is a serious problem. 
We should be concerned. 
We have the benefits of all the science and technology that we talk about here. 
We've got cell phones to get information from the public and get information out to them. 
We have advances in biology that should dramatically change the turnaround time to look at a pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen. 
So we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system. 
And we need preparedness. 
The best lessons, I think, on how to get prepared are again, what we do for war. 
For soldiers, we have full-time, waiting to go. 
We have reserves that can scale us up to large numbers. 
Do they understand about fuel and logistics and the same radio frequencies? 
So they are absolutely ready to go. 
What are the key pieces? 
That's where mothers can give birth safely, kids can get all their vaccines. 
We need a medical reserve corps: lots of people who've got the training and background who are ready to go, with the expertise. 
taking advantage of the military's ability to move fast, do logistics and secure areas. 
We need to do simulations, germ games, not war games, so that we see where the holes are. 
There are some big breakthroughs, like the Adeno-associated virus, that could work very, very quickly. 
Now I don't have an exact budget for what this would cost, but I'm quite sure it's very modest compared to the potential harm. 
The World Bank estimates that if we have a worldwide flu epidemic, global wealth will go down by over three trillion dollars and we'd have millions and millions of deaths. 
These investments offer significant benefits beyond just being ready for the epidemic. 
The primary healthcare, the R & D, those things would reduce global health equity and make the world more just as well as more safe. 
There's no need to panic. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What if I could present you a story that you would remember with your entire body and not just with your mind? 
My whole life as a journalist, I've really been compelled to try to make stories that can make a difference and maybe inspire people to care. 
I've worked in print. I've worked in documentary. 
I've worked in broadcast. 
But it really wasn't until I got involved with virtual reality that I started seeing these really intense, authentic reactions from people that really blew my mind. 
So the deal is that with VR, virtual reality, I can put you on scene in the middle of the story. 
By putting on these goggles that track wherever you look, you get this whole-body sensation, like you're actually, like, there. 
So five years ago was about when I really began to push the envelope with using virtual reality and journalism together. 
And I wanted to do a piece about hunger. 
Families in America are going hungry, food banks are overwhelmed, and they're often running out of food. 
Now, I knew I couldn't make people feel hungry, but maybe I could figure out a way to get them to feel something physical. 
So — again, this is five years ago — so doing journalism and virtual reality together was considered a worse-than-half-baked idea, and I had no funding. 
Believe me, I had a lot of colleagues laughing at me. 
And I did, though, have a really great intern, a woman named Michaela Kobsa-Mark. 
And together we went out to food banks and started recording audio and photographs. 
Until one day she came back to my office and she was bawling, she was just crying. 
She had been on scene at a long line, where the woman running the line was feeling extremely overwhelmed, and she was screaming, "" There's too many people! 
There's too many people! "" And this man with diabetes doesn't get food in time, his blood sugar drops too low, and he collapses into a coma. 
As soon as I heard that audio, I knew that this would be the kind of evocative piece that could really describe what was going on at food banks. 
So here's the real line. You can see how long it was, right? 
And again, as I said, we didn't have very much funding, so I had to reproduce it with virtual humans that were donated, and people begged and borrowed favors to help me create the models and make things as accurate as we could. 
And then we tried to convey what happened that day with as much as accuracy as is possible. 
(Video) Voice: There's too many people! There's too many people! 
Voice: OK, he's having a seizure. 
Voice: We need an ambulance. 
Nonny de la Peña: So the man on the right, for him, he's walking around the body. 
For him, he's in the room with that body. 
Like, that guy is at his feet. 
And even though, through his peripheral vision, he can see that he's in this lab space, he should be able to see that he's not actually on the street, but he feels like he's there with those people. 
He's very cautious not to step on this guy who isn't really there, right? 
So that piece ended up going to Sundance in 2012, a kind of amazing thing, and it was the first virtual reality film ever, basically. 
And when we went, I was really terrified. 
I didn't really know how people were going to react and what was going to happen. 
And we showed up with this duct-taped pair of goggles. 
(Video) Oh, you're crying. You're crying. Gina, you're crying. 
So you can hear the surprise in my voice, right? 
And this kind of reaction ended up being the kind of reaction we saw over and over and over: people down on the ground trying to comfort the seizure victim, trying to whisper something into his ear or in some way help, even though they couldn't. 
And I had a lot of people come out of that piece saying, "Oh my God, I was so frustrated. I couldn't help the guy," and take that back into their lives. 
So after this piece was made, the dean of the cinema school at USC, the University of Southern California, brought in the head of the World Economic Forum to try "" Hunger, "" and he took off the goggles, and he commissioned a piece about Syria on the spot. 
And I really wanted to do something about Syrian refugee kids, because children have been the worst affected by the Syrian civil war. 
I sent a team to the border of Iraq to record material at refugee camps, basically an area I wouldn't send a team now, as that's where ISIS is really operating. 
And then we also recreated a street scene in which a young girl is singing and a bomb goes off. 
Now, when you're in the middle of that scene and you hear those sounds, and you see the injured around you, it's an incredibly scary and real feeling. 
I've had individuals who have been involved in real bombings tell me that it evokes the same kind of fear. 
[The civil war in Syria may seem far away] [until you experience it yourself.] (Girl singing) (Explosion) [Project Syria] [A virtual reality experience] NP: We were then invited to take the piece to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 
And it wasn't advertised. 
And we were put in this tapestry room. 
There was no press about it, so anybody who happened to walk into the museum to visit it that day would see us with these crazy lights. 
You know, maybe they would want to see the old storytelling of the tapestries. 
They were confronted by our virtual reality cameras. 
But a lot of people tried it, and over a five-day run we ended up with 54 pages of guest book comments, and we were told by the curators there that they'd never seen such an outpouring. 
Things like, "" It's so real, "" "" Absolutely believable, "" or, of course, the one that I was excited about, "" A real feeling as if you were in the middle of something that you normally see on the TV news. "" So, it works, right? This stuff works. 
And it doesn't really matter where you're from or what age you are — it's really evocative. 
Now, don't get me wrong — I'm not saying that when you're in a piece you forget that you're here. 
But it turns out we can feel like we're in two places at once. 
We can have what I call this duality of presence, and I think that's what allows me to tap into these feelings of empathy. 
Right? 
So that means, of course, that I have to be very cautious about creating these pieces. 
I have to really follow best journalistic practices and make sure that these powerful stories are built with integrity. 
If we don't capture the material ourselves, we have to be extremely exacting about figuring out the provenance and where did this stuff come from and is it authentic? 
Let me give you an example. 
With this Trayvon Martin case, this is a guy, a kid, who was 17 years old and he bought soda and a candy at a store, and on his way home he was tracked by a neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman who ended up shooting and killing him. 
To make that piece, we got the architectural drawings of the entire complex, and we rebuilt the entire scene inside and out, based on those drawings. 
All of the action is informed by the real 911 recorded calls to the police. 
And interestingly, we broke some news with this story. 
The forensic house that did the audio reconstruction, Primeau Productions, they say that they would testify that George Zimmerman, when he got out of the car, he cocked his gun before he went to give chase to Martin. 
So you can see that the basic tenets of journalism, they don't really change here, right? 
We're still following the same principles that we would always. 
What is different is the sense of being on scene, whether you're watching a guy collapse from hunger or feeling like you're in the middle of a bomb scene. 
And this is kind of what has driven me forward with these pieces, and thinking about how to make them. 
We're trying to make this, obviously, beyond the headset, more available. 
We're creating mobile pieces like the Trayvon Martin piece. 
And these things have had impact. 
I've had Americans tell me that they've donated, direct deductions from their bank account, money to go to Syrian children refugees. 
And "" Hunger in LA, "" well, it's helped start a new form of doing journalism that I think is going to join all the other normal platforms in the future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi. I'm going to talk to you today about laughter, and I just want to start by thinking about the first time I can ever remember noticing laughter. 
This is when I was a little girl. I would've been about six. 
And I came across my parents doing something unusual, where they were laughing. 
They were laughing very, very hard. 
They were lying on the floor laughing. 
They were screaming with laughter. 
I did not know what they were laughing at, but I wanted in. 
I wanted to be part of that, and I kind of sat around at the edge going, "" Hoo hoo! "" (Laughter) Now, incidentally, what they were laughing at was a song which people used to sing, which was based around signs in toilets on trains telling you what you could and could not do in toilets on trains. 
And the thing you have to remember about the English is, of course, we do have an immensely sophisticated sense of humor. 
(Laughter) At the time, though, I didn't understand anything of that. 
I just cared about the laughter, and actually, as a neuroscientist, I've come to care about it again. 
And it is a really weird thing to do. 
What I'm going to do now is just play some examples of real human beings laughing, and I want you think about the sound people make and how odd that can be, and in fact how primitive laughter is as a sound. 
It's much more like an animal call than it is like speech. 
So here we've got some laughter for you. The first one is pretty joyful. 
(Audio: Laughing) Now this next guy, I need him to breathe. 
There's a point in there where I'm just, like, you've got to get some air in there, mate, because he just sounds like he's breathing out. 
(Audio: Laughing) This hasn't been edited; this is him. 
(Audio: Laughing) (Laughter) And finally we have — this is a human female laughing. 
And laughter can take us to some pretty odd places in terms of making noises. 
(Audio: Laughing) She actually says, "" Oh my God, what is that? "" in French. 
We're all kind of with her. I have no idea. 
Now, to understand laughter, you have to look at a part of the body that psychologists and neuroscientists don't normally spend much time looking at, which is the ribcage, and it doesn't seem terribly exciting, but actually you're all using your ribcage all the time. 
What you're all doing at the moment with your ribcage, and don't stop doing it, is breathing. 
So you use the intercostal muscles, the muscles between your ribs, to bring air in and out of your lungs just by expanding and contracting your ribcage, and if I was to put a strap around the outside of your chest called a breath belt, and just look at that movement, you see a rather gentle sinusoidal movement, so that's breathing. 
You're all doing it. Don't stop. 
As soon as you start talking, you start using your breathing completely differently. 
So what I'm doing now is you see something much more like this. 
In talking, you use very fine movements of the ribcage to squeeze the air out — and in fact, we're the only animals that can do this. 
It's why we can talk at all. 
Now, both talking and breathing has a mortal enemy, and that enemy is laughter, because what happens when you laugh is those same muscles start to contract very regularly, and you get this very marked sort of zig-zagging, and that's just squeezing the air out of you. 
It literally is that basic a way of making a sound. 
You could be stamping on somebody, it's having the same effect. 
You're just squeezing air out, and each of those contractions — Ha! — gives you a sound. 
And as the contractions run together, you can get these spasms, and that's when you start getting these — (Wheezing) — things happening. 
I'm brilliant at this. (Laughter) Now, in terms of the science of laughter, there isn't very much, but it does turn out that pretty much everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. 
So it's not at all unusual, for example, to hear people to say humans are the only animals that laugh. 
In fact, you find laughter throughout the mammals. 
It's been well-described and well-observed in primates, but you also see it in rats, and wherever you find it — humans, primates, rats — you find it associated with things like tickling. 
That's the same for humans. 
You find it associated with play, and all mammals play. 
And wherever you find it, it's associated with interactions. 
So Robert Provine, who has done a lot of work on this, has pointed out that you are 30 times more likely to laugh if you are with somebody else than if you're on your own, and where you find most laughter is in social interactions like conversation. 
So if you ask human beings, "" When do you laugh? "" they'll talk about comedy and they'll talk about humor and they'll talk about jokes. 
If you look at when they laugh, they're laughing with their friends. 
And when we laugh with people, we're hardly ever actually laughing at jokes. 
You are laughing to show people that you understand them, that you agree with them, that you're part of the same group as them. 
You're laughing to show that you like them. 
You might even love them. 
You're doing all that at the same time as talking to them, and the laughter is doing a lot of that emotional work for you. 
Something that Robert Provine has pointed out, as you can see here, and the reason why we were laughing when we heard those funny laughs at the start, and why I was laughing when I found my parents laughing, is that it's an enormously behaviorally contagious effect. 
You can catch laughter from somebody else, and you are more likely to catch laughter off somebody else if you know them. 
So it's still modulated by this social context. 
You have to put humor to one side and think about the social meaning of laughter because that's where its origins lie. 
Now, something I've got very interested in is different kinds of laughter, and we have some neurobiological evidence about how human beings vocalize that suggests there might be two kinds of laughs that we have. 
So it seems possible that the neurobiology for helpless, involuntary laughter, like my parents lying on the floor screaming about a silly song, might have a different basis to it than some of that more polite social laughter that you encounter, which isn't horrible laughter, but it's behavior somebody is doing as part of their communicative act to you, part of their interaction with you; they are choosing to do this. 
In our evolution, we have developed two different ways of vocalizing. 
Involuntary vocalizations are part of an older system than the more voluntary vocalizations like the speech I'm doing now. 
So we might imagine that laughter might actually have two different roots. 
So I've been looking at this in more detail. 
To do this, we've had to make recordings of people laughing, and we've had to do whatever it takes to make people laugh, and we got those same people to produce more posed, social laughter. 
So imagine your friend told a joke, and you're laughing because you like your friend, but not really because the joke's all that. 
So I'm going to play you a couple of those. 
I want you to tell me if you think this laughter is real laughter, or if you think it's posed. 
So is this involuntary laughter or more voluntary laughter? 
(Audio: Laughing) What does that sound like to you? 
Audience: Posed. Sophie Scott: Posed? Posed. 
How about this one? 
(Audio: Laughing) (Laughter) I'm the best. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Not really. 
No, that was helpless laughter, and in fact, to record that, all they had to do was record me watching one of my friends listening to something I knew she wanted to laugh at, and I just started doing this. 
What you find is that people are good at telling the difference between real and posed laughter. 
They seem to be different things to us. 
Interestingly, you see something quite similar with chimpanzees. 
Chimpanzees laugh differently if they're being tickled than if they're playing with each other, and we might be seeing something like that here, involuntary laughter, tickling laughter, being different from social laughter. 
They're acoustically very different. 
The real laughs are longer. They're higher in pitch. 
When you start laughing hard, you start squeezing air out from your lungs under much higher pressures than you could ever produce voluntarily. 
For example, I could never pitch my voice that high to sing. 
Also, you start to get these sort of contractions and weird whistling sounds, all of which mean that real laughter is extremely easy, or feels extremely easy to spot. 
In contrast, posed laughter, we might think it sounds a bit fake. 
Actually, it's not, it's actually an important social cue. 
We use it a lot, we're choosing to laugh in a lot of situations, and it seems to be its own thing. 
So, for example, you find nasality in posed laughter, that kind of "" ha ha ha ha ha "" sound that you never get, you could not do, if you were laughing involuntarily. 
We took it into the scanner to see how brains respond when you hear laughter. 
And when you do this, this is a really boring experiment. 
We just played people real and posed laughs. 
We didn't tell them it was a study on laughter. 
We put other sounds in there to distract them, and all they're doing is lying listening to sounds. 
We don't tell them to do anything. 
Nonetheless, when you hear real laughter and when you hear posed laughter, the brains are responding completely differently, significantly differently. 
What you see in the regions in blue, which lies in auditory cortex, are the brain areas that respond more to the real laughs, and what seems to be the case, when you hear somebody laughing involuntarily, you hear sounds you would never hear in any other context. 
It's very unambiguous, and it seems to be associated with greater auditory processing of these novel sounds. 
In contrast, when you hear somebody laughing in a posed way, what you see are these regions in pink, which are occupying brain areas associated with mentalizing, thinking about what somebody else is thinking. 
And I think what that means is, even if you're having your brain scanned, which is completely boring and not very interesting, when you hear somebody going, "" A ha ha ha ha ha, "" you're trying to work out why they're laughing. 
Laughter is always meaningful. 
You are always trying to understand it in context, even if, as far as you are concerned, at that point in time, it has not necessarily anything to do with you, you still want to know why those people are laughing. 
Now, we've had the opportunity to look at how people hear real and posed laughter across the age range. 
So this is an online experiment we ran with the Royal Society, and here we just asked people two questions. 
First of all, they heard some laughs, and they had to say, how real or posed do these laughs sound? 
The real laughs are shown in red and the posed laughs are shown in blue. 
What you see is there is a rapid onset. 
As you get older, you get better and better at spotting real laughter. 
So six-year-olds are at chance, they can't really hear the difference. 
By the time you are older, you get better, but interestingly, you do not hit peak performance in this dataset until you are in your late 30s and early 40s. 
You don't understand laughter fully by the time you hit puberty. 
You don't understand laughter fully by the time your brain has matured at the end of your teens. 
You're learning about laughter throughout your entire early adult life. 
If we turn the question around and now say not, what does the laughter sound like in terms of being real or posed, but we say, how much does this laughter make you want to laugh, how contagious is this laughter to you, we see a different profile. 
And here, the younger you are, the more you want to join in when you hear laughter. 
Remember me laughing with my parents when I had no idea what was going on. 
You really can see this. 
Now everybody, young and old, finds the real laughs more contagious than the posed laughs, but as you get older, it all becomes less contagious to you. 
Now, either we're all just becoming really grumpy as we get older, or it may mean that as you understand laughter better, and you are getting better at doing that, you need more than just hearing people laugh to want to laugh. 
You need the social stuff there. 
So we've got a very interesting behavior about which a lot of our lay assumptions are incorrect, but I'm coming to see that actually there's even more to laughter than it's an important social emotion we should look at, because it turns out people are phenomenally nuanced in terms of how we use laughter. 
There's a really lovely set of studies coming out from Robert Levenson's lab in California, where he's doing a longitudinal study with couples. 
He gets married couples, men and women, into the lab, and he gives them stressful conversations to have while he wires them up to a polygraph so he can see them becoming stressed. 
So you've got the two of them in there, and he'll say to the husband, "Tell me something that your wife does that irritates you." 
And what you see is immediately — just run that one through your head briefly, you and your partner — you can imagine everybody gets a bit more stressed as soon as that starts. 
You can see physically, people become more stressed. 
What he finds is that the couples who manage that feeling of stress with laughter, positive emotions like laughter, not only immediately become less stressed, they can see them physically feeling better, they're dealing with this unpleasant situation better together, they are also the couples that report high levels of satisfaction in their relationship and they stay together for longer. 
So in fact, when you look at close relationships, laughter is a phenomenally useful index of how people are regulating their emotions together. 
We're not just emitting it at each other to show that we like each other, we're making ourselves feel better together. 
Now, I don't think this is going to be limited to romantic relationships. 
I think this is probably going to be a characteristic of close emotional relationships such as you might have with friends, which explains my next clip, which is of a YouTube video of some young men in the former East Germany on making a video to promote their heavy metal band, and it's extremely macho, and the mood is very serious, and I want you to notice what happens in terms of laughter when things go wrong and how quickly that happens, and how that changes the mood. 
He's cold. He's about to get wet. He's got swimming trunks on, got a towel. 
Ice. 
What might possibly happen? 
Video starts. 
Serious mood. 
And his friends are already laughing. They are already laughing, hard. 
He's not laughing yet. 
(Laughter) He's starting to go now. 
And now they're all off. 
(Laughter) They're on the floor. (Laughter) 
The thing I really like about that is it's all very serious until he jumps onto the ice, and as soon as he doesn't go through the ice, but also there isn't blood and bone everywhere, his friends start laughing. 
And imagine if that had played him out with him standing there going, "No seriously, Heinrich, I think this is broken," we wouldn't enjoy watching that. That would be stressful. 
Or if he was running around with a visibly broken leg laughing, and his friends are going, "" Heinrich, I think we need to go to the hospital now, "" that also wouldn't be funny. 
The fact that the laughter works, it gets him from a painful, embarrassing, difficult situation, into a funny situation, into what we're actually enjoying there, and I think that's a really interesting use, and it's actually happening all the time. 
For example, I can remember something like this happening at my father's funeral. 
We weren't jumping around on the ice in our underpants. 
We're not Canadian. 
(Laughter) (Applause) These events are always difficult, I had a relative who was being a bit difficult, my mum was not in a good place, and I can remember finding myself just before the whole thing started telling this story about something that happened in a 1970s sitcom, and I just thought at the time, I don't know why I'm doing this, and what I realized I was doing was I was coming up with something from somewhere I could use to make her laugh together with me. 
It was a very basic reaction to find some reason we can do this. 
We can laugh together. We're going to get through this. 
We're going to be okay. 
And in fact, all of us are doing this all the time. 
You do it so often, you don't even notice it. 
Everybody underestimates how often they laugh, and you're doing something, when you laugh with people, that's actually letting you access a really ancient evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds, and clearly to regulate emotions, to make ourselves feel better. 
It's not something specific to humans — it's a really ancient behavior which really helps us regulate how we feel and makes us feel better. 
In other words, when it comes to laughter, you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals. (Laughter) Thank you. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

Four years ago today, exactly, actually, I started a fashion blog called Style Rookie. 
Last September of 2011, I started an online magazine for teenage girls called Rookiemag.com. 
My name's Tavi Gevinson, and the title of my talk is "" Still Figuring It Out, "" and the MS Paint quality of my slides was a total creative decision in keeping with today's theme, and has nothing to do with my inability to use PowerPoint. (Laughter) So I edit this site for teenage girls. I'm a feminist. 
I am kind of a pop culture nerd, and I think a lot about what makes a strong female character, and, you know, movies and TV shows, these things have influence. My own website. 
So I think the question of what makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted, and instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen who maybe have one quality that's played up a lot, like a Catwoman type, or she plays her sexuality up a lot, and it's seen as power. 
But they're not strong characters who happen to be female. 
They're completely flat, and they're basically cardboard characters. 
The problem with this is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple, when, in actuality, women are complicated, women are multifaceted — not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy, and women happen to be people. (Laughter) So the flaws are the key. 
I'm not the first person to say this. 
What makes a strong female character is a character who has weaknesses, who has flaws, who is maybe not immediately likable, but eventually relatable. 
I don't like to acknowledge a problem without also acknowledging those who work to fix it, so just wanted to acknowledge shows like "" Mad Men, "" movies like "" Bridesmaids, "" whose female characters or protagonists are complex, multifaceted. 
Lena Dunham, who's on here, her show on HBO that premiers next month, "" Girls, "" she said she wanted to start it because she felt that every woman she knew was just a bundle of contradictions, and that feels accurate for all people, but you don't see women represented like that as much. 
Congrats, guys. (Laughs) But I don't feel that — I still feel that there are some types of women who are not represented that way, and one group that we'll focus on today are teens, because I think teenagers are especially contradictory and still figuring it out, and in the '90s there was "" Freaks and Geeks "" and "" My So-Called Life, "" and their characters, Lindsay Weir and Angela Chase, I mean, the whole premise of the shows were just them trying to figure themselves out, basically, but those shows only lasted a season each, and I haven't really seen anything like that on TV since. 
So this is a scientific diagram of my brain — (Laughter) — around the time when I was, when I started watching those TV shows. 
I was ending middle school, starting high school — I'm a sophomore now — and I was trying to reconcile all of these differences that you're told you can't be when you're growing up as a girl. 
You can't be smart and pretty. 
You can't be a feminist who's also interested in fashion. 
You can't care about clothes if it's not for the sake of what other people, usually men, will think of you. 
So I was trying to figure all that out, and I felt a little confused, and I said so on my blog, and I said that I wanted to start a website for teenage girls that was not this kind of one-dimensional strong character empowerment thing because I think one thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism is that girls then think that to be a feminist, they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in your beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all of the answers. And this is not true, and, actually, reconciling all the contradictions I was feeling 
became easier once I understood that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion, a conversation, a process, and this is a spread from a zine that I made last year when I — I mean, I think I've let myself go a bit on the illustration front since. 
But, yeah. 
So I said on my blog that I wanted to start this publication for teenage girls and ask people to submit their writing, their photography, whatever, to be a member of our staff. 
I got about 3,000 emails. 
My editorial director and I went through them and put together a staff of people, and we launched last September. 
And this is an excerpt from my first editor's letter, where I say that Rookie, we don't have all the answers, we're still figuring it out too, but the point is not to give girls the answers, and not even give them permission to find the answers themselves, but hopefully inspire them to understand that they can give themselves that permission, they can ask their own questions, find their own answers, all of that, and Rookie, I think we've been trying to make it a nice place for all of that to be figured out. 
So I'm not saying, "" Be like us, "" and "" We're perfect role models, "" because we're not, but we just want to help represent girls in a way that shows those different dimensions. 
I mean, we have articles called "On Taking Yourself Seriously: How to Not Care What People Think of You," but we also have articles like, oops — I'm figuring it out! 
Ha ha. (Laughter) If you use that, you can get away with anything. 
We also have articles called "How to Look Like You Weren't Just Crying in Less than Five Minutes." 
So all of that being said, I still really appreciate those characters in movies and articles like that on our site, that aren't just about being totally powerful, maybe finding your acceptance with yourself and self-esteem and your flaws and how you accept those. 
So what I you to take away from my talk, the lesson of all of this, is to just be Stevie Nicks. 
Like, that's all you have to do. (Laughter) Because my favorite thing about her, other than, like, everything, is that she is very — has always been unapologetically present on stage, and unapologetic about her flaws and about reconciling all of her contradictory feelings and she makes you listen to them and think about them, and yeah, so please be Stevie Nicks. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

In July of 1911, a 35-year-old Yale graduate and professor set out from his rainforest camp with his team. 
After climbing a steep hill and wiping the sweat from his brow, he described what he saw beneath him. 
He saw rising from the dense rainforest foliage this incredible interlocking maze of structures built of granite, beautifully put together. 
What's amazing about this project is that it was the first funded by National Geographic, and it graced the front cover of its magazine in 1912. 
This professor used state-of-the-art photography equipment to record the site, forever changing the face of exploration. 
The site was Machu Picchu, discovered and explored by Hiram Bingham. 
When he saw the site, he asked, "" This is an impossible dream. 
What could it be? "" So today, 100 years later, I invite you all on an incredible journey with me, a 37-year-old Yale graduate and professor. 
(Cheers) We will do nothing less than use state-of-the-art technology to map an entire country. 
This is a dream started by Hiram Bingham, but we are expanding it to the world, making archaeological exploration more open, inclusive, and at a scale simply not previously possible. 
This is why I am so excited to share with you all today that we will begin the 2016 TED Prize platform in Latin America, more specifically Peru. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
We will be taking Hiram Bingham's impossible dream and turning it into an amazing future that we can all share in together. 
So Peru doesn't just have Machu Picchu. 
It has absolutely stunning jewelry, like what you can see here. 
It has amazing Moche pottery of human figures. 
It has the Nazca Lines and amazing textiles. 
So as part of the TED Prize platform, we are going to partnering with some incredible organizations, first of all with DigitalGlobe, the world's largest provider of high-resolution commercial satellite imagery. 
They're going to be helping us build out this amazing crowdsourcing platform they have. 
Maybe some of you used it with the MH370 crash and search for the airplane. 
Of course, they'll also be providing us with the satellite imagery. 
National Geographic will be helping us with education and of course exploration. 
As well, they'll be providing us with rich content for the platform, including some of the archival imagery like you saw at the beginning of this talk and some of their documentary footage. 
We've already begun to build and plan the platform, and I'm just so excited. 
So here's the cool part. 
My team, headed up by Chase Childs, is already beginning to look at some of the satellite imagery. 
Of course, what you can see here is 0.3-meter data. 
This is site called Chan Chan in northern Peru. 
It dates to 850 AD. 
It's a really amazing city, but let's zoom in. 
This is the type and quality of data that you all will get to see. 
You can see individual structures, individual buildings. 
And we've already begun to find previously unknown sites. 
What we can say already is that as part of the platform, you will all help discover thousands of previously unknown sites, like this one here, and this potentially large one here. 
Unfortunately, we've also begun to uncover large-scale looting at sites, like what you see here. 
So many sites in Peru are threatened, but the great part is that all of this data is going to be shared with archaeologists on the front lines of protecting these sites. 
So I was just in Peru, meeting with their Minister of Culture as well as UNESCO. 
We'll be collaborating closely with them. 
Just so you all know, the site is going to be in both English and Spanish, which is absolutely essential to make sure that people in Peru and across Latin America can participate. 
Our main project coprincipal investigator is the gentleman you see here, Dr. Luis Jaime Castillo, professor at Catholic University. 
As a respected Peruvian archaeologist and former vice-minister, Dr. Castillo will be helping us coordinate and share the data with archaeologists so they can explore these sites on the ground. 
He also runs this amazing drone mapping program, some of the images of which you can see behind me here and here. 
And this data will be incorporated into the platform, and also he'll be helping to image some of the new sites you help find. 
Our on-the-ground partner who will be helping us with education, outreach, as well as site preservation components, is the Sustainable Preservation Initiative, led by Dr. Larry Coben. 
Some of you may not be aware that some of the world's poorest communities coexist with some of the world's most well-known archaeological sites. 
What SPI does is it helps to empower these communities, in particular women, with new economic approaches and business training. 
So it helps to teach them to create beautiful handicrafts which are then sold on to tourists. 
This empowers the women to treasure their cultural heritage and take ownership of it. 
I had the opportunity to spend some time with 24 of these women at a well-known archaeological site called Pachacamac, just outside Lima. 
These women were unbelievably inspiring, and what's great is that SPI will help us transform communities near some of the sites that you help to discover. 
Peru is just the beginning. 
We're going to be expanding this platform to the world, but already I've gotten thousands of emails from people all across the world — professors, educators, students, and other archaeologists — who are so excited to help participate. 
In fact, they're already suggesting amazing places for us to help discover, including Atlantis. 
I don't know if we're going to be looking for Atlantis, but you never know. 
So I'm just so excited to launch this platform. 
It's going to be launched formally by the end of the year. 
And I have to say, if what my team has already discovered in the past few weeks are any indication, what the world discovers is just going to be beyond imagination. 
Make sure to hold on to your alpacas. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

First, of course you know, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed. 
Now, notice that the leader embraces him as an equal. 
It takes guts to stand out like that. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And here comes a second follower. 
Now it's not a lone nut, it's not two nuts — three is a crowd, and a crowd is news. 
So a movement must be public. 
Now, here come two more people, and immediately after, three more people. 
Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. 
(Laughter) So, notice that, as more people join in, it's less risky. 
So first, if you are the type, like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals so it's clearly about the movement, not you. 
The biggest lesson, if you noticed — did you catch it? — is that leadership is over-glorified. 
And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in. 
And what a perfect place to do that, at TED. 
(Applause) 

My grandfather was a cobbler. 
Back in the day, he made custom-made shoes. 
I never got to meet him. 
He perished in the Holocaust. 
But I did inherit his love for making, except that it doesn't exist that much anymore. 
You see, while the Industrial Revolution did a great deal to improve humanity, it eradicated the very skill that my grandfather loved, and it atrophied craftsmanship as we know it. 
But all of that is about to change with 3D printing, and it all started with this, the very first part that was ever printed. 
It's a little older than TED. 
It was printed in 1983 by Chuck Hull, who invented 3D printing. 
But the thing that I want to talk to you about today, the big idea that I want to discuss with you, is not that 3D printing is going to catapult us into the future, but rather that it's actually going to connect us with our heritage, and it's going to usher in a new era of localized, distributed manufacturing that is actually based on digital fabrication. 
So think about useful things. 
You all know your shoe size. 
How many of you know the size of the bridge of your nose or the distance between your temples? 
Anybody? 
Wouldn't it be awesome if you could, for the first time, get eyewear that actually fits you perfectly and doesn't require any hinge assembly, so chances are, the hinges are not going to break? 
But the implications of 3D printing go well beyond the tips of our noses. 
When I met Amanda for the first time, she could already stand up and walk a little bit even though she was paralyzed from the waist down, but she complained to me that her suit was uncomfortable. 
It was a beautiful robotic suit made by Ekso Bionics, but it wasn't inspired by her body. 
It wasn't made to measure. 
So she challenged me to make her something that was a little bit more feminine, a little bit more elegant, and lightweight, and like good tailors, we thought that we would measure her digitally. 
And we did. We built her an amazing suit. 
The incredible part about what I learned from Amanda is a lot of us are looking at 3D printing and we say to ourselves, it's going to replace traditional methods. 
Amanda looked at it and she said, it's an opportunity for me to reclaim my symmetry and to embrace my authenticity. 
And you know what? She's not standing still. 
She now wants to walk in high heels. 
It doesn't stop there. 
3D printing is changing personalized medical devices as we know them, from new, beautiful, conformal, ventilated scoliosis braces to millions of dental restorations and to beautiful bracings for amputees, another opportunity to emotionally reconnect with your symmetry. 
And as we sit here today, you can go wireless on your braces with clear aligners, or your dental restorations. 
Millions of in-the-ear hearing aids are already 3D printed today. 
Millions of people are served today from these devices. 
What about full knee replacements, from your data, made to measure, where all of the tools and guides are 3D printed? 
G.E. is using 3D printing to make the next generation LEAP engine that will save fuel to the tune of about 15 percent and cost for an airline of about 14 million dollars. 
Good for G.E., right? 
And their customers and the environment. 
But, you know, the even better news is that this technology is no longer reserved for deep-pocketed corporations. 
Planetary Resources, a startup for space explorations is going to put out its first space probe later this year. 
It was a fraction of a NASA spaceship, it costs a fraction of its cost, and it's made with less than a dozen moving parts, and it's going to be out in space later this year. 
Google is taking on this very audacious project of making the block phone, the Ara. 
It's only possible because of the development of high-speed 3D printing that for the first time will make functional, usable modules that will go into it. 
A real moonshot, powered by 3D printing. 
How about food? 
What if we could, for the first time, make incredible delectables like this beautiful TED Teddy here, that are edible? 
What if we could completely change the experience, like you see with that absinthe serving that is completely 3D printed? 
And what if we could begin to put ingredients and colors and flavors in every taste, which means not only delicious foods but the promise of personalized nutrition around the corner? 
And that gets me to one of the biggest deals about 3D printing. 
With 3D printing, complexity is free. 
The printer doesn't care if it makes the most rudimentary shape or the most complex shape, and that is completely turning design and manufacturing on its head as we know it. 
Many people think that 3D printing will be the end of manufacturing as we know it. 
I think that it's the opportunity to put tomorrow's technology in the hands of youngsters that will create endless abundance of job opportunities, and with that, everybody can become an expert maker and an expert manufacturer. 
That will take new tools. 
Not everybody knows how to use CAD, so we're developing haptics, perceptual devices that will allow you to touch and feel your designs as if you play with digital clay. 
When you do things like that, and we also developed things that take physical photographs that are instantly printable, it will make it easier to create content, but with all of the unimagined, we will also have the unintended, like democratized counterfeiting and ubiquitous illegal possession. 
So many people ask me, will we have a 3D printer in every home? 
I think it's the wrong question to ask. 
The right question to ask is, how will 3D printing change my life? 
Or, in other words, what room in my house will 3D printing fit in? 
So everything that you see here has been 3D printed, including these shoes at the Amsterdam fashion show. 
Now, these are not my grandfather's shoes. 
These are shoes that represent the continuation of his passion for hyper-local manufacturing. 
My grandfather didn't get to see Nike printing cleats for the recent Super Bowl, and my father didn't get to see me standing in my hybridized 3D printed shoes. 
He passed away three years ago. 
But Chuck Hull, the man that invented it all, is right here in the house today, and thanks to him, I can say, thanks to his invention, I can say that I am a cobbler too, and by standing in these shoes I am honoring my past while manufacturing the future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Tell your daughters of this year, how we woke needing coffee but discovered instead cadavers strewn about our morning papers, waterlogged facsimiles of our sisters, spouses, small children. 
Say to your baby of this year when she asks, as she certainly should, tell her it was too late coming. 
Admit even in the year we leased freedom, we didn't own it outright. 
There were still laws for every way we used our privates while they pawed at the soft folds of us, grabbed with no concern for consent, no laws made for the men that enforced them. 
We were trained to dodge, to wait, to cower and cover, to wait more, still, wait. 
We were told to be silent. 
But speak to your girls of this wartime, a year preceded by a score of the same, so as in two decades before, we wiped our eyes, laced caskets with flags, evacuated the crime scene of the club, caterwauled in the street, laid our bodies on the concrete against the outlines of our fallen, cried, "" Of course we mattered, "" chanted for our disappeared. 
The women wept this year. 
They did. 
In the same year, we were ready. 
The year we lost our inhibition and moved with courageous abandon was also the year we stared down barrels, sang of cranes in skies, ducked and parried, caught gold in hijab, collected death threats, knew ourselves as patriots, said, "" We're 35 now, time we settled down and found a running mate, "" made road maps for infant joy, shamed nothing but fear, called ourselves fat and meant, of course, impeccable. 
This year, we were women, not brides or trinkets, not an off-brand gender, not a concession, but women. 
Instruct your babies. 
Remind them that the year has passed to be docile or small. 
Some of us said for the first time that we were women, took this oath of solidarity seriously. 
Some of us bore children and some of us did not, and none of us questioned whether that made us real or appropriate or true. 
When she asks you of this year, your daughter, whether your offspring or heir to your triumph, from her comforted side of history teetering towards woman, she will wonder and ask voraciously, though she cannot fathom your sacrifice, she will hold your estimation of it holy, curiously probing, "" Where were you? 
Did you fight? Were you fearful or fearsome? 
What colored the walls of your regret? 
What did you do for women in the year it was time? 
This path you made for me, which bones had to break? 
Did you do enough, and are you OK, momma? 
And are you a hero? "" She will ask the difficult questions. 
She will not care about the arc of your brow, the weight of your clutch. 
She will not ask of your mentions. 
Your daughter, for whom you have already carried so much, wants to know what you brought, what gift, what light did you keep from extinction? 
When they came for victims in the night, did you sleep through it or were you roused? 
What was the cost of staying woke? 
What, in the year we said time's up, what did you do with your privilege? 
Did you sup on others' squalor? 
Did you look away or directly into the flame? 
Did you know your skill or treat it like a liability? 
Were you fooled by the epithets of "" nasty "" or "" less than ""? 
Did you teach with an open heart or a clenched fist? 
Where were you? 
Tell her the truth. Make it your life. 
Confirm it. Say, "" Daughter, I stood there with the moment drawn on my face like a dagger, and flung it back at itself, slicing space for you. "" Tell her the truth, how you lived in spite of crooked odds. 
Tell her you were brave, and always, always in the company of courage, mostly the days when you just had yourself. 
Tell her she was born as you were, as your mothers before, and the sisters beside them, in the age of legends, like always. 
Tell her she was born just in time, just in time to lead. 
(Applause) 

I'm a lifelong traveler. 
Even as a little kid, I was actually working out that it would be cheaper to go to boarding school in England than just to the best school down the road from my parents' house in California. 
So, from the time I was nine years old I was flying alone several times a year over the North Pole, just to go to school. 
And of course the more I flew the more I came to love to fly, so the very week after I graduated from high school, I got a job mopping tables so that I could spend every season of my 18th year on a different continent. 
And then, almost inevitably, I became a travel writer so my job and my joy could become one. 
And I really began to feel that if you were lucky enough to walk around the candlelit temples of Tibet or to wander along the seafronts in Havana with music passing all around you, you could bring those sounds and the high cobalt skies and the flash of the blue ocean back to your friends at home, and really bring some magic and clarity to your own life. 
Except, as you all know, one of the first things you learn when you travel is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it. 
You take an angry man to the Himalayas, he just starts complaining about the food. 
And I found that the best way that I could develop more attentive and more appreciative eyes was, oddly, by going nowhere, just by sitting still. 
But it was also the only way that I could find to sift through the slideshow of my experience and make sense of the future and the past. 
And so, to my great surprise, I found that going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to Tibet or to Cuba. 
And by going nowhere, I mean nothing more intimidating than taking a few minutes out of every day or a few days out of every season, or even, as some people do, a few years out of a life in order to sit still long enough to find out what moves you most, to recall where your truest happiness lies and to remember that sometimes making a living and making a life point in opposite directions. 
And of course, this is what wise beings through the centuries from every tradition have been telling us. 
It's an old idea. 
More than 2,000 years ago, the Stoics were reminding us it's not our experience that makes our lives, it's what we do with it. 
Imagine a hurricane suddenly sweeps through your town and reduces every last thing to rubble. 
One man is traumatized for life. 
But another, maybe even his brother, almost feels liberated, and decides this is a great chance to start his life anew. 
It's exactly the same event, but radically different responses. 
There is nothing either good or bad, as Shakespeare told us in "" Hamlet, "" but thinking makes it so. 
Twenty-four years ago I took the most mind-bending trip across North Korea. 
But the trip lasted a few days. 
What I've done with it sitting still, going back to it in my head, trying to understand it, finding a place for it in my thinking, that's lasted 24 years already and will probably last a lifetime. 
The trip, in other words, gave me some amazing sights, but it's only sitting still that allows me to turn those into lasting insights. 
And I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads, in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation, that if I really want to change my life I might best begin by changing my mind. 
Again, none of this is new; that's why Shakespeare and the Stoics were telling us this centuries ago, but Shakespeare never had to face 200 emails in a day. 
(Laughter) The Stoics, as far as I know, were not on Facebook. 
We all know that in our on-demand lives, one of the things that's most on demand is ourselves. 
Wherever we are, any time of night or day, our bosses, junk-mailers, our parents can get to us. 
Sociologists have actually found that in recent years Americans are working fewer hours than 50 years ago, but we feel as if we're working more. 
We have more and more time-saving devices, but sometimes, it seems, less and less time. 
We can more and more easily make contact with people on the furthest corners of the planet, but sometimes in that process we lose contact with ourselves. 
And one of my biggest surprises as a traveler has been to find that often it's exactly the people who have most enabled us to get anywhere who are intent on going nowhere. 
In other words, precisely those beings who have created the technologies that override so many of the limits of old, are the ones wisest about the need for limits, even when it comes to technology. 
I once went to the Google headquarters and I saw all the things many of you have heard about; the indoor tree houses, the trampolines, workers at that time enjoying 20 percent of their paid time free so that they could just let their imaginations go wandering. 
But what impressed me even more was that as I was waiting for my digital I.D., one Googler was telling me about the program that he was about to start to teach the many, many Googlers who practice yoga to become trainers in it, and the other Googler was telling me about the book that he was about to write on the inner search engine, and the ways in which science has empirically shown that sitting still, or meditation, can lead not just to better health or to clearer thinking, but even to emotional intelligence. 
I have another friend in Silicon Valley who is really one of the most eloquent spokesmen for the latest technologies, and in fact was one of the founders of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly. 
And Kevin wrote his last book on fresh technologies without a smartphone or a laptop or a TV in his home. 
And like many in Silicon Valley, he tries really hard to observe what they call an Internet sabbath, whereby for 24 or 48 hours every week they go completely offline in order to gather the sense of direction and proportion they'll need when they go online again. 
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology. 
And when you speak of the sabbath, look at the Ten Commandments — there's only one word there for which the adjective "" holy "" is used, and that's the Sabbath. 
I pick up the Jewish holy book of the Torah — its longest chapter, it's on the Sabbath. 
And we all know that it's really one of our greatest luxuries, the empty space. 
In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. 
And I know I as a writer will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe. 
Now, in the physical domain, of course, many people, if they have the resources, will try to get a place in the country, a second home. 
I've never begun to have those resources, but I sometimes remember that any time I want, I can get a second home in time, if not in space, just by taking a day off. 
And it's never easy because, of course, whenever I do I spend much of it worried about all the extra stuff that's going to crash down on me the following day. 
I sometimes think I'd rather give up meat or sex or wine than the chance to check on my emails. 
(Laughter) And every season I do try to take three days off on retreat but a part of me still feels guilty to be leaving my poor wife behind and to be ignoring all those seemingly urgent emails from my bosses and maybe to be missing a friend's birthday party. 
But as soon as I get to a place of real quiet, I realize that it's only by going there that I'll have anything fresh or creative or joyful to share with my wife or bosses or friends. 
Otherwise, really, I'm just foisting on them my exhaustion or my distractedness, which is no blessing at all. 
And so when I was 29, I decided to remake my entire life in the light of going nowhere. 
One evening I was coming back from the office, it was after midnight, I was in a taxi driving through Times Square, and I suddenly realized that I was racing around so much I could never catch up with my life. 
And my life then, as it happened, was pretty much the one I might have dreamed of as a little boy. 
I had really interesting friends and colleagues, I had a nice apartment on Park Avenue and 20th Street. 
I had, to me, a fascinating job writing about world affairs, but I could never separate myself enough from them to hear myself think — or really, to understand if I was truly happy. 
And so, I abandoned my dream life for a single room on the backstreets of Kyoto, Japan, which was the place that had long exerted a strong, really mysterious gravitational pull on me. 
Even as a child I would just look at a painting of Kyoto and feel I recognized it; I knew it before I ever laid eyes on it. 
But it's also, as you all know, a beautiful city encircled by hills, filled with more than 2,000 temples and shrines, where people have been sitting still for 800 years or more. 
And quite soon after I moved there, I ended up where I still am with my wife, formerly our kids, in a two-room apartment in the middle of nowhere where we have no bicycle, no car, no TV I can understand, and I still have to support my loved ones as a travel writer and a journalist, so clearly this is not ideal for job advancement or for cultural excitement or for social diversion. 
But I realized that it gives me what I prize most, which is days and hours. 
I have never once had to use a cell phone there. 
I almost never have to look at the time, and every morning when I wake up, really the day stretches in front of me like an open meadow. 
And when life throws up one of its nasty surprises, as it will, more than once, when a doctor comes into my room wearing a grave expression, or a car suddenly veers in front of mine on the freeway, I know, in my bones, that it's the time I've spent going nowhere that is going to sustain me much more than all the time I've spent racing around to Bhutan or Easter Island. 
I'll always be a traveler — my livelihood depends on it — but one of the beauties of travel is that it allows you to bring stillness into the motion and the commotion of the world. 
I once got on a plane in Frankfurt, Germany, and a young German woman came down and sat next to me and engaged me in a very friendly conversation for about 30 minutes, and then she just turned around and sat still for 12 hours. 
She didn't once turn on her video monitor, she never pulled out a book, she didn't even go to sleep, she just sat still, and something of her clarity and calm really imparted itself to me. 
Some people go to black-hole resorts where they'll spend hundreds of dollars a night in order to hand over their cell phone and their laptop to the front desk on arrival. 
Some people I know, just before they go to sleep, instead of scrolling through their messages or checking out YouTube, just turn out the lights and listen to some music, and notice that they sleep much better and wake up much refreshed. 
I was once fortunate enough to drive into the high, dark mountains behind Los Angeles, where the great poet and singer and international heartthrob Leonard Cohen was living and working for many years as a full-time monk in the Mount Baldy Zen Center. 
And I wasn't entirely surprised when the record that he released at the age of 77, to which he gave the deliberately unsexy title of "" Old Ideas, "" went to number one in the charts in 17 nations in the world, hit the top five in nine others. 
Something in us, I think, is crying out for the sense of intimacy and depth that we get from people like that. 
And I think many of us have the sensation, I certainly do, that we're standing about two inches away from a huge screen, and it's noisy and it's crowded and it's changing with every second, and that screen is our lives. 
And it's only by stepping back, and then further back, and holding still, that we can begin to see what the canvas means and to catch the larger picture. 
So, in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. 
And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. 
And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still. 
So you can go on your next vacation to Paris or Hawaii, or New Orleans; I bet you'll have a wonderful time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Twelve years ago, I picked up a camera for the first time to film the olive harvest in a Palestinian village in the West Bank. 
I thought I was there to make a single documentary and would then move on to some other part of the world. 
But something kept bringing me back. 
Now, usually, when international audiences hear about that part of the world, they often just want that conflict to go away. 
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bad, and we wish it could just disappear. 
We feel much the same way about other conflicts around the world. 
But every time we turn our attention to the news, it seems like one more country has gone up in flames. 
So I've been wondering whether we should not start looking at conflict in a different way — whether instead of simply wishing to end conflict, we focus instead on how to wage conflict. 
This has been a big question for me, one I've pursued together with my team at the nonprofit Just Vision. 
After witnessing several different kinds of struggles in the Middle East, I started noticing some patterns on the more successful ones. 
I wondered whether these variables held across cases, and if they did, what lessons we could glean for waging constructive conflict, in Palestine, Israel and elsewhere. 
There is some science about this. 
In a study of 323 major political conflicts from 1900 to 2006, Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns were almost 100 percent more likely to lead to success than violent campaigns. 
Nonviolent campaigns are also less likely to cause physical harm to those waging the campaign, as well as their opponents. 
And, critically, they typically lead to more peaceful and democratic societies. 
In other words, nonviolent resistance is a more effective and constructive way of waging conflict. 
But if that's such an easy choice, why don't more groups use it? 
Political scientist Victor Asal and colleagues have looked at several factors that shape a political group's choice of tactics. 
And it turns out that the greatest predictor of a movement's decision to adopt nonviolence or violence is not whether that group is more left-wing or right-wing, not whether the group is more or less influenced by religious beliefs, not whether it's up against a democracy or a dictatorship, and not even the levels of repression that that group is facing. 
The greatest predictor of a movement's decision to adopt nonviolence is its ideology regarding the role of women in public life. 
(Applause) When a movement includes in its discourse language around gender equality, it increases dramatically the chances it will adopt nonviolence, and thus, the likelihood it will succeed. 
The research squared up with my own documentation of political organizing in Israel and Palestine. 
I've noticed that movements which welcome women into leadership positions, such as the one I documented in a village called Budrus, were much more likely to achieve their goals. 
This village was under a real threat of being wiped off the map when Israel started building the separation barrier. 
The proposed route would require the destruction of this community's olive groves, their cemeteries and would ultimately close the village from all sides. 
Through inspired local leadership, they launched a nonviolent resistance campaign to stop that from happening. 
The odds were massively stacked against them. 
But they had a secret weapon: a 15-year-old girl who courageously jumped in front of a bulldozer which was about to uproot an olive tree, stopping it. 
In that moment, the community of Budrus realized what was possible if they welcomed and encouraged women to participate in public life. 
And so it was that the women of Budrus went to the front lines day after day, using their creativity and acumen to overcome multiple obstacles they faced in a 10-month unarmed struggle. 
And as you can probably tell at this point, they win at the end. 
The separation barrier was changed completely to the internationally recognized green line, and the women of Budrus came to be known across the West Bank for their indomitable energy. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
I want to pause for a second, which you helped me do, because I do want to tackle two very serious misunderstandings that could happen at this point. 
The first one is that I don't believe women are inherently or essentially more peaceful than men. 
But I do believe that in today's world, women experience power differently. 
Having had to navigate being in the less powerful position in multiple aspects of their lives, women are often more adept at how to surreptitiously pressure for change against large, powerful actors. 
The term "" manipulative, "" often charged against women in a derogatory way, reflects a reality in which women have often had to find ways other than direct confrontation to achieve their goals. 
And finding alternatives to direct confrontation is at the core of nonviolent resistance. 
Now to the second potential misunderstanding. 
I've been talking a lot about my experiences in the Middle East, and some of you might be thinking now that the solution then is for us to educate Muslim and Arab societies to be more inclusive of their women. 
If we were to do that, they would be more successful. 
They do not need this kind of help. 
Women have been part of the most influential movements coming out of the Middle East, but they tend to be invisible to the international community. 
Our cameras are largely focused on the men who often end up involved in the more confrontational scenes that we find so irresistible in our news cycle. 
And we end up with a narrative that not only erases women from the struggles in the region but often misrepresents the struggles themselves. 
In the late 1980s, an uprising started in Gaza, and quickly spread to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 
It came to be known as the First Intifada, and people who have any visual memory of it generally conjure up something like this: Palestinian men throwing rocks at Israeli tanks. 
The news coverage at the time made it seem like stones, Molotov cocktails and burning tires were the only activities taking place in the Intifada. 
This period, though, was also marked by widespread nonviolent organizing in the forms of strikes, sit-ins and the creation of parallel institutions. 
During the First Intifada, whole sectors of the Palestinian civilian population mobilized, cutting across generations, factions and class lines. 
They did this through networks of popular committees, and their use of direct action and communal self-help projects challenged Israel's very ability to continue ruling the West Bank and Gaza. 
According to the Israeli Army itself, 97 percent of activities during the First Intifada were unarmed. 
And here's another thing that is not part of our narrative about that time. 
For 18 months in the Intifada, women were the ones calling the shots behind the scenes: Palestinian women from all walks of life in charge of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people in a concerted effort to withdraw consent from the occupation. 
Naela Ayyash, who strived to build a self-sufficient Palestinian economy by encouraging women in Gaza to grow vegetables in their backyards, an activity deemed illegal by the Israeli authorities at that time; Rabeha Diab, who took over decision-making authority for the entire uprising when the men who had been running it were deported; Fatima Al Jaafari, who swallowed leaflets containing the uprising's directives in order to spread them across the territories without getting caught; and Zahira Kamal, who ensured the longevity of the uprising by leading an organization that went from 25 women to 3,000 in a single year. 
Despite their extraordinary achievements, none of these women have made it into our narrative of the First Intifada. 
We do this in other parts of the globe, too. 
In our history books, for instance, and in our collective consciousness, men are the public faces and spokespersons for the 1960s struggle for racial justice in the United States. 
But women were also a critical driving force, mobilizing, organizing, taking to the streets. 
How many of us think of Septima Clark when we think of the United States Civil Rights era? 
Remarkably few. 
But she played a crucial role in every phase of the struggle, particularly by emphasizing literacy and education. 
She's been omitted, ignored, like so many other women who played critical roles in the United States Civil Rights Movement. 
This is not about getting credit. 
It's more profound than that. 
The stories we tell matter deeply to how we see ourselves, and to how we believe movements are run and how movements are won. 
The stories we tell about a movement like the First Intifada or the United States Civil Rights era matter deeply and have a critical influence in the choices Palestinians, Americans and people around the world will make next time they encounter an injustice and develop the courage to confront it. 
If we do not lift up the women who played critical roles in these struggles, we fail to offer up role models to future generations. 
Without role models, it becomes harder for women to take up their rightful space in public life. 
And as we saw earlier, one of the most critical variables in determining whether a movement will be successful or not is a movement's ideology regarding the role of women in public life. 
This is a question of whether we're moving towards more democratic and peaceful societies. 
In a world where so much change is happening, and where change is bound to continue at an increasingly faster pace, it is not a question of whether we will face conflict, but rather a question of which stories will shape how we choose to wage conflict. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I would be willing to bet that I'm the dumbest guy in the room because I couldn't get through school. I struggled with school. 
But what I knew at a very early age was that I loved money and I loved business and I loved this entrepreneurial thing, and I was raised to be an entrepreneur, and what I've been really passionate about ever since — and I've never spoken about this ever, until now — so this is the first time anyone's ever heard it, except my wife three days ago, because she said, "" What are you talking about? "" and I told her — is that I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits, and to groom them or show them 
that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing. 
It's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified, which is what happens in a lot of society. 
Kids, when we grow up, have dreams, and we have passions, and we have visions, and somehow we get those things crushed. 
We get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor. 
My parents got me a tutor in French, and I still suck in French. 
Two years ago, I was the highest-rated lecturer at MIT's entrepreneurial master's program. 
And it was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world. 
When I was in grade two, I won a city-wide speaking competition, but nobody had ever said, "" Hey, this kid's a good speaker. 
He can't focus, but he loves walking around and getting people energized. "" No one said, "" Get him a coach in speaking. "" They said, get me a tutor in what I suck at. 
So as kids show these traits — and we need to start looking for them — I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers. 
Unfortunately the school system is grooming this world to say, "" Hey, let's be a lawyer or let's be a doctor, "" and we're missing that opportunity because no one ever says, "" Hey, be an entrepreneur. "" Entrepreneurs are people — because we have a lot of them in this room — who have these ideas and these passions or see these needs in the world and we decide to stand up and do it. 
And we put everything on the line to make that stuff happen. 
We have the ability to get those groups of people around us that want to kind of build that dream with us, and I think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age of being entrepreneurial, we could change everything in the world that is a problem today. 
Every problem that's out there, somebody has the idea for. 
And as a young kid, nobody can say it can't happen because you're too dumb to realize that you couldn't figure it out. 
I think we have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fish instead of giving them the fish — the old parable: "" If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. 
If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. "" If we can teach our kids to become entrepreneurial — the ones that show those traits to be — like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science, what if we saw the ones who had entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs? 
We could actually have all these kids spreading businesses instead of waiting for government handouts. 
What we do is we sit and teach our kids all the things they shouldn't do: Don't hit; don't bite; don't swear. 
Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs, you know, and the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. 
And the media says that it's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like Luongo, Crosby. 
Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs. 
The reason that I avoided an MBA program — other than the fact that I couldn't get into any because I had a 61 percent average out of high school and then 61 percent average at the only school in Canada that accepted me, Carlton — but our MBA programs don't teach kids to be entrepreneurs. 
They teach them to go work in corporations. 
So who's starting these companies? It's these random few people. 
Even in popular literature, the only book I've ever found — and this should be on all of your reading lists — the only book I've ever found that makes the entrepreneur into the hero is "" Atlas Shrugged. "" Everything else in the world tends to look at entrepreneurs and say that we're bad people. 
I look at even my family. 
Both my grandfathers were entrepreneurs. My dad was an entrepreneur. 
Both my brother and sister and I, all three of us own companies as well. 
And we all decided to start these things because it's really the only place we fit. 
We didn't fit in the normal work. We couldn't work for somebody else because we're too stubborn and we have all these other traits. 
But kids could be entrepreneurs as well. 
I'm a big part of a couple organizations globally called the Entrepreneurs' Organization and the Young Presidents' Organization. 
I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO global conference, and everyone that I met over there who's an entrepreneur struggled with school. 
I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed. 
So this thing right here is freaking me out. 
(Laughter) It's probably why I'm a little bit panicked right now — other than all the caffeine that I've had and the sugar — but this is really creepy for an entrepreneur. 
Attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder. 
Do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease? 
Ted Turner's got it. Steve Jobs has it. 
All three of the founders of Netscape had it. 
I could go on and on. 
Kids — you can see these signs in kids. 
And what we're doing is we're giving them Ritalin and saying, "" Don't be an entrepreneurial type. 
Fit into this other system and try to become a student. "" Sorry, entrepreneurs aren't students. 
We fast-track. We figure out the game. 
I stole essays. I cheated on exams. 
I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments. 
But as an entrepreneur you don't do accounting, you hire accountants. 
So I just figured that out earlier. 
(Laughter) (Applause) At least I can admit I cheated in university; most of you won't. 
I'm also quoted — and I told the person who wrote the textbook — I'm now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every Canadian university and college studies. 
In managerial accounting, I'm chapter eight. 
I open up chapter eight talking about budgeting. 
And I told the author, after they did my interview, that I cheated in that same course. 
And she thought it was too funny to not include it anyway. 
But kids, you can see these signs in them. 
The definition of an entrepreneur is "" a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk of a business venture. "" That doesn't mean you have to go to an MBA program. 
It doesn't mean you have to get through school. 
It just means that those few things have to feel right in your gut. 
And we've heard those things about "" is it nurture or is it nature, "" right? 
Is it thing one or thing two? What is it? 
Well, I don't think it's either. I think it can be both. 
I was groomed as an entrepreneur. 
When I was growing up as a young kid, I had no choice, because I was taught at a very early, young age — when my dad realized I wasn't going to fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school — that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age. 
He groomed us, the three of us, to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies that we could employ other people. 
My first little business venture: I was seven years old, I was in Winnipeg, and I was lying in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords. 
And I was calling all the dry cleaners in Winnipeg to find out how much would the dry cleaners pay me for coat hangers. 
And my mom came into the room and she said, "Where are you going to get the coat hangers to sell to the dry cleaners?" 
And I said, "" Let's go and look in the basement. "" And we went down to the basement. And I opened up this cupboard. 
And there was about a thousand coat hangers that I'd collected. 
Because, when I told her I was going out to play with the kids, I was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect coat hangers to put in the basement to sell. 
Because I saw her a few weeks before that — you could get paid. They used to pay you two cents per coat hanger. 
So I was just like, well there's all kinds of coat hangers. 
And so I'll just go get them. 
And I knew she wouldn't want me to go get them, so I just did it anyway. 
And I learned that you could actually negotiate with people. 
This one person offered me three cents and I got him up to three and a half. 
I even knew at a seven-year-old age that I could actually get a fractional percent of a cent, and people would pay that because it multiplied up. 
At seven years old I figured it out. I got three and a half cents for a thousand coat hangers. 
I sold license plate protectors door to door. 
My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me these things at wholesale. 
And at nine years old, I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license plate protectors door to door to houses. 
And I remember this one customer so vividly because I also did some other stuff with these clients. 
I sold newspapers. 
And he wouldn't buy a newspaper from me ever. 
But I was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license plate protector. 
And he's like, "" Well, we don't need one. "" And I said, "" But you've got two cars... "" — I'm nine years old. 
I'm like, "" But you have two cars and they don't have license plate protectors. "" And he said, "" I know. "" And I said, "" This car here's got one license plate that's all crumpled up. "" And he said, "" Yes, that's my wife's car. "" And I said, "" Why don't we just test one on the front of your wife's car and see if it lasts longer. "" So I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each. 
If I couldn't sell all four, I could at least get one. 
I learned that at a young age. 
I did comic book arbitrage. 
When I was about 10 years old, I sold comic books out of our cottage on Georgian Bay. 
And I would go biking up to the end of the beach and buy all the comics from the poor kids. 
And then I would go back to the other end of the beach and sell them to the rich kids. 
But it was obvious to me, right? Buy low, sell high. 
You've got this demand over here that has money. 
Don't try to sell to the poor kids; they don't have cash. The rich people do. Go get some. 
So that's obvious, right. 
It's like a recession. So, there's a recession. 
There's still 13 trillion dollars circulating in the U.S. economy. 
Go get some of that. And I learned that at a young age. 
I also learned, don't reveal your source, because I got beat up after about four weeks of doing this because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics from, and he didn't like the fact that he was paying a lot more. 
I was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old. 
I didn't really want a paper route, but at 10, my dad said, "" That's going to be your next business. "" So not only would he get me one, but I had to get two, and then he wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers, which I did, and then I realized that collecting tips was where you made all the money. 
So I would collect the tips and get payment. 
So I would go and collect for all the papers. 
He could just deliver them. 
Because then I realized I could make the money. 
By this point, I was definitely not going to be an employee. 
(Laughter) My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop. 
He had all these old automotive parts lying around. 
They had this old brass and copper. 
I asked him what he did with it, and he said he just throws it out. 
I said, "" But wouldn't somebody pay you for that? "" And he goes, "" Maybe. "" Remember at 10 years old — so 34 years ago I saw opportunity in this stuff. 
I saw there was money in garbage. 
And I was actually collecting it from all the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle. 
And then my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid. 
And I thought that was kind of cool. 
Strangely enough, 30 years later, we're building 1-800-GOT-JUNK? 
and making money off that too. 
I built these little pincushions when I was 11 years old in Cubs, and we made these pin cushions for our moms for Mother's Day. 
And you made these pincushions out of wooden clothespins — when we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside. 
And you'd make these chairs. 
And I had these little pillows that I would sew up. 
And you could stuff pins in them. 
Because people used to sew and they needed a pin cushion. 
But what I realized was that you had to have options. 
So I actually spray painted a whole bunch of them brown. 
And then when I went to the door, it wasn't, "" Do you want to buy one? "" It was, "" Which color would you like? "" Like I'm 10 years old; you're not going to say no to me, especially if you have two options — you have the brown one or the clear one. 
So I learned that lesson at a young age. 
I learned that manual labor really sucks. 
Right, like cutting lawns is brutal. 
But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing. 
That if I land this client once, and every week I get paid by that person, that's way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person. 
Because you can't sell them more. 
So I love that recurring revenue model I started to learn at a young age. 
Remember, I was being groomed to do this. I was not allowed to have jobs. 
I would caddy, I would go to the golf course and caddy for people. 
But I realized that there was this one hill on our golf course, the 13th hole that had this huge hill. 
And people could never get their bags up it. 
So I would sit there with a lawn chair and just carry up all the people who didn't have caddies. 
I would carry their golf bags up to the top, and they'd pay me a dollar. 
Meanwhile, my friends were working for five hours to haul some guy's bag around and get paid 10 bucks. 
I'm like, "" That's stupid because you have to work for five hours. 
That doesn't make any sense. "" You just figure out a way to make more money faster. 
Every week, I would go to the corner store and buy all these pops. 
Then I would go up and deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge. 
And they'd give me their orders for the following week. 
And then I'd just deliver pop and I'd just charge twice. 
And I had this captured market. You didn't need contracts. 
You just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you. 
These women weren't going to go to anybody else because they liked me, and I kind of figured it out. 
I went and got golf balls from golf courses. 
But everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. 
I'm like, screw that. They're all in the pond and nobody's going into the pond. 
So I would go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes. 
You just pick them up with both feet. 
You can't do it on stage. 
You get the golf balls, and you just throw them in your bathing suit trunks and when you're done you've got a couple hundred of them. 
But the problem is that people all didn't want all the golf balls. 
So I just packaged them. I'm like 12, right? 
I packaged them up three ways. 
I had the Pinnacles and DDHs and the really cool ones back then. 
Those sold for two dollars each. 
And then I had all the good ones that didn't look crappy. They were 50 cents each. 
And then I'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones. 
And they could use those for practice balls. 
I sold sunglasses, when I was in school, to all the kids in high school. 
This is what really kind of gets everybody hating you is because you're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time. 
But it paid the bills. 
So I sold lots and lots of sunglasses. 
Then when the school shut me down — the school actually called me into the office and told me I couldn't do it — so I went to the gas stations and I sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers. 
That was cool because then I had retail outlets. 
And I think I was 14. 
Then I paid my entire way through first year university at Carlton by selling wine skins door to door. 
You know that you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin? So what, right? 
Yeah, but you know what? You stuff that down your shorts, when you go into a football game you can get booze in for free, everybody bought them. 
Supply, demand, big opportunity. 
I also branded it, so I sold them for five times the normal cost. 
It had our university logo on it. 
You know we teach our kids and we buy them games, but why don't we get them games, if they're entrepreneurial kids, that kind of nurture the traits that you need to be entrepreneurs? 
Why don't you teach them not to waste money? 
I remember being told to walk out in the middle of a street in Banff, Alberta because I'd thrown a penny out in the street, and my dad said, "" Go pick it up. "" He said, "" I work too damn hard for my money. I'm not going to see you ever waste a penny. "" And I remember that lesson to this day. 
Allowances teach kids the wrong habits. 
Allowances, by nature, are teaching kids to think about a job. 
An entrepreneur doesn't expect a regular paycheck. 
Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck. 
That's wrong, for me, if you want to raise entrepreneurs. 
What I do with my kids now — I've got two, nine and seven — is I teach them to walk around the house and the yard, looking for stuff that needs to get done. 
Come to me and tell me what it is. 
Or I'll come to them and say, "" Here's what I need done. "" And then you know what we do? We negotiate. 
They go around looking for what it is. 
But then we negotiate on what they're going to get paid. 
And then they don't have a regular check, but they have more opportunities to find more stuff, and they learn the skill of negotiating, and they learn the skill of finding opportunities as well. 
You breed that kind of stuff. Each of my kids has two piggy banks. 
Fifty percent of all the money that they earn or get gifted, 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. 
Anything in their toy account they can spend on whatever they want. 
The 50 percent that goes in their house account, every six months, goes to the bank. 
They walk up with me. Every year all the money in the bank goes to their broker. 
Both my nine- and seven-year-olds have a stock broker already. 
But I'm teaching them to force that savings habit. 
It drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying, "Maybe I'll start contributing to my RSP now." 
Shit, you've missed 25 years. 
You can teach those habits to young kids when they don't even feel the pain yet. 
Don't read them bedtime stories every night. 
Maybe four nights out of the week read them bedtime stories and three nights of the week have them tell stories. 
Why don't you sit down with kids and give them four items, a red shirt, a blue tie, a kangaroo and a laptop, and have them tell a story about those four things? 
My kids do that all the time. 
It teaches them to sell; it teaches them creativity; it teaches them to think on their feet. 
Just do that kind of stuff and have fun with it. 
Get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk, even if it's just stand up in front of their friends and do plays and have speeches. 
Those are entrepreneurial traits that you want to be nurturing. 
Show the kids what bad customers or bad employees look like. 
Show them the grumpy employees. 
When you see grumpy customer service, point that out to them. 
Say, "" By the way, that guy's a crappy employee. "" And say, "" These ones are good ones. "" (Laughter) If you go into a restaurant and you have bad customer service, show them what bad customer service looks like. (Laughter) 
We have all these lessons in front of us, but we don't take those opportunities; we teach kids to go get a tutor. 
Imagine if you actually took all the kids' junk that's in the house right now, all the toys that they've outgrown two years ago and said, "" Why don't we start selling some of this on Craigslist and Kijiji? "" And they can actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when they get email offers come in. 
They can come into your account or a sub account or whatever. 
But teach them how to fix the price, guess the price, pull up the photos. 
Teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money. 
Then the money they get, 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. 
My kids love this stuff. 
Some of the entrepreneurial traits that you've got to nurture in kids: attainment, tenacity, leadership, introspection, interdependence, values. 
All these traits you can find in young kids, and you can help nurture them. 
Look for that kind of stuff. 
There's two traits that I want you to also look out for that we don't kind of get out of their system. 
Don't medicate kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really, really freaking bad. 
(Applause) The same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression, unless it is so clinically brutal, man. 
Bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease. 
When Steve Jurvetson and Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale have all got it, and they built Netscape — imagine if they were given Ritalin. 
We wouldn't have have that stuff, right? 
Al Gore really would have had to invented the Internet. 
(Laughter) These skills are the skills we should be teaching in the classroom as well as everything else. 
I'm not saying don't get kids to want to be lawyers. 
But how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them as well? 
Because there's huge opportunities in that. 
I want to close with a quick little video. 
It's a video that was done by one of the companies that I mentor. 
These guys, Grasshopper. 
It's about kids. It's about entrepreneurship. 
Hopefully this inspires you to take what you've heard from me and do something with it to change the world. 
[Kid... "" And you thought you could do anything? ""] [You still can.] [Because a lot of what we consider impossible...] [... is easy to overcome] [Because in case you haven't noticed, we live in a place where] [One individual can make a difference] [Want proof?] [Just look at the people who built our country;] [Our parents, grandparents, our aunts, uncles...] [They were immigrants, newcomers ready to make their mark] [Maybe they came with very little] [Or perhaps they didn't own anything except for...] [... a single brilliant idea] [These people were thinkers, doers...] [... innovators...] [... until they came up with the name...] 
[... entrepreneurs!] [They change the way we think about what is possible.] [They have a clear vision of how life can be better] [for all of us, even when times are tough.] [Right now, it's hard to see...] [... when our view is cluttered with obstacles.] [But turbulence creates opportunities] [for success, achievement, and pushes us...] [to discover new ways of doing things] [So what opportunities will you go after and why?] [If you're an entrepreneur] [you know that risk isn't the reward.] [No. The rewards are driving innovation...] [... changing people's lives. Creating jobs.] [Fueling growth.] [And making a better world.] 
[Entrepreneurs are everywhere.] [They run small businesses that support our economy,] [design tools to help you...] [... stay connected with friends, family and colleagues around the world.] [And they're finding new ways of helping to solve society's oldest problems.] [Do you know an entrepreneur?] [Entrepreneurs can be anyone...] [Even... you!] [So seize the opportunity to create the job you always wanted] [Help heal the economy] [Make a difference.] [Take your business to new heights.] [But most importantly,] [remember when you were a kid...] [when everything was within you reach,] [and then say to yourself quietly, but with determination:] 
["" It still is. ""] Thank you very much for having me. 

It's pretty simple. There are nine, sort of, rules that I discovered after 35 years of rock climbing. 
Most of them are pretty basic. 
Number one: don't let go — very sure success method. 
But really, truly — often you think about letting go way before your body does. 
So hang in there, and you come up with some pretty peculiar solutions. 
Number two: hesitation is bad. 
This is a friction climb, up in Tuolumne Meadows, in the Yosemite high country. 
Friction climbing doesn't have any sort of hard positive edges. 
You're climbing on little dimples and nubbins in the rock. 
The most friction you have is when you first put your hand or your foot on the rock. 
And then from that point on, you're basically falling. 
So momentum is good. Don't stop. 
Rule number three: have a plan. 
This is a climb called the Naked Edge, in El Dorado Canyon, outside of Boulder. 
This climber is on the last pitch of it. 
He's actually right about where I fell. 
There is about 1,000 feet of air below him. 
And all the hard pitches are actually below him. 
Often what happens is you're planning so hard for like, "How do I get through the hardest part? How do I get through the hardest part?" 
And then what happens? 
You get to the last pitch. It's easy. 
And you're completely flamed out. Don't do it. 
You have to plan ahead to get to the top. 
But you also can't forget that each individual move you have to be able to complete. 
This is a climb called the Dike Route, on Pywjack Dome, up in the Yosemite high country. 
The interesting thing about this climb is it's not that hard. 
But if you're the leader on it, at the hardest move, you're looking at about 100 foot fall, onto some low angle slabs. 
So you've got to focus. 
You don't want to stop in the middle like Coleridge's Kubla Kahn. 
You've got to keep going. 
Rule number five: know how to rest. 
It's amazing. The best climbers are the ones that in the most extreme situations can get their bodies into some position where they can rest, regroup, calm themselves, focus, and keep going. 
This is a climb in the Needles, again in California. 
Fear really sucks because what it means is you're not focusing on what you're doing. 
You're focusing on the consequences of failing at what you're doing because any given move should require all your concentration and thought processes to execute it effectively. 
One of the things in climbing is, most people sort of take it straight on. And they follow the most obvious solution. 
This is the Devils Tower in Wyoming, which is a columnar basalt formation that most of you probably know from "" Close Encounters. "" With this, typically crack climbers would put their hands in and their toes in and just start climbing. 
The cracks are too small to get your toes into so the only way to climb is using your fingertips in the cracks, and using opposing pressure and forcing yourself up. 
Rule number eight: strength doesn't always equal success. 
In the 35 years I've been a climbing guide and taught on indoor walls, and stuff like that, the most important thing I've learned was, guys will always try to do pull-ups. 
Beginning guys, it's like, they thrash, they thrash, they get 15 feet up — and they can do about 15 pull-ups right — And then they just flame out. 
Women are much more in balance because they don't have that idea that they're going to be able to do 100 pull-ups. 
They think about how to get the weight over their feet because it's sort of natural — they carry you all day long. 
So balance is really critical, and keeping your weight on your feet, which is your strongest muscle. 
And of course there is rule number nine. 
I came up with rule number nine after I actually didn't plan for a fall, and went about 40 feet and cracked a rib. 
Once you get to that point where you know it's going to happen, you need to start thinking about how you're going to let go because that is the critical piece of not getting hurt — how you're going to fall onto the rope, or if you're climbing without a rope, fall to a place where you can actually control the fall. 
So don't hang on till the bitter end. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

What I wanted to talk to you about today is two things: one, the rise of a culture of availability; and two, a request. 
We're seeing, along with that proliferation of mobile devices, an expectation of availability. 
And, with that, comes the third point, which is obligation — and an obligation to that availability. 
And the problem is, we're still working through, from a societal standpoint, how we allow people to be available. 
There's a significant delta, in fact, between what we're willing to accept. 
Apologies to Hans Rosling — he said anything that's not using real stats is a lie — but the big delta there is how we deal with this from a public standpoint. 
So we've developed certain tactics and strategies to cover up. 
This first one's called "" the lean. "" And if you've ever been in a meeting where you play sort of meeting "" chicken, "" you're sitting there, looking at the person, waiting for them to look away, and then quickly checking the device. 
Although you can see the gentleman up on the right is busting him. 
"The stretch." 
OK, the gentleman on the left is saying, "" Screw you, I'm going to check my device. "" But the guy, here, on the right, he's doing the stretch. 
It's that reeeee-e-e-each out, the physical contortion to get that device just below the tabletop. 
Or, my favorite, the "" Love you; mean it. "" (Laughter) Nothing says "" I love you "" like "" Let me find somebody else I give a damn about. "" Or, this one, coming to us from India. 
You can find this on YouTube, the gentleman who's recumbent on a motorcycle while text messaging. 
Or what we call the "" sweet gravy, stop me before I kill again! "" That is actually the device. 
What this is doing is, we find a — (Laughter) a direct collision — we find a direct collision between availability — and what's possible through availability — and a fundamental human need — which we've been hearing about a lot, actually — the need to create shared narratives. 
We're very good at creating personal narratives, but it's the shared narratives that make us a culture. 
And when you're standing with someone, and you're on your mobile device, effectively what you're saying to them is, "" You are not as important as, literally, almost anything that could come to me through this device. "" Look around you. 
There might be somebody on one right now, participating in multi-dimensional engagement. 
(Laughter) Our reality right now is less interesting than the story we're going to tell about it later. 
This one I love. 
This poor kid, clearly a prop — don't get me wrong, a willing prop — but the kiss that's being documented kind of looks like it sucks. 
This is the sound of one hand clapping. 
So, as we lose the context of our identity, it becomes incredibly important that what you share becomes the context of shared narrative, becomes the context in which we live. 
The stories that we tell — what we push out — becomes who we are. 
People aren't simply projecting identity, they're creating it. 
And so that's the request I have for everybody in this room. 
We are creating the technology that is going to create the new shared experience, which will create the new world. 
And so my request is, please, let's make technologies that make people more human, and not less. 
Thank you. 

At Free America, we've done a listening and learning tour. 
We visited not only with prosecutors but with legislators, with inmates in our state and local prisons. 
We've gone to immigration detention centers. 
We've met a lot of people. 
And we've seen that redemption and transformation can happen in our prisons, our jails and our immigration detention centers, giving hope to those who want to create a better life after serving their time. 
Imagine if we also considered the front end of this prison pipeline. 
What would it look like if we intervened, with rehabilitation as a core value — with love and compassion as core values? 
We would have a society that is safer, healthier and worthy of raising our children in. 
I want to introduce you to James Cavitt. 
James served 12 years in the San Quentin State Prison and is being released in 18 months. 
Now James, like you and me, is more than the worst thing he's done. 
He is a father, a husband, a son, a poet. 
He committed a crime; he's paying his debt, and working hard to build the skills to make the transition back to a productive life when he enters the civilian population again. 
Now James, like millions of people behind bars, is an example of what happens if we believe that our failings don't define who we are, that we are all worthy of redemption and if we support those impacted by mass incarceration, we can all heal together. 
I'd like to introduce you to James right now, and he's going to share his journey of redemption through spoken word. 
James Cavitt: Thanks, John. 
TED, welcome to San Quentin. 
The talent is abundant behind prison walls. 
Future software engineers, entrepreneurs, craftsmen, musicians and artists. 
This piece is inspired by all of the hard work that men and women are doing on the inside to create better lives and futures for themselves after they serve their time. 
This piece is entitled, "" Where I Live. "" I live in a world where most people are too afraid to go. 
Surrounded by tall, concrete walls, steel bars, where razor wire have a way of cutting away at the hopes for a brighter tomorrow. 
I live in a world that kill people who kill people in order to teach people that killing people is wrong. 
Imagine that. 
Better yet, imagine a world where healed people helped hurt people heal and become strong. 
Maybe then we would all be singin '"" Redemption Song. "" I live in a world that has been called "" hell on Earth "" by those trapped inside. 
But I've come to the stark realization that prison — it really is what you make it. 
You see, in spite of the harshness of my reality, there is a silver lining. 
I knew that my freedom was gonna come, it was just a matter of time. 
And so I treated my first steps as if they were my last mile, and I realized that you don't have to be free in order to experience freedom. 
And just because you're free, doesn't mean that you have freedom. 
Many of us, for years, have been battling our inner demons. 
We walk around smiling when inside we're really screamin ': freedom! 
Don't you get it? 
We're all serving time; we're just in different places. 
As for me, I choose to be free from the prisons I've created. 
The key: forgiveness. 
Action's my witness. 
If we want freedom, then we gotta think different. 
Because freedom... 
it isn't a place. 
It's a mind setting. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Piano) John Legend: Old pirates, yes, they rob I. 
Sold I to the merchant ships. 
Minutes after they took I from the bottomless pit. 
My hands were made strong by the hand of the almighty. 
We forward in this generation triumphantly. 
Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom? 
'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. 
Redemption songs. 
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. 
None but ourselves can free our minds. 
Have no fear for atomic energy 'cause none of them can stop the time. 
How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look? 
Some say it's just a part of it, we've got to fulfill the book. 
Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom? 
'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. 
Redemption songs. 
(Piano) Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. 
None but ourselves can free our minds. 
Have no fear for atomic energy 'cause none of them can stop the time. 
How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look? 
Some say it's just a part of it, we've got to fulfill the book. 
Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom? 
'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. 
Redemption songs. 
These songs of freedom. 
'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. 
Redemption songs. Redemption songs. 
(Piano) 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 

Organic chemists make molecules, very complicated molecules, by chopping up a big molecule into small molecules and reverse engineering. 
And as a chemist, one of the things I wanted to ask my research group a couple of years ago is, could we make a really cool universal chemistry set? 
In essence, could we "" app "" chemistry? 
Now what would this mean, and how would we do it? 
Well to start to do this, we took a 3D printer and we started to print our beakers and our test tubes on one side and then print the molecule at the same time on the other side and combine them together in what we call reactionware. 
And so by printing the vessel and doing the chemistry at the same time, we may start to access this universal toolkit of chemistry. 
Now what could this mean? 
Well if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine, so if you have a cell that's ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you want to kill, if you have this embedded in your device at the same time, and you do the chemistry, you may be able to make drugs in a new way. 
So how are we doing this in the lab? 
Well it requires software, it requires hardware and it requires chemical inks. 
And so the really cool bit is, the idea is that we want to have a universal set of inks that we put out with the printer, and you download the blueprint, the organic chemistry for that molecule and you make it in the device. 
And so you can make your molecule in the printer using this software. 
So what could this mean? 
Well, ultimately, it could mean that you could print your own medicine. 
And this is what we're doing in the lab at the moment. 
But to take baby steps to get there, first of all we want to look at drug design and production, or drug discovery and manufacturing. 
Because if we can manufacture it after we've discovered it, we could deploy it anywhere. 
You don't need to go to the chemist anymore. 
We can print drugs at point of need. 
We can download new diagnostics. 
Say a new super bug has emerged. 
You put it in your search engine, and you create the drug to treat the threat. 
So this allows you on-the-fly molecular assembly. 
But perhaps for me the core bit going into the future is this idea of taking your own stem cells, with your genes and your environment, and you print your own personal medicine. 
And if that doesn't seem fanciful enough, where do you think we're going to go? 
Well, you're going to have your own personal matter fabricator. 
Beam me up, Scotty. 
(Applause) 

My students and I work on very tiny robots. 
Now, you can think of these as robotic versions of something that you're all very familiar with: an ant. 
We all know that ants and other insects at this size scale can do some pretty incredible things. 
We've all seen a group of ants, or some version of that, carting off your potato chip at a picnic, for example. 
But what are the real challenges of engineering these ants? 
Well, first of all, how do we get the capabilities of an ant in a robot at the same size scale? 
Well, first we need to figure out how to make them move when they're so small. 
We need mechanisms like legs and efficient motors in order to support that locomotion, and we need the sensors, power and control in order to pull everything together in a semi-intelligent ant robot. 
And finally, to make these things really functional, we want a lot of them working together in order to do bigger things. 
So I'll start with mobility. 
Insects move around amazingly well. 
This video is from UC Berkeley. 
It shows a cockroach moving over incredibly rough terrain without tipping over, and it's able to do this because its legs are a combination of rigid materials, which is what we traditionally use to make robots, and soft materials. 
Jumping is another really interesting way to get around when you're very small. 
So these insects store energy in a spring and release that really quickly to get the high power they need to jump out of water, for example. 
So one of the big contributions from my lab has been to combine rigid and soft materials in very, very small mechanisms. 
So this jumping mechanism is about four millimeters on a side, so really tiny. 
The hard material here is silicon, and the soft material is silicone rubber. 
And the basic idea is that we're going to compress this, store energy in the springs, and then release it to jump. 
So there's no motors on board this right now, no power. 
This is actuated with a method that we call in my lab "" graduate student with tweezers. "" (Laughter) So what you'll see in the next video is this guy doing amazingly well for its jumps. 
So this is Aaron, the graduate student in question, with the tweezers, and what you see is this four-millimeter-sized mechanism jumping almost 40 centimeters high. 
That's almost 100 times its own length. 
And it survives, bounces on the table, it's incredibly robust, and of course survives quite well until we lose it because it's very tiny. 
Ultimately, though, we want to add motors to this too, and we have students in the lab working on millimeter-sized motors to eventually integrate onto small, autonomous robots. 
But in order to look at mobility and locomotion at this size scale to start, we're cheating and using magnets. 
So this shows what would eventually be part of a micro-robot leg, and you can see the silicone rubber joints and there's an embedded magnet that's being moved around by an external magnetic field. 
So this leads to the robot that I showed you earlier. 
The really interesting thing that this robot can help us figure out is how insects move at this scale. 
We have a really good model for how everything from a cockroach up to an elephant moves. 
We all move in this kind of bouncy way when we run. 
But when I'm really small, the forces between my feet and the ground are going to affect my locomotion a lot more than my mass, which is what causes that bouncy motion. 
So this guy doesn't work quite yet, but we do have slightly larger versions that do run around. 
So this is about a centimeter cubed, a centimeter on a side, so very tiny, and we've gotten this to run about 10 body lengths per second, so 10 centimeters per second. 
It's pretty quick for a little, small guy, and that's really only limited by our test setup. 
We can also make 3D-printed versions of this that can climb over obstacles, a lot like the cockroach that you saw earlier. 
But ultimately we want to add everything onboard the robot. 
We want sensing, power, control, actuation all together, and not everything needs to be bio-inspired. 
So this robot's about the size of a Tic Tac. 
And in this case, instead of magnets or muscles to move this around, we use rockets. 
So this is a micro-fabricated energetic material, and we can create tiny pixels of this, and we can put one of these pixels on the belly of this robot, and this robot, then, is going to jump when it senses an increase in light. 
So the next video is one of my favorites. 
So you have this 300-milligram robot jumping about eight centimeters in the air. 
It's only four by four by seven millimeters in size. 
And you'll see a big flash at the beginning when the energetic is set off, and the robot tumbling through the air. 
So there was that big flash, and you can see the robot jumping up through the air. 
So there's no tethers on this, no wires connecting to this. 
Everything is onboard, and it jumped in response to the student just flicking on a desk lamp next to it. 
So I think you can imagine all the cool things that we could do with robots that can run and crawl and jump and roll at this size scale. 
Imagine the rubble that you get after a natural disaster like an earthquake. 
Imagine these small robots running through that rubble to look for survivors. 
Or imagine a lot of small robots running around a bridge in order to inspect it and make sure it's safe so you don't get collapses like this, which happened outside of Minneapolis in 2007. 
Or just imagine what you could do if you had robots that could swim through your blood. 
Right? "" Fantastic Voyage, "" Isaac Asimov. 
Or they could operate without having to cut you open in the first place. 
Or we could radically change the way we build things if we have our tiny robots work the same way that termites do, and they build these incredible eight-meter-high mounds, effectively well ventilated apartment buildings for other termites in Africa and Australia. 
So I think I've given you some of the possibilities of what we can do with these small robots. 
And we've made some advances so far, but there's still a long way to go, and hopefully some of you can contribute to that destination. 
Thanks very much. 
(Applause) 

I've got a confession. 
I love looking through people's garbage. 
Now, it's not some creepy thing. 
I'm usually just looking for old electronics, stuff I can take to my workshop and hack. 
I do have a fetish for CD-ROM drives. 
Each one's got three different motors, so now you can build things that move. 
There's switches so you can turn things on and off. 
There's even a freaking laser, so you can make a cool robot into an awesome robot. 
Now, I've built a lot of stuff out of garbage, and some of these things have even been kind of useful. 
But here's the thing, for me, garbage is just a chance to play, to be creative and build things to amuse myself. 
This is what I love doing, so I just made it part of my day job. 
I lead a university-based biological research lab, where we value curiosity and exploration above all else. 
We aren't focused on any particular problem, and we're not trying to solve any particular disease. 
This is just a place where people can come and ask fascinating questions and find answers. 
And I realized a long time ago that if I challenge people to build the equipment they need out of the garbage I find, it's a great way to foster creativity. 
And what happened was that artists and scientists from around the world started coming to my lab. 
And it's not just because we value unconventional ideas, it's because we test and validate them with scientific rigor. 
So one day I was hacking something, I was taking it apart, and I had this sudden idea: Could I treat biology like hardware? 
Could I dismantle a biological system, mix and match the parts and then put it back together in some new and creative way? 
My lab started working on this, and I want to show you the result. 
Can any of you guys tell me what fruit this is? 
Audience: Apple! 
Andrew Pelling: That's right — it's an apple. 
Now, I actually want you to notice as well that this is a lot redder than most apples. 
And that's because we grew human cells into it. 
We took a totally innocent Macintosh apple, removed all the apple cells and DNA and then implanted human cells. 
And what we're left with after removing all the apple cells is this cellulose scaffold. 
This is the stuff that gives plants their shape and texture. 
And these little holes that you can see, this is where all the apple cells used to be. 
So then we come along, we implant some mammalian cells that you can see in blue. 
What happens is, these guys start multiplying and they fill up this entire scaffold. 
As weird as this is, it's actually really reminiscent of how our own tissues are organized. 
And we found in our pre-clinical work that you can implant these scaffolds into the body, and the body will send in cells and a blood supply and actually keep these things alive. 
This is the point when people started asking me, "Andrew, can you make body parts out of apples?" 
And I'm like, "" You've come to the right place. "" (Laughter) I actually brought this up with my wife. 
She's a musical instrument maker, and she does a lot of wood carving for a living. 
So I asked her, "" Could you, like, literally carve some ears out of an apple for us? "" And she did. 
So I took her ears to the lab. 
We then started preparing them. 
Yeah, I know. 
(Laughter) It's a good lab, man. (Laughter) 
And then we grew cells on them. 
And this is the result. 
Listen, my lab is not in the ear-manufacturing business. 
People have actually been working on this for decades. 
Here's the issue: commercial scaffolds can be really expensive and problematic, because they're sourced from proprietary products, animals or cadavers. 
We used an apple and it cost pennies. 
What's also really cool here is it's not that hard to make these things. 
The equipment you need can be built from garbage, and the key processing step only requires soap and water. 
So what we did was put all the instructions online as open source. 
And then we founded a mission-driven company, and we're developing kits to make it easier for anyone with a sink and a soldering iron to make these things at home. 
What I'm really curious about is if one day, it will be possible to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen. 
Speaking of kitchens, here's some asparagus. 
They're tasty, and they make your pee smell funny. 
(Laughter) Now, I was in my kitchen, and I was noticing that when you look down the stalks of these asparagus, what you can see are all these tiny little vessels. 
And when we image them in the lab, you can see how the cellulose forms these structures. 
This image reminds me of two things: our blood vessels and the structure and organization of our nerves and spinal cord. 
So here's the question: Can we grow axons and neurons down these channels? 
Because if we can, then maybe we can use asparagus to form new connections between the ends of damaged and severed nerves. 
Or maybe even a spinal cord. 
Don't get me wrong — this is exceptionally challenging and really hard work to do, and we are not the only ones working on this. 
But we are the only ones using asparagus. 
(Laughter) Right now, we've got really promising pilot data. 
And we're working with tissue engineers and neurosurgeons to find out what's actually possible. 
So listen, all of the work I've shown you, the stuff that I've built that's all around me on this stage and the other projects my lab is involved in are all a direct result of me playing with your garbage. 
Play — play is a key part of my scientific practice. 
It's how I train my mind to be unconventional and to be creative and to decide to make human apple ears. 
So, the next time any of you are looking at some old, broken-down, malfunctioning, piece-of-crap technology, I want you to think of me. 
Because I want it. 
(Laughter) Seriously, please find any way to get in touch with me, and let's see what we can build. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life? 
If you were going to invest now in your future best self, where would you put your time and your energy? 
There was a recent survey of millennials asking them what their most important life goals were, and over 80 percent said that a major life goal for them was to get rich. 
And another 50 percent of those same young adults said that another major life goal was to become famous. 
(Laughter) And we're constantly told to lean in to work, to push harder and achieve more. 
We're given the impression that these are the things that we need to go after in order to have a good life. 
Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get. 
Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20 / 20. 
We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative. 
But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time? 
What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really keeps people happy and healthy? 
We did that. 
The Harvard Study of Adult Development may be the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. 
For 75 years, we've tracked the lives of 724 men, year after year, asking about their work, their home lives, their health, and of course asking all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out. 
Studies like this are exceedingly rare. 
Almost all projects of this kind fall apart within a decade because too many people drop out of the study, or funding for the research dries up, or the researchers get distracted, or they die, and nobody moves the ball further down the field. 
But through a combination of luck and the persistence of several generations of researchers, this study has survived. 
About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participating in the study, most of them in their 90s. 
And we are now beginning to study the more than 2,000 children of these men. 
And I'm the fourth director of the study. 
Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of men. 
The first group started in the study when they were sophomores at Harvard College. 
They all finished college during World War II, and then most went off to serve in the war. 
And the second group that we've followed was a group of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods, boys who were chosen for the study specifically because they were from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in the Boston of the 1930s. 
Most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water. 
When they entered the study, all of these teenagers were interviewed. 
They were given medical exams. 
We went to their homes and we interviewed their parents. 
And then these teenagers grew up into adults who entered all walks of life. 
They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors, one President of the United States. 
Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia. 
Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the very top, and some made that journey in the opposite direction. 
The founders of this study would never in their wildest dreams have imagined that I would be standing here today, 75 years later, telling you that the study still continues. 
Every two years, our patient and dedicated research staff calls up our men and asks them if we can send them yet one more set of questions about their lives. 
Many of the inner city Boston men ask us, "Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life just isn't that interesting." 
The Harvard men never ask that question. 
(Laughter) To get the clearest picture of these lives, we don't just send them questionnaires. 
We interview them in their living rooms. 
We get their medical records from their doctors. 
We draw their blood, we scan their brains, we talk to their children. 
We videotape them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns. 
And when, about a decade ago, we finally asked the wives if they would join us as members of the study, many of the women said, "" You know, it's about time. "" (Laughter) So what have we learned? 
What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages of information that we've generated on these lives? 
Well, the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. 
The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. 
We've learned three big lessons about relationships. 
The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. 
It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected. 
And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. 
People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely. 
And the sad fact is that at any given time, more than one in five Americans will report that they're lonely. 
And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a marriage, so the second big lesson that we learned is that it's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship, but it's the quality of your close relationships that matters. 
It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health. 
High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced. 
And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective. 
Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife and to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn't. 
And when we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn't their middle age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. 
It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. 
The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. 
And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old. 
Our most happily partnered men and women reported, in their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy. 
But the people who were in unhappy relationships, on the days when they reported more physical pain, it was magnified by more emotional pain. 
And the third big lesson that we learned about relationships and our health is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. 
It turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your 80s is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those people's memories stay sharper longer. 
And the people in relationships where they feel they really can't count on the other one, those are the people who experience earlier memory decline. 
And those good relationships, they don't have to be smooth all the time. 
Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn't take a toll on their memories. 
So this message, that good, close relationships are good for our health and well-being, this is wisdom that's as old as the hills. 
Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore? 
Well, we're human. 
What we'd really like is a quick fix, something we can get that'll make our lives good and keep them that way. 
Relationships are messy and they're complicated and the hard work of tending to family and friends, it's not sexy or glamorous. 
It's also lifelong. It never ends. 
The people in our 75-year study who were the happiest in retirement were the people who had actively worked to replace workmates with new playmates. 
Just like the millennials in that recent survey, many of our men when they were starting out as young adults really believed that fame and wealth and high achievement were what they needed to go after to have a good life. 
But over and over, over these 75 years, our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community. 
So what about you? 
Let's say you're 25, or you're 40, or you're 60. 
What might leaning in to relationships even look like? 
Well, the possibilities are practically endless. 
It might be something as simple as replacing screen time with people time or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together, long walks or date nights, or reaching out to that family member who you haven't spoken to in years, because those all-too-common family feuds take a terrible toll on the people who hold the grudges. 
I'd like to close with a quote from Mark Twain. 
More than a century ago, he was looking back on his life, and he wrote this: "" There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. 
There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that. "" The good life is built with good relationships. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Please close your eyes, and open your hands. 
Now imagine what you could place in your hands: an apple, maybe your wallet. 
Now open your eyes. 
What about a life? 
What you see here is a premature baby. 
He looks like he's resting peacefully, but in fact he's struggling to stay alive because he can't regulate his own body temperature. 
This baby is so tiny he doesn't have enough fat on his body to stay warm. 
Sadly, 20 million babies like this are born every year around the world. 
Four million of these babies die annually. 
But the bigger problem is that the ones who do survive grow up with severe, long-term health problems. 
The reason is because in the first month of a baby's life, its only job is to grow. 
If it's battling hypothermia, its organs can't develop normally, resulting in a range of health problems from diabetes, to heart disease, to low I.Q. 
Imagine: Many of these problems could be prevented if these babies were just kept warm. 
That is the primary function of an incubator. 
But traditional incubators require electricity and cost up to 20 thousand dollars. 
So, you're not going to find them in rural areas of developing countries. 
As a result, parents resort to local solutions like tying hot water bottles around their babies' bodies, or placing them under light bulbs like the ones you see here — methods that are both ineffective and unsafe. 
I've seen this firsthand over and over again. 
On one of my first trips to India, I met this young woman, Sevitha, who had just given birth to a tiny premature baby, Rani. 
She took her baby to the nearest village clinic, and the doctor advised her to take Rani to a city hospital so she could be placed in an incubator. 
But that hospital was over four hours away, and Sevitha didn't have the means to get there, so her baby died. 
Inspired by this story, and dozens of other similar stories like this, my team and I realized what was needed was a local solution, something that could work without electricity, that was simple enough for a mother or a midwife to use, given that the majority of births still take place in the home. 
We needed something that was portable, something that could be sterilized and reused across multiple babies and something ultra-low-cost, compared to the 20,000 dollars that an incubator in the U.S. costs. 
So, this is what we came up with. 
What you see here looks nothing like an incubator. 
It looks like a small sleeping bag for a baby. 
You can open it up completely. It's waterproof. 
There's no seams inside so you can sterilize it very easily. 
But the magic is in this pouch of wax. 
This is a phase-change material. 
It's a wax-like substance with a melting point of human body temperature, 37 degrees Celsius. 
You can melt this simply using hot water and then when it melts it's able to maintain one constant temperature for four to six hours at a time, after which you simply reheat the pouch. 
So, you then place it into this little pocket back here, and it creates a warm micro-environment for the baby. 
Looks simple, but we've reiterated this dozens of times by going into the field to talk to doctors, moms and clinicians to ensure that this really meets the needs of the local communities. 
We plan to launch this product in India in 2010, and the target price point will be 25 dollars, less than 0.1 percent of the cost of a traditional incubator. 
Over the next five years we hope to save the lives of almost a million babies. 
But the longer-term social impact is a reduction in population growth. 
This seems counterintuitive, but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced, population sizes also decrease, because parents don't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die. 
We hope that the Embrace infant warmer and other simple innovations like this represent a new trend for the future of technology: simple, localized, affordable solutions that have the potential to make huge social impact. 
In designing this we followed a few basic principles. 
We really tried to understand the end user, in this case, people like Sevitha. 
We tried to understand the root of the problem rather than being biased by what already exists. 
And then we thought of the most simple solution we could to address this problem. 
In doing this, I believe we can truly bring technology to the masses. 
And we can save millions of lives through the simple warmth of an Embrace. 

(Music) I went down to St. James Infirmary To see my baby there She was lying on a long wooden table So cold, so still, so fair I went up to see the doctor "" She's very low, "" he said I went back to see my baby Good God she's lying there dead I went down to old Joe's bar room On the corner of the square They were serving drinks as per usual And the usual crowd was there To my left stood Old Joe McKennedy His eyes were bloodshot red He turned to the crowd around him And these are the words he said 
"" Let her go, let her go, God bless her Wherever she may be She can search this whole wide world all over But she'll never find another man like me She can search this whole wide world all over And she'll never find another man like me When I die, please God, bury me In my ten-dollar Stetson hat Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain So my friends know I died standing pat Get six gamblers to carry my coffin And six choir girls to sing me a song Stick a jazz band on my hearse wagon To raise hell as I go along 
Now that's the end of my story Let's have another round of booze And if anyone should ask you Just tell them I got the St. James Infirmary blues (Applause) 

(Guitar music starts) (Music ends) (Applause) (Distorted guitar music starts) (Music ends) (Applause) (Ambient / guitar music starts) (Music ends) (Applause) 

In 2008, Burhan Hassan, age 17, boarded a flight from Minneapolis to the Horn of Africa. 
And while Burhan was the youngest recruit, he was not alone. 
Al-Shabaab managed to recruit over two dozen young men in their late teens and early 20s with a heavy presence on social media platforms like Facebook. 
With the Internet and other technologies, they've changed our everyday lives, but they've also changed recruitment, radicalization and the front lines of conflict today. 
What about the links connecting Twitter, Google and protesters fighting for democracy? 
These numbers represent Google's public DNS servers, effectively the only digital border crossing protesters had and could use to communicate with each other, to reach the outside world and to spread viral awareness of what was happening in their own country. 
Today, conflict is essentially borderless. 
If there are bounds to conflict today, they're bound by digital, not physical geography. 
And under all this is a vacuum of power where non-state actors, individuals and private organizations have the advantage over slow, outdated military and intelligence agencies. 
And this is because, in the digital age of conflict, there exists a feedback loop where new technologies, platforms like the ones I mentioned, and more disruptive ones, can be adapted, learned, and deployed by individuals and organizations faster than governments can react. 
To understand the pace of our own government thinking on this, I like to turn to something aptly named the Worldwide Threat Assessment, where every year the Director of National Intelligence in the US looks at the global threat landscape, and he says, "" These are the threats, these are the details, and this is how we rank them. "" In 2007, there was absolutely no mention of cyber security. 
It took until 2011, when it came at the end, where other things, like West African drug trafficking, took precedence. 
In 2012, it crept up, still behind things like terrorism and proliferation. 
In 2013, it became the top threat, in 2014 and for the foreseeable future. 
What things like that show us is that there is a fundamental inability today on the part of governments to adapt and learn in digital conflict, where conflict can be immaterial, borderless, often wholly untraceable. 
And conflict isn't just online to offline, as we see with terrorist radicalization, but it goes the other way as well. 
We all know the horrible events that unfolded in Paris this year with the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks. 
What an individual hacker or a small group of anonymous individuals did was enter those social media conversations that so many of us took part in. 
# JeSuisCharlie. 
On Facebook, on Twitter, on Google, all sorts of places where millions of people, myself included, were talking about the events and saw images like this, the emotional, poignant image of a baby with "" Je suis Charlie "" on its wrist. 
And this turned into a weapon. 
What the hackers did was weaponize this image, where unsuspecting victims, like all of us in those conversations, saw this image, downloaded it but it was embedded with malware. 
And so when you downloaded this image, it hacked your system. 
It took six days to deploy a global malware campaign. 
The divide between physical and digital domains today ceases to exist, where we have offline attacks like those in Paris appropriated for online hacks. 
And it goes the other way as well, with recruitment. 
We see online radicalization of teens, who can then be deployed globally for offline terrorist attacks. 
With all of this, we see that there's a new 21st century battle brewing, and governments don't necessarily take a part. 
So in another case, Anonymous vs. Los Zetas. 
In early September 2011 in Mexico, Los Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels, hung two bloggers with a sign that said, "This is what will happen to all Internet busybodies." 
A week later, they beheaded a young girl. 
They severed her head, put it on top of her computer with a similar note. 
And taking the digital counteroffensive because governments couldn't even understand what was going on or act, Anonymous, a group we might not associate as the most positive force in the world, took action, not in cyber attacks, but threatening information to be free. 
On social media, they said, "" We will release information that ties prosecutors and governors to corrupt drug deals with the cartel. "" And escalating that conflict, Los Zetas said, "" We will kill 10 people for every bit of information you release. "" And so it ended there because it would become too gruesome to continue. 
But what was powerful about this was that anonymous individuals, not federal policia, not military, not politicians, could strike fear deep into the heart of one of the most powerful, violent organizations in the world. 
And so we live in an era that lacks the clarity of the past in conflict, in who we're fighting, in the motivations behind attacks, in the tools and techniques used, and how quickly they evolve. 
And the question still remains: what can individuals, organizations and governments do? 
For answers to these questions, it starts with individuals, and I think peer-to-peer security is the answer. 
Those people in relationships that bought over teens online, we can do that with peer-to-peer security. 
Individuals have more power than ever before to affect national and international security. 
And we can create those positive peer-to-peer relationships on and offline, we can support and educate the next generation of hackers, like myself, instead of saying, "" You can either be a criminal or join the NSA. "" That matters today. 
And it's not just individuals — it's organizations, corporations even. 
They have an advantage to act across more borders, more effectively and more rapidly than governments can, and there's a set of real incentives there. 
It's profitable and valuable to be seen as trustworthy in the digital age, and will only be more so in future generations to come. 
But we still can't ignore government, because that's who we turn to for collective action to keep us safe and secure. 
But we see where that's gotten us so far, where there's an inability to adapt and learn in digital conflict, where at the highest levels of leadership, the Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense, they say, "" Cyber Pearl Harbor will happen. "" "" Cyber 9 / 11 is imminent. "" But this only makes us more fearful, not more secure. 
By banning encryption in favor of mass surveillance and mass hacking, sure, GCHQ and the NSA can spy on you. 
But that doesn't mean that they're the only ones that can. 
Capabilities are cheap, even free. 
Technical ability is rising around the world, and individuals and small groups have the advantage. 
So today it might just be the NSA and GCHQ, but who's to say that the Chinese can't find that backdoor? 
Or in another generation, some kid in his basement in Estonia? 
And so I would say that it's not what governments can do, it's that they can't. 
Governments today need to give up power and control in order to help make us more secure. 
Giving up mass surveillance and hacking and instead fixing those backdoors means that, yeah, they can't spy on us, but neither can the Chinese or that hacker in Estonia a generation from now. 
And government support for technologies like Tor and Bitcoin mean giving up control, but it means that developers, translators, anybody with an Internet connection, in countries like Cuba, Iran and China, can sell their skills, their products, in the global marketplace, but more importantly sell their ideas, show us what's happening in their own countries. 
And so it should be not fearful, it should be inspiring to the same governments that fought for civil rights, free speech and democracy in the great wars of the last century, that today, for the first time in human history, we have a technical opportunity to make billions of people safer around the world that we've never had before in human history. 
It should be inspiring. 
(Applause) 

I want to address the issue of compassion. 
Compassion has many faces. 
Some of them are fierce; some of them are wrathful; some of them are tender; some of them are wise. 
A line that the Dalai Lama once said, he said, "" Love and compassion are necessities. 
They are not luxuries. 
Without them, humanity cannot survive. "" And I would suggest, it is not only humanity that won't survive, but it is all species on the planet, as we've heard today. 
It is the big cats, and it's the plankton. 
Two weeks ago, I was in Bangalore in India. 
I was so privileged to be able to teach in a hospice on the outskirts of Bangalore. 
And early in the morning, I went into the ward. 
In that hospice, there were 31 men and women who were actively dying. 
And I walked up to the bedside of an old woman who was breathing very rapidly, fragile, obviously in the latter phase of active dying. 
I looked into her face. 
I looked into the face of her son sitting next to her, and his face was just riven with grief and confusion. 
And I remembered a line from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic: "What is the most wondrous thing in the world, Yudhisthira?" 
And Yudhisthira replied, "" The most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us people can be dying and we don't realize it can happen to us. "" I looked up. 
Tending those 31 dying people were young women from villages around Bangalore. 
I looked into the face of one of these women, and I saw in her face the strength that arises when natural compassion is really present. 
I watched her hands as she bathed an old man. 
My gaze went to another young woman as she wiped the face of another dying person. 
And it reminded me of something that I had just been present for. 
Every year or so, I have the privilege of taking clinicians into the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. 
And we run clinics in these very remote regions where there's no medical care whatsoever. 
And on the first day at Simikot in Humla, far west of Nepal, the most impoverished region of Nepal, an old man came in clutching a bundle of rags. 
And he walked in, and somebody said something to him, we realized he was deaf, and we looked into the rags, and there was this pair of eyes. 
The rags were unwrapped from a little girl whose body was massively burned. 
Again, the eyes and hands of Avalokiteshvara. 
It was the young women, the health aids, who cleaned the wounds of this baby and dressed the wounds. 
I know those hands and eyes; they touched me as well. 
They touched me at that time. 
They have touched me throughout my 68 years. 
They touched me when I was four and I lost my eyesight and was partially paralyzed. 
And my family brought in a woman whose mother had been a slave to take care of me. 
And that woman did not have sentimental compassion. 
She had phenomenal strength. 
And it was really her strength, I believe, that became the kind of mudra and imprimatur that has been a guiding light in my life. 
So we can ask: What is compassion comprised of? 
And there are various facets. 
And there's referential and non-referential compassion. 
But first, compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering. 
It is that ability to really stand strong and to recognize also that I'm not separate from this suffering. 
But that is not enough, because compassion, which activates the motor cortex, means that we aspire, we actually aspire to transform suffering. 
And if we're so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering. 
But compassion has another component, and that component is really essential. 
That component is that we cannot be attached to outcome. 
Now I worked with dying people for over 40 years. 
I had the privilege of working on death row in a maximum security [prison] for six years. 
And I realized so clearly in bringing my own life experience, from working with dying people and training caregivers, that any attachment to outcome would distort deeply my own capacity to be fully present to the whole catastrophe. 
And when I worked in the prison system, it was so clear to me, this: that many of us in this room, and almost all of the men that I worked with on death row, the seeds of their own compassion had never been watered. 
That compassion is actually an inherent human quality. 
It is there within every human being. 
But the conditions for compassion to be activated, to be aroused, are particular conditions. 
I had that condition, to a certain extent, from my own childhood illness. 
Eve Ensler, whom you'll hear later, has had that condition activated amazingly in her through the various waters of suffering that she has been through. 
And what is fascinating is that compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear. 
And you know, we have a society, a world, that is paralyzed by fear. 
And in that paralysis, of course, our capacity for compassion is also paralyzed. 
The very word terror is global. 
The very feeling of terror is global. 
So our work, in a certain way, is to address this imago, this kind of archetype that has pervaded the psyche of our entire globe. 
Now we know from neuroscience that compassion has some very extraordinary qualities. 
For example: A person who is cultivating compassion, when they are in the presence of suffering, they feel that suffering a lot more than many other people do. 
However, they return to baseline a lot sooner. 
This is called resilience. 
Many of us think that compassion drains us, but I promise you it is something that truly enlivens us. 
Another thing about compassion is that it really enhances what's called neural integration. 
It hooks up all parts of the brain. 
Another, which has been discovered by various researchers at Emory and at Davis and so on, is that compassion enhances our immune system. 
Hey, we live in a very noxious world. 
(Laughter) Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. 
But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity. 
You know, if compassion is so good for us, I have a question. 
Why don't we train our children in compassion? 
(Applause) If compassion is so good for us, why don't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is to really transform suffering? 
And if compassion is so good for us, why don't we vote on compassion? 
Why don't we vote for people in our government based on compassion, so that we can have a more caring world? 
In Buddhism, we say, "" it takes a strong back and a soft front. "" It takes tremendous strength of the back to uphold yourself in the midst of conditions. 
And that is the mental quality of equanimity. 
But it also takes a soft front — the capacity to really be open to the world as it is, to have an undefended heart. 
And the archetype of this in Buddhism is Avalokiteshvara, Kuan-Yin. 
It's a female archetype: she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world. 
She stands with 10,000 arms, and in every hand, there is an instrument of liberation, and in the palm of every hand, there are eyes, and these are the eyes of wisdom. 
I say that, for thousands of years, women have lived, exemplified, met in intimacy, the archetype of Avalokitesvara, of Kuan-Yin, she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world. 
Women have manifested for thousands of years the strength arising from compassion in an unfiltered, unmediated way in perceiving suffering as it is. 
They have infused societies with kindness, and we have really felt that as woman after woman has stood on this stage in the past day and a half. 
And they have actualized compassion through direct action. 
Jody Williams called it: It's good to meditate. 
I'm sorry, you've got to do a little bit of that, Jody. 
Step back, give your mother a break, okay. 
(Laughter) But the other side of the equation is you've got to come out of your cave. 
You have to come into the world like Asanga did, who was looking to realize Maitreya Buddha after 12 years sitting in the cave. 
He said, "" I'm out of here. "" He's going down the path. 
He sees something in the path. 
He looks, it's a dog, he drops to his knees. 
He sees that the dog has this big wound on its leg. 
The wound is just filled with maggots. 
He puts out his tongue in order to remove the maggots, so as not to harm them. 
And at that moment, the dog transformed into the Buddha of love and kindness. 
I believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men — with their fathers, with their sons, with their brothers, with the plumbers, the road builders, the caregivers, the doctors, the lawyers, with our president, and with all beings. 
The women in this room are lotuses in a sea of fire. 
May we actualize that capacity for women everywhere. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to tell you about an affliction I suffer from. 
And I have a funny feeling that quite a few of you suffer from it as well. 
When I'm walking around an art gallery, rooms and rooms full of paintings, after about 15 or 20 minutes, I realize I'm not thinking about the paintings. 
I'm not connecting to them. 
Instead, I'm thinking about that cup of coffee I desperately need to wake me up. 
I'm suffering from gallery fatigue. 
How many of you out there suffer from — yes. Ha ha, ha ha! 
Now, sometimes you might last longer than 20 minutes, or even shorter, but I think we all suffer from it. And do you have the accompanying guilt? 
For me, I look at the paintings on the wall and I think, somebody has decided to put them there, thinks they're good enough to be on that wall, but I don't always see it. 
In fact, most of the time I don't see it. 
And I leave feeling actually unhappy. 
I feel guilty and unhappy with myself, rather than thinking there's something wrong with the painting, I think there's something wrong with me. 
And that's not a good experience, to leave a gallery like that. 
(Laughter) The thing is, I think we should give ourselves a break. 
If you think about going into a restaurant, when you look at the menu, are you expected to order every single thing on the menu? 
No! You select. 
If you go into a department store to buy a shirt, are you going to try on every single shirt and want every single shirt? 
Of course not, you can be selective. It's expected. 
How come, then, it's not so expected to be selective when we go to an art gallery? 
Why are we supposed to have a connection with every single painting? 
Well I'm trying to take a different approach. 
And there's two things I do: When I go into a gallery, first of all, I go quite fast, and I look at everything, and I pinpoint the ones that make me slow down for some reason or other. 
I don't even know why they make me slow down, but something pulls me like a magnet and then I ignore all the others, and I just go to that painting. 
So it's the first thing I do is, I do my own curation. 
I choose a painting. It might just be one painting in 50. 
And then the second thing I do is I stand in front of that painting, and I tell myself a story about it. 
Why a story? Well, I think that we are wired, our DNA tells us to tell stories. 
We tell stories all the time about everything, and I think we do it because the world is kind of a crazy, chaotic place, and sometimes stories, we're trying to make sense of the world a little bit, trying to bring some order to it. 
Why not apply that to our looking at paintings? 
So I now have this sort of restaurant menu visiting of art galleries. 
There are three paintings I'm going to show you now that are paintings that made me stop in my tracks and want to tell stories about them. 
The first one needs little introduction — "" Girl with a Pearl Earring "" by Johannes Vermeer, 17th-century Dutch painter. 
This is the most glorious painting. 
I first saw it when I was 19, and I immediately went out and got a poster of it, and in fact I still have that poster. 30 years later it's hanging in my house. 
It's accompanied me everywhere I've gone, I never tire of looking at her. 
What made me stop in my tracks about her to begin with was just the gorgeous colors he uses and the light falling on her face. 
But I think what's kept me still coming back year after year is another thing, and that is the look on her face, the conflicted look on her face. 
I can't tell if she's happy or sad, and I change my mind all the time. 
So that keeps me coming back. 
One day, 16 years after I had this poster on my wall, I lay in bed and looked at her, and I suddenly thought, I wonder what the painter did to her to make her look like that. 
And it was the first time I'd ever thought that the expression on her face is actually reflecting how she feels about him. 
Always before I'd thought of it as a portrait of a girl. 
Now I began to think of it as a portrait of a relationship. 
And I thought, well, what is that relationship? 
So I went to find out. I did some research and discovered, we have no idea who she is. 
In fact, we don't know who any of the models in any of Vermeer's paintings are, and we know very little about Vermeer himself. 
Which made me go, "" Yippee! "" I can do whatever I want, I can come up with whatever story I want to. 
So here's how I came up with the story. 
First of all, I thought, I've got to get her into the house. 
How does Vermeer know her? 
Well, there've been suggestions that she is his 12-year-old daughter. 
The daughter at the time was 12 when he painted the painting. 
And I thought, no, it's a very intimate look, but it's not a look a daughter gives her father. 
For one thing, in Dutch painting of the time, if a woman's mouth was open, it was indicating sexual availability. 
It would have been inappropriate for Vermeer to paint his daughter like that. 
So it's not his daughter, but it's somebody close to him, physically close to him. 
Well, who else would be in the house? 
A servant, a lovely servant. 
So, she's in the house. 
How do we get her into the studio? 
We don't know very much about Vermeer, but the little bits that we do know, one thing we know is that he married a Catholic woman, they lived with her mother in a house where he had his own room where he — his studio. He also had 11 children. 
It would have been a chaotic, noisy household. 
And if you've seen Vermeer's paintings before, you know that they're incredibly calm and quiet. 
How does a painter paint such calm, quiet paintings with 11 kids around? 
Well, he compartmentalizes his life. 
He gets to his studio, and he says, "" Nobody comes in here. 
Not the wife, not the kids. Okay, the maid can come in and clean. "" She's in the studio. He's got her in the studio, they're together. 
And he decides to paint her. 
He has her wear very plain clothes. 
Now, all of the women, or most of the women in Vermeer's other paintings wore velvet, silk, fur, very sumptuous materials. 
This is very plain; the only thing that isn't plain is her pearl earring. 
Now, if she's a servant, there is no way she could afford a pair of pearl earrings. 
So those are not her pearl earrings. Whose are they? 
We happen to know, there's a list of Catharina, the wife's clothes. 
Amongst them a yellow coat with white fur, a yellow and black bodice, and you see these clothes on lots of other paintings, different women in the paintings, Vermeer's paintings. 
So clearly, her clothes were lent to various different women. 
It's not such a leap of faith to take that that pearl earring actually belongs to his wife. 
So we've got all the elements for our story. 
She's in the studio with him for a long time. 
These paintings took a long time to make. 
They would have spent the time alone, all that time. 
She's wearing his wife's pearl earring. 
She's gorgeous. She obviously loves him. She's conflicted. 
And does the wife know? Maybe not. 
And if she doesn't, well — that's the story. 
(Laughter) The next painting I'm going to talk about is called "" Boy Building a House of Cards "" by Chardin. 
He's an 18th-century French painter best known for his still lifes, but he did occasionally paint people. 
And in fact, he painted four versions of this painting, different boys building houses of cards, all concentrated. 
I like this version the best, because some of the boys are older and some are younger, and to me, this one, like Goldilocks's porridge, is just right. 
He's not quite a child, and he's not quite a man. 
He's absolutely balanced between innocence and experience, and that made me stop in my tracks in front of this painting. 
And I looked at his face. It's like a Vermeer painting a bit. 
The light comes in from the left, his face is bathed in this glowing light. It's right in the center of the painting, and you look at it, and I found that when I was looking at it, I was standing there going, "Look at me. Please look at me." 
And he didn't look at me. He was still looking at his cards, and that's one of the seductive elements of this painting is, he's so focused on what he's doing that he doesn't look at us. 
And that is, to me, the sign of a masterpiece, of a painting when there's a lack of resolution. 
He's never going to look at me. 
So I was thinking of a story where, if I'm in this position, who could be there looking at him? 
Not the painter, I don't want to think about the painter. 
I'm thinking of an older version of himself. 
He's a man, a servant, an older servant looking at this younger servant, saying, "" Look at me. I want to warn you about what you're about to go through. Please look at me. "" And he never does. 
And that lack of resolution, the lack of resolution in "" Girl with a Pearl Earring "" — we don't know if she's happy or sad. 
I've written an entire novel about her, and I still don't know if she's happy or sad. 
Again and again, back to the painting, looking for the answer, looking for the story to fill in that gap. 
And we may make a story, and it satisfies us momentarily, but not really, and we come back again and again. 
The last painting I'm going to talk about is called "" Anonymous "" by anonymous. (Laughter) This is a Tudor portrait bought by the National Portrait Gallery. 
They thought it was a man named Sir Thomas Overbury, and then they discovered that it wasn't him, and they have no idea who it is. 
Now, in the National Portrait Gallery, if you don't know the biography of the painting, it's kind of useless to you. 
They can't hang it on the wall, because they don't know who he is. 
So unfortunately, this orphan spends most of his time in storage, along with quite a number of other orphans, some of them some beautiful paintings. 
This painting made me stop in my tracks for three reasons: One is the disconnection between his mouth that's smiling and his eyes that are wistful. 
He's not happy, and why isn't he happy? 
The second thing that really attracted me were his bright red cheeks. 
He is blushing. He's blushing for his portrait being made! 
This must be a guy who blushes all the time. 
What is he thinking about that's making him blush? 
The third thing that made me stop in my tracks is his absolutely gorgeous doublet. 
Silk, gray, those beautiful buttons. 
And you know what it makes me think of, is it's sort of snug and puffy; it's like a duvet spread over a bed. 
I kept thinking of beds and red cheeks, and of course I kept thinking of sex when I looked at him, and I thought, is that what he's thinking about? 
And I thought, if I'm going to make a story, what's the last thing I'm going to put in there? 
Well, what would a Tudor gentleman be preoccupied with? 
And I thought, well, Henry VIII, okay. 
He'd be preoccupied with his inheritance, with his heir. 
Who is going to inherit his name and his fortune? 
You put all those together, and you've got your story to fill in that gap that makes you keep coming back. 
Now, here's the story. 
It's short. 
"Rosy" I am still wearing the white brocade doublet Caroline gave me. 
It has a plain high collar, detachable sleeves and intricate buttons of twisted silk thread, set close together so that the fit is snug. 
The doublet makes me think of a coverlet on the vast bed. 
Perhaps that was the intention. 
I first wore it at an elaborate dinner her parents held in our honor. 
I knew even before I stood up to speak that my cheeks were inflamed. 
I have always flushed easily, from physical exertion, from wine, from high emotion. 
As a boy, I was teased by my sisters and by schoolboys, but not by George. 
Only George could call me Rosy. 
I would not allow anyone else. 
He managed to make the word tender. 
When I made the announcement, George did not turn rosy, but went pale as my doublet. 
He should not have been surprised. 
It has been a common assumption that I would one day marry his cousin. 
But it is difficult to hear the words aloud. 
I know, I could barely utter them. 
Afterwards, I found George on the terrace overlooking the kitchen garden. 
Despite drinking steadily all afternoon, he was still pale. 
We stood together and watched the maids cut lettuces. 
"" What do you think of my doublet? "" I asked. 
He glanced at me. "" That collar looks to be strangling you. "" "" We will still see each other, "" I insisted. 
"" We can still hunt and play cards and attend court. 
Nothing need change. "" George did not speak. 
"" I am 23 years old. It is time for me to marry and produce an heir. It is expected of me. "" George drained another glass of claret and turned to me. 
"" Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, James. 
I'm sure you'll be content together. "" He never used my nickname again. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

The brain is an amazing and complex organ. 
And while many people are fascinated by the brain, they can't really tell you that much about the properties about how the brain works because we don't teach neuroscience in schools. 
And one of the reasons why is that the equipment is so complex and so expensive that it's really only done at major universities and large institutions. 
And so in order to be able to access the brain, you really need to dedicate your life and spend six and a half years as a graduate student just to become a neuroscientist to get access to these tools. 
And that's a shame because one out of five of us, that's 20 percent of the entire world, will have a neurological disorder. 
And there are zero cures for these diseases. 
And so it seems that what we should be doing is reaching back earlier in the eduction process and teaching students about neuroscience so that in the future, they may be thinking about possibly becoming a brain scientist. 
When I was a graduate student, my lab mate Tim Marzullo and myself, decided that what if we took this complex equipment that we have for studying the brain and made it simple enough and affordable enough that anyone that you know, an amateur or a high school student, could learn and actually participate in the discovery of neuroscience. 
And so we did just that. 
A few years ago, we started a company called Backyard Brains and we make DIY neuroscience equipment and I brought some here tonight, and I want to do some demonstrations. 
You guys want to see some? 
So I need a volunteer. 
So right before — what is your name? (Applause) Sam Kelly: Sam. 
Greg Gage: All right, Sam, I'm going to record from your brain. 
Have you had this before? 
SK: No. 
GG: I need you to stick out your arm for science, roll up your sleeve a bit, So what I'm going to do, I'm putting electrodes on your arm, and you're probably wondering, I just said I'm going to record from your brain, what am I doing with your arm? 
Well, you have about 80 billion neurons inside your brain right now. 
They're sending electrical messages back and forth, and chemical messages. 
But some of your neurons right here in your motor cortex are going to send messages down when you move your arm like this. 
They're going to go down across your corpus callosum, down onto your spinal cord to your lower motor neuron out to your muscles here, and that electrical discharge is going to be picked up by these electrodes right here and we're going to be able to listen to exactly what your brain is going to be doing. 
So I'm going to turn this on for a second. 
Have you ever heard what your brain sounds like? 
SK: No. 
GG: Let's try it out. So go ahead and squeeze your hand. 
(Rumbling) So what you're listening to, so this is your motor units happening right here. 
Let's take a look at it as well. 
So I'm going to stand over here, and I'm going to open up our app here. 
So now I want you to squeeze. 
(Rumbling) So right here, these are the motor units that are happening from her spinal cord out to her muscle right here, and as she's doing it, you're seeing the electrical activity that's happening here. 
You can even click here and try to see one of them. 
So keep doing it really hard. 
So now we've paused on one motor action potential that's happening right now inside of your brain. 
Do you guys want to see some more? 
(Applause) That's interesting, but let's get it better. 
I need one more volunteer. 
What is your name, sir? 
Miguel Goncalves: Miguel. 
GG: Miguel, all right. 
You're going to stand right here. 
So when you're moving your arm like this, your brain is sending a signal down to your muscles right here. 
I want you to move your arm as well. 
So your brain is going to send a signal down to your muscles. 
And so it turns out that there is a nerve that's right here that runs up here that innervates these three fingers, and it's close enough to the skin that we might be able to stimulate that so that what we can do is copy your brain signals going out to your hand and inject it into your hand, so that your hand will move when your brain tells your hand to move. 
So in a sense, she will take away your free will and you will no longer have any control over this hand. 
You with me? 
So I just need to hook you up. 
(Laughter) So I'm going to find your ulnar nerve, which is probably right around here. 
You don't know what you're signing up for when you come up. 
So now I'm going to move away and we're going to plug it in to our human-to-human interface over here. 
Okay, so Sam, I want you to squeeze your hand again. 
Do it again. Perfect. 
So now I'm going to hook you up over here so that you get the — It's going to feel a little bit weird at first, this is going to feel like a — (Laughter) You know, when you lose your free will, and someone else becomes your agent, it does feel a bit strange. 
Now I want you to relax your hand. 
Sam, you're with me? 
So you're going to squeeze. 
I'm not going to turn it on yet, so go ahead and give it a squeeze. 
So now, are you ready, Miguel? 
MG: Ready as I'll ever be. 
GG: I've turned it on, so go ahead and turn your hand. 
Do you feel that a little bit? MG: Nope. 
GG: Okay, do it again? MG: A little bit. 
GG: A little bit? (Laughter) So relax. 
So hit it again. 
(Laughter) Oh, perfect, perfect. 
So relax, do it again. 
All right, so right now, your brain is controlling your arm and it's also controlling his arm, so go ahead and just do it one more time. 
All right, so it's perfect. (Laughter) So now, what would happen if I took over my control of your hand? 
And so, just relax your hand. 
What happens? 
Ah, nothing. 
Why not? 
Because the brain has to do it. 
So you do it again. 
All right, that's perfect. 
Thank you guys for being such a good sport. 
This is what's happening all across the world — electrophysiology! 
We're going to bring on the neuro-revolution. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Meet Tony. He's my student. 
He's about my age, and he's in San Quentin State Prison. 
When Tony was 16 years old, one day, one moment, "" It was mom's gun. 
Just flash it, scare the guy. He's a punk. 
He took some money; we'll take his money. That'll teach him. 
Then last minute, I'm thinking, 'Can't do this. This is wrong.' My buddy says, 'C'mon, let's do this.' I say, 'Let's do this.' "" And those three words, Tony's going to remember, because the next thing he knows, he hears the pop. 
There's the punk on the ground, puddle of blood. 
And that's felony murder — 25 to life, parole at 50 if you're lucky, and Tony's not feeling very lucky. 
So when we meet in my philosophy class in his prison and I say, "" In this class, we will discuss the foundations of ethics, "" Tony interrupts me. 
"" What are you going to teach me about right and wrong? 
I know what is wrong. I have done wrong. 
I am told every day, by every face I see, every wall I face, that I am wrong. 
If I ever get out of here, there will always be a mark by my name. 
I'm a convict; I am branded 'wrong.' What are you going to tell me about right and wrong? "" So I say to Tony, "" Sorry, but it's worse than you think. 
You think you know right and wrong? 
Then can you tell me what wrong is? 
No, don't just give me an example. 
I want to know about wrongness itself, the idea of wrong. 
What is that idea? 
What makes something wrong? 
How do we know that it's wrong? Maybe you and I disagree. 
Maybe one of us is wrong about the wrong. 
Maybe it's you, maybe it's me — but we're not here to trade opinions; everyone's got an opinion. 
We are here for knowledge. 
Our enemy is thoughtlessness. This is philosophy. "" And something changes for Tony. 
"" Could be I'm wrong. I'm tired of being wrong. 
I want to know what is wrong. 
I want to know what I know. "" What Tony sees in that moment is the project of philosophy, the project that begins in wonder — what Kant called "" admiration and awe at the starry sky above and the moral law within. "" What can creatures like us know of such things? 
It is the project that always takes us back to the condition of existence — what Heidegger called "" the always already there. "" It is the project of questioning what we believe and why we believe it — what Socrates called "" the examined life. "" Socrates, a man wise enough to know that he knows nothing. 
Socrates died in prison, his philosophy intact. 
So Tony starts doing his homework. 
He learns his whys and wherefores, his causes and correlations, his logic, his fallacies. 
Turns out, Tony's got the philosophy muscle. 
His body is in prison, but his mind is free. 
Tony learns about the ontologically promiscuous, the epistemologically anxious, the ethically dubious, the metaphysically ridiculous. 
That's Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche and Bill Clinton. 
So when he gives me his final paper, in which he argues that the categorical imperative is perhaps too uncompromising to deal with the conflict that affects our everyday and challenges me to tell him whether therefore we are condemned to moral failure, I say, "" I don't know. 
Let us think about that. "" Because in that moment, there's no mark by Tony's name; it's just the two of us standing there. 
It is not professor and convict, it is just two minds ready to do philosophy. 
And I say to Tony, "Let's do this." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Nicole Paris: TEDYouth, make some noise! 
(Beatboxing) TEDYouth, make some — (Beatboxing) (Beatboxing ends) Are you ready? 
(Cheers and applause) Are you ready? 
Ed Cage: Yeah, yeah, yeah! 
(Beatboxing) (Laughter) EC: Y'all like that? Let me show you how we used to do it — NP: Get it pops, go ahead. 
EC:... when I was growing up in the '90s. 
(Beatboxing) (Beatboxing ends) (Laughter) (Beatboxing) NP: Pops, pops, pops, pops, pops, pops, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up! 
Oh my God. 
OK, he's trying to battle me. 
Hold on, right now, hold on. 
Do you remember when you used to beatbox me to sleep? 
EC: Yeah, yeah, I remember. 
That's when she was a little baby. 
We would do something like this. 
(Beatboxing) NP: I remember that. (Beatboxing) 
NP: All right, pops, pops, pops, chill out, chill out. 
Hold up, hold up, hold up. 
EC: Y'all remember the video. 
This is like a little payback or something for 50 million people calling me the loser. 
NP: Hold up, hold up. 
But a lot of people out there don't really know what beatboxing is, where it started from. 
EC: Right, right. 
NP: Where it came from. 
So why don't you give them a little history — just a tickle — a bit of history of where it comes from. 
EC: Beatbox started here in New York. 
(Cheers) That's right, that's right. New York, New York! 
Everybody like, "" Yeah! "" Well, we from St. Louis. 
(Laughter) NP: Now you can put y'all hands down. (Laughter) 
EC: But beatbox started here in New York. 
What you would have is that, when we would go to parties, you would have the DJ and you would have the rapper. 
But because I don't have electricity coming out of me, we had to emulate what the beats was doing. 
So when you would see the beatboxer, you would see us over to the side. 
Then you would see a rapper, and when the rapper began to rap, we would do a simple beat, because back then the beats were simple — (Beatboxing) or — (Beatboxing) Those were simple beats. 
But now, you got folks that want to do all type of stuff with their beats now, and they want to humiliate their father, which is not right when you want to humiliate the person that take care of you, pay all your tuition, (Nicole laughs) especially when you have 50 million people that just go around and call you "" the loser. "" Well, I'm taking that to heart. 
But now we do something different in our house, so we have these jam sessions, and our jam sessions consist of us jamming in church. 
You know, in church, we'll look at each other like, (Beatboxing) (Laughter) and we'll text the beat to each other. 
Or we'll be in the kitchen cooking, road trips, airports. 
NP: Standing right there in the corner, "" Aw, Dad — listen to that. "" (Beatboxing) Naw, I'm kidding. But you know what? 
We're talking all about this jam session and everything. 
EC: Yeah. 
NP: Why don't we give them a little peek, just a tiny bit of our jam session? 
NP: Y'all want to hear some jam session? EC: Y'all ready for a jam session? 
(Cheers) NP: Sorry? I can't hear you. (Cheers) 
Yeah! Kick it, pops! 
(Beatboxing) (Applause) (Beatboxing) (Beatboxing ends) (Applause) NP: I'm getting ready to go! 
EC: Y'all ready? Everybody stand up! Come on, everybody stand up! 
Get on up! Come on, stretch! 
(Beatboxing) (Beatboxing ends) NP: That's it. 
(Cheers and applause) Thank you! Make some noise! 
EG: Thank you, everybody! 
NP: Make some noise! Make some noise! 
Thank you! 

Today, I am going to talk about anger. 
When I was 11, seeing some of my friends leaving the school because their parents could not afford textbooks made me angry. 
When I was 27, hearing the plight of a desperate slave father whose daughter was about to be sold to a brothel made me angry. 
At the age of 50, lying on the street, in a pool of blood, along with my own son, made me angry. 
Dear friends, for centuries we were taught anger is bad. 
Our parents, teachers, priests — everyone taught us how to control and suppress our anger. 
But I ask why? 
Why can't we convert our anger for the larger good of society? 
Why can't we use our anger to challenge and change the evils of the world? 
That I tried to do. 
Friends, most of the brightest ideas came to my mind out of anger. 
Like when I was 35 and sat in a locked-up, tiny prison. 
The whole night, I was angry. 
But it has given birth to a new idea. 
But I will come to that later on. 
Let me begin with the story of how I got a name for myself. 
I had been a big admirer of Mahatma Gandhi since my childhood. 
Gandhi fought and lead India's freedom movement. 
But more importantly, he taught us how to treat the most vulnerable sections, the most deprived people, with dignity and respect. 
And so, when India was celebrating Mahatma Gandhi's birth centenary in 1969 — at that time I was 15 — an idea came to my mind. 
Why can't we celebrate it differently? 
I knew, as perhaps many of you might know, that in India, a large number of people are born in the lowest segment of caste. 
And they are treated as untouchables. 
These are the people — forget about allowing them to go to the temples, they cannot even go into the houses and shops of high-caste people. 
So I was very impressed with the leaders of my town who were speaking very highly against the caste system and untouchability and talking of Gandhian ideals. 
So inspired by that, I thought, let us set an example by inviting these people to eat food cooked and served by the untouchable community. 
I went to some low-caste, so-called untouchable, people, tried to convince them, but it was unthinkable for them. 
They told me, "" No, no. It's not possible. It never happened. "" I said, "" Look at these leaders, they are so great, they are against untouchability. 
They will come. If nobody comes, we can set an example. "" These people thought that I was too naive. 
Finally, they were convinced. 
My friends and I took our bicycles and invited political leaders. 
And I was so thrilled, rather, empowered to see that each one of them agreed to come. 
I thought, "" Great idea. We can set an example. 
We can bring about change in the society. "" The day has come. 
All these untouchables, three women and two men, they agreed to come. 
I could recall that they had used the best of their clothes. 
They brought new utensils. 
They had taken baths hundreds of times because it was unthinkable for them to do. 
It was the moment of change. 
They gathered. Food was cooked. 
It was 7 o'clock. 
By 8 o'clock, we kept on waiting, because it's not very uncommon that the leaders become late, for an hour or so. 
So after 8 o'clock, we took our bicycles and went to these leaders' homes, just to remind them. 
One of the leader's wives told me, "Sorry, he is having some headache, perhaps he cannot come." 
I went to another leader and his wife told me, "" Okay, you go, he will definitely join. "" So I thought that the dinner will take place, though not at that large a scale. 
I went back to the venue, which was a newly built Mahatma Gandhi Park. 
It was 10 o'clock. 
None of the leaders showed up. 
That made me angry. 
I was standing, leaning against Mahatma Gandhi's statue. 
I was emotionally drained, rather exhausted. 
Then I sat down where the food was lying. 
I kept my emotions on hold. 
But then, when I took the first bite, I broke down in tears. 
And suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. 
And it was the healing, motherly touch of an untouchable woman. 
And she told me, "" Kailash, why are you crying? 
You have done your bit. 
You have eaten the food cooked by untouchables, which has never happened in our memory. "" She said, "" You won today. "" And my friends, she was right. 
I came back home, a little after midnight, shocked to see that several high-caste elderly people were sitting in my courtyard. 
I saw my mother and elderly women were crying and they were pleading to these elderly people because they had threatened to outcaste my whole family. 
And you know, outcasting the family is the biggest social punishment one can think of. 
Somehow they agreed to punish only me, and the punishment was purification. 
That means I had to go 600 miles away from my hometown to the River Ganges to take a holy dip. 
And after that, I should organize a feast for priests, 101 priests, wash their feet and drink that water. 
It was total nonsense, and I refused to accept that punishment. 
How did they punish me? 
I was barred from entering into my own kitchen and my own dining room, my utensils were separated. 
But the night when I was angry, they wanted to outcaste me. 
But I decided to outcaste the entire caste system. 
(Applause) And that was possible because the beginning would have been to change the family name, or surname, because in India, most of the family names are caste names. 
So I decided to drop my name. 
And then, later on, I gave a new name to myself: Satyarthi, that means, "" seeker of truth. "" (Applause) And that was the beginning of my transformative anger. 
Friends, maybe one of you can tell me, what was I doing before becoming a children's rights activist? 
Does anybody know? 
No. 
I was an engineer, an electrical engineer. 
And then I learned how the energy of burning fire, coal, the nuclear blast inside the chambers, raging river currents, fierce winds, could be converted into the light and lives of millions. 
I also learned how the most uncontrollable form of energy could be harnessed for good and making society better. 
So I'll come back to the story of when I was caught in the prison: I was very happy freeing a dozen children from slavery, handing them over to their parents. 
I cannot explain my joy when I free a child. 
I was so happy. 
But when I was waiting for my train to come back to my hometown, Delhi, I saw that dozens of children were arriving; they were being trafficked by someone. 
I stopped them, those people. 
I complained to the police. 
So the policemen, instead of helping me, they threw me in this small, tiny shell, like an animal. 
And that was the night of anger when one of the brightest and biggest ideas was born. 
I thought that if I keep on freeing 10 children, and 50 more will join, that's not done. 
And I believed in the power of consumers, and let me tell you that this was the first time when a campaign was launched by me or anywhere in the world, to educate and sensitize the consumers to create a demand for child-labor-free rugs. 
In Europe and America, we have been successful. 
And it has resulted in a fall in child labor in South Asian countries by 80 percent. 
(Applause) Not only that, but this first-ever consumer's power, or consumer's campaign has grown in other countries and other industries, maybe chocolate, maybe apparel, maybe shoes — it has gone beyond. 
My anger at the age of 11, when I realized how important education is for every child, I got an idea to collect used books and help the poorest children. 
I created a book bank at the age of 11. 
But I did not stop. 
Later on, I cofounded the world's single largest civil society campaign for education that is the Global Campaign for Education. 
That has helped in changing the whole thinking towards education from the charity mode to the human rights mode, and that has concretely helped the reduction of out-of-school children by half in the last 15 years. 
(Applause) My anger at the age of 27, to free that girl who was about to be sold to a brothel, has given me an idea to go for a new strategy of raid and rescue, freeing children from slavery. 
And I am so lucky and proud to say that it is not one or 10 or 20, but my colleagues and I have been able to physically liberate 83,000 child slaves and hand them over back to their families and mothers. 
(Applause) I knew that we needed global policies. 
We organized the worldwide marches against child labor and that has also resulted in a new international convention to protect the children who are in the worst forms. 
And the concrete result was that the number of child laborers globally has gone down by one third in the last 15 years. 
(Applause) So, in each case, it began from anger, turned into an idea, and action. 
So anger, what next? 
Idea, and — Audience: Action Kailash Satyarthi: Anger, idea, action. Which I tried to do. 
Anger is a power, anger is an energy, and the law of nature is that energy can never be created and never be vanished, can never be destroyed. 
So why can't the energy of anger be translated and harnessed to create a better and beautiful world, a more just and equitable world? 
Anger is within each one of you, and I will share a secret for a few seconds: that if we are confined in the narrow shells of egos, and the circles of selfishness, then the anger will turn out to be hatred, violence, revenge, destruction. 
But if we are able to break the circles, then the same anger could turn into a great power. 
We can break the circles by using our inherent compassion and connect with the world through compassion to make this world better. 
That same anger could be transformed into it. 
So dear friends, sisters and brothers, again, as a Nobel Laureate, I am urging you to become angry. I am urging you to become angry. 
And the angriest among us 
is the one who can transform his anger into idea and action. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: For many years, you've been an inspiration to others. 
Who or what inspires you and why? 
KS: Good question. 
Chris, let me tell you, and that is the truth, each time when I free a child, the child who has lost all his hope that he will ever come back to his mother, the first smile of freedom, and the mother who has lost all hope that the son or daughter can ever come back and sit in her lap, they become so emotional and the first tear of joy rolls down on her cheek, I see the glimpse of God in it — this is my biggest inspiration. 
And I am so lucky that not once, as I said before, but thousands of times, I have been able to witness my God in the faces of those children and they are my biggest inspirations. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

♫ Feminists don't have a sense of humor. ♫ ♫ Feminists just want to be alone — boo hoo, hoo, hoo. ♫ ♫ Feminists spread vicious lies and rumors. ♫ ♫ They have a tumor on their funny bone. ♫ ♫ They say child molestation isn't funny — ha, ha, ha, ha. ♫ ♫ Rape and degradation's just a crime — lighten up, ladies. ♫ ♫ Rampant prostitution's sex for money — what ’ s wrong with that? ♫ ♫ Can't these chicks do anything but whine? ♫ ♫ Dance break! Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. ♫ 
♫ Woo-hoo! ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da — ♫ ♫ yeah, take it off. ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, dum. ♫ ♫ They say cheap objectification isn ’ t witty — it ’ s hot! ♫ ♫ Equal work and wages worth the fight — ♫ ♫ sing us a new one. ♫ ♫ On-demand abortion every city — OK, but no gun control. ♫ ♫ Won ’ t these women ever get a life? ♫ ♫ Feminists don ’ t have a sense of humor — poor Hillary. ♫ ♫ Feminists and vegetarians — make mine a Big Mac. ♫ 
♫ Feminists spread vicious lies and rumors. ♫ ♫ They're far too sensitive to ever be a ham, ♫ ♫ that's why these feminists just need to find a man. ♫ ♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. ♫ I ’ m Dennis Kucinich and I approved this message. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. 
I asked my mother, you know, should I say anything in support of anyone? And she said, "" Oh no! Just dis everybody, except Ralph Nader. "" 
(Laughter) ♫ I could show the world how to smile, ♫ ♫ I could be glad all of the while. ♫ ♫ I could turn the gray skies to blue, if I had you. ♫ ♫ I could leave the old days behind, ♫ ♫ leave all my pals, I ’ d never mind. ♫ ♫ I could start my life all anew, if I had you. ♫ ♫ I could climb the snow-capped mountains, ♫ ♫ sail the mighty ocean wide. ♫ ♫ I could cross the burning desert, if I had you by my side. ♫ 
♫ I could be a king, dear, uncrowned, humble or poor, rich or renowned. ♫ ♫ There is nothing I couldn ’ t do, if I had you. ♫ Thank you. Well, thank you so much. 

I'd like to talk today about a powerful and fundamental aspect of who we are: our voice. 
Each one of us has a unique voiceprint that reflects our age, our size, even our lifestyle and personality. 
In the words of the poet Longfellow, "the human voice is the organ of the soul." 
As a speech scientist, I'm fascinated by how the voice is produced, and I have an idea for how it can be engineered. 
That's what I'd like to share with you. 
I'm going to start by playing you a sample of a voice that you may recognize. 
(Recording) Stephen Hawking: "" I would have thought it was fairly obvious what I meant. "" Rupal Patel: That was the voice of Professor Stephen Hawking. 
What you may not know is that same voice may also be used by this little girl who is unable to speak because of a neurological condition. 
In fact, all of these individuals may be using the same voice, and that's because there's only a few options available. 
In the U.S. alone, there are 2.5 million Americans who are unable to speak, and many of whom use computerized devices to communicate. 
Now that's millions of people worldwide who are using generic voices, including Professor Hawking, who uses an American-accented voice. 
This lack of individuation of the synthetic voice really hit home when I was at an assistive technology conference a few years ago, and I recall walking into an exhibit hall and seeing a little girl and a grown man having a conversation using their devices, different devices, but the same voice. 
And I looked around and I saw this happening all around me, literally hundreds of individuals using a handful of voices, voices that didn't fit their bodies or their personalities. 
We wouldn't dream of fitting a little girl with the prosthetic limb of a grown man. 
So why then the same prosthetic voice? 
It really struck me, and I wanted to do something about this. 
I'm going to play you now a sample of someone who has, two people actually, who have severe speech disorders. 
I want you to take a listen to how they sound. 
They're saying the same utterance. 
(First voice) (Second voice) You probably didn't understand what they said, but I hope that you heard their unique vocal identities. 
So what I wanted to do next is, I wanted to find out how we could harness these residual vocal abilities and build a technology that could be customized for them, voices that could be customized for them. 
So I reached out to my collaborator, Tim Bunnell. 
Dr. Bunnell is an expert in speech synthesis, and what he'd been doing is building personalized voices for people by putting together pre-recorded samples of their voice and reconstructing a voice for them. 
These are people who had lost their voice later in life. 
We didn't have the luxury of pre-recorded samples of speech for those born with speech disorder. 
But I thought, there had to be a way to reverse engineer a voice from whatever little is left over. 
So we decided to do exactly that. 
We set out with a little bit of funding from the National Science Foundation, to create custom-crafted voices that captured their unique vocal identities. 
We call this project VocaliD, or vocal I.D., for vocal identity. 
Now before I get into the details of how the voice is made and let you listen to it, I need to give you a real quick speech science lesson. Okay? 
So first, we know that the voice is changing dramatically over the course of development. 
Children sound different from teens who sound different from adults. 
We've all experienced this. 
Fact number two is that speech is a combination of the source, which is the vibrations generated by your voice box, which are then pushed through the rest of the vocal tract. 
These are the chambers of your head and neck that vibrate, and they actually filter that source sound to produce consonants and vowels. 
So the combination of source and filter is how we produce speech. 
And that happens in one individual. 
Now I told you earlier that I'd spent a good part of my career understanding and studying the source characteristics of people with severe speech disorder, and what I've found is that even though their filters were impaired, they were able to modulate their source: the pitch, the loudness, the tempo of their voice. 
These are called prosody, and I've been documenting for years that the prosodic abilities of these individuals are preserved. 
So when I realized that those same cues are also important for speaker identity, I had this idea. 
Why don't we take the source from the person we want the voice to sound like, because it's preserved, and borrow the filter from someone about the same age and size, because they can articulate speech, and then mix them? 
Because when we mix them, we can get a voice that's as clear as our surrogate talker — that's the person we borrowed the filter from — and is similar in identity to our target talker. 
It's that simple. 
That's the science behind what we're doing. 
So once you have that in mind, how do you go about building this voice? 
Well, you have to find someone who is willing to be a surrogate. 
It's not such an ominous thing. 
Being a surrogate donor only requires you to say a few hundred to a few thousand utterances. 
The process goes something like this. 
(Video) Voice: Things happen in pairs. 
I love to sleep. 
The sky is blue without clouds. 
RP: Now she's going to go on like this for about three to four hours, and the idea is not for her to say everything that the target is going to want to say, but the idea is to cover all the different combinations of the sounds that occur in the language. 
The more speech you have, the better sounding voice you're going to have. 
Once you have those recordings, what we need to do is we have to parse these recordings into little snippets of speech, one- or two-sound combinations, sometimes even whole words that start populating a dataset or a database. 
We're going to call this database a voice bank. 
Now the power of the voice bank is that from this voice bank, we can now say any new utterance, like, "" I love chocolate "" — everyone needs to be able to say that — fish through that database and find all the segments necessary to say that utterance. 
(Video) Voice: I love chocolate. 
RP: So that's speech synthesis. 
It's called concatenative synthesis, and that's what we're using. 
That's not the novel part. 
What's novel is how we make it sound like this young woman. 
This is Samantha. 
I met her when she was nine, and since then, my team and I have been trying to build her a personalized voice. 
We first had to find a surrogate donor, and then we had to have Samantha produce some utterances. 
What she can produce are mostly vowel-like sounds, but that's enough for us to extract her source characteristics. 
What happens next is best described by my daughter's analogy. She's six. 
She calls it mixing colors to paint voices. 
It's beautiful. It's exactly that. 
Samantha's voice is like a concentrated sample of red food dye which we can infuse into the recordings of her surrogate to get a pink voice just like this. 
(Video) Samantha: Aaaaaah. 
RP: So now, Samantha can say this. 
(Video) Samantha: This voice is only for me. 
I can't wait to use my new voice with my friends. 
RP: Thank you. (Applause) I'll never forget the gentle smile that spread across her face when she heard that voice for the first time. 
Now there's millions of people around the world like Samantha, millions, and we've only begun to scratch the surface. 
What we've done so far is we have a few surrogate talkers from around the U.S. 
who have donated their voices, and we have been using those to build our first few personalized voices. 
But there's so much more work to be done. 
For Samantha, her surrogate came from somewhere in the Midwest, a stranger who gave her the gift of voice. 
And as a scientist, I'm so excited to take this work out of the laboratory and finally into the real world so it can have real-world impact. 
What I want to share with you next is how I envision taking this work to that next level. 
I imagine a whole world of surrogate donors from all walks of life, different sizes, different ages, coming together in this voice drive to give people voices that are as colorful as their personalities. 
To do that as a first step, we've put together this website, VocaliD.org, as a way to bring together those who want to join us as voice donors, as expertise donors, in whatever way to make this vision a reality. 
They say that giving blood can save lives. 
Well, giving your voice can change lives. 
All we need is a few hours of speech from our surrogate talker, and as little as a vowel from our target talker, to create a unique vocal identity. 
So that's the science behind what we're doing. 
I want to end by circling back to the human side that is really the inspiration for this work. 
About five years ago, we built our very first voice for a little boy named William. 
When his mom first heard this voice, she said, "" This is what William would have sounded like had he been able to speak. "" And then I saw William typing a message on his device. 
I wondered, what was he thinking? 
Imagine carrying around someone else's voice for nine years and finally finding your own voice. 
Imagine that. 
This is what William said: "Never heard me before." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is my great uncle, my father's father's younger brother. 
His name was Joe McKenna. 
He was a young husband and a semi-pro basketball player and a fireman in New York City. 
Family history says he loved being a fireman, and so in 1938, on one of his days off, he elected to hang out at the firehouse. 
To make himself useful that day, he started polishing all the brass, the railings on the fire truck, the fittings on the walls, and one of the fire hose nozzles, a giant, heavy piece of metal, toppled off a shelf and hit him. 
A few days later, his shoulder started to hurt. 
Two days after that, he spiked a fever. 
The fever climbed and climbed. 
His wife was taking care of him, but nothing she did made a difference, and when they got the local doctor in, nothing he did mattered either. 
They flagged down a cab and took him to the hospital. 
The nurses there recognized right away that he had an infection, what at the time they would have called "" blood poisoning, "" and though they probably didn't say it, they would have known right away that there was nothing they could do. 
There was nothing they could do because the things we use now to cure infections didn't exist yet. 
The first test of penicillin, the first antibiotic, was three years in the future. 
People who got infections either recovered, if they were lucky, or they died. 
My great uncle was not lucky. 
He was in the hospital for a week, shaking with chills, dehydrated and delirious, sinking into a coma as his organs failed. 
His condition grew so desperate that the people from his firehouse lined up to give him transfusions hoping to dilute the infection surging through his blood. 
Nothing worked. He died. 
He was 30 years old. 
If you look back through history, most people died the way my great uncle died. 
Most people didn't die of cancer or heart disease, the lifestyle diseases that afflict us in the West today. 
They didn't die of those diseases because they didn't live long enough to develop them. 
They died of injuries — being gored by an ox, shot on a battlefield, crushed in one of the new factories of the Industrial Revolution — and most of the time from infection, which finished what those injuries began. 
All of that changed when antibiotics arrived. 
Suddenly, infections that had been a death sentence became something you recovered from in days. 
It seemed like a miracle, and ever since, we have been living inside the golden epoch of the miracle drugs. 
And now, we are coming to an end of it. 
My great uncle died in the last days of the pre-antibiotic era. 
We stand today on the threshold of the post-antibiotic era, in the earliest days of a time when simple infections such as the one Joe had will kill people once again. 
In fact, they already are. 
People are dying of infections again because of a phenomenon called antibiotic resistance. 
Briefly, it works like this. 
Bacteria compete against each other for resources, for food, by manufacturing lethal compounds that they direct against each other. 
Other bacteria, to protect themselves, evolve defenses against that chemical attack. 
When we first made antibiotics, we took those compounds into the lab and made our own versions of them, and bacteria responded to our attack the way they always had. 
Here is what happened next: Penicillin was distributed in 1943, and widespread penicillin resistance arrived by 1945. 
Vancomycin arrived in 1972, vancomycin resistance in 1988. 
Imipenem in 1985, and resistance to in 1998. 
Daptomycin, one of the most recent drugs, in 2003, and resistance to it just a year later in 2004. 
For 70 years, we played a game of leapfrog — our drug and their resistance, and then another drug, and then resistance again — and now the game is ending. 
Bacteria develop resistance so quickly that pharmaceutical companies have decided making antibiotics is not in their best interest, so there are infections moving across the world for which, out of the more than 100 antibiotics available on the market, two drugs might work with side effects, or one drug, or none. 
This is what that looks like. 
In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, identified a single case in a hospital in North Carolina of an infection resistant to all but two drugs. 
Today, that infection, known as KPC, has spread to every state but three, and to South America, Europe and the Middle East. 
In 2008, doctors in Sweden diagnosed a man from India with a different infection resistant to all but one drug that time. 
The gene that creates that resistance, known as NDM, has now spread from India into China, Asia, Africa, Europe and Canada, and the United States. 
It would be natural to hope that these infections are extraordinary cases, but in fact, in the United States and Europe, 50,000 people a year die of infections which no drugs can help. 
A project chartered by the British government known as the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance estimates that the worldwide toll right now is 700,000 deaths a year. 
That is a lot of deaths, and yet, the chances are good that you don't feel at risk, that you imagine these people were hospital patients in intensive care units or nursing home residents near the ends of their lives, people whose infections are remote from us, in situations we can't identify with. 
What you didn't think about, none of us do, is that antibiotics support almost all of modern life. 
If we lost antibiotics, here's what else we'd lose: First, any protection for people with weakened immune systems — cancer patients, AIDS patients, transplant recipients, premature babies. 
Next, any treatment that installs foreign objects in the body: stents for stroke, pumps for diabetes, dialysis, joint replacements. 
How many athletic baby boomers need new hips and knees? 
A recent study estimates that without antibiotics, one out of ever six would die. 
Next, we'd probably lose surgery. 
Many operations are preceded by prophylactic doses of antibiotics. 
Without that protection, we'd lose the ability to open the hidden spaces of the body. 
So no heart operations, no prostate biopsies, no Cesarean sections. 
We'd have to learn to fear infections that now seem minor. 
Strep throat used to cause heart failure. 
Skin infections led to amputations. 
Giving birth killed, in the cleanest hospitals, almost one woman out of every 100. 
Pneumonia took three children out of every 10. 
More than anything else, we'd lose the confident way we live our everyday lives. 
If you knew that any injury could kill you, would you ride a motorcycle, bomb down a ski slope, climb a ladder to hang your Christmas lights, let your kid slide into home plate? 
After all, the first person to receive penicillin, a British policeman named Albert Alexander, who was so ravaged by infection that his scalp oozed pus and doctors had to take out an eye, was infected by doing something very simple. 
He walked into his garden and scratched his face on a thorn. 
That British project I mentioned which estimates that the worldwide toll right now is 700,000 deaths a year also predicts that if we can't get this under control by 2050, not long, the worldwide toll will be 10 million deaths a year. 
How did we get to this point where what we have to look forward to is those terrifying numbers? 
The difficult answer is, we did it to ourselves. 
Resistance is an inevitable biological process, but we bear the responsibility for accelerating it. 
We did this by squandering antibiotics with a heedlessness that now seems shocking. 
Penicillin was sold over the counter until the 1950s. 
In much of the developing world, most antibiotics still are. 
In the United States, 50 percent of the antibiotics given in hospitals are unnecessary. 
Forty-five percent of the prescriptions written in doctor's offices are for conditions that antibiotics cannot help. 
And that's just in healthcare. 
On much of the planet, most meat animals get antibiotics every day of their lives, not to cure illnesses, but to fatten them up and to protect them against the factory farm conditions they are raised in. 
In the United States, possibly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold every year go to farm animals, not to humans, creating resistant bacteria that move off the farm in water, in dust, in the meat the animals become. 
Aquaculture depends on antibiotics too, particularly in Asia, and fruit growing relies on antibiotics to protect apples, pears, citrus, against disease. 
And because bacteria can pass their DNA to each other like a traveler handing off a suitcase at an airport, once we have encouraged that resistance into existence, there is no knowing where it will spread. 
This was predictable. 
In fact, it was predicted by Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin. 
He was given the Nobel Prize in 1945 in recognition, and in an interview shortly after, this is what he said: "" The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of a man who succumbs to infection with a pencillin-resistant organism. "" He added, "" I hope this evil can be averted. "" Can we avert it? 
There are companies working on novel antibiotics, things the superbugs have never seen before. 
We need those new drugs badly, and we need incentives: discovery grants, extended patents, prizes, to lure other companies into making antibiotics again. 
But that probably won't be enough. 
Here's why: Evolution always wins. 
Bacteria birth a new generation every 20 minutes. 
It takes pharmaceutical chemistry 10 years to derive a new drug. 
Every time we use an antibiotic, we give the bacteria billions of chances to crack the codes of the defenses we've constructed. 
There has never yet been a drug they could not defeat. 
This is asymmetric warfare, but we can change the outcome. 
We could build systems to harvest data to tell us automatically and specifically how antibiotics are being used. 
We could build gatekeeping into drug order systems so that every prescription gets a second look. 
We could require agriculture to give up antibiotic use. 
We could build surveillance systems to tell us where resistance is emerging next. 
Those are the tech solutions. 
They probably aren't enough either, unless we help. 
Antibiotic resistance is a habit. 
We all know how hard it is to change a habit. 
But as a society, we've done that in the past. 
People used to toss litter into the streets, used to not wear seatbelts, used to smoke inside public buildings. 
We don't do those things anymore. 
We don't trash the environment or court devastating accidents or expose others to the possibility of cancer, because we decided those things were expensive, destructive, not in our best interest. 
We changed social norms. 
We could change social norms around antibiotic use too. 
I know that the scale of antibiotic resistance seems overwhelming, but if you've ever bought a fluorescent lightbulb because you were concerned about climate change, or read the label on a box of crackers because you think about the deforestation from palm oil, you already know what it feels like to take a tiny step to address an overwhelming problem. 
We could take those kinds of steps for antibiotic use too. 
We could forgo giving an antibiotic if we're not sure it's the right one. 
We could stop insisting on a prescription for our kid's ear infection before we're sure what caused it. 
We could ask every restaurant, every supermarket, where their meat comes from. 
We could promise each other never again to buy chicken or shrimp or fruit raised with routine antibiotic use, and if we did those things, we could slow down the arrival of the post-antibiotic world. 
But we have to do it soon. 
Penicillin began the antibiotic era in 1943. 
In just 70 years, we walked ourselves up to the edge of disaster. 
We won't get 70 years to find our way back out again. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Wikipedia, on the other hand, begins with a very radical idea, and that's for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. 
The tools and the software: there's lots of tools that allow us — allow us, meaning the community — to self-monitor and to monitor all the work. 
Somebody looks at it — they can immediately see highlighted in red all of the changes that took place — to see, OK, well, these words have changed, things like this. 
So the Wikipedia governance model, the governance of the community, is a very confusing, but workable mix of consensus — meaning we try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral — some amount of democracy — all of the administrators — these are the people who have the ability to delete pages. 
And for a lot of people in the world, if I give you an encyclopedia that's written at a university level, it doesn't do you any good without a whole host of literacy materials to build you up to the point where you can actually use it. 

Now... 
let's go back in time. 
It's 1974. 
There is the gallery somewhere in the world, and there is a young girl, age 23, standing in the middle of the space. 
In the front of her is a table. 
On the table there are 76 objects for pleasure and for pain. 
Some of the objects are a glass of water, a coat, a shoe, a rose. 
But also the knife, the razor blade, the hammer and the pistol with one bullet. 
There are instructions which say, "" I'm an object. 
You can use everything on the table on me. 
I'm taking all responsibility — even killing me. 
And the time is six hours. "" The beginning of this performance was easy. 
People would give me the glass of water to drink, they'd give me the rose. 
But very soon after, there was a man who took the scissors and cut my clothes, and then they took the thorns of the rose and stuck them in my stomach. 
Somebody took the razor blade and cut my neck and drank the blood, and I still have the scar. 
The women would tell the men what to do. 
And the men didn't rape me because it was just a normal opening, and it was all public, and they were with their wives. 
They carried me around and put me on the table, and put the knife between my legs. 
And somebody took the pistol and bullet and put it against my temple. 
And another person took the pistol and they started a fight. 
And after six hours were finished, I... 
started walking towards the public. 
I was a mess. 
I was half-naked, I was full of blood and tears were running down my face. 
And everybody escaped, they just ran away. 
They could not confront myself, with myself as a normal human being. 
And then — what happened is I went to the hotel, it was at two in the morning. And 
I looked at myself in the mirror, and I had a piece of gray hair. 
Alright — please take off your blindfolds. 
Welcome to the performance world. 
First of all, let's explain what the performance is. 
So many artists, so many different explanations, but my explanation for performance is very simple. 
Performance is a mental and physical construction that the performer makes in a specific time in a space in front of an audience and then energy dialogue happens. 
The audience and the performer make the piece together. 
And the difference between performance and theater is huge. 
In the theater, the knife is not a knife and the blood is just ketchup. 
In the performance, the blood is the material, and the razor blade or knife is the tool. 
It's all about being there in the real time, and you can't rehearse performance, because you can't do many of these types of things twice — ever. 
Which is very important, the performance is — you know, all human beings are always afraid of very simple things. 
We're afraid of suffering, we're afraid of pain, we're afraid of mortality. 
So what I'm doing — I'm staging these kinds of fears in front of the audience. 
I'm using your energy, and with this energy I can go and push my body as far as I can. 
And then I liberate myself from these fears. 
And I'm your mirror. 
If I can do this for myself, you can do it for you. 
After Belgrade, where I was born, I went to Amsterdam. 
And you know, I've been doing performances since the last 40 years. 
And here I met Ulay, and he was the person I actually fell in love with. 
And we made, for 12 years, performances together. 
You know the knife and the pistols and the bullets, I exchange into love and trust. 
So to do this kind work you have to trust the person completely because this arrow is pointing to my heart. 
So, heart beating and adrenaline is rushing and so on, is about trust, is about total trust to another human being. 
Our relationship was 12 years, and we worked on so many subjects, both male and female energy. 
And as every relationship comes to an end, ours went too. 
We didn't make phone calls like normal human beings do and say, you know, "" This is over. "" We walked the Great Wall of China to say goodbye. 
I started at the Yellow Sea, and he started from the Gobi Desert. 
We walked, each of us, three months, two and a half thousand kilometers. 
It was the mountains, it was difficult. 
It was climbing, it was ruins. 
It was, you know, going through the 12 Chinese provinces, this was before China was open in '87. 
And we succeeded to meet in the middle to say goodbye. 
And then our relationship stopped. 
And now, it completely changed how I see the public. 
And one very important piece I made in those days was "" Balkan Baroque. "" And this was the time of the Balkan Wars, and I wanted to create some very strong, charismatic image, something that could serve for any war at any time, because the Balkan Wars are now finished, but there's always some war, somewhere. 
So here I am washing two and a half thousand dead, big, bloody cow bones. 
You can't wash the blood, you never can wash shame off the wars. 
So I'm washing this six hours, six days, and wars are coming off these bones, and becoming possible — an unbearable smell. 
But then something stays in the memory. 
I want to show you the one who really changed my life, and this was the performance in MoMa, which I just recently made. 
This performance — when I said to the curator, "" I'm just going to sit at the chair, and there will be an empty chair at the front, and anybody from the public can come and sit as long as they want. "" The curator said to me, "" That's ridiculous, you know, this is New York, this chair will be empty, nobody has time to sit in front of you. "" (Laughter) But I sit for three months. 
And I sit everyday, eight hours — the opening of the museum — and 10 hours on Friday when the museum is open 10 hours, and I never move. 
And I removed the table and I'm still sitting, and this changed everything. 
This performance, maybe 10 or 15 years ago — nothing would have happened. 
But the need of people to actually experience something different, the public was not anymore the group — relation was one to one. 
I was watching these people, they would come and sit in front of me, but they would have to wait for hours and hours and hours to get to this position, and finally, they sit. 
And what happened? 
They are observed by the other people, they're photographed, they're filmed by the camera, they're observed by me and they have nowhere to escape except in themselves. 
And that makes a difference. 
There was so much pain and loneliness, there's so much incredible things when you look in somebody else's eyes, because in the gaze with that total stranger, that you never even say one word — everything happened. 
And I understood when I stood up from that chair after three months, I am not the same anymore. 
And I understood that I have a very strong mission, that I have to communicate this experience to everybody. 
And this is how, for me, was born the idea to have an institute of immaterial performing arts. 
Because thinking about immateriality, performance is time-based art. 
It's not like a painting. 
You have the painting on the wall, the next day it's there. 
Performance, if you are missing it, you only have the memory, or the story of somebody else telling you, but you actually missed the whole thing. 
So you have to be there. 
And in my point, if you talk about immaterial art, music is the highest — absolutely highest art of all, because it's the most immaterial. 
And then after this is performance, and then everything else. 
That's my subjective way. 
This institute is going to happen in Hudson, upstate New York, and we are trying to build with Rem Koolhaas, an idea. 
And it's very simple. 
If you want to get experience, you have to give me your time. 
You have to sign the contract before you enter the building, that you will spend there a full six hours, you have to give me your word of honor. 
It's something so old-fashioned, but if you don't respect your own word of honor and you leave before — that's not my problem. 
But it's six hours, the experience. 
And then after you finish, you get a certificate of accomplishment, so get home and frame it if you want. 
(Laughter) This is orientation hall. 
The public comes in, and the first thing you have to do is dress in lab coats. 
It's this importance of stepping from being just a viewer into experimenter. 
And then you go to the lockers and you put your watch, your iPhone, your iPod, your computer and everything digital, electronic. 
And you are getting free time for yourself for the first time. 
Because there is nothing wrong with technology, our approach to technology is wrong. 
We are losing the time we have for ourselves. 
This is an institute to actually give you back this time. 
So what you do here, first you start slow walking, you start slowing down. 
You're going back to simplicity. 
After slow walking, you're going to learn how to drink water — very simple, drinking water for maybe half an hour. 
After this, you're going to the magnet chamber, where you're going to create some magnet streams on your body. 
Then after this, you go to crystal chamber. 
After crystal chamber, you go to eye-gazing chamber, after eye-gazing chamber, you go to a chamber where you are lying down. 
So it's the three basic positions of the human body, sitting, standing and lying. 
And slow walking. 
And there is a sound chamber. 
And then after you've seen all of this, and prepared yourself mentally and physically, then you are ready to see something with a long duration, like in immaterial art. 
It can be music, it can be opera, it can be a theater piece, it can be film, it can be video dance. 
You go to the long duration chairs because now you are comfortable. 
In the long duration chairs, you're transported to the big place where you're going to see the work. 
And if you fall asleep, which is very possible because it's been a long day, you're going to be transported to the parking lot. 
(Laughter) And you know, sleeping is very important. 
In sleeping, you're still receiving art. 
So in the parking lot you stay for a certain amount of time, and then after this you just, you know, go back, you see more of the things you like to see or go home with your certificate. 
So this institute right now is virtual. 
Right now, I am just making my institute in Brazil, then it's going to be in Australia, then it's coming here, to Canada and everywhere. 
And this is to experience a kind of simple method, how you go back to simplicity in your own life. 
Counting rice will be another thing. 
(Laughter) You know, if you count rice you can make life, too. 
How to count rice for six hours? 
It's incredibly important. 
You know, you go through this whole range of being bored, being angry, being completely frustrated, not finishing the amount of rice you're counting. 
And then this unbelievable amount of peace you get when satisfying work is finished — or counting sand in the desert. 
Or having the sound-isolated situation — that you have headphones, that you don't hear anything, and you're just there together without sound, with the people experiencing silence, just the simple silence. 
We are always doing things we like in our life. 
And this is why you're not changing. 
You do things in life — it's just nothing happens if you always do things the same way. 
But my method is to do things I'm afraid of, the things I fear, the things I don't know, to go to territory that nobody's ever been. 
And then also to include the failure. 
I think failure is important because if you go, if you experiment, you can fail. 
If you don't go into that area and you don't fail, you are actually repeating yourself over and over again. 
And I think that human beings right now need a change, and the only change to be made is a personal level change. 
You have to make the change on yourself. 
Because the only way to change consciousness and to change the world around us, is to start with yourself. 
It's so easy to criticize how it's different, the things in the world and they're not right, and the governments are corrupted and there's hunger in the world and there's wars — the killing. 
But what we do on the personal level — what is our contribution to this whole thing? 
Can you turn to your neighbor, the one you don't know, and look at them for two full minutes in their eyes, right now? 
(Chatter) I'm asking two minutes of your time, that's so little. 
Breathe slowly, don't try to blink, don't be self-conscious. 
Be relaxed. 
And just look a complete stranger in your eyes, in his eyes. 
(Silence) Thank you for trusting me. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. 
Thank you so much. 

Humanity takes center stage at TED, but I would like to add a voice for the animals, whose bodies and minds and spirits shaped us. 
Some years ago, it was my good fortune to meet a tribal elder on an island not far from Vancouver. 
His name is Jimmy Smith, and he shared a story with me that is told among his people, who call themselves the Kwikwasut'inuxw. 
Once upon a time, he told me, all animals on Earth were one. 
Even though they look different on the outside, inside, they're all the same, and from time to time they would gather at a sacred cave deep inside the forest to celebrate their unity. 
When they arrived, they would all take off their skins. 
Raven shed his feathers, bear his fur, and salmon her scales, and then, they would dance. 
But one day, a human made it to the cave and laughed at what he saw because he did not understand. 
Embarrassed, the animals fled, and that was the last time they revealed themselves this way. 
The ancient understanding that underneath their separate identities, all animals are one, has been a powerful inspiration to me. 
I like to get past the fur, the feathers and the scales. 
I want to get under the skin. 
No matter whether I'm facing a giant elephant or a tiny tree frog, my goal is to connect us with them, eye to eye. 
Sure. People are always present in my photos, no matter whether they appear to portray tortoises or cougars or lions. 
You just have to learn how to look past their disguise. 
As a photographer, I try to reach beyond the differences in our genetic makeup to appreciate all we have in common with every other living thing. 
When I use my camera, I drop my skin like the animals at that cave so I can show who they really are. 
As animals blessed with the power of rational thought, we can marvel at the intricacies of life. 
As citizens of a planet in trouble, it is our moral responsibility to deal with the dramatic loss in diversity of life. 
But as humans with hearts, we can all rejoice in the unity of life, and perhaps we can change what once happened in that sacred cave. 
Let's find a way to join the dance. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, people want a lot of things out of life, but I think, more than anything else, they want happiness. 
Aristotle called happiness "" the chief good, "" the end towards which all other things aim. 
According to this view, the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable. 
It's that we expect them to bring us happiness. 
Now in the last 50 years, we Americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want. We're richer. 
We live longer. We have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. 
The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically, we haven't actually gotten any happier. 
Maybe because these conventional notions of progress haven't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness, there's been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself. 
People have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time, in fact for thousands of years, but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved. 
Well, as with many other domains in life, I think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question. 
In fact, in the last few years, there's been an explosion in research on happiness. For example, we've learned a lot about its demographics, how things like income and education, gender and marriage relate to it. 
But one of the puzzles this has revealed is that factors like these don't seem to have a particularly strong effect. 
Yes, it's better to make more money rather than less, or to graduate from college instead of dropping out, but the differences in happiness tend to be small. 
It certainly seems that we're going about our lives, that what we're doing, who we're with, what we're thinking about, have a big influence on our happiness, and yet these are the very factors that have been very difficult, in fact almost impossible, for scientists to study. 
How does this work? Basically, I send people signals at random points throughout the day, and then I ask them a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience at the instant just before the signal. 
The idea is that, if we can watch how people's happiness goes up and down over the course of the day, minute to minute in some cases, and try to understand how what people are doing, who they're with, what they're thinking about, and all the other factors that describe our day, how those might relate to those changes in happiness, we might be able to discover some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness. 
We've been fortunate with this project to collect quite a lot of data, a lot more data of this kind than I think has ever been collected before, over 650,000 real-time reports from over 15,000 people. 
And it's not just a lot of people, it's a really diverse group, people from a wide range of ages, from 18 to late 80s, a wide range of incomes, education levels, people who are married, divorced, widowed, etc. 
They collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries. 
What I'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we've been investigating, and that's mind-wandering. 
As human beings, we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present. 
This guy is sitting here working on his computer, and yet he could be thinking about the vacation he had last month, wondering what he's going to have for dinner. 
Maybe he's worried that he's going bald. (Laughter) This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing. It allows us to learn and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can. 
And yet it's not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness. 
You've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present. "" Be here now, "" you've probably heard a hundred times. 
Maybe, to really be happy, we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment. 
Maybe these people are right. Maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing. 
On the other hand, when our minds wander, they're unconstrained. We can't change the physical reality in front of us, but we can go anywhere in our minds. 
Since we know people want to be happy, maybe when our minds wander, they're going to someplace happier than the place that they're leaving. It would make a lot of sense. 
Well, since I'm a scientist, I'd like to try to resolve this debate with some data, and in particular I'd like to present some data to you from three questions that I ask with Track Your Happiness. Remember, this is from sort of moment-to-moment experience in people's real lives. 
There are three questions. The first one is a happiness question: How do you feel, on a scale ranging from very bad to very good? Second, an activity question: What are you doing, on a list of 22 different activities including things like eating and working and watching TV? 
And finally a mind-wandering question: Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing? 
People could say no — in other words, I'm focused only on my task — or yes — I am thinking about something else — and the topic of those thoughts are pleasant, neutral or unpleasant. 
So what did we find? 
This graph shows happiness on the vertical axis, and you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they're focused on the present, when they're not mind-wandering. 
As it turns out, people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they're not. 
Now you might look at this result and say, okay, sure, on average people are less happy when they're mind-wandering, but surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn't very enjoyable to begin with, at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us. 
Nope. As it turns out, people are less happy when they're mind-wandering no matter what they're doing. For example, people don't really like commuting to work very much. 
It's one of their least enjoyable activities, and yet they are substantially happier when they're focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else. 
It's amazing. 
So how could this be happening? I think part of the reason, a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things, and they are enormously less happy when they do that, our worries, our anxieties, our regrets, and yet even when people are thinking about something neutral, they're still considerably less happy than when they're not mind-wandering at all. 
Even when they're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant, they're actually just slightly less happy than when they aren't mind-wandering. 
If mind-wandering were a slot machine, it would be like having the chance to lose 50 dollars, 20 dollars or one dollar. Right? You'd never want to play. (Laughter) So I've been talking about this, suggesting, perhaps, that mind-wandering causes unhappiness, but all I've really shown you is that these two things are correlated. 
It's possible that's the case, but it might also be the case that when people are unhappy, then they mind-wander. 
Maybe that's what's really going on. How could we ever disentangle these two possibilites? 
Well, one fact that we can take advantage of, I think a fact you'll all agree is true, is that time goes forward, not backward. Right? The cause has to come before the effect. 
We're lucky in this data we have many responses from each person, and so we can look and see, does mind-wandering tend to precede unhappiness, or does unhappiness tend to precede mind-wandering, to get some insight into the causal direction. 
As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later, consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy. 
In contrast, there's no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later. 
A few minutes ago, I likened mind-wandering to a slot machine you'd never want to play. 
Forty-seven percent of the time, people are thinking about something other than what they're currently doing. 
This shows the rate of mind-wandering across 22 activities ranging from a high of 65 percent — (Laughter) — when people are taking a shower, brushing their teeth, to 50 percent when they're working, to 40 percent when they're exercising, all the way down to this one short bar on the right that I think some of you are probably laughing at. 
Ten percent of the time people's minds are wandering when they're having sex. (Laughter) But there's something I think that's quite interesting in this graph, and that is, basically with one exception, no matter what people are doing, they're mind-wandering at least 30 percent of the time, which suggests, I think, that mind-wandering isn't just frequent, it's ubiquitous. 
In my talk today, I've told you a little bit about mind-wandering, a variable that I think turns out to be fairly important in the equation for happiness. 
My hope is that over time, by tracking people's moment-to-moment happiness and their experiences in daily life, we'll be able to uncover a lot of important causes of happiness, and then in the end, a scientific understanding of happiness will help us create a future that's not only richer and healthier, but happier as well. 
Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 

Hannah is excited to be going to college. 
She couldn't wait to get out of her parents' house, to prove to them that she's an adult, and to prove to her new friends that she belongs. 
She heads to a campus party where she sees a guy that she has a crush on. 
Let's call him Mike. 
The next day, Hannah wakes up with a pounding headache. 
She can only remember the night in flashes. 
But what she does remember is throwing up in the hall outside Mike's room and staring at the wall silently while he was inside her, wanting it to stop, then shakily stumbling home. 
She doesn't feel good about what happened, but she thinks, "" Maybe this is just what sex in college is? "" One in five women and one in 13 men will be sexually assaulted at some point during their college career in the United States. 
Less than 10 percent will ever report their assault to their school or to the police. 
And those who do, on average, wait 11 months to make the report. 
Hannah initially just feels like dealing with what happened on her own. 
But when she sees Mike taking girls home from parties, she's worried about them. 
After graduation, Hannah learns that she was one of five women who Mike did the exact same thing to. 
And this is not an unlikely scenario because 90 percent of sexual assaults are committed by repeat offenders. 
But with such low reporting rates, it's fairly unlikely that even repeat perpetrators will be reported, much less anything happen if they are. 
In fact, only six percent of assaults reported to the police end with the assailant spending a single day in prison. 
Meaning, there's a 99 percent chance that they'll get away with it. 
This means there's practically no deterrent to assault in the United States. 
Now, I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist by training. 
I'm interested in systems and networks and where we can concentrate our resources to do the most good. 
So this, to me, is a tragic but a solvable problem. 
So when the issue of campus assault started hitting the news a few years ago, it felt like a unique opportunity to make a change. 
And so we did. 
We started by talking to college survivors. 
And what they wish they'd had in college is pretty simple; they wanted a website, one they could use at the time and place that felt safest to them with clearly written information about their reporting options, with the ability to electronically report their assault, rather than having the first step to go in and talk to someone who may or may not believe them. 
With the option to create a secure, timestamped document of what happened to them, preserving evidence even if they don't want to report yet. 
And lastly, and perhaps most critically, with the ability to report their assault only if someone else reported the same assailant. 
You see, knowing that you weren't the only one changes everything. 
It changes the way you frame your own experience, it changes the way you think about your perpetrator, it means that if you do come forward, you'll have someone else's back and they'll have yours. 
We created a website that actually does this and we launched it [...] in August, on two college campuses. 
And we included a unique matching system where if Mike's first victim had come forward, saved her record, entered into the matching system and named Mike, and Mike's second victim had done the same thing a few months later, they would have matched and the verified contact information of both survivors would have been sent to the authorities at the same time for investigation and follow up. 
If a system like this had existed for Hannah and her peers, it's more likely that they would have reported, that they would have been believed, and that Mike would have been kicked off campus, gone to jail, or at least gotten the help that he needed. 
And if we were able to stop repeat offenders like Mike after just their second assault following a match, survivors like Hannah would never even be assaulted in the first place. 
We could prevent 59 percent of sexual assaults just by stopping repeat perpetrators earlier on. 
And because we're creating a real deterrent to assault, for perhaps the first time, maybe the Mikes of the world would never even try to assault anyone. 
The type of system I'm describing, the type of system that survivors want is a type of information escrow, meaning an entity that holds on to information for you and only releases it to a third party when certain pre-agreed upon conditions are met, such as a match. 
The application that we built is for college campuses. 
But the same type of system could be used in the military or even the workplace. 
We don't have to live in a world where 99 percent of rapists get away with it. 
We can create one where those who do wrong are held accountable, where survivors get the support and justice they deserve, where the authorities get the information they need, and where there's a real deterrent to violating the rights of another human being. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Life is about opportunities, creating them and embracing them, and for me, that was the Olympic dream. 
That's what defined me. That was my bliss. 
As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team, headed towards the Winter Olympics, I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates. 
As we made our way up towards the spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney, it was the perfect autumn day: sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream. 
Life was good. 
We'd been on our bikes for around five and half hours when we got to the part of the ride that I loved, and that was the hills, because I loved the hills. 
And I got up off the seat of my bike, and I started pumping my legs, and as I sucked in the cold mountain air, I could feel it burning my lungs, and I looked up to see the sun shining in my face. 
And then everything went black. 
Where was I? What was happening? 
My body was consumed by pain. 
I'd been hit by a speeding utility truck with only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride. 
I was airlifted from the scene of the accident by a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney. 
I had extensive and life-threatening injuries. 
I'd broken my neck and my back in six places. 
I broke five ribs on my left side. 
I broke my right arm. I broke my collarbone. 
I broke some bones in my feet. 
My whole right side was ripped open, filled with gravel. 
My head was cut open across the front, lifted back, exposing the skull underneath. 
I had head injures. I had internal injuries. 
I had massive blood loss. In fact, I lost about five liters of blood, which is all someone my size would actually hold. 
By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing. 
I was having a really bad day. (Laughter) For over 10 days, I drifted between two dimensions. 
I had an awareness of being in my body, but also being out of my body, somewhere else, watching from above as if it was happening to someone else. 
Why would I want to go back to a body that was so broken? 
But this voice kept calling me: "" Come on, stay with me. "" "No. It's too hard." 
"Come on. This is our opportunity." 
"No. That body is broken. It can no longer serve me." 
"Come on. Stay with me. We can do it. We can do it together." 
I was at a crossroads. 
I knew if I didn't return to my body, I'd have to leave this world forever. 
It was the fight of my life. 
After 10 days, I made the decision to return to my body, and the internal bleeding stopped. 
The next concern was whether I would walk again, because I was paralyzed from the waist down. 
They said to my parents, the neck break was a stable fracture, but the back was completely crushed. 
The vertebra at L1 was like you'd dropped a peanut, stepped on it, smashed it into thousands of pieces. 
They'd have to operate. 
They went in. They put me on a beanbag. They cut me, literally cut me in half, I have a scar that wraps around my entire body. 
They picked as much broken bone as they could that had lodged in my spinal cord. 
They took out two of my broken ribs, and they rebuilt my back, L1, they rebuilt it, they took out another broken rib, they fused T12, L1 and L2 together. 
Then they stitched me up. They took an entire hour to stitch me up. 
I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excited that the operation had been a success because at that stage I had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes, and I thought, "" Great, because I'm going to the Olympics! "" (Laughter) I had no idea. That's the sort of thing that happens to someone else, not me, surely. 
But then the doctor came over to me, and she said, "" Janine, the operation was a success, and we've picked as much bone out of your spinal cord as we could, but the damage is permanent. 
The central nervous system nerves, there is no cure. 
You're what we call a partial paraplegic, and you'll have all of the injuries that go along with that. 
You have no feeling from the waist down, and at most, you might get 10- or 20-percent return. 
You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life. 
You'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life. 
And if you walk again, it will be with calipers and a walking frame. "" And then she said, "" Janine, you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life, because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before. "" I tried to grasp what she was saying. 
I was an athlete. That's all I knew. That's all I'd done. 
If I couldn't do that, then what could I do? 
And the question I asked myself is, if I couldn't do that, then who was I? 
They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal. 
I was lying on a thin, hard spinal bed. 
I had no movement in my legs. I had tight stockings on to protect from blood clots. 
I had one arm in plaster, one arm tied down by drips. 
I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my head and I saw my world through a mirror that was suspended above my head. 
I shared the ward with five other people, and the amazing thing is that because we were all lying paralyzed in a spinal ward, we didn't know what each other looked like. 
How amazing is that? How often in life do you get to make friendships, judgment-free, purely based on spirit? 
And there were no superficial conversations as we shared our innermost thoughts, our fears, and our hopes for life after the spinal ward. 
I remember one night, one of the nurses came in, Jonathan, with a whole lot of plastic straws. 
He put a pile on top of each of us, and he said, "Start threading them together." 
Well, there wasn't much else to do in the spinal ward, so we did. 
And when we'd finished, he went around silently and he joined all of the straws up till it looped around the whole ward, and then he said, "Okay, everybody, hold on to your straws." 
And we did. And he said, "" Right. Now we're all connected. "" And as we held on, and we breathed as one, we knew we weren't on this journey alone. 
And even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward, there were moments of incredible depth and richness, of authenticity and connection that I had never experienced before. 
And each of us knew that when we left the spinal ward we would never be the same. 
After six months, it was time to go home. 
I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair, wrapped in a plaster body cast, and feeling the sun on my face for the first time. 
I soaked it up and I thought, how could I ever have taken this for granted? 
I felt so incredibly grateful for my life. 
But before I left the hospital, the head nurse had said to me, "" Janine, I want you to be ready, because when you get home, something's going to happen. "" And I said, "" What? "" And she said, "You're going to get depressed." 
And I said, "" Not me, not Janine the Machine, "" which was my nickname. 
She said, "" You are, because, see, it happens to everyone. 
In the spinal ward, that's normal. 
You're in a wheelchair. That's normal. 
But you're going to get home and realize how different life is. "" And I got home and something happened. 
I realized Sister Sam was right. 
I did get depressed. 
I was in my wheelchair. I had no feeling from the waist down, attached to a catheter bottle. I couldn't walk. 
I'd lost so much weight in the hospital I now weighed about 80 pounds. 
And I wanted to give up. 
All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door. 
I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back. 
And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed, and saying, "" I wonder if life will ever be good again. "" And I thought, "" How could it? Because I've lost everything that I valued, everything that I'd worked towards. 
Gone. "" And the question I asked was, "" Why me? Why me? "" And then I remembered my friends that were still in the spinal ward, particularly Maria. 
Maria was in a car accident, and she woke up on her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic, had no movement from the neck down, had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk. 
They told me, "" We're going to move you next to her because we think it will be good for her. "" I was worried. I didn't know how I'd react to being next to her. 
I knew it would be challenging, but it was actually a blessing, because Maria always smiled. 
She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again, albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once. 
And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance. 
And I realized that this wasn't just my life. 
It was life itself. I realized that this wasn't just my pain. 
It was everybody's pain. And then I knew, just like before, that I had a choice. I could keep fighting this or I could let go and accept not only my body but the circumstances of my life. 
And then I stopped asking, "" Why me? "" And I started to ask, "" Why not me? "" And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottom is actually the perfect place to start. 
I had never before thought of myself as a creative person. 
I was an athlete. My body was a machine. 
But now I was about to embark on the most creative project that any of us could ever do: that of rebuilding a life. 
And even though I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do, in that uncertainty came a sense of freedom. 
I was no longer tied to a set path. 
I was free to explore life's infinite possibilities. 
And that realization was about to change my life. 
Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast, an airplane flew overhead, and I looked up, and I thought to myself, "" That's it! 
If I can't walk, then I might as well fly. "" I said, "" Mom, I'm going to learn how to fly. "" She said, "" That's nice, dear. "" (Laughter) I said, "" Pass me the yellow pages. "" She passed me the phone book, I rang up the flying school, I made a booking, said I'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight. 
They said, "" You know, when do you want to come out? "" I said, "" Well, I have to get a friend to drive me out because I can't drive. Sort of can't walk either. 
Is that a problem? "" I made a booking, and weeks later my friend Chris and my mom drove me out to the airport, all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body cast in a baggy pair of overalls. (Laughter) I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidate to get a pilot's license. (Laughter) I'm holding on to the counter because I can't stand. 
I said, "" Hi, I'm here for a flying lesson. "" And they took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws. 
"You get her." "No, no, you take her." 
Finally this guy comes out. He goes, "Hi, I'm Andrew, and I'm going to take you flying." 
I go, "" Great. "" And so they drive me down, they get me out on the tarmac, and there was this red, white and blue airplane. 
It was beautiful. They lifted me into the cockpit. 
They had to slide me up on the wing, put me in the cockpit. 
They sat me down. There are buttons and dials everywhere. 
I'm going, "" Wow, how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do? "" Andrew the instructor got in the front, started the airplane up. 
He said, "" Would you like to have a go at taxiing? "" That's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedals to control the airplane on the ground. 
I said, "" No, I can't use my legs. "" He went, "" Oh. "" I said, "" But I can use my hands, "" and he said, "" Okay. "" So he got over to the runway, and he applied the power. 
And as we took off down the runway, and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne, I had the most incredible sense of freedom. 
And Andrew said to me, as we got over the training area, "You see that mountain over there?" 
And I said, "" Yeah. "" And he said, "" Well, you take the controls, and you fly towards that mountain. "" And as I looked up, I realized that he was pointing towards the Blue Mountains where the journey had begun. 
And I took the controls, and I was flying. 
And I was a long, long way from that spinal ward, and I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot. 
Didn't know how on Earth I'd ever pass a medical. 
But I'd worry about that later, because right now I had a dream. 
So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan. 
And I practiced my walking as much as I could, and I went from the point of two people holding me up to one person holding me up to the point where I could walk around the furniture as long as it wasn't too far apart. 
And then I made great progression to the point where I could walk around the house, holding onto the walls, like this, and Mom said she was forever following me, wiping off my fingerprints. (Laughter) But at least she always knew where I was. 
So while the doctors continued to operate and put my body back together again, I went on with my theory study, and then eventually, and amazingly, I passed my pilot's medical, and that was my green light to fly. 
And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school, way out of my comfort zone, all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots, you know, and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast, and then my steel brace, my baggy overalls, my bag of medication and catheters and my limp, and they used to look at me and think, "Oh, who is she kidding? She's never going to be able to do this." 
And sometimes I thought that too. 
But that didn't matter, because now there was something inside that burned that far outweighed my injuries. 
And little goals kept me going along the way, and eventually I got my private pilot's license, and then I learned to navigate, and I flew my friends around Australia. 
And then I learned to fly an airplane with two engines and I got my twin engine rating. 
And then I learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weather and got my instrument rating. 
And then I got my commercial pilot's license. 
And then I got my instructor rating. 
And then I found myself back at that same school where I'd gone for that very first flight, teaching other people how to fly, just under 18 months after I'd left the spinal ward. 
(Applause) And then I thought, "" Why stop there? 
Why not learn to fly upside down? "" And I did, and I learned to fly upside down and became an aerobatics flying instructor. 
And Mom and Dad? Never been up. 
But then I knew for certain that although my body might be limited, it was my spirit that was unstoppable. 
The philosopher Lao Tzu once said, "" When you let go of what you are, you become what you might be. "" I now know that it wasn't until I let go of who I thought I was that I was able to create a completely new life. 
It wasn't until I let go of the life I thought I should have that I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me. 
I now know that my real strength never came from my body, and although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically, who I am is unchanged. 
The pilot light inside of me was still a light, just as it is in each and every one of us. 
I know that I'm not my body, and I also know that you're not yours. 
And then it no longer matters what you look like, where you come from, or what you do for a living. 
All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanity by living our lives as the ultimate creative expression of who we really are, because we are all connected by millions and millions of straws, and it's time to join those up and to hang on. 
And if we are to move towards our collective bliss, it's time we shed our focus on the physical and instead embrace the virtues of the heart. 
So raise your straws if you'll join me. 
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. 

Let me tell you a story about a little girl named Naghma. 
Naghma lived in a refugee camp with her parents and her eight brothers and sisters. 
Every morning, her father would wake up in the hopes he'd be picked for construction work, and on a good month he would earn 50 dollars. 
The winter was very harsh, and unfortunately, Naghma's brother died and her mother became very ill. 
In desperation, her father went to a neighbor to borrow 2,500 dollars. 
After several months of waiting, the neighbor became very impatient, and he demanded that he be paid back. 
Unfortunately, Naghma's father didn't have the money, and so the two men agreed to a jirga. 
So simply put, a jirga is a form of mediation that's used in Afghanistan's informal justice system. 
It's usually presided over by religious leaders and village elders, and jirgas are often used in rural countries like Afghanistan, where there's deep-seated resentment against the formal system. 
At the jirga, the men sat together and they decided that the best way to satisfy the debt would be if Naghma married the neighbor's 21-year-old son. 
She was six. 
Now, stories like Naghma's unfortunately are all too common, and from the comforts of our home, we may look at these stories as another crushing blow to women's rights. 
And if you watched Afghanistan on the news, you may have this view that it's a failed state. 
However, Afghanistan does have a legal system, and while jirgas are built on long-standing tribal customs, even in jirgas, laws are supposed to be followed, and it goes without saying that giving a child to satisfy a debt is not only grossly immoral, it's illegal. 
In 2008, I went to Afghanistan for a justice funded program, and I went there originally on this nine-month program to train Afghan lawyers. 
In that nine months, I went around the country and I talked to hundreds of people that were locked up, and I talked to many businesses that were also operating in Afghanistan. 
And within these conversations, I started hearing the connections between the businesses and the people, and how laws that were meant to protect them were being underused, while gross and illegal punitive measures were overused. 
And so this put me on a quest for justness, and what justness means to me is using laws for their intended purpose, which is to protect. 
The role of laws is to protect. 
So as a result, I decided to open up a private practice, and I became the first foreigner to litigate in Afghan courts. 
Throughout this time, I also studied many laws, I talked to many people, I read up on many cases, and I found that the lack of justness is not just a problem in Afghanistan, but it's a global problem. 
And while I originally shied away from representing human rights cases because I was really concerned about how it would affect me both professionally and personally, I decided that the need for justness was so great that I couldn't continue to ignore it. 
And so I started representing people like Naghma pro bono also. 
Now, since I've been in Afghanistan and since I've been an attorney for over 10 years, I've represented from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to ambassadors to little girls like Naghma, and with much success. 
And the reason for my success is very simple: I work the system from the inside out and use the laws in the ways that they're intended to be used. 
I find that achieving justness in places like Afghanistan is difficult, and there's three reasons. 
The first reason is that simply put, people are very uneducated as to what their legal rights were, and I find that this is a global problem. 
The second issue is that even with laws on the books, it's often superseded or ignored by tribal customs, like in the first jirga that sold Naghma off. 
And the third problem with achieving justness is that even with good, existing laws on the books, there aren't people or lawyers that are willing to fight for those laws. 
And that's what I do: I use existing laws, often unused laws, and I work those to the benefits of my clients. 
We all need to create a global culture of human rights and be investors in a global human rights economy, and by working in this mindset, we can significantly improve justice globally. 
Now let's get back to Naghma. 
Several people heard about this story, and so they contacted me because they wanted to pay the $2,500 debt. 
And it's not just that simple; you can't just throw money at this problem and think that it's going to disappear. 
That's not how it works in Afghanistan. 
So I told them I'd get involved, but in order to get involved, what needed to happen is a second jirga needed to be called, a jirga of appeals. 
And so in order for that to happen, we needed to get the village elders together, we needed to get the tribal leaders together, the religious leaders. 
Naghma's father needed to agree, the neighbor needed to agree, and also his son needed to agree. 
And I thought, if I'm going to get involved in this thing, then they also need to agree that I preside over it. 
So, after hours of talking and tracking them down, and about 30 cups of tea, they finally agreed that we could sit down for a second jirga, and we did. 
And what was different about the second jirga is this time, we put the law at the center of it, and it was very important for me that they all understood that Naghma had a right to be protected. 
And at the end of this jirga, it was ordered by the judge that the first decision was erased, and that the $2,500 debt was satisfied, and we all signed a written order where all the men acknowledged that what they did was illegal, and if they did it again, that they would go to prison. 
Most — (Applause) Thanks. 
And most importantly, the engagement was terminated and Naghma was free. 
Protecting Naghma and her right to be free protects us. 
Now, with my job, there's above-average amount of risks that are involved. 
I've been temporarily detained. 
I've been accused of running a brothel, accused of being a spy. 
I've had a grenade thrown at my office. 
It didn't go off, though. 
But I find that with my job, that the rewards far outweigh the risks, and as many risks as I take, my clients take far greater risks, because they have a lot more to lose if their cases go unheard, or worse, if they're penalized for having me as their lawyer. 
With every case that I take, I realize that as much as I'm standing behind my clients, that they're also standing behind me, and that's what keeps me going. 
Law as a point of leverage is crucial in protecting all of us. 
Journalists are very vital in making sure that that information is given to the public. 
Too often, we receive information from journalists but we forget how that information was given. 
This picture is a picture of the British press corps in Afghanistan. 
It was taken a couple of years ago by my friend David Gill. 
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, since 2010, there have been thousands of journalists who have been threatened, injured, killed, detained. 
Too often, when we get this information, we forget who it affects or how that information is given to us. 
What many journalists do, both foreign and domestic, is very remarkable, especially in places like Afghanistan, and it's important that we never forget that, because what they're protecting is not only our right to receive that information but also the freedom of the press, which is vital to a democratic society. 
Matt Rosenberg is a journalist in Afghanistan. 
He works for The New York Times, and unfortunately, a few months ago he wrote an article that displeased people in the government. 
As a result, he was temporarily detained and he was illegally exiled out of the country. 
I represent Matt, and after dealing with the government, I was able to get legal acknowledgment that in fact he was illegally exiled, and that freedom of the press does exist in Afghanistan, and there's consequences if that's not followed. 
And I'm happy to say that as of a few days ago, the Afghan government formally invited him back into the country and they reversed their exile order of him. 
(Applause) If you censor one journalist, then it intimidates others, and soon nations are silenced. 
It's important that we protect our journalists and freedom of the press, because that makes governments more accountable to us and more transparent. 
Protecting journalists and our right to receive information protects us. 
Our world is changing. We live in a different world now, and what were once individual problems are really now global problems for all of us. 
Two weeks ago, Afghanistan had its first democratic transfer of power and elected president Ashraf Ghani, which is huge, and I'm very optimistic about him, and I'm hopeful that he'll give Afghanistan the changes that it needs, especially within the legal sector. 
We live in a different world. 
We live in a world where my eight-year-old daughter only knows a black president. 
There's a great possibility that our next president will be a woman, and as she gets older, she may question, can a white guy be president? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Our world is changing, and we need to change with it, and what were once individual problems are problems for all of us. 
According to UNICEF, there are currently over 280 million boys and girls who are married under the age of 15. 
Two hundred and eighty million. 
Child marriages prolong the vicious cycle of poverty, poor health, lack of education. 
At the age of 12, Sahar was married. 
She was forced into this marriage and sold by her brother. 
When she went to her in-laws' house, they forced her into prostitution. 
Because she refused, she was tortured. 
She was severely beaten with metal rods. 
They burned her body. 
They tied her up in a basement and starved her. 
They used pliers to take out her fingernails. 
At one point, she managed to escape from this torture chamber to a neighbor's house, and when she went there, instead of protecting her, they dragged her back to her husband's house, and she was tortured even worse. 
When I met first Sahar, thankfully, Women for Afghan Women gave her a safe haven to go to. 
As a lawyer, I try to be very strong for all my clients, because that's very important to me, but seeing her, how broken and very weak as she was, was very difficult. 
It took weeks for us to really get to what happened to her when she was in that house, but finally she started opening up to me, and when she opened up, what I heard was she didn't know what her rights were, but she did know she had a certain level of protection by her government that failed her, and so we were able to talk about what her legal options were. 
And so we decided to take this case to the Supreme Court. 
Now, this is extremely significant, because this is the first time that a victim of domestic violence in Afghanistan was being represented by a lawyer, a law that's been on the books for years and years, but until Sahar, had never been used. 
In addition to this, we also decided to sue for civil damages, again using a law that's never been used, but we used it for her case. 
So there we were at the Supreme Court arguing in front of 12 Afghan justices, me as an American female lawyer, and Sahar, a young woman who when I met her couldn't speak above a whisper. 
She stood up, she found her voice, and my girl told them that she wanted justice, and she got it. 
At the end of it all, the court unanimously agreed that her in-laws should be arrested for what they did to her, her fucking brother should also be arrested for selling her — (Applause) — and they agreed that she did have a right to civil compensation. 
What Sahar has shown us is that we can attack existing bad practices by using the laws in the ways that they're intended to be used, and by protecting Sahar, we are protecting ourselves. 
After having worked in Afghanistan for over six years now, a lot of my family and friends think that what I do looks like this. 
(Laughter) But in all actuality, what I do looks like this. 
Now, we can all do something. 
I'm not saying we should all buy a plane ticket and go to Afghanistan, but we can all be contributors to a global human rights economy. 
We can create a culture of transparency and accountability to the laws, and make governments more accountable to us, as we are to them. 
A few months ago, a South African lawyer visited me in my office and he said, "" I wanted to meet you. 
I wanted to see what a crazy person looked like. "" The laws are ours, and no matter what your ethnicity, nationality, gender, race, they belong to us, and fighting for justice is not an act of insanity. 
Businesses also need to get with the program. 
A corporate investment in human rights is a capital gain on your businesses, and whether you're a business, an NGO, or a private citizen, rule of law benefits all of us. 
And by working together with a concerted mindset, through the people, public and private sector, we can create a global human rights economy and all become global investors in human rights. 
And by doing this, we can achieve justness together. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I call myself a body architect. 
I trained in classical ballet and have a background in architecture and fashion. 
As a body architect, I fascinate with the human body and explore how I can transform it. 
I worked at Philips Electronics in the far-future design research lab, looking 20 years into the future. 
I explored the human skin, and how technology can transform the body. 
I worked on concepts like an electronic tattoo, which is augmented by touch, or dresses that blushed and shivered with light. 
I started my own experiments. 
These were the low-tech approaches to the high-tech conversations I was having. 
These are Q-tips stuck to my roommate with wig glue. 
(Laughter) I started a collaboration with a friend of mine, Bart Hess — he doesn't normally look like this — and we used ourselves as models. 
We transformed our apartments into our laboratories, and worked in a very spontaneous and immediate way. 
We were creating visual imagery provoking human evolution. 
Whilst I was at Philips, we discussed this idea of a maybe technology, something that wasn't either switched on or off, but in between. 
A maybe that could take the form of a gas or a liquid. 
And I became obsessed with this idea of blurring the perimeter of the body, so you couldn't see where the skin ended and the near environment started. 
I set up my studio in the red-light district and obsessively wrapped myself in plumbing tubing, and found a way to redefine the skin and create this dynamic textile. 
I was introduced to Robyn, the Swedish pop star, and she was also exploring how technology coexists with raw human emotion. 
And she talked about how technology with these new feathers, this new face paint, this punk, the way that we identify with the world, and we made this music video. 
I'm fascinated with the idea of what happens when you merge biology with technology, and I remember reading about this idea of being able to reprogram biology, in the future, away from disease and aging. 
And I thought about this concept of, imagine if we could reprogram our own body odor, modify and biologically enhance it, and how would that change the way that we communicate with each other? 
Or the way that we attract sexual partners? 
And would we revert back to being more like animals, more primal modes of communication? 
I worked with a synthetic biologist, and I created a swallowable perfume, which is a cosmetic pill that you eat and the fragrance comes out through the skin's surface when you perspire. 
It completely blows apart the way that perfume is, and provides a whole new format. 
It's perfume coming from the inside out. 
It redefines the role of skin, and our bodies become an atomizer. 
I've learned that there's no boundaries, and if I look at the evolution of my work i can see threads and connections that make sense. 
But when I look towards the future, the next project is completely unknown and wide open. 
I feel like I have all these ideas existing embedded inside of me, and it's these conversations and these experiences that connect these ideas, and they kind of instinctively come out. 
As a body architect, I've created this limitless and boundless platform for me to discover whatever I want. 
And I feel like I've just got started. 
So here's to another day at the office. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you! Thank you! 

I have a confession to make. 
As a scientist and engineer, I've focused on efficiency for many years. 
But efficiency can be a cult, and today I'd like to tell you about a journey that moved me out of the cult and back to a far richer reality. 
A few years ago, after finishing my Ph.D. in London, I moved to Boston. 
I lived in Boston and worked in Cambridge. 
I bought a racing bicycle that summer, and I bicycled every day to work. 
To find my way, I used my phone. 
It sent me over Mass. Ave., Massachusetts Avenue, the shortest route from Boston to Cambridge. 
But after a month that I was cycling every day on the car-packed Mass. Ave., I took a different route one day. 
I'm not entirely sure why I took a different route that day, a detour. 
I just remember a feeling of surprise; surprise at finding a street with no cars, as opposed to the nearby Mass. Ave. full of cars; surprise at finding a street draped by leaves and surrounded by trees. 
But after the feeling of surprise, I felt shame. 
How could I have been so blind? 
For an entire month, I was so trapped in my mobile app that a journey to work became one thing only: the shortest path. 
In this single journey, there was no thought of enjoying the road, no pleasure in connecting with nature, no possibility of looking people in the eyes. 
And why? 
Because I was saving a minute out of my commute. 
Now let me ask you: Am I alone here? 
How many of you have never used a mapping app for finding directions? 
Most of you, if not all, have. 
And don't get me wrong — mapping apps are the greatest game-changer for encouraging people to explore the city. 
You take your phone out and you know immediately where to go. 
However, the app also assumes there are only a handful of directions to the destination. 
It has the power to make those handful of directions the definitive direction to that destination. 
After that experience, I changed. 
I changed my research from traditional data-mining to understanding how people experience the city. 
I used computer science tools to replicate social science experiments at scale, at web scale. 
I became captivated by the beauty and genius of traditional social science experiments done by Jane Jacobs, Stanley Milgram, Kevin Lynch. 
The result of that research has been the creation of new maps, maps where you don't only find the shortest path, the blue one, but also the most enjoyable path, the red one. 
How was that possible? 
Einstein once said, "" Logic will get you from A to B. 
Imagination will take you everywhere. "" So with a bit of imagination, we needed to understand which parts of the city people find beautiful. 
At the University of Cambridge, with colleagues, we thought about this simple experiment. 
If I were to show you these two urban scenes, and I were to ask you which one is more beautiful, which one would you say? 
Don't be shy. 
Who says A? Who says B? 
Brilliant. 
Based on that idea, we built a crowdsourcing platform, a web game. 
Players are shown pairs of urban scenes, and they're asked to choose which one is more beautiful, quiet and happy. 
Based on thousands of user votes, then we are able to see where consensus emerges. 
We are able to see which are the urban scenes that make people happy. 
After that work, I joined Yahoo Labs, and I teamed up with Luca and Rossano, and together, we aggregated those winning locations in London to build a new map of the city, a cartography weighted for human emotions. 
On this cartography, you're not only able to see and connect from point A to point B the shortest segments, but you're also able to see the happy segment, the beautiful path, the quiet path. 
In tests, participants found the happy, the beautiful, the quiet path far more enjoyable than the shortest one, and that just by adding a few minutes to travel time. 
Participants also love to attach memories to places. 
Shared memories — that's where the old BBC building was; and personal memories — that's where I gave my first kiss. 
They also recalled how some paths smelled and sounded. 
So what if we had a mapping tool that would return the most enjoyable routes based not only on aesthetics but also based on smell, sound, and memories? 
That's where our research is going right now. 
More generally, my research, what it tries to do is avoid the danger of the single path, to avoid robbing people of fully experiencing the city in which they live. 
Walk the path through the park, not through the car park, and you have an entirely different path. 
Walk the path full of people you love and not full of cars, and you have an entirely different path. 
It's that simple. 
I would like to end with this thought: do you remember "" The Truman Show? "" It's a media satire in which a real person doesn't know he's living in a fabricated world. 
Perhaps we live in a world fabricated for efficiency. 
Look at some of your daily habits, and as Truman did in the movie, escape the fabricated world. 
Why? 
Well, if you think that adventure is dangerous, try routine. It's deadly. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Today, I want to talk to you about dreams. 
I have been a lucid dreamer my whole life, and it's cooler than in the movies. 
(Laughter) Beyond flying, breathing fire, and making hot men spontaneously appear... (Laughter) 
I can do things like read and write music. 
Fun fact is that I wrote my personal statement to college in a dream. 
And I did accepted. So, yeah. 
I am a very visual thinker. 
I think in pictures, not words. 
To me, words are more like instincts and language. 
There are many people like me; Nikola Tesla, for example, who could visualize, design, test, and troubleshoot everything — all of his inventions — in his mind, accurately. 
Language is kind of exclusive to our species, anyway. 
I am a bit more primitive, like a beta version of Google Translate. 
(Laughter) My brain has the ability to hyper-focus on things that interest me. 
For example, once I had an affair with calculus that lasted longer than some celebrity marriages. 
(Laughter) There are some other unusual things about me. 
You may have noticed that I don't have much inflection in my voice. 
That's why people often confuse me with a GPS. 
(Laughter) This can make basic communication a challenge, unless you need directions. (Laughter) 
Thank you. 
(Applause) A few years ago, when I started doing presentations, I went to get head shots done for the first time. 
The photographer told me to look flirty. 
(Laughter) And I had no idea what she was talking about. (Laughter) 
She said, "" Do that thing, you know, with your eyes, when you're flirting with guys. "" "" What thing? "" I asked. 
"You know, squint." 
And so I tried, really. 
It looked something like this. 
(Laughter) I looked like I was searching for Waldo. (Laughter) 
There's a reason for this, as there is a reason that Waldo is hiding. (Laughter) 
I have Asperger's, a high-functioning form of autism that impairs the basic social skills one is expected to display. 
It's made life difficult in many ways, and growing up, I struggled to fit in socially. 
My friends would tell jokes, but I didn't understand them. 
My personal heroes were George Carlin and Stephen Colbert — and they taught me humor. 
My personality switched from being shy and awkward to being defiant and cursing out a storm. 
Needless to say, I did not have many friends. 
I was also hypersensitive to texture. 
The feel of water on my skin was like pins and needles, and so for years, I refused to shower. 
I can assure you that my hygiene routine is up to standards now, though. 
(Laughter) I had to do a lot to get here, and my parents — things kind of got out of control when I was sexually assaulted by a peer, and on top of everything, it made a difficult situation worse. 
And I had to travel 2,000 miles across the country to get treatment, but within days of them prescribing a new medication, my life turned into an episode of the Walking Dead. 
I became paranoid, and began to hallucinate that rotting corpses were coming towards me. 
My family finally rescued me, but by that time, I had lost 19 pounds in those three weeks, as well as developing severe anemia, and was on the verge of suicide. 
I transferred to a new treatment center that understood my aversions, my trauma, and my social anxiety, and they knew how to treat it, and I got the help I finally needed. 
And after 18 months of hard work, I went on to do incredible things. 
One of the things with Asperger's is that oftentimes, these people have a very complex inner life, and I know for myself, I have a very colorful personality, rich ideas, and just a lot going on in my mind. 
But there's a gap between where that stands, and how I communicate it with the rest of the world. 
And this can make basic communication a challenge. 
Not many places would hire me, due to my lack of social skills, which is why I applied to Waffle House. 
(Laughter) Waffle House is an exceptional 24-hour diner — (Laughter) (Applause) thank you — where you can order your hash browns the many ways that someone would dispose of a human corpse... (Laughter) 
Sliced, diced, peppered, chunked, topped, capped, and covered. (Laughter) 
As social norms would have it, you should only go to Waffle House at an ungodly hour in the night. (Laughter) 
So one time, at 2 am, I was chatting with a waitress, and I asked her, "What's the most ridiculous thing that's happened to you on the job?" 
And she told me that one time, a man walked in completely naked. 
(Laughter) I said, "" Great! Sign me up for the graveyard shift! "" (Laughter) Needless to say, Waffle House did not hire me. 
So in terms of having Asperger's, it can be viewed as a disadvantage, and sometimes it is a real pain in the butt, but it's also the opposite. 
It's a gift, and it allows me to think innovatively. 
At 19, I won a research competition for my research on coral reefs, and I ended up speaking at the UN Convention of Biological Diversity, presenting this research. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
And at 22, I'm getting ready to graduate college, and I am a co-founder of a biotech company called AutismSees. (Applause) 
Thank you. (Applause) 
But consider what I had to do to get here: 25 therapists, 11 misdiagnoses, and years of pain and trauma. 
I spent a lot of time thinking if there's a better way, and I think there is: autism-assistive technology. 
This technology could play an integral role in helping people with autistic spectrum disorder, or ASD. 
The app Podium, released by my company, AutismSees, has the ability to independently assess and help develop communication skills. 
In addition to this, it tracks eye contact through camera and simulates a public-speaking and job-interview experience. 
And so maybe one day, Waffle House will hire me, after practicing on it some more. 
(Laughter) And one of the great things is that I've used Podium to help me prepare for today, and it's been a great help. 
But it's more than that. 
There's more that can be done. 
For people with ASD — it has been speculated that many innovative scientists, researchers, artists, and engineers have it; like, for example, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Isaac Newton, and Bill Gates are some examples. 
But the problem that's encountered is that these brilliant ideas often can't be shared if there are communication roadblocks. 
And so, many people with autism are being overlooked every day, and they're being taken advantage of. 
So my dream for people with autism is to change that, to remove the roadblocks that prevent them from succeeding. 
One of the reasons I love lucid dreaming is because it allows me to be free, without judgment of social and physical consequences. 
When I'm flying over scenes that I create in my mind, I am at peace. 
I am free from judgment, and so I can do whatever I want, you know? 
I'm making out with Brad Pitt, and Angelina is totally cool with it. 
(Laughter) But the goal of autism-assistive technology is bigger than that, and more important. 
My goal is to shift people's perspective of autism and people with higher-functioning Asperger's because there is a lot they can do. 
I mean, look at Temple Grandin, for example. 
And by doing so, we allow people to share their talents with this world and move this world forward. 
In addition, we give them the courage to pursue their dreams in the real world, in real time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

Hi. 
Let me ask the audience a question: Did you ever lie as a child? 
If you did, could you please raise your hand? 
Wow! This is the most honest group of people I've ever met. 
(Laughter) So for the last 20 years, I've been studying how children learn to tell lies. 
And today, I'm going to share with you some of the discoveries we have made. 
But to begin, I'm going to tell you a story from Mr. Richard Messina, who is my friend and an elementary school principal. 
He got a phone call one day. 
The caller says, "" Mr. Messina, my son Johnny will not come to school today because he's sick. "" Mr. Messina asks, "Who am I speaking to, please?" 
And the caller says, "I am my father." 
(Laughter) So this story — (Laughter) sums up very nicely three common beliefs we have about children and lying. 
One, children only come to tell lies after entering elementary school. 
Two, children are poor liars. 
We adults can easily detect their lies. 
And three, if children lie at a very young age, there must be some character flaws with them, and they are going to become pathological liars for life. 
Well, it turns out all of the three beliefs are wrong. 
We have been playing guessing games with children all over the world. 
Here is an example. 
So in this game, we asked children to guess the numbers on the cards. 
And we tell them if they win the game, they are going to get a big prize. 
But in the middle of the game, we make an excuse and leave the room. 
And before we leave the room, we tell them not to peek at the cards. 
Of course, we have hidden cameras in the room to watch their every move. 
Because the desire to win the game is so strong, more than 90 percent of children will peek as soon as we leave the room. 
(Laughter) The crucial question is: When we return and ask the children whether or not they have peeked, will the children who peeked confess or lie about their transgression? 
We found that regardless of gender, country, religion, at two years of age, 30 percent lie, 70 percent tell the truth about their transgression. 
At three years of age, 50 percent lie and 50 percent tell the truth. 
At four years of age, more than 80 percent lie. 
And after four years of age, most children lie. 
So as you can see, lying is really a typical part of development. 
And some children begin to tell lies as young as two years of age. 
So now, let's take a closer look at the younger children. 
Why do some but not all young children lie? 
In cooking, you need good ingredients to cook good food. 
And good lying requires two key ingredients. 
The first key ingredient is theory of mind, or the mind-reading ability. 
Mind reading is the ability to know that different people have different knowledge about the situation and the ability to differentiate between what I know and what you know. 
Mind reading is important for lying because the basis of lying is that I know you don't know what I know. 
Therefore, I can lie to you. 
The second key ingredient for good lying is self-control. 
It is the ability to control your speech, your facial expression and your body language, so that you can tell a convincing lie. 
And we found that those young children who have more advanced mind-reading and self-control abilities tell lies earlier and are more sophisticated liars. 
As it turns out, these two abilities are also essential for all of us to function well in our society. 
In fact, deficits in mind-reading and self-control abilities are associated with serious developmental problems, such as ADHD and autism. 
So if you discover your two-year-old is telling his or her first lie, instead of being alarmed, you should celebrate — (Laughter) because it signals that your child has arrived at a new milestone of typical development. 
Now, are children poor liars? 
Do you think you can easily detect their lies? 
Would you like to give it a try? 
Yes? OK. 
So I'm going to show you two videos. 
In the videos, the children are going to respond to a researcher's question, "Did you peek?" 
So try to tell me which child is lying and which child is telling the truth. 
Here's child number one. 
Are you ready? 
(Video) Adult: Did you peek? Child: No. 
Kang Lee: And this is child number two. 
(Video) Adult: Did you peek? Child: No. 
KL: OK, if you think child number one is lying, please raise your hand. 
And if you think child number two is lying, please raise your hand. 
OK, so as a matter of fact, child number one is telling the truth, child number two is lying. 
Looks like many of you are terrible detectors of children's lies. 
(Laughter) Now, we have played similar kinds of games with many, many adults from all walks of life. 
And we show them many videos. 
In half of the videos, the children lied. 
In the other half of the videos, the children told the truth. 
And let's find out how these adults performed. 
Because there are as many liars as truth tellers, if you guess randomly, there's a 50 percent chance you're going to get it right. 
So if your accuracy is around 50 percent, it means you are a terrible detector of children's lies. 
So let's start with undergrads and law school students, who typically have limited experience with children. 
No, they cannot detect children's lies. 
Their performance is around chance. 
Now how about social workers and child-protection lawyers, who work with children on a daily basis? 
Can they detect children's lies? 
No, they cannot. 
(Laughter) What about judges, customs officers and police officers, who deal with liars on a daily basis? 
Can they detect children's lies? 
No, they cannot. 
What about parents? 
Can parents detect other children's lies? 
No, they cannot. 
What about, can parents detect their own children's lies? 
No, they cannot. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So now you may ask why children's lies are so difficult to detect. 
Let me illustrate this with my own son, Nathan. 
This is his facial expression when he lies. 
(Laughter) So when children lie, their facial expression is typically neutral. 
However, behind this neutral expression, the child is actually experiencing a lot of emotions, such as fear, guilt, shame and maybe a little bit of liar's delight. 
(Laughter) Unfortunately, such emotions are either fleeting or hidden. 
Therefore, it's mostly invisible to us. 
So in the last five years, we have been trying to figure out a way to reveal these hidden emotions. 
Then we made a discovery. 
We know that underneath our facial skin, there's a rich network of blood vessels. 
When we experience different emotions, our facial blood flow changes subtly. 
And these changes are regulated by the autonomic system that is beyond our conscious control. 
By looking at facial blood flow changes, we can reveal people's hidden emotions. 
Unfortunately, such emotion-related facial blood flow changes are too subtle to detect by our naked eye. 
So to help us reveal people's facial emotions, we have developed a new imaging technology we call "" transdermal optical imaging. "" To do so, we use a regular video camera to record people when they experience various hidden emotions. 
And then, using our image processing technology, we can extract transdermal images of facial blood flow changes. 
By looking at transdermal video images, now we can easily see facial blood flow changes associated with the various hidden emotions. 
And using this technology, we can now reveal the hidden emotions associated with lying, and therefore detect people's lies. 
We can do so noninvasively, remotely, inexpensively, with an accuracy at about 85 percent, which is far better than chance level. 
And in addition, we discovered a Pinocchio effect. 
No, not this Pinocchio effect. 
(Laughter) This is the real Pinocchio effect. 
When people lie, the facial blood flow on the cheeks decreases, and the facial blood flow on the nose increases. 
Of course, lying is not the only situation that will evoke our hidden emotions. 
So then we asked ourselves, in addition to detecting lies, how can our technology be used? 
One application is in education. 
For example, using this technology, we can help this mathematics teacher to identify the student in his classroom who may experience high anxiety about the topic he's teaching so that he can help him. 
And also we can use this in health care. 
For example, every day I Skype my parents, who live thousands of miles away. 
And using this technology, I can not only find out what's going on in their lives but also simultaneously monitor their heart rate, their stress level, their mood and whether or not they are experiencing pain. 
And perhaps in the future, their risks for heart attack or hypertension. 
And you may ask: Can we use this also to reveal politicians' emotions? 
(Laughter) For example, during a debate. 
Well, the answer is yes. 
Using TV footage, we could detect the politicians' heart rate, mood and stress, and perhaps in the future, whether or not they are lying to us. 
We can also use this in marketing research, for example, to find out whether or not people like certain consumer products. 
We can even use it in dating. 
So for example, if your date is smiling at you, this technology can help you to determine whether she actually likes you or she is just trying to be nice to you. 
And in this case, she is just trying to be nice to you. 
(Laughter) So transdermal optical imaging technology is at a very early stage of development. 
Many new applications will come about that we don't know today. 
However, one thing I know for sure is that lying will never be the same again. 
Thank you very much. 
Xiè xie. 
(Applause) 

These rocks have been hitting our earth for about three billion years, and are responsible for much of what ’ s gone on on our planet. 
This is an example of a real meteorite, and you can see all the melting of the iron from the speed and the heat when a meteorite hits the earth, and just how much of it survives and melts. 
From a meteorite from space, we ’ re over here with an original Sputnik. 
This is one of the seven surviving Sputniks that was not launched into space. 
This is not a copy. 
The space age began 50 years ago in October, and that ’ s exactly what Sputnik looked like. 
And it wouldn ’ t be fun to talk about the space age without seeing a flag that was carried to the moon and back, on Apollo 11. 
The astronauts each got to carry about ten silk flags in their personal kits. 
They would bring them back and mount them. 
So this has actually been carried to the moon and back. 
So that ’ s for fun. 
The dawn of books is, of course, important. 
And it wouldn ’ t be interesting to talk about the dawn of books without having a copy of a Guttenberg Bible. 
You can see how portable and handy it was to have your own Guttenberg in 1455. 
But what ’ s interesting about the Guttenberg Bible, and the dawn of this technology, is not the book. 
You see, the book was not driven by reading. 
In 1455, nobody could read. 
So why did the printing press succeed? 
This is an original page of a Guttenberg Bible. 
So you ’ re looking here at one of the first printed books using movable type in the history of man, 550 years ago. 
We are living at the age here at the end of the book, where electronic paper will undoubtedly replace it. 
But why is this so interesting? Here ’ s the quick story. 
It turns out that in the 1450s, the Catholic Church needed money, and so they actually hand-wrote these things called indulgences, which were forgiveness ’ s on pieces of paper. 
They traveled all around Europe and sold by the hundreds or by the thousands. 
They got you out of purgatory faster. 
And when the printing press was invented what they found was they could print indulgences, which was the equivalent of printing money. 
And so all of Western Europe started buying printing presses in 1455 — to print out thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and then ultimately millions of single, small pieces of paper that got you out of middle hell and into heaven. 
That is why the printing press succeeded, and that is why Martin Luther nailed his 90 theses to the door: because he was complaining that the Catholic Church had gone amok in printing out indulgences and selling them in every town and village and city in all of Western Europe. 
So the printing press, ladies and gentlemen, was driven entirely by the printing of forgivenesses and had nothing to do with reading. 
More tomorrow. I also have pictures coming of the library for those of you that have asked for pictures. 
We ’ re going to have some tomorrow. 
(Applause) Instead of showing an object from the stage I ’ m going to do something special for the first time. 
We are going to show, actually, what the library looks like, OK? 
So, I am married to the most wonderful woman in the world. 
You ’ re going to find out why in a minute, because when I went to see Eileen, this is what I said I wanted to build. 
This is the Library of Human Imagination. 
The room itself is three stories tall. 
In the glass panels are 5,000 years of human imagination that are computer controlled. 
The room is a theatre. It changes colors. 
And all throughout the library are different objects, different spaces. 
It ’ s designed like an Escher print. 
Here is some of the lower level of the library, where the exhibits constantly change. 
You can walk through. You can touch. 
You can see exactly how many of these types of items would fit in a room. 
There ’ s my very own Saturn V. 
Everybody should have one, OK? (Laughter) So you can see here in the lower level of the library the books and the objects. 
In the glass panels all along is sort of the history of imagination. 
There is a glass bridge that you walk across that ’ s suspended in space. 
So it ’ s a leap of imagination. 
How do we create? 
Part of the question that I have answered is, is we create by surrounding ourselves with stimuli: with human achievement, with history, with the things that drive us and make us human — the passionate discovery, the bones of dinosaurs long gone, the maps of space that we ’ ve experienced, and ultimately the hallways that stimulate our mind and our imagination. 
So hopefully tomorrow I ’ ll show one or two more objects from the stage, but for today I just wanted to say thank you for all the people that came and talked to us about it. 
And Eileen and I are thrilled to open our home and share it with the TED community. 
(Applause) TED is all about patterns in the clouds. 
It ’ s all about connections. 
It ’ s all about seeing things that everybody else has seen before but thinking about them in ways that nobody has thought of them before. 
And that ’ s really what discovery and imagination is all about. 
For example, we can look at a DNA molecule model here. 
None of us really have ever seen one, but we know it exists because we ’ ve been taught to understand this molecule. 
But we can also look at an Enigma machine from the Nazis in World War II that was a coding and decoding machine. 
Now, you might say, what does this have to do with this? 
Well, this is the code for life, and this is a code for death. 
These two molecules code and decode. 
And yet, looking at them, you would see a machine and a molecule. 
But once you ’ ve seen them in a new way, you realize that both of these things really are connected. 
And they ’ re connected primarily because of this here. 
You see, this is a human brain model, OK? 
And it ’ s rare, because we never really get to see a brain. 
We get to see a skull. But there it is. 
All of imagination — everything that we think, we feel, we sense — comes through the human brain. 
And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape. 
And I ’ ll give you a quick example. 
We think about the Internet; we think about information that goes across the Internet. 
And we never think about the hidden connection. 
But I brought along here a lump of coal — right here, one lump of coal. 
And what does a lump of coal have to do with the Internet? 
You see, it takes the energy in one lump of coal to move one megabyte of information across the net. 
So every time you download a file, each megabyte is a lump of coal. 
What that means is, a 200-megabyte file looks like this, ladies and gentlemen. OK? 
So the next time you download a gigabyte, or two gigabytes, it ’ s not for free, OK? 
The connection is the energy it takes to run the web, and to make everything we think possible, possible. 
Thanks, Chris. 
(Applause) 

I'm turning 44 next month, and I have the sense that 44 is going to be a very good year, a year of fulfillment, realization. 
I have that sense, not because of anything particular in store for me, but because I read it would be a good year in a 1968 book by Norman Mailer. 
"He felt his own age, forty-four..." 
wrote Mailer in "" The Armies of the Night, "" ""... felt as if he were a solid embodiment of bone, muscle, heart, mind, and sentiment to be a man, as if he had arrived. "" Yes, I know Mailer wasn't writing about me. 
But I also know that he was; for all of us — you, me, the subject of his book, age more or less in step, proceed from birth along the same great sequence: through the wonders and confinements of childhood; the emancipations and frustrations of adolescence; the empowerments and millstones of adulthood; the recognitions and resignations of old age. 
There are patterns to life, and they are shared. 
As Thomas Mann wrote: "" It will happen to me as to them. "" We don't simply live these patterns. 
We record them, too. 
We write them down in books, where they become narratives that we can then read and recognize. 
Books tell us who we've been, who we are, who we will be, too. 
So they have for millennia. 
As James Salter wrote, "Life passes into pages if it passes into anything." 
And so six years ago, a thought leapt to mind: if life passed into pages, there were, somewhere, passages written about every age. 
If I could find them, I could assemble them into a narrative. 
I could assemble them into a life, a long life, a hundred-year life, the entirety of that same great sequence through which the luckiest among us pass. 
I was then 37 years old, "" an age of discretion, "" wrote William Trevor. 
I was prone to meditating on time and age. 
An illness in the family and later an injury to me had long made clear that growing old could not be assumed. 
And besides, growing old only postponed the inevitable, time seeing through what circumstance did not. 
It was all a bit disheartening. 
A list, though, would last. 
To chronicle a life year by vulnerable year would be to clasp and to ground what was fleeting, would be to provide myself and others a glimpse into the future, whether we made it there or not. 
And when I then began to compile my list, I was quickly obsessed, searching pages and pages for ages and ages. 
Here we were at every annual step through our first hundred years. 
"Twenty-seven... a time of sudden revelations," "sixty-two,... of subtle diminishments." 
I was mindful, of course, that such insights were relative. 
For starters, we now live longer, and so age more slowly. 
Christopher Isherwood used the phrase "" the yellow leaf "" to describe a man at 53, only one century after Lord Byron used it to describe himself at 36. 
(Laughter) I was mindful, too, that life can swing wildly and unpredictably from one year to the next, and that people may experience the same age differently. 
But even so, as the list coalesced, so, too, on the page, clear as the reflection in the mirror, did the life that I had been living: finding at 20 that ""... one is less and less sure of who one is; "" emerging at 30 from the ""... wasteland of preparation into active life; "" learning at 40 ""... to close softly the doors to rooms [I would] not be coming back to. "" There I was. 
Of course, there we all are. 
Milton Glaser, the great graphic designer whose beautiful visualizations you see here, and who today is 85 — all those years ""... a ripening and an apotheosis, "" wrote Nabokov — noted to me that, like art and like color, literature helps us to remember what we've experienced. 
And indeed, when I shared the list with my grandfather, he nodded in recognition. 
He was then 95 and soon to die, which, wrote Roberto Bolaño, "... is the same as never dying." 
And looking back, he said to me that, yes, Proust was right that at 22, we are sure we will not die, just as a thanatologist named Edwin Shneidman was right that at 90, we are sure we will. 
It had happened to him, as to them. 
Now the list is done: a hundred years. 
And looking back over it, I know that I am not done. 
I still have my life to live, still have many more pages to pass into. 
And mindful of Mailer, I await 44. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What I thought I would do is I would start with a simple request. 
I'd like all of you to pause for a moment, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence. 
(Laughter) Now that was the advice that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers in the fifth century. 
It was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40. 
Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior — I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I was working too hard and I was neglecting the family. 
And I decided that I would try and turn my life around. 
In particular, I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance. 
So I stepped back from the workforce, and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children. 
But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn't have any work. 
(Laughter) Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out. 
So I went back to work, and I've spent these seven years since struggling with, studying and writing about work-life balance. 
And I have four observations I'd like to share with you today. 
The first is: if society's to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. 
But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance. 
All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. 
Now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in. 
And the reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like. 
(Laughter) (Applause) It's my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and [a] T-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue. (Laughter) 
The second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us. 
We should stop looking outside. 
It's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead. 
If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance. 
It's particularly important — this isn't on the World Wide Web, is it? I'm about to get fired — it's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation. 
Now I'm not talking here just about the bad companies — the "" abattoirs of the human soul, "" as I call them. 
(Laughter) I'm talking about all companies. 
Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you [as] they can get away with. 
It's in their nature; it's in their DNA; it's what they do — even the good, well-intentioned companies. 
On the one hand, putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened. 
On the other hand, it's a nightmare — it just means you spend more time at the bloody office. 
We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life. 
The third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance. 
Before I went back to work after my year at home, I sat down and I wrote out a detailed, step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to. 
And it went like this: wake up well rested after a good night's sleep. 
Have sex. 
Walk the dog. 
Have breakfast with my wife and children. 
Have sex again. 
(Laughter) Drive the kids to school on the way to the office. 
Do three hours' work. 
Play a sport with a friend at lunchtime. 
Do another three hours' work. 
Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink. 
Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids. 
Meditate for half an hour. 
Have sex. 
Walk the dog. Have sex again. 
Go to bed. 
(Applause) How often do you think I have that day? 
(Laughter) We need to be realistic. 
You can't do it all in one day. 
We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the "" I'll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I've got no mates or interests left. "" (Laughter) A day is too short; "" after I retire "" is too long. 
There's got to be a middle way. 
A fourth observation: We need to approach balance in a balanced way. 
A friend came to see me last year — and she doesn't mind me telling this story — a friend came to see me last year and said, "" Nigel, I've read your book. 
And I realize that my life is completely out of balance. 
It's totally dominated by work. 
I work 10 hours a day; I commute two hours a day. 
All of my relationships have failed. 
There's nothing in my life apart from my work. 
So I've decided to get a grip and sort it out. 
So I joined a gym. "" (Laughter) Now I don't mean to mock, but being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat isn't more balanced; it's more fit. (Laughter) 
Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life — there's the intellectual side; there's the emotional side; there's the spiritual side. 
And to be balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas — not just do 50 stomach crunches. 
Now that can be daunting. 
Because people say, "" Bloody hell mate, I haven't got time to get fit. 
You want me to go to church and call my mother. "" And I understand. 
I truly understand how that can be daunting. 
But an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective. 
My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today, called me up at the office and said, "" Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son "" — Harry — "" up from school. "" Because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening. 
So I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school gates. 
We walked down to the local park, messed around on the swings, played some silly games. 
I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe, and we shared a pizza for two, then walked down the hill to our home, and I gave him his bath and put him in his Batman pajamas. 
I then read him a chapter of Roald Dahl's "" James and the Giant Peach. "" I then put him to bed, tucked him in, gave him a kiss on his forehead and said, "" Goodnight, mate, "" and walked out of his bedroom. 
As I was walking out of his bedroom, he said, "" Dad? "" I went, "" Yes, mate? "" He went, "" Dad, this has been the best day of my life, ever. "" I hadn't done anything, hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation. 
Now my point is the small things matter. 
Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life. 
With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. 
Moreover, I think, it can transform society. 
Because if enough people do it, we can change society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like. 
And that, I think, is an idea worth spreading. 
(Applause) 

Thank you very much. 
Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles — (Laughter) thinking we were moving to America, but anyway — (Laughter) It's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America. (Laughter) 
I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "" Americans don't get irony. "" (Laughter) Have you come across this idea? 
(Laughter) But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation, "" No Child Left Behind. "" (Laughter) Because whoever thought of that title gets irony. (Laughter) 
Don't they? 
(Applause) Because it's leaving millions of children behind. 
In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. 
If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a trillion dollars. 
But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. 
What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it. 
And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. 
There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure. 
How about two children or more? Right. 
Aren't they? 
(Applause) You would never confuse them, would you? 
Like, "" Which one are you? Remind me. "" (Laughter) "" Your mother and I need some color-coding system so we don't get confused. "" Education under "" No Child Left Behind "" is based on not diversity but conformity. 
An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you — (Applause) One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. 
ADHD. 
If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. 
(Laughter) And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. 
I went through the whole thing. 
They're important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched. 
The second, thank you — (Applause) The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. 
If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. 
Children are natural learners. 
Now the reason I say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-professionalize teachers. 
There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. 
The whole point of education is to get people to learn. 
(Laughter) That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid. (Laughter) 
He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. 
You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. 
(Laughter) It's a very good example. 
You can say, "" There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's teaching. "" But if nobody's learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it. 
The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. 
That's it. 
And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. 
(Applause) If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. 
(Laughter) "Is that good?" "We don't know." (Laughter) 
So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. 
Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. 
And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. 
And your dog may get depressed. 
"Would you like to come for a walk?" 
"No, I'm fine." 
(Laughter) "You go. I'll wait. But take pictures." (Laughter) 
It really doesn't. 
Now, we only know that's what they do well at, because that's all that's being tested. 
If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and we help and support them. "" Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America." 
(Laughter) Really. Really. 
I was asked to lock up when I left. 
(Laughter) But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America — I mean, as a whole. 
They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity. 
It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. 
And the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done. 
Central or state governments decide, they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. 
It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. 
And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. 
It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. 
The point is that education is not a mechanical system. 
It's a human system. 
It's about people, people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn. 
Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. 
They may find it boring. 
They may find it irrelevant. 
I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of — they're called alternative education programs. 
They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school. 
What's interesting to me is, these are called "" alternative education. "" (Laughter) You know? 
And all the evidence from around the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no need for the alternative. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) So I think we have to embrace a different metaphor. 
We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. 
We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. 
Culture is an organic term, isn't it? 
Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there. 
Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain. 
In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. 
Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. 
And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. 
The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. 
What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead. 
It's dormant. 
Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. 
The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. 
And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected. 
There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin. 
"" There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen. "" And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. 
And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. 
And that's what we need. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 

Anyone in the room thought about sex today? 
(Laughter) Yeah, you did. 
Thank you for putting your hand up over there. 
Well, I'm here to provide you with some biological validation for your sordid daydreams. 
I'm here to tell you a few things that you might not have known about wild sex. 
Now, when humans think about sex, male and female forms are generally what come to mind, but for many millions of years, such specific categories didn't even exist. 
Sex was a mere fusion of bodies or a trickle of DNA shared between two or more beings. 
It wasn't until about 500 million years ago that we start to see structures akin to a penis or a thing that gives DNA out, and a vagina, something that receives it. 
Now invariably, you're probably thinking about what belongs to our own species, these very familiar structures, but the diversity that we see in sexual structures in the animal kingdom that has evolved in response to the multitude of factors surrounding reproduction is pretty mind-blowing. 
Penile diversity is especially profuse. 
So this is a paper nautilus. 
It's a close relative of squid and octopus, and males have a hectocotylus. 
Just what is a hectocotylus? 
A detachable, swimming penis. 
It leaves the [body of the male], finds the female through pheromonal cues in the water, attaches itself to her body and deposits the sperm. 
Now, the tapir is a mammal from South America. 
And the tapir has a prehensile penis. 
It actually has a level of dexterity in its penis much akin to what we have with our hands. 
And it uses this dexterity to bypass the vagina altogether and deposit sperm directly into the female's uterus, not to mention it's a pretty good size. 
The biggest penis in the animal kingdom, however, is not that of the tapir. 
The biggest penis-to-body-size ratio in the animal kingdom actually belongs to the meager beach barnacle, and this video is actually showing you what the human penis would look like if it were the same size as that of a barnacle. 
(Laughter) Mm-hm. (Laughter) So with all of this diversity in structure, one might think, then, that penises are fitting neatly into vaginas all over the place for the purposes of successful reproduction. 
Simply insert part A into slot B, and we should all be good to go. 
But of course, that doesn't exactly happen, and that's because we can't just take form into account. 
We have to think about function as well, and when it comes to sex, function relates to the contributions made by the gametes, or the sperm and the eggs. 
And these contributions are far from equal. 
Eggs are very expensive to make, so it makes sense for females to be very choosy about who she shares them with. 
Sperm, on the other hand, is abundant and cheap, so it makes more sense for males to have a more-sex-is-better strategy when it comes to siring members of future generations. 
So how do animals cope with these very incongruent needs between the sexes? 
I mean, if a female doesn't choose a particular male, or if she has the ability to store sperm and she simply has enough, then it makes more sense for her to spend her time doing other biologically relevant things: avoiding predators, taking care of offspring, gathering and ingesting food. 
This is, of course, bad news for any male who has yet to make a deposit in her sperm bank, and this sets the scene for some pretty drastic strategies for successful fertilization. 
This is bedbug sex, and it's aptly termed traumatic insemination. 
Males have a spiked, barbed penis that they literally stab into the female, and they don't stab it anywhere near her vagina. 
They stab it anywhere in her body, and the sperm simply migrates through her hemolymph to her ovaries. 
If a female gets too many stab wounds, or if a stab wound happens to become infected, she can actually die from it. 
Now if you've ever been out for a nice, peaceful walk by the lake and happened to see some ducks having sex, you've undoubtedly been alarmed, because it looks like gang rape. 
And quite frankly, that's exactly what it is. 
A group of males will grab a female, hold her down, and ballistically ejaculate their spiral-shaped penis into her corkscrew-shaped vagina over and over and over again. 
From flaccid to ejaculation in less than a second. 
Now the female actually gets the last laugh, though, because she can actually manipulate her posture so as to allow the sperm of certain suitors better access to her ovaries. 
Now, I like to share stories like this with my audiences because, yeah, we humans, we tend to think sex, sex is fun, sex is good, there's romance, and there's orgasm. 
But orgasm didn't actually evolve until about 65 million years ago with the advent of mammals. 
But some animals had it going on quite a bit before that. 
There are some more primitive ways of pleasing one's partner. 
Earwig males have either really large penile appendages or really small ones. 
It's a very simple genetically inherited trait and the males are not otherwise any different. 
Those that have long penile appendages are not bigger or stronger or otherwise any different at all. 
So going back to our biological minds, then, we might think that females should choose to have sex with the guys that have the shorter appendages, because she can use her time for other things: avoiding predators, taking care of young, finding and ingesting food. 
But biologists have repeatedly observed that females choose to have sex with the males that have the long appendages. 
Why do they do this? 
Well, according to the biological literature, "" During copulation, the genitalia of certain males may elicit more favorable female responses through superior mechanical or stimulatory interaction with the female reproductive tract. "" Mm-hm. 
These are Mexican guppies, and what you see on their upper maxilla is an outgrowth of epidermal filaments, and these filaments basically form a fish mustache, if you will. 
Now males have been observed to prod the female's genital opening prior to copulating with her, and in what I have lovingly termed the Magnum, P.I. hypothesis, females are overwhelmingly more likely to be found with males that have these fish mustaches. 
A little guppy porn for you right there. 
So we've seen very different strategies that males are using when it comes to winning a female partner. 
We've seen a coercion strategy in which sexual structures are used in a forceful way to basically make a female have sex. 
We've also seen a titillation strategy where males are actually pleasing their female partners into choosing them as a sex partner. 
Now unfortunately, in the animal kingdom, it's the coercion strategy that we see time and time again. 
It's very common in many phyla, from invertebrates to avian species, mammals, and, of course, even in primates. 
Now interestingly, there are a few mammalian species in which females have evolved specialized genitalia that doesn't allow for sexual coercion to take place. 
Female elephants and female hyenas have a penile clitoris, or an enlarged clitoral tissue that hangs externally, much like a penis, and in fact it's very difficult to sex these animals by merely looking at their external morphology. 
So before a male can insert his penis into a female's vagina, she has to take this penile clitoris and basically inside-out it in her own body. 
I mean, imagine putting a penis into another penis. 
It's simply not going to happen unless the female is on board with the action. 
Now, even more interesting is the fact that elephant and hyena societies are entirely matriarchal: they're run by females, groups of females, sisters, aunts and offspring, and when young males attain sexual maturity, they're turfed out of the group. 
In hyena societies, adult males are actually the lowest on the social scale. 
They can take part in a kill only after everybody else, including the offspring. 
So it seems that when you take the penis power away from a male, you take away all the social power he has. 
So what are my take-home messages from my talk today? 
The sexual strategies and reproductive structures that we see in the animal kingdom basically dictate how males and females will react to each other, which then dictates how populations and societies form and evolve. 
So it may not be surprising to any of you that animals, including ourselves, spend a good amount of time thinking about sex, but what might surprise you is the extent to which so many other aspects of their lives and our lives are influenced by it. 
So thank you, and happy daydreaming. 

Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives, from our health and how we learn, to how we do business and make decisions, big ones and small. 
Our emotions also influence how we connect with one another. 
We've evolved to live in a world like this, but instead, we're living more and more of our lives like this — this is the text message from my daughter last night — in a world that's devoid of emotion. 
So I'm on a mission to change that. 
I want to bring emotions back into our digital experiences. 
I started on this path 15 years ago. 
I was a computer scientist in Egypt, and I had just gotten accepted to a Ph.D. program at Cambridge University. 
So I did something quite unusual for a young newlywed Muslim Egyptian wife: With the support of my husband, who had to stay in Egypt, I packed my bags and I moved to England. 
At Cambridge, thousands of miles away from home, I realized I was spending more hours with my laptop than I did with any other human. 
Yet despite this intimacy, my laptop had absolutely no idea how I was feeling. 
It had no idea if I was happy, having a bad day, or stressed, confused, and so that got frustrating. 
Even worse, as I communicated online with my family back home, I felt that all my emotions disappeared in cyberspace. 
I was homesick, I was lonely, and on some days I was actually crying, but all I had to communicate these emotions was this. 
(Laughter) Today's technology has lots of I.Q., but no E.Q.; lots of cognitive intelligence, but no emotional intelligence. 
So that got me thinking, what if our technology could sense our emotions? 
What if our devices could sense how we felt and reacted accordingly, just the way an emotionally intelligent friend would? 
Those questions led me and my team to create technologies that can read and respond to our emotions, and our starting point was the human face. 
So our human face happens to be one of the most powerful channels that we all use to communicate social and emotional states, everything from enjoyment, surprise, empathy and curiosity. 
In emotion science, we call each facial muscle movement an action unit. 
So for example, action unit 12, it's not a Hollywood blockbuster, it is actually a lip corner pull, which is the main component of a smile. 
Try it everybody. Let's get some smiles going on. 
Another example is action unit 4. It's the brow furrow. 
It's when you draw your eyebrows together and you create all these textures and wrinkles. 
We don't like them, but it's a strong indicator of a negative emotion. 
So we have about 45 of these action units, and they combine to express hundreds of emotions. 
Teaching a computer to read these facial emotions is hard, because these action units, they can be fast, they're subtle, and they combine in many different ways. 
So take, for example, the smile and the smirk. 
They look somewhat similar, but they mean very different things. 
(Laughter) So the smile is positive, a smirk is often negative. 
Sometimes a smirk can make you become famous. 
But seriously, it's important for a computer to be able to tell the difference between the two expressions. 
So how do we do that? 
We give our algorithms tens of thousands of examples of people we know to be smiling, from different ethnicities, ages, genders, and we do the same for smirks. 
And then, using deep learning, the algorithm looks for all these textures and wrinkles and shape changes on our face, and basically learns that all smiles have common characteristics, all smirks have subtly different characteristics. 
And the next time it sees a new face, it essentially learns that this face has the same characteristics of a smile, and it says, "" Aha, I recognize this. This is a smile expression. "" So the best way to demonstrate how this technology works is to try a live demo, so I need a volunteer, preferably somebody with a face. 
(Laughter) Cloe's going to be our volunteer today. 
So over the past five years, we've moved from being a research project at MIT to a company, where my team has worked really hard to make this technology work, as we like to say, in the wild. 
And we've also shrunk it so that the core emotion engine works on any mobile device with a camera, like this iPad. 
So let's give this a try. 
As you can see, the algorithm has essentially found Cloe's face, so it's this white bounding box, and it's tracking the main feature points on her face, so her eyebrows, her eyes, her mouth and her nose. 
The question is, can it recognize her expression? 
So we're going to test the machine. 
So first of all, give me your poker face. Yep, awesome. (Laughter) And then as she smiles, this is a genuine smile, it's great. 
So you can see the green bar go up as she smiles. 
Now that was a big smile. 
Can you try a subtle smile to see if the computer can recognize? 
It does recognize subtle smiles as well. 
We've worked really hard to make that happen. 
And then eyebrow raised, indicator of surprise. 
Brow furrow, which is an indicator of confusion. 
Frown. Yes, perfect. 
So these are all the different action units. There's many more of them. 
This is just a slimmed-down demo. 
But we call each reading an emotion data point, and then they can fire together to portray different emotions. 
So on the right side of the demo — look like you're happy. 
So that's joy. Joy fires up. 
And then give me a disgust face. 
Try to remember what it was like when Zayn left One Direction. 
(Laughter) Yeah, wrinkle your nose. Awesome. 
And the valence is actually quite negative, so you must have been a big fan. 
So valence is how positive or negative an experience is, and engagement is how expressive she is as well. 
So imagine if Cloe had access to this real-time emotion stream, and she could share it with anybody she wanted to. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) So, so far, we have amassed 12 billion of these emotion data points. 
It's the largest emotion database in the world. 
We've collected it from 2.9 million face videos, people who have agreed to share their emotions with us, and from 75 countries around the world. 
It's growing every day. 
It blows my mind away that we can now quantify something as personal as our emotions, and we can do it at this scale. 
So what have we learned to date? 
Gender. 
Our data confirms something that you might suspect. 
Women are more expressive than men. 
Not only do they smile more, their smiles last longer, and we can now really quantify what it is that men and women respond to differently. 
Let's do culture: So in the United States, women are 40 percent more expressive than men, but curiously, we don't see any difference in the U.K. between men and women. 
(Laughter) Age: People who are 50 years and older are 25 percent more emotive than younger people. 
Women in their 20s smile a lot more than men the same age, perhaps a necessity for dating. 
But perhaps what surprised us the most about this data is that we happen to be expressive all the time, even when we are sitting in front of our devices alone, and it's not just when we're watching cat videos on Facebook. 
We are expressive when we're emailing, texting, shopping online, or even doing our taxes. 
Where is this data used today? 
In understanding how we engage with media, so understanding virality and voting behavior; and also empowering or emotion-enabling technology, and I want to share some examples that are especially close to my heart. 
Emotion-enabled wearable glasses can help individuals who are visually impaired read the faces of others, and it can help individuals on the autism spectrum interpret emotion, something that they really struggle with. 
In education, imagine if your learning apps sense that you're confused and slow down, or that you're bored, so it's sped up, just like a great teacher would in a classroom. 
What if your wristwatch tracked your mood, or your car sensed that you're tired, or perhaps your fridge knows that you're stressed, so it auto-locks to prevent you from binge eating. (Laughter) I would like that, yeah. 
What if, when I was in Cambridge, I had access to my real-time emotion stream, and I could share that with my family back home in a very natural way, just like I would've if we were all in the same room together? 
I think five years down the line, all our devices are going to have an emotion chip, and we won't remember what it was like when we couldn't just frown at our device and our device would say, "" Hmm, you didn't like that, did you? "" Our biggest challenge is that there are so many applications of this technology, my team and I realize that we can't build them all ourselves, so we've made this technology available so that other developers can get building and get creative. 
We recognize that there are potential risks and potential for abuse, but personally, having spent many years doing this, I believe that the benefits to humanity from having emotionally intelligent technology far outweigh the potential for misuse. 
And I invite you all to be part of the conversation. 
The more people who know about this technology, the more we can all have a voice in how it's being used. 
So as more and more of our lives become digital, we are fighting a losing battle trying to curb our usage of devices in order to reclaim our emotions. 
So what I'm trying to do instead is to bring emotions into our technology and make our technologies more responsive. 
So I want those devices that have separated us to bring us back together. 
And by humanizing technology, we have this golden opportunity to reimagine how we connect with machines, and therefore, how we, as human beings, connect with one another. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Reason appears to have fallen on hard times: Popular culture plumbs new depths of dumbth and political discourse has become a race to the bottom. 
We're living in an era of scientific creationism, 9 / 11 conspiracy theories, psychic hotlines, and a resurgence of religious fundamentalism. 
People who think too well are often accused of elitism, and even in the academy, there are attacks on logocentrism, the crime of letting logic dominate our thinking. 
Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. 
And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? 
In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. 
Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. 
My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact. 
RNG: How could a reasoned argument logically entail the ineffectiveness of reasoned arguments? 
Look, you're trying to persuade us of reason's impotence. 
You're not threatening us or bribing us, suggesting that we resolve the issue with a show of hands or a beauty contest. 
By the very act of trying to reason us into your position, you're conceding reason's potency. 
Reason isn't up for grabs here. It can't be. 
You show up for that debate and you've already lost it. 
SP: But can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? 
After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. 
Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. 
Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste? 
RNG: All on its own, the answer is no, but it doesn't take much to switch it to yes. 
You need two conditions: The first is that reasoners all care about their own well-being. 
That's one of the passions that has to be present in order for reason to go to work, and it's obviously present in all of us. 
We all care passionately about our own well-being. 
The second condition is that reasoners are members of a community of reasoners who can affect one another's well-being, can exchange messages, and comprehend each other's reasoning. 
And that's certainly true of our gregarious and loquatious species, well endowed with the instinct for language. 
SP: Well, that sounds good in theory, but has it worked that way in practice? 
In particular, can it explain a momentous historical development that I spoke about five years ago here at TED? 
Namely, we seem to be getting more humane. 
Centuries ago, our ancestors would burn cats alive as a form of popular entertainment. 
Knights waged constant war on each other by trying to kill as many of each other's peasants as possible. 
Governments executed people for frivolous reasons, like stealing a cabbage or criticizing the royal garden. 
The executions were designed to be as prolonged and as painful as possible, like crucifixion, disembowelment, breaking on the wheel. 
Respectable people kept slaves. 
For all our flaws, we have abandoned these barbaric practices. 
RNG: So, do you think it's human nature that's changed? 
SP: Not exactly. I think we still harbor instincts that can erupt in violence, like greed, tribalism, revenge, dominance, sadism. 
But we also have instincts that can steer us away, like self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. 
RNG: So if human nature didn't change, what invigorated those better angels? 
SP: Well, among other things, our circle of empathy expanded. 
Years ago, our ancestors would feel the pain only of their family and people in their village. 
But with the expansion of literacy and travel, people started to sympathize with wider and wider circles, the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race, and perhaps eventually, all of humanity. 
RNG: Can hard-headed scientists really give so much credit to soft-hearted empathy? 
SP: They can and do. 
Neurophysiologists have found neurons in the brain that respond to other people's actions the same way they respond to our own. 
Empathy emerges early in life, perhaps before the age of one. 
Books on empathy have become bestsellers, like "" The Empathic Civilization "" and "" The Age of Empathy. "" RNG: I'm all for empathy. I mean, who isn't? 
But all on its own, it's a feeble instrument for making moral progress. 
For one thing, it's innately biased toward blood relations, babies and warm, fuzzy animals. 
As far as empathy is concerned, ugly outsiders can go to hell. 
And even our best attempts to work up sympathy for those who are unconnected with us fall miserably short, a sad truth about human nature that was pointed out by Adam Smith. 
Adam Smith: Let us suppose that the great empire of China was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe would react on receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. 
He would, I imagine, first of all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people. 
He would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure with the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened. 
If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight, but provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren. 
SP: But if empathy wasn't enough to make us more humane, what else was there? 
RNG: Well, you didn't mention what might be one of our most effective better angels: reason. 
Reason has muscle. 
It's reason that provides the push to widen that circle of empathy. 
Every one of the humanitarian developments that you mentioned originated with thinkers who gave reasons for why some practice was indefensible. 
They demonstrated that the way people treated some particular group of others was logically inconsistent with the way they insisted on being treated themselves. 
SP: Are you saying that reason can actually change people's minds? 
Don't people just stick with whatever conviction serves their interests or conforms to the culture that they grew up in? 
RNG: Here's a fascinating fact about us: Contradictions bother us, at least when we're forced to confront them, which is just another way of saying that we are susceptible to reason. 
And if you look at the history of moral progress, you can trace a direct pathway from reasoned arguments to changes in the way that we actually feel. 
Time and again, a thinker would lay out an argument as to why some practice was indefensible, irrational, inconsistent with values already held. 
Their essay would go viral, get translated into many languages, get debated at pubs and coffee houses and salons, and at dinner parties, and influence leaders, legislators, popular opinion. 
Eventually their conclusions get absorbed into the common sense of decency, erasing the tracks of the original argument that had gotten us there. 
Few of us today feel any need to put forth a rigorous philosophical argument as to why slavery is wrong or public hangings or beating children. 
By now, these things just feel wrong. 
But just those arguments had to be made, and they were, in centuries past. 
SP: Are you saying that people needed a step-by-step argument to grasp why something might be a wee bit wrong with burning heretics at the stake? 
RNG: Oh, they did. Here's the French theologian Sebastian Castellio making the case. 
Sebastian Castellio: Calvin says that he's certain, and other sects say that they are. 
Who shall be judge? 
If the matter is certain, to whom is it so? To Calvin? 
But then, why does he write so many books about manifest truth? 
In view of the uncertainty, we must define heretics simply as one with whom we disagree. 
And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will be a war of extermination, since each is sure of himself. 
SP: Or with hideous punishments like breaking on the wheel? 
RNG: The prohibition in our constitution of cruel and unusual punishments was a response to a pamphlet circulated in 1764 by the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria. 
Cesare Beccaria: As punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, which like fluids always adjust to the level of the objects that surround them, become hardened, and after a hundred years of cruel punishments, breaking on the wheel causes no more fear than imprisonment previously did. 
For a punishment to achieve its objective, it is only necessary that the harm that it inflicts outweighs the benefit that derives from the crime, and into this calculation ought to be factored the certainty of punishment and the loss of the good that the commission of the crime will produce. 
Everything beyond this is superfluous, and therefore tyrannical. 
SP: But surely antiwar movements depended on mass demonstrations and catchy tunes by folk singers and wrenching photographs of the human costs of war. 
RNG: No doubt, but modern anti-war movements reach back to a long chain of thinkers who had argued as to why we ought to mobilize our emotions against war, such as the father of modernity, Erasmus. 
Erasmus: The advantages derived from peace diffuse themselves far and wide, and reach great numbers, while in war, if anything turns out happily, the advantage redounds only to a few, and those unworthy of reaping it. 
One man's safety is owing to the destruction of another. 
One man's prize is derived from the plunder of another. 
The cause of rejoicings made by one side is to the other a cause of mourning. 
Whatever is unfortunate in war, is severely so indeed, and whatever, on the contrary, is called good fortune, is a savage and a cruel good fortune, an ungenerous happiness deriving its existence from another's woe. 
SP: But everyone knows that the movement to abolish slavery depended on faith and emotion. 
It was a movement spearheaded by the Quakers, and it only became popular when Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel "" Uncle Tom's Cabin "" became a bestseller. 
RNG: But the ball got rolling a century before. 
John Locke bucked the tide of millennia that had regarded the practice as perfectly natural. 
He argued that it was inconsistent with the principles of rational government. 
John Locke: Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by common to everyone of that society and made by the legislative power erected in it, a liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature. 
SP: Those words sound familiar. 
Where have I read them before? Ah, yes. 
Mary Astell: If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a state, how comes it to be so in a family? 
Since no reason can be alleged for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other, if all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves, as they must be if being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of men be the perfect condition of slavery? 
RNG: That sort of co-option is all in the job description of reason. 
One movement for the expansion of rights inspires another because the logic is the same, and once that's hammered home, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable to ignore the inconsistency. 
In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement inspired the movements for women's rights, children's rights, gay rights and even animal rights. 
But fully two centuries before, the Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham had exposed the indefensibility of customary practices such as the cruelty to animals. 
Jeremy Bentham: The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer? 
RNG: And the persecution of homosexuals. 
JB: As to any primary mischief, it's evident that it produces no pain in anyone. 
On the contrary, it produces pleasure. 
The partners are both willing. 
If either of them be unwilling, the act is an offense, totally different in its nature of effects. 
It's a personal injury. It's a kind of rape. 
As to the any danger exclusive of pain, the danger, if any, much consist in the tendency of the example. 
But what is the tendency of this example? 
To dispose others to engage in the same practices. 
But this practice produces not pain of any kind to anyone. 
SP: Still, in every case, it took at least a century for the arguments of these great thinkers to trickle down and infiltrate the population as a whole. 
It kind of makes you wonder about our own time. 
Are there practices that we engage in where the arguments against them are there for all to see but nonetheless we persist in them? 
RNG: When our great grandchildren look back at us, will they be as appalled by some of our practices as we are by our slave-owning, heretic-burning, wife-beating, gay-bashing ancestors? 
SP: I'm sure everyone here could think of an example. 
RNG: I opt for the mistreatment of animals in factory farms. 
SP: The imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders and the toleration of rape in our nation's prisons. 
RNG: Scrimping on donations to life-saving charities in the developing world. 
SP: The possession of nuclear weapons. 
RNG: The appeal to religion to justify the otherwise unjustifiable, such as the ban on contraception. 
SP: What about religious faith in general? 
RNG: Eh, I'm not holding my breath. 
SP: Still, I have become convinced that reason is a better angel that deserves the greatest credit for the moral progress our species has enjoyed and that holds out the greatest hope for continuing moral progress in the future. 
RNG: And if, our friends, you detect a flaw in this argument, just remember you'll be depending on reason to point it out. 
Thank you. SP: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I would like to share with you today a project that has changed how I approach and practice architecture: the Fez River Rehabilitation Project. 
My hometown of Fez, Morocco, boasts one of the largest walled medieval cities in the world, called the medina, nestled in a river valley. 
The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 
Since the 1950s, as the population of the medina grew, basic urban infrastructure such as green open spaces and sewage quickly changed and got highly stressed. 
One of the biggest casualties of the situation was the Fez River, which bisects the medina in its middle and has been considered for many centuries as the city's very soul. 
In fact, one can witness the presence of the river's extensive water network all throughout the city, in places such as private and public fountains. 
Unfortunately, because of the pollution of the river, it has been covered little by little by concrete slabs since 1952. 
This process of erasure was coupled with the destruction of many houses along the river banks to be able to make machineries enter the narrow pedestrian network of the medina. 
Those urban voids quickly became illegal parking or trash yards. 
Actually, the state of the river before entering the medina is pretty healthy. 
Then pollution takes its toll, mainly due to untreated sewage and chemical dumping from crafts such as tanning. 
At some point, I couldn't bear the desecration of the river, such an important part of my city, and I decided to take action, especially after I heard that the city received a grant to divert sewage water and to treat it. 
With clean water, suddenly the uncovering of the river became possible, and with luck and actually a lot of pushing, my partner Takako Tajima and I were commissioned by the city to work with a team of engineers to uncover the river. 
However, we were sneaky, and we proposed more: to convert riverbanks into pedestrian pathways, and then to connect these pathways back to the city fabric, and finally to convert the urban voids along the riverbanks into public spaces that are lacking in the Medina of Fez. 
I will show you briefly now two of these public spaces. 
The first one is the Rcif Plaza, which sits actually right on top of the river, which you can see here in dotted lines. 
This plaza used to be a chaotic transportation hub that actually compromised the urban integrity of the medina, that has the largest pedestrian network in the world. 
And right beyond the historic bridge that you can see here, right next to the plaza, you can see that the river looked like a river of trash. 
Instead, what we proposed is to make the plaza entirely pedestrian, to cover it with recycled leather canopies, and to connect it to the banks of the river. 
The second site of intervention is also an urban void along the river banks, and it used to be an illegal parking, and we proposed to transform it into the first playground in the medina. 
The playground is constructed using recycled tires and also is coupled with a constructed wetland that not only cleans the water of the river but also retains it when floods occur. 
As the project progressed and received several design awards, new stakeholders intervened and changed the project goals and design. 
The only way for us to be able to bring the main goals of the project ahead was for us to do something very unusual that usually architects don't do. 
It was for us to take our design ego and our sense of authorship and put it in the backseat and to focus mainly on being activists and on trying to coalesce all of the agendas of stakeholders and focus on the main goals of the project: that is, to uncover the river, treat its water, and provide public spaces for all. 
We were actually very lucky, and many of those goals happened or are in the process of happening. 
Like, you can see here in the Rcif Plaza. 
This is how it looked like about six years ago. 
This is how it looks like today. 
It's still under construction, but actually it is heavily used by the local population. 
And finally, this is how the Rcif Plaza will look like when the project is completed. 
This is the river, covered, used as a trash yard. 
Then after many years of work, the river with clean water, uncovered. 
And finally, you can see here the river when the project will be completed. 
So for sure, the Fez River Rehabilitation will keep on changing and adapting to the sociopolitical landscape of the city, but we strongly believe that by reimagining the role and the agency of the architect, we have set up the core idea of the project into motion; that is, to transform the river from sewage to public space for all, thereby making sure that the city of Fez will remain a living city for its inhabitants rather than a mummified heritage. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I know what you're thinking. 
You think I've lost my way, and somebody's going to come on the stage in a minute and guide me gently back to my seat. 
(Applause) I get that all the time in Dubai. 
"Here on holiday are you, dear?" 
(Laughter) "" Come to visit the children? 
How long are you staying? "" Well actually, I hope for a while longer yet. 
I have been living and teaching in the Gulf for over 30 years. 
(Applause) And in that time, I have seen a lot of changes. 
Now that statistic is quite shocking. 
And I want to talk to you today about language loss and the globalization of English. 
I want to tell you about my friend who was teaching English to adults in Abu Dhabi. 
And one fine day, she decided to take them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary. 
But it was she who ended up learning all the Arabic words for the local plants, as well as their uses — medicinal uses, cosmetics, cooking, herbal. 
How did those students get all that knowledge? 
Of course, from their grandparents and even their great-grandparents. 
It's not necessary to tell you how important it is to be able to communicate across generations. 
But sadly, today, languages are dying at an unprecedented rate. 
A language dies every 14 days. 
Now, at the same time, English is the undisputed global language. 
Could there be a connection? 
Well I don't know. 
But I do know that I've seen a lot of changes. 
When I first came out to the Gulf, I came to Kuwait in the days when it was still a hardship post. 
Actually, not that long ago. 
That is a little bit too early. 
But nevertheless, I was recruited by the British Council, along with about 25 other teachers. 
And we were the first non-Muslims to teach in the state schools there in Kuwait. 
We were brought to teach English because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education. 
And of course, the U.K. benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth. 
Okay. 
Now this is the major change that I've seen — how teaching English has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to becoming a massive international business that it is today. 
No longer just a foreign language on the school curriculum, and no longer the sole domain of mother England, it has become a bandwagon for every English-speaking nation on earth. 
And why not? 
After all, the best education — according to the latest World University Rankings — is to be found in the universities of the U.K. and the U.S. 
So everybody wants to have an English education, naturally. 
But if you're not a native speaker, you have to pass a test. 
Now can it be right to reject a student on linguistic ability alone? 
Perhaps you have a computer scientist who's a genius. 
Would he need the same language as a lawyer, for example? 
Well, I don't think so. 
We English teachers reject them all the time. 
We put a stop sign, and we stop them in their tracks. 
They can't pursue their dream any longer, 'til they get English. 
Now let me put it this way: if I met a monolingual Dutch speaker who had the cure for cancer, would I stop him from entering my British University? 
I don't think so. 
But indeed, that is exactly what we do. 
We English teachers are the gatekeepers. 
And you have to satisfy us first that your English is good enough. 
Now it can be dangerous to give too much power to a narrow segment of society. 
Maybe the barrier would be too universal. 
Okay. 
"" But, "" I hear you say, "" what about the research? 
It's all in English. "" So the books are in English, the journals are done in English, but that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. 
It feeds the English requirement. 
And so it goes on. 
I ask you, what happened to translation? 
If you think about the Islamic Golden Age, there was lots of translation then. 
They translated from Latin and Greek into Arabic, into Persian, and then it was translated on into the Germanic languages of Europe and the Romance languages. 
And so light shone upon the Dark Ages of Europe. 
Now don't get me wrong; I am not against teaching English, all you English teachers out there. 
I love it that we have a global language. 
We need one today more than ever. 
But I am against using it as a barrier. 
Do we really want to end up with 600 languages and the main one being English, or Chinese? 
We need more than that. Where do we draw the line? 
This system equates intelligence with a knowledge of English, which is quite arbitrary. 
(Applause) And I want to remind you that the giants upon whose shoulders today's intelligentsia stand did not have to have English, they didn't have to pass an English test. 
Case in point, Einstein. 
He, by the way, was considered remedial at school because he was, in fact, dyslexic. 
But fortunately for the world, he did not have to pass an English test. 
Because they didn't start until 1964 with TOEFL, the American test of English. 
Now it's exploded. 
There are lots and lots of tests of English. 
And millions and millions of students take these tests every year. 
Now you might think, you and me, "Those fees aren't bad, they're okay," but they are prohibitive to so many millions of poor people. 
So immediately, we're rejecting them. 
(Applause) It brings to mind a headline I saw recently: "Education: The Great Divide." 
Now I get it, I understand why people would want to focus on English. 
They want to give their children the best chance in life. 
And to do that, they need a Western education. 
Because, of course, the best jobs go to people out of the Western Universities, that I put on earlier. 
It's a circular thing. 
Okay. 
Let me tell you a story about two scientists, two English scientists. 
They were doing an experiment to do with genetics and the forelimbs and the hind limbs of animals. 
But they couldn't get the results they wanted. 
They really didn't know what to do, until along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb, whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German. 
So bingo, problem solved. 
If you can't think a thought, you are stuck. 
But if another language can think that thought, then, by cooperating, we can achieve and learn so much more. 
My daughter came to England from Kuwait. 
She had studied science and mathematics in Arabic. 
It's an Arabic-medium school. 
She had to translate it into English at her grammar school. 
And she was the best in the class at those subjects. 
Which tells us that when students come to us from abroad, we may not be giving them enough credit for what they know, and they know it in their own language. 
When a language dies, we don't know what we lose with that language. 
This is — I don't know if you saw it on CNN recently — they gave the Heroes Award to a young Kenyan shepherd boy who couldn't study at night in his village, like all the village children, because the kerosene lamp, it had smoke and it damaged his eyes. 
And anyway, there was never enough kerosene, because what does a dollar a day buy for you? 
So he invented a cost-free solar lamp. 
And now the children in his village get the same grades at school as the children who have electricity at home. 
(Applause) When he received his award, he said these lovely words: "" The children can lead Africa from what it is today, a dark continent, to a light continent. "" A simple idea, but it could have such far-reaching consequences. 
People who have no light, whether it's physical or metaphorical, cannot pass our exams, and we can never know what they know. 
Let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark. 
Let us celebrate diversity. 
Mind your language. 
Use it to spread great ideas. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 

Why do so many people reach success and then fail? 
One of the big reasons is, we think success is a one-way street. 
So we do everything that leads up to success, but then we get there. We figure we've made it, we sit back in our comfort zone, and we actually stop doing everything that made us successful. 
And it doesn't take long to go downhill. 
And I can tell you this happens, because it happened to me. 
Reaching success, I worked hard, I pushed myself. 
But then I stopped, because I figured, "" Oh, you know, I made it. 
I can just sit back and relax. "" Reaching success, I always tried to improve and do good work. 
But then I stopped because I figured, "" Hey, I'm good enough. 
I don't need to improve any more. "" Reaching success, I was pretty good at coming up with good ideas. 
Because I did all these simple things that led to ideas. 
But then I stopped, because I figured I was this hot-shot guy and I shouldn't have to work at ideas, they should just come like magic. 
And the only thing that came was creative block. 
I couldn't come up with any ideas. 
Reaching success, I always focused on clients and projects, and ignored the money. Then all this money started pouring in. 
And I got distracted by it. 
And suddenly I was on the phone to my stockbroker and my real estate agent, when I should have been talking to my clients. 
And reaching success, I always did what I loved. 
But then I got into stuff that I didn't love, like management. I am the world's worst manager, but I figured I should be doing it, because I was, after all, the president of the company. 
Well, soon a black cloud formed over my head and here I was, outwardly very successful, but inwardly very depressed. 
But I'm a guy; I knew how to fix it. 
I bought a fast car. 
(Laughter) It didn't help. 
I was faster but just as depressed. 
So I went to my doctor. I said, "" Doc, I can buy anything I want. But I'm not happy. I'm depressed. 
It's true what they say, and I didn't believe it until it happened to me. 
But money can't buy happiness. "" He said, "" No. But it can buy Prozac. "" And he put me on anti-depressants. 
And yeah, the black cloud faded a little bit, but so did all the work, because I was just floating along. I couldn't care less if clients ever called. 
(Laughter) And clients didn't call. (Laughter) 
Because they could see I was no longer serving them, I was only serving myself. 
So they took their money and their projects to others who would serve them better. 
Well, it didn't take long for business to drop like a rock. 
My partner and I, Thom, we had to let all our employees go. 
It was down to just the two of us, and we were about to go under. 
And that was great. 
Because with no employees, there was nobody for me to manage. 
So I went back to doing the projects I loved. 
I had fun again, I worked harder and, to cut a long story short, did all the things that took me back up to success. 
But it wasn't a quick trip. 
It took seven years. 
But in the end, business grew bigger than ever. 
And when I went back to following these eight principles, the black cloud over my head disappeared altogether. 
And I woke up one day and I said, "I don't need Prozac anymore." 
And I threw it away and haven't needed it since. 
I learned that success isn't a one-way street. 
It doesn't look like this; it really looks more like this. 
It's a continuous journey. 
And if we want to avoid "" success-to-failure-syndrome, "" we just keep following these eight principles, because that is not only how we achieve success, it's how we sustain it. 
So here is to your continued success. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I'd like to begin this song I wrote about ceaseless yearning and never-ending want with a poem of popular Petrarchan paradoxes by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder: "" I find no peace, and all my war is done; I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice; I fly above the wind, and yet I cannot arise; And naught I have, and all the world I seize upon. "" ♫ I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ 
♫ Have but I don't have ♫ ♫ It feels like all I got is loss on a bad back ♫ ♫ Gone with the last train, honey don't you fret ♫ ♫ Every cloud has a silver lining ♫ 
♫ Just a little rain, just a little rain, just a little rain ♫ ♫ I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says go ♫ ♫ Nobody knows how to hold me ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says, ♫ ♫ "" Good things come to those who wait "" ♫ ♫ And I can't stand in... ♫ 
♫ I can't stand in line forever ♫ ♫ Stand the cold air ♫ ♫ Glad-handed ♫ ♫ Sick and tired of the "" Later, maybe "" ♫ ♫ Take it, fake it, take it, take-it-or-leave-it life ♫ ♫ And I gotta just tame it ♫ ♫ I gotta just name it ♫ ♫ I gotta just seize, so please, oh please, oh please, oh please ♫ ♫ Oh please me right, 'cause ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop ♫ ♫ And my heart says go ♫ ♫ Nobody knows how to hold me ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop — and my heart says go-ooooo... ♫ 
♫ Good things must be here — yes, right here ♫ ♫ Here, right here, right here ♫ ♫ I won't live this life forever ♫ ♫ One time round is all the offer is ♫ ♫ Sick and tired of the "" Later, maybe "" ♫ ♫ Take it, fake it, make it, leave it life ♫ ♫ And I gotta just name it, I gotta just claim it ♫ ♫ I gotta just seize ♫ ♫ Oh please, oh please, oh please me right ♫ ♫ I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ 
♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have — you know that ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says go ♫ ♫ Nobody knows how to hold me, no ♫ ♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says go ♫ ♫ 'Cause I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I — have what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ 
♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have, what I want ♫ ♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫ ♫ Have but I don't have what I want ♫ (Applause) 

When Dorothy was a little girl, she was fascinated by her goldfish. 
Her father explained to her that fish swim by quickly wagging their tails to propel themselves through the water. 
Without hesitation, little Dorothy responded, "Yes, Daddy, and fish swim backwards by wagging their heads." 
(Laughter) In her mind, it was a fact as true as any other. 
Fish swim backwards by wagging their heads. 
She believed it. 
Our lives are full of fish swimming backwards. 
We make assumptions and faulty leaps of logic. 
We harbor bias. 
We know that we are right, and they are wrong. 
We fear the worst. 
We strive for unattainable perfection. 
We tell ourselves what we can and cannot do. 
In our minds, fish swim by in reverse frantically wagging their heads and we don't even notice them. 
I'm going to tell you five facts about myself. 
One fact is not true. 
One: I graduated from Harvard at 19 with an honors degree in mathematics. 
Two: I currently run a construction company in Orlando. 
Three: I starred on a television sitcom. 
Four: I lost my sight to a rare genetic eye disease. 
Five: I served as a law clerk to two US Supreme Court justices. 
Which fact is not true? 
Actually, they're all true. 
Yeah. They're all true. 
(Applause) At this point, most people really only care about the television show. 
(Laughter) I know this from experience. 
OK, so the show was NBC's "" Saved by the Bell: The New Class. "" And I played Weasel Wyzell, who was the sort of dorky, nerdy character on the show, which made it a very major acting challenge for me as a 13-year-old boy. 
(Laughter) Now, did you struggle with number four, my blindness? 
Why is that? 
We make assumptions about so-called disabilities. 
As a blind man, I confront others' incorrect assumptions about my abilities every day. 
My point today is not about my blindness, however. 
Going blind taught me to live my life eyes wide open. 
It taught me to spot those backwards-swimming fish that our minds create. 
Going blind cast them into focus. 
What does it feel like to see? 
It's immediate and passive. 
You open your eyes and there's the world. 
Seeing is believing. Sight is truth. 
Right? 
Well, that's what I thought. 
Then, from age 12 to 25, my retinas progressively deteriorated. 
My sight became an increasingly bizarre carnival funhouse hall of mirrors and illusions. 
The salesperson I was relieved to spot in a store was really a mannequin. 
Reaching down to wash my hands, I suddenly saw it was a urinal I was touching, not a sink, when my fingers felt its true shape. 
A friend described the photograph in my hand, and only then I could see the image depicted. 
Objects appeared, morphed and disappeared in my reality. 
It was difficult and exhausting to see. 
I pieced together fragmented, transitory images, consciously analyzed the clues, searched for some logic in my crumbling kaleidoscope, until I saw nothing at all. 
I learned that what we see is not universal truth. 
It is not objective reality. 
What we see is a unique, personal, virtual reality that is masterfully constructed by our brain. 
Let me explain with a bit of amateur neuroscience. 
Your visual cortex takes up about 30 percent of your brain. 
That's compared to approximately eight percent for touch and two to three percent for hearing. 
Every second, your eyes can send your visual cortex as many as two billion pieces of information. 
The rest of your body can send your brain only an additional billion. 
So sight is one third of your brain by volume and can claim about two thirds of your brain's processing resources. 
It's no surprise then that the illusion of sight is so compelling. 
But make no mistake about it: sight is an illusion. 
Here's where it gets interesting. 
To create the experience of sight, your brain references your conceptual understanding of the world, other knowledge, your memories, opinions, emotions, mental attention. 
All of these things and far more are linked in your brain to your sight. 
These linkages work both ways, and usually occur subconsciously. 
So for example, what you see impacts how you feel, and the way you feel can literally change what you see. 
Numerous studies demonstrate this. 
If you are asked to estimate the walking speed of a man in a video, for example, your answer will be different if you're told to think about cheetahs or turtles. 
A hill appears steeper if you've just exercised, and a landmark appears farther away if you're wearing a heavy backpack. 
We have arrived at a fundamental contradiction. 
What you see is a complex mental construction of your own making, but you experience it passively as a direct representation of the world around you. 
You create your own reality, and you believe it. 
I believed mine until it broke apart. 
The deterioration of my eyes shattered the illusion. 
You see, sight is just one way we shape our reality. 
We create our own realities in many other ways. 
Let's take fear as just one example. 
Your fears distort your reality. 
Under the warped logic of fear, anything is better than the uncertain. 
Fear fills the void at all costs, passing off what you dread for what you know, offering up the worst in place of the ambiguous, substituting assumption for reason. 
Psychologists have a great term for it: awfulizing. 
(Laughter) Right? 
Fear replaces the unknown with the awful. 
Now, fear is self-realizing. 
When you face the greatest need to look outside yourself and think critically, fear beats a retreat deep inside your mind, shrinking and distorting your view, drowning your capacity for critical thought with a flood of disruptive emotions. 
When you face a compelling opportunity to take action, fear lulls you into inaction, enticing you to passively watch its prophecies fulfill themselves. 
When I was diagnosed with my blinding disease, I knew blindness would ruin my life. 
Blindness was a death sentence for my independence. 
It was the end of achievement for me. 
Blindness meant I would live an unremarkable life, small and sad, and likely alone. 
I knew it. 
This was a fiction born of my fears, but I believed it. 
It was a lie, but it was my reality, just like those backwards-swimming fish in little Dorothy's mind. 
If I had not confronted the reality of my fear, I would have lived it. 
I am certain of that. 
So how do you live your life eyes wide open? 
It is a learned discipline. 
It can be taught. It can be practiced. 
I will summarize very briefly. 
Hold yourself accountable for every moment, every thought, every detail. 
See beyond your fears. 
Recognize your assumptions. 
Harness your internal strength. 
Silence your internal critic. 
Correct your misconceptions about luck and about success. 
Accept your strengths and your weaknesses, and understand the difference. 
Open your hearts to your bountiful blessings. 
Your fears, your critics, your heroes, your villains — they are your excuses, rationalizations, shortcuts, justifications, your surrender. 
They are fictions you perceive as reality. 
Choose to see through them. 
Choose to let them go. 
You are the creator of your reality. 
With that empowerment comes complete responsibility. 
I chose to step out of fear's tunnel into terrain uncharted and undefined. 
I chose to build there a blessed life. 
Far from alone, I share my beautiful life with Dorothy, my beautiful wife, with our triplets, whom we call the Tripskys, and with the latest addition to the family, sweet baby Clementine. 
What do you fear? 
What lies do you tell yourself? 
How do you embellish your truth and write your own fictions? 
What reality are you creating for yourself? 
In your career and personal life, in your relationships, and in your heart and soul, your backwards-swimming fish do you great harm. 
They exact a toll in missed opportunities and unrealized potential, and they engender insecurity and distrust where you seek fulfillment and connection. 
I urge you to search them out. 
Helen Keller said that the only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. 
For me, going blind was a profound blessing, because blindness gave me vision. 
I hope you can see what I see. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Isaac, before you leave the stage, just a question. 
This is an audience of entrepreneurs, of doers, of innovators. 
You are a CEO of a company down in Florida, and many are probably wondering, how is it to be a blind CEO? 
What kind of specific challenges do you have, and how do you overcome them? 
Isaac Lidsky: Well, the biggest challenge became a blessing. 
I don't get visual feedback from people. 
(Laughter) BG: What's that noise there? IL: Yeah. 
So, for example, in my leadership team meetings, I don't see facial expressions or gestures. 
I've learned to solicit a lot more verbal feedback. 
I basically force people to tell me what they think. 
And in this respect, it's become, like I said, a real blessing for me personally and for my company, because we communicate at a far deeper level, we avoid ambiguities, and most important, my team knows that what they think truly matters. 
BG: Isaac, thank you for coming to TED. IL: Thank you, Bruno. 
(Applause) 

When I was first learning to meditate, the instruction was to simply pay attention to my breath, and when my mind wandered, to bring it back. 
Sounded simple enough. 
Yet I'd sit on these silent retreats, sweating through T-shirts in the middle of winter. 
I'd take naps every chance I got because it was really hard work. 
Actually, it was exhausting. 
The instruction was simple enough but I was missing something really important. 
So why is it so hard to pay attention? 
Well, studies show that even when we're really trying to pay attention to something — like maybe this talk — at some point, about half of us will drift off into a daydream, or have this urge to check our Twitter feed. 
So what's going on here? 
It turns out that we're fighting one of the most evolutionarily-conserved learning processes currently known in science, one that's conserved back to the most basic nervous systems known to man. 
This reward-based learning process is called positive and negative reinforcement, and basically goes like this. 
We see some food that looks good, our brain says, "" Calories!... Survival! "" We eat the food, we taste it — it tastes good. 
And especially with sugar, our bodies send a signal to our brain that says, "Remember what you're eating and where you found it." 
We lay down this context-dependent memory and learn to repeat the process next time. 
See food, eat food, feel good, repeat. 
Trigger, behavior, reward. 
Simple, right? 
Well, after a while, our creative brains say, "" You know what? 
You can use this for more than just remembering where food is. 
You know, next time you feel bad, why don't you try eating something good so you'll feel better? "" We thank our brains for the great idea, try this and quickly learn that if we eat chocolate or ice cream when we're mad or sad, we feel better. 
Same process, just a different trigger. 
Instead of this hunger signal coming from our stomach, this emotional signal — feeling sad — triggers that urge to eat. 
Maybe in our teenage years, we were a nerd at school, and we see those rebel kids outside smoking and we think, "Hey, I want to be cool." 
So we start smoking. 
The Marlboro Man wasn't a dork, and that was no accident. 
See cool, smoke to be cool, feel good. Repeat. 
Trigger, behavior, reward. 
And each time we do this, we learn to repeat the process and it becomes a habit. 
So later, feeling stressed out triggers that urge to smoke a cigarette or to eat something sweet. 
Now, with these same brain processes, we've gone from learning to survive to literally killing ourselves with these habits. 
Obesity and smoking are among the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in the world. 
So back to my breath. 
What if instead of fighting our brains, or trying to force ourselves to pay attention, we instead tapped into this natural, reward-based learning process... 
but added a twist? 
What if instead we just got really curious about what was happening in our momentary experience? 
I'll give you an example. 
In my lab, we studied whether mindfulness training could help people quit smoking. 
Now, just like trying to force myself to pay attention to my breath, they could try to force themselves to quit smoking. 
And the majority of them had tried this before and failed — on average, six times. 
Now, with mindfulness training, we dropped the bit about forcing and instead focused on being curious. 
In fact, we even told them to smoke. 
What? Yeah, we said, "" Go ahead and smoke, just be really curious about what it's like when you do. "" And what did they notice? 
Well here's an example from one of our smokers. 
She said, "" Mindful smoking: smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals, YUCK! "" Now, she knew, cognitively that smoking was bad for her, that's why she joined our program. 
What she discovered just by being curiously aware when she smoked was that smoking tastes like shit. 
(Laughter) Now, she moved from knowledge to wisdom. 
She moved from knowing in her head that smoking was bad for her to knowing it in her bones, and the spell of smoking was broken. 
She started to become disenchanted with her behavior. 
Now, the prefrontal cortex, that youngest part of our brain from an evolutionary perspective, it understands on an intellectual level that we shouldn't smoke. 
And it tries its hardest to help us change our behavior, to help us stop smoking, to help us stop eating that second, that third, that fourth cookie. 
We call this cognitive control. 
We're using cognition to control our behavior. 
Unfortunately, this is also the first part of our brain that goes offline when we get stressed out, which isn't that helpful. 
Now, we can all relate to this in our own experience. 
We're much more likely to do things like yell at our spouse or kids when we're stressed out or tired, even though we know it's not going to be helpful. 
We just can't help ourselves. 
When the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we fall back into our old habits, which is why this disenchantment is so important. 
Seeing what we get from our habits helps us understand them at a deeper level — to know it in our bones so we don't have to force ourselves to hold back or restrain ourselves from behavior. 
We're just less interested in doing it in the first place. 
And this is what mindfulness is all about: Seeing really clearly what we get when we get caught up in our behaviors, becoming disenchanted on a visceral level and from this disenchanted stance, naturally letting go. 
This isn't to say that, poof, magically we quit smoking. 
But over time, as we learn to see more and more clearly the results of our actions, we let go of old habits and form new ones. 
The paradox here is that mindfulness is just about being really interested in getting close and personal with what's actually happening in our bodies and minds from moment to moment. 
This willingness to turn toward our experience rather than trying to make unpleasant cravings go away as quickly as possible. 
And this willingness to turn toward our experience is supported by curiosity, which is naturally rewarding. 
What does curiosity feel like? 
It feels good. 
And what happens when we get curious? 
We start to notice that cravings are simply made up of body sensations — oh, there's tightness, there's tension, there's restlessness — and that these body sensations come and go. 
These are bite-size pieces of experiences that we can manage from moment to moment rather than getting clobbered by this huge, scary craving that we choke on. 
In other words, when we get curious, we step out of our old, fear-based, reactive habit patterns, and we step into being. 
We become this inner scientist where we're eagerly awaiting that next data point. 
Now, this might sound too simplistic to affect behavior. 
But in one study, we found that mindfulness training was twice as good as gold standard therapy at helping people quit smoking. 
So it actually works. 
And when we studied the brains of experienced meditators, we found that parts of a neural network of self-referential processing called the default mode network were at play. 
Now, one current hypothesis is that a region of this network, called the posterior cingulate cortex, is activated not necessarily by craving itself but when we get caught up in it, when we get sucked in, and it takes us for a ride. 
In contrast, when we let go — step out of the process just by being curiously aware of what's happening — this same brain region quiets down. 
Now we're testing app and online-based mindfulness training programs that target these core mechanisms and, ironically, use the same technology that's driving us to distraction to help us step out of our unhealthy habit patterns of smoking, of stress eating and other addictive behaviors. 
Now, remember that bit about context-dependent memory? 
We can deliver these tools to peoples' fingertips in the contexts that matter most. 
So we can help them tap into their inherent capacity to be curiously aware right when that urge to smoke or stress eat or whatever arises. 
So if you don't smoke or stress eat, maybe the next time you feel this urge to check your email when you're bored, or you're trying to distract yourself from work, or maybe to compulsively respond to that text message when you're driving, see if you can tap into this natural capacity, just be curiously aware of what's happening in your body and mind in that moment. 
It will just be another chance to perpetuate one of our endless and exhaustive habit loops... 
or step out of it. 
Instead of see text message, compulsively text back, feel a little bit better — notice the urge, get curious, feel the joy of letting go and repeat. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I don't know if you've noticed, but there's been a spate of books that have come out lately contemplating or speculating on the cognition and emotional life of dogs. 
Do they think, do they feel and, if so, how? 
So this afternoon, in my limited time, I wanted to take the guesswork out of a lot of that by introducing you to two dogs, both of whom have taken the command "" speak "" quite literally. 
The first dog is the first to go, and he is contemplating an aspect of his relationship to his owner, and the title is "" A Dog on His Master. "" "" As young as I look, I am growing older faster than he. 
Seven to one is the ratio, they tend to say. 
Whatever the number, I will pass him one day and take the lead, the way I do on our walks in the woods, and if this ever manages to cross his mind, it would be the sweetest shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass. "" (Applause) Thank you. 
And our next dog speaks in something called the revenant, which means a spirit that comes back to visit you. 
"" I am the dog you put to sleep, as you like to call the needle of oblivion, come back to tell you this simple thing: I never liked you. "" (Laughter) "" When I licked your face, I thought of biting off your nose. 
When I watched you toweling yourself dry, I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap. 
I resented the way you moved, your lack of animal grace, the way you would sit in a chair to eat, a napkin on your lap, a knife in your hand. 
I would have run away but I was too weak, a trick you taught me while I was learning to sit and heel and, greatest of insults, shake hands without a hand. 
I admit the sight of the leash would excite me, but only because it meant I was about to smell things you had never touched. 
You do not want to believe this, but I have no reason to lie: I hated the car, hated the rubber toys, disliked your friends, and worse, your relatives. 
The jingling of my tags drove me mad. 
You always scratched me in the wrong place. "" (Laughter) "" All I ever wanted from you was food and water in my bowls. 
While you slept, I watched you breathe as the moon rose in the sky. 
It took all of my strength not to raise my head and howl. 
Now, I am free of the collar, free of the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater, the absurdity of your lawn, and that is all you need to know about this place, except what you already supposed and are glad it did not happen sooner, that everyone here can read and write, the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I love to collect things. 
Ever since I was a kid, I've had massive collections of random stuff, everything from bizarre hot sauces from all around the world to insects that I've captured and put in jars. 
Now, it's no secret, because I like collecting things, that I love the Natural History Museum and the collections of animals at the Natural History Museum in dioramas. 
These, to me, are like living sculptures, right, that you can go and look at, and they memorialize a specific point of time in this animal's life. 
So I was thinking about my own life, and how I'd like to memorialize my life, you know, for the ages, and also — (Laughter) — the lives of my friends, but the problem with this is that my friends aren't quite keen on the idea of me taxidermy-ing them. (Laughter) So instead, I turned to video, and video is the next best way to preserve and memorialize someone and to capture a specific moment in time. 
So what I did was, I filmed six of my friends and then, using video mapping and video projection, I created a video sculpture, which was these six friends projected into jars. (Laughter) So now I have this collection of my friends I can take around with me whenever I go, and this is called Animalia Chordata, from the Latin nomenclature for human being, classification system. 
So this piece memorializes my friends in these jars, and they actually move around. (Laughter) So, this is interesting to me, but it lacked a certain human element. (Laughter) It's a digital sculpture, so I wanted to add an interaction system. So what I did was, I added a proximity sensor, so that when you get close to the people in jars, they react to you in different ways. 
You know, just like people on the street when you get too close to them. 
Some people reacted in terror. (Laughter) Others reacted in asking you for help, and some people hide from you. 
So this was really interesting to me, this idea of taking video off the screen and putting it in real life, and also adding interactivity to sculpture. 
So over the next year, I documented 40 of my other friends and trapped them in jars as well and created a piece known as Garden, which is literally a garden of humanity. 
But something about the first piece, the Animali Chordata piece, kept coming back to me, this idea of interaction with art, and I really liked the idea of people being able to interact, and also being challenged by interacting with art. 
So I wanted to create a new piece that actually forced people to come and interact with something, and the way I did this was actually by projecting a 1950s housewife into a blender. (Laughter) This is a piece called Blend, and what it does is it actually makes you implicit in the work of art. 
You may never experience the entire thing yourself. 
You can walk away, you can just watch as this character stands there in the blender and looks at you, or you can actually choose to interact with it. 
So if you do choose to interact with the piece, and you press the blender button, it actually sends this character into this dizzying disarray of dishevelment. 
By doing that, you are now part of my piece. 
You, like the people that are trapped in my work — (Blender noises, laughter) — have become part of my work as well. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) But, but this seems a bit unfair, right? 
I put my friends in jars, I put this character, this sort of endangered species character in a blender. 
But I'd never done anything about myself. 
I'd never really memorialized myself. 
So I decided to create a piece which is a self-portrait piece. 
This is sort of a self-portrait taxidermy time capsule piece called A Point Just Passed, in which I project myself on top of a time card punch clock, and it's up to you. 
If you want to choose to punch that punch card clock, you actually age me. 
So I start as a baby, and then if you punch the clock, you'll actually transform the baby into a toddler, and then from a toddler I'm transformed into a teenager. 
From a teenager, I'm transformed into my current self. 
From my current self, I'm turned into a middle-aged man, and then, from there, into an elderly man. 
And if you punch the punch card clock a hundred times in one day, the piece goes black and is not to be reset until the next day. 
So, in doing so, you're erasing time. 
You're actually implicit in this work and you're erasing my life. 
So I like this about interactive video sculpture, that you can actually interact with it, that all of you can actually touch an artwork and be part of the artwork yourselves, and hopefully, one day, I'll have each and every one of you trapped in one of my jars. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) 

You might think there are many things that I can't do because I cannot see. 
That's largely true. 
Actually, I just needed to have a bit of help to come up to the stage. 
But there is also a lot that I can do. 
This is me rock climbing for the first time. 
Actually, I love sports and I can play many sports, like swimming, skiing, skating, scuba diving, running and so on. 
But there is one limitation: somebody needs to help me. 
I want to be independent. 
I lost my sight at the age of 14 in a swimming pool accident. 
I was an active, independent teenager, and suddenly I became blind. 
The hardest thing for me was losing my independence. 
Things that until then seemed simple became almost impossible to do alone. 
For example, one of my challenges was textbooks. 
Back then, there were no personal computers, no Internet, no smartphones. 
So I had to ask one of my two brothers to read me textbooks, and I had to create my own books in Braille. 
Can you imagine? 
Of course, my brothers were not happy about it, and later, I noticed they were not there whenever I needed them. 
(Laughter) I think they tried to stay away from me. 
I don't blame them. 
I really wanted to be freed from relying on someone. 
That became my strong desire to ignite innovation. 
Jump ahead to the mid-1980s. 
I got to know cutting-edge technologies and I thought to myself, how come there is no computer technology to create books in Braille? 
These amazing technologies must be able to also help people with limitations like myself. 
That's the moment my innovation journey began. 
I started developing digital book technologies, such as a digital Braille editor, digital Braille dictionary and a digital Braille library network. 
Today, every student who is visually impaired can read textbooks, by using personal computers and mobile devices, in Braille or in voice. 
This may not surprise you, since everyone now has digital books in their tablets in 2015. 
But Braille went digital many years before digital books, already in the late 1980s, almost 30 years ago. 
Strong and specific needs of the blind people made this opportunity to create digital books way back then. 
And this is actually not the first time this happened, because history shows us accessibility ignites innovation. 
The telephone was invented while developing a communication tool for hearing impaired people. 
Some keyboards were also invented to help people with disabilities. 
Now I'm going to give you another example from my own life. 
In the '90s, people around me started talking about the Internet and web browsing. 
I remember the first time I went on the web. 
I was astonished. 
I could access newspapers at any time and every day. 
I could even search for any information by myself. 
I desperately wanted to help the blind people have access to the Internet, and I found ways to render the web into synthesized voice, which dramatically simplified the user interface. 
This led me to develop the Home Page Reader in 1997, first in Japanese and later, translated into 11 languages. 
When I developed the Home Page Reader, I got many comments from users. 
One that I strongly remember said, "For me, the Internet is a small window to the world." 
It was a revolutionary moment for the blind. 
The cyber world became accessible, and this technology that we created for the blind has many uses, way beyond what I imagined. 
It can help drivers listen to their emails or it can help you listen to a recipe while cooking. 
Today, I am more independent, but it is still not enough. 
For example, when I approached the stage just now, I needed assistance. 
My goal is to come up here independently. 
And not just here. 
My goal is to be able to travel and do things that are simple to you. 
OK, now let me show you the latest technologies. 
This is a smartphone app that we are working on. 
(Video) Electronic voice: 51 feet to the door, and keep straight. 
EV: Take the two doors to go out. The door is on your right. 
EV: Nick is approaching. Looks so happy. 
Chieko Asakawa: Hi, Nick! 
(Laughter) CA: Where are you going? You look so happy. 
Nick: Oh — well, my paper just got accepted. 
CA: That's great! Congratulations. 
Nick: Thanks. Wait — how'd you know it was me, and that I look happy? 
(Chieko and Nick laugh) Man: Hi. 
(Laughter) CA: Oh... hi. 
EV: He is not talking to you, but on his phone. 
EV: Potato chips. 
EV: Dark chocolate with almonds. 
EV: You gained 5 pounds since yesterday; take apple instead of chocolate. 
(Laughter) EV: Approaching. 
EV: You arrived. 
CA: Now... 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So now the app navigates me by analyzing beacon signals and smartphone sensors and permits me to move around indoor and outdoor environments all by myself. 
But the computer vision part that showed who is approaching, in which mood — we are still working on that part. 
And recognizing facial expressions is very important for me to be social. 
So now the fusions of technologies are ready to help me see the real world. 
We call this cognitive assistance. 
It understands our surrounding world and whispers to me in voice or sends a vibration to my fingers. 
Cognitive assistance will augment missing or weakened abilities — in other words, our five senses. 
This technology is only in an early stage, but eventually, I'll be able to find a classroom on campus, enjoy window shopping or find a nice restaurant while walking along a street. 
It will be amazing if I can find you on the street before you notice me. 
It will become my best buddy, and yours. 
So, this really is a great challenge. 
It is a challenge that needs collaboration, which is why we are creating an open community to accelerate research activities. 
Just this morning, we announced the open-source fundamental technologies you just saw in the video. 
The frontier is the real world. 
The blind community is exploring this technical frontier and the pathfinder. 
I hope to work with you to explore the new era, and the next time that I'm on this stage, through technology and innovation, I will be able to walk up here all by myself. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

So infectious diseases, right? 
Infectious diseases are still the main cause of human suffering and death around the world. 
We have drugs and vaccines. 
And we're conscious — we learn from our experiences and come up with creative solutions. 
We're not the only medical doctors. 
Most famous, perhaps, chimpanzees. 
Not so much different from us, they can use plants to treat their intestinal parasites. 
And even more interesting than that is that recent discoveries are telling us that insects and other little animals with smaller brains can use medication too. 
The problem with infectious diseases, as we all know, is that pathogens continue to evolve, and a lot of the drugs that we have developed are losing their efficacy. 
Now, monarchs are extremely famous for their spectacular migrations from the U.S. and Canada down to Mexico every year, where millions of them come together, but it's not why I started studying them. 
And I think what they do can tell us a lot about drugs that we can develop for humans. 
Now, the parasites that monarchs get infected with are called ophryocystis elektroscirrha — a mouthful. 
What they do is they produce spores, millions of spores on the outside of the butterfly that are shown as little specks in between the scales of the butterfly. 
And this is really detrimental to the monarch. 
It shortens their lifespan, it reduces their ability to fly, it can even kill them before they're even adults. 
Very detrimental parasite. 
As part of my job, I spend a lot of time in the greenhouse growing plants, and the reason for this is that monarchs are extremely picky eaters. 
Luckily, there are several species of milkweed that they can use, and all these milkweeds have cardenolides in them. 
These are chemicals that are toxic. 
In fact, monarchs can take up the chemicals, put it in their own bodies, and it makes them toxic against their predators, such as birds. 
And what they do, then, is advertise this toxicity through their beautiful warning colorations with this orange, black and white. 
So what I did during my job is grow plants in the greenhouse, different ones, different milkweeds. 
Some were toxic, including the tropical milkweed, with very high concentrations of these cardenolides. 
And some were not toxic. 
But some of the monarchs were sick, and what I found is that some of these milkweeds are medicinal, meaning they reduce the disease symptoms in the monarch butterflies, meaning these monarchs can live longer when they are infected when feeding on these medicinal plants. 
And when I found this, I had this idea, and a lot of people said it was a crazy idea, but I thought, what if monarchs can use this? 
What if they can act as medical doctors? 
So my team and I started doing experiments. 
In the first types of experiments, we had caterpillars, and gave them a choice: medicinal milkweed versus non-medicinal milkweed. 
So then we moved on to adult butterflies, and we started asking the question whether it's the mothers that can medicate their offspring. 
Can the mothers lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick? 
We have done these experiments now over several years, and always get the same results. 
In other words, what these females are doing is they're laying 68 percent of their eggs in the medicinal milkweed. 
Intriguingly, what they do is they actually transmit the parasites when they're laying the eggs. 
They cannot prevent this. 
But what these experiments tell us is that these monarchs, these mothers, can lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick. 
Now, this is a really important discovery, I think, not just because it tells us something cool about nature, but also because it may tell us something more about how we should find drugs. 
Now, these are animals that are very small and we tend to think of them as very simple. 
They have tiny little brains, yet they can do this very sophisticated medication. 
Now, we know that even today, most of our drugs derive from natural products, including plants, and in indigenous cultures, traditional healers often look at animals to find new drugs. 
What I think is important, though, is to move beyond these large-brained mammals and give these guys more credit, these simple animals, these insects that we tend to think of as very, very simple with tiny little brains. 
The discovery that these animals can also use medication opens up completely new avenues, and I think that maybe one day, we will be treating human diseases with drugs that were first discovered by butterflies, and I think that is an amazing opportunity worth pursuing. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

Do I look real to you? 
Hope so. 
I have no idea if you're seeing this, but I'm just going to look ahead and trust that you're there. 
I've drawn a semicircle in the sand in front of me so I don't walk past it and look like I'm floating in midair. 
Right now I'm standing in the open air, on a beach under a palm tree, in the exact spot where your stage used to be. 
I have 12 minutes with you. 
I set a limit. 
My wife Navid once said that infinite possibility is a creator's worst enemy. 
For example, this dress: I'd asked her to design something that a priest might have worn in 23rd-century Cairo. 
But we only had three days to make it, and the only fabric we had was an old duvet cover that another resident left behind. 
But she did it, and it's perfect. 
And she looked at it and said, "Proof of concept — creation needs constraint." 
So with these 12 minutes, I'm going to tell you about my greatest discovery. 
For my whole life, my obsession has been eternal life, as I know it is so many of yours. 
You may be happy to know that your research will pay off. 
I am 318 years old. 
The average human lifespan is now 432 years, and my work has been to extend the human lifespan indefinitely. 
And I've never questioned that someday, we'll reach a point where we'll be content. 
But the opposite keeps happening: the longer we live, the longer we want to live, the less we want to die. 
Who can blame us? 
The universe is so big. 
There won't ever not be more to see. 
Just yesterday, I was reading about how you can take out a boat on Europa and sail from island to island all over the planet, and some of the islands have villages that you can stay and visit and sleep under the shadow of Jupiter. 
And then there's this other island where there's just one songwriter who sits and plays mandolin for the ocean. 
And then there are others where there's no one and there never has been, and so you go just for the pleasure of touching your foot to sand that no foot has ever touched before. 
You could spend 400 years doing just that. 
Right now the Moon is rising in the Northeast. 
I can see the cities on it with my naked eye. 
They're connected like nerve clusters: Mariapolis on the South Pole, and Ramachandran on the Equator. 
And New Tehran in the Sea of Tranquility. 
That's where Navid and I met. 
We were both artists downtown. 
The day we met, we were passing each other in Azadi Square, and we bumped shoulders. 
And I turned to apologize and she, without saying hello or introducing herself or anything, said, "" Well, why do you think we didn't just pass through each other? "" And first of all, I thought, "" Who the hell are you? "" But second, the question annoyed me, because the answer is so simple. 
I said, "" We didn't pass through each other because elementary particles have mass and because the space between elementary particles is filled with the binding energy that also has the properties of mass, and we've known that for 800 years. "" She must have been in one of those moods where she likes to mess with strangers. 
Or maybe she was just flirting with me, because she looked at me and said, "" I thought you'd say that. 
Think deeper. "" And then she took off her belt, this belt that I'm wearing now, and she said, "" Our universe is built so that particles have mass. 
Without that basic constraint, we'd have just passed right through each other at the speed of light and never even known. "" And that's how our romance began. 
Navid and I never ran out of things to talk about. 
Never. 
It was incredible. 
It was like we were both heroes climbing up into a mountain range together and we kept arriving at new vistas, and these new, perfect constellations of words would come out of us to describe them. 
And we'd forget them as soon as we made them, and throw them over our shoulder and go on to the next thing, on and up. 
Or one time, Navid said that our talk was like we were always making bread, and that we were always adding in a little more flour and a little more water, and folding it in and turning it over and never getting around to baking it. 
If my obsession was eternal life, Navid's obsession was touch. 
She had a genius for it. 
All of her work revolved around it. 
My body was like a canvas for her, and she would draw her fingertip down over my face so slowly that I couldn't feel it moving. 
And she was obsessed with the exact moment when I would stop being able to tell the difference between her body and mine. 
Or she would just lie across me and dig her shoulder into mine and say, "" Pilar, why does this feel so good? "" I'd say, "" I don't know! "" And she always had a facetious answer for her facetious question, but the answer I remember today is, "" It feels good because the universe chose its constraints, and we are its art. "" It's always funny what you think the future is going to be like versus what it turns out to be. 
In your time, scientists thought humans could freeze themselves and wake up in the future. 
And they did — but then they died. 
In your time, scientists thought humans could replace organs and extend life for hundreds of years. 
And they did, but eventually, they died anyway. 
In your time, Earth is the only place people live. 
In my time, Earth is the place people come to die. 
So when Navid started to show the signs, our friends assumed I would do what everyone does, which is say goodbye and send her to Earth, so that none of us would have to look at her or be around her or think about her and her... 
failure to keep living. 
More than anything, they didn't want to be around her actual physical body. 
They kept referring to it as "" declining, "" even though she herself was fascinated by it, the changes it was going through, following the rules of its nature day by day, independent of her will. 
I did send Navid to Earth. 
But I came with her. 
I remember a friend of ours, just before we left, said, "" I just think it's arrogant, like the rules don't apply to you, like you think your love is that special. "" But I did. 
So, even here on Earth, I kept working on how to extend life. 
It didn't occur to me that there could be any other response. 
I kept going back to that thing that Navid said to me that day in Azadi Square, that without that basic constraint — a universe that granted mass to matter — we would not exist. 
That's one rule. 
Another rule is that all mass is subject to entropy. 
And there is no way to be in this universe without mass. 
I know. I tried everything. 
I tried creating a photon box where the Higgs field was altered. 
I tried recording all subatomic movements in my body and replaying them on closed loop. 
Nothing worked. 
But my final innovation was to create a coil dimension with the boundaries of a body in which time moved infinitely slower, but whose projection would appear to move in normal time. 
That body would then appear in our universe as a hologram — here but not here. 
When I realized I'd done it, I ran to her room, so happy to tell her I'd done it, moving through space almost normally to all eyes, even to my own, and went to lie down next to her, and forgot, and fell right through her. 
I'd found a way to eternal life, at the expense of the one thing Navid loved most, which was to touch and be touched. 
And she threw me out. 
I still got to watch, though. 
Humans live 400 years now, and we still die. 
And when death comes, the dying still pick at their bedsheets, and their arms break out in blue and violet blooms on the insides, and their breaths get further and further apart, like they're falling asleep. 
I've always thought that what gives a life meaning is adventure. 
And death is just a problem we haven't discovered the solution to yet. 
But maybe a life has meaning only because it ends. 
Maybe that's the paradox: constraints don't constrain, they allow perfect freedom. 
(Sighs) There was a thunderstorm here this morning. 
There is another forecast for tonight, but for now the sky is clear. 
I can't feel the wind here, but I just asked one of the caretakers who passed by what it felt like, and she said it felt warm, like melted butter. 
An answer worthy of my wife. 
I have to find my way back to the flesh. 
Until then, I take up no space but the space you give me. 

Have you ever been asked by your Chinese friend, "What is your zodiac sign?" 
Don't think they are making small talk. 
If you say, "" I'm a Monkey, "" they immediately know you are either 24, 36, 48 or 60 years old. 
(Laughter) Asking a zodiac sign is a polite way of asking your age. 
By revealing your zodiac sign, you are also being evaluated. 
Judgments are being made about your fortune or misfortune, your personality, career prospects and how you will do in a given year. 
If you share you and your partner's animal signs, they will paint a picture in their mind about your private life. 
Maybe you don't believe in the Chinese zodiac. 
As a quarter of the world population is influenced by it, you'd be wise to do something about that. 
So what is the Chinese zodiac, exactly? 
Most Westerners think of Greco-Roman zodiac, the signs divided into 12 months. 
The Chinese zodiac is different. 
It's a 12-year cycle labeled with animals, starting with a Rat and ending with a Pig, and has no association with constellations. 
For example, if you were born in 1975, you are a Rabbit. 
Can you see your zodiac sign there? 
Our Chinese ancestors constructed a very complicated theoretical framework based on yin and yang, the five elements and the 12 zodiac animals. 
Over thousands of years, this popular culture has affected people's major decisions, such as naming, marriage, giving birth and attitude towards each other. 
And some of the implications are quite amazing. 
The Chinese believe certain animals get on better than the others. 
So parents choose specific years to give birth to babies, because they believe the team effort by the right combination of animals can give prosperity to families. 
We even refer to the zodiac when entering into romantic relations. 
I'm a Pig; I should have perfect romance with Tigers, Goats and Rabbits. 
Chinese people believe some animals are natural enemies. 
As a Pig, I need to be careful with a Snake. 
Raise your hand if you are a Snake. 
Let's have a chat later. 
(Laughter) We believe some animals are luckier than the others, such as the Dragon. 
Unlike the Western tradition, the Chinese Dragon is a symbol for power, strength and wealth. 
It's everyone's dream to have a Dragon baby. 
Jack Ma's parents must have been very proud. 
And they are not the only ones. 
In 2012, the Year of the Dragon, the birthrate in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan increased by five percent. 
That means another one million more babies. 
With a traditional preference to baby boys, the boy-girl ratio that year was 120 to 100. 
When those Dragon boys grow up, they will face much more severe competition in love and job markets. 
According to the BBC and the Chinese government's press release, January 2015 saw a peak of Cesarean sections. 
Why? 
That was the last month for the Year of the Horse. 
It's not because they like horses so much, it's because they try to avoid having unlucky Goat babies. 
(Laughter) If you are a Goat, please don't feel bad. 
Those are Goat babies. 
They don't look like losers to me. 
(Laughter) Tiger is another undesirable animal, due to its volatile temperament. 
Many Chinese regions saw a sharp decline of birthrate during those years. 
Perhaps one should consider zodiac in reverse, as those Tiger and Goat babies will face much less competition. 
Maybe they are the lucky ones. 
I went through the Forbes top 300 richest people in the world, and it's interesting to see the most undesirable two animals, the Goat and Tiger, are at the top of the chart, even higher than the Dragon. 
So maybe we should consider, maybe it's much better to have less competition. 
One last but interesting point: many Chinese people make their investment decisions based on the zodiac sign index. 
Although the belief and tradition of the zodiac sign has been over thousands of years, the trend of using it in making major decisions did not really happen until the past few decades. 
Our ancestors were very busy surviving poverty, drought, famine, riot, disease and civil war. 
And finally, Chinese people have the time, wealth and technology to create an ideal life they've always wanted. 
The collective decision made by 1.3 billion people has caused the fluctuation in economics and demand on everything, from health care and education to property and consumer goods. 
As China plays such an important role in the global economy and geopolitics, the decisions made based on the zodiac and other Chinese traditions end up impacting everyone around the world. 
Are there any Monkeys here? 
2016 is the Year of the Monkey. 
Monkeys are clever, curious, creative and mischievous. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

You may not realize this, but there are more bacteria in your body than stars in our entire galaxy. 
This fascinating universe of bacteria inside of us is an integral part of our health, and our technology is evolving so rapidly that today we can program these bacteria like we program computers. 
Now, the diagram that you see here, I know it looks like some kind of sports play, but it is actually a blueprint of the first bacterial program I developed. 
And like writing software, we can print and write DNA into different algorithms and programs inside of bacteria. 
What this program does is produces fluorescent proteins in a rhythmic fashion and generates a small molecule that allows bacteria to communicate and synchronize, as you're seeing in this movie. 
The growing colony of bacteria that you see here is about the width of a human hair. 
Now, what you can't see is that our genetic program instructs these bacteria to each produce small molecules, and these molecules travel between the thousands of individual bacteria telling them when to turn on and off. 
And the bacteria synchronize quite well at this scale, but because the molecule that synchronizes them together can only travel so fast, in larger colonies of bacteria, this results in traveling waves between bacteria that are far away from each other, and you can see these waves going from right to left across the screen. 
Now, our genetic program relies on a natural phenomenon called quorum sensing, in which bacteria trigger coordinated and sometimes virulent behaviors once they reach a critical density. 
You can observe quorum sensing in action in this movie, where a growing colony of bacteria only begins to glow once it reaches a high or critical density. 
Our genetic program continues producing these rhythmic patterns of fluorescent proteins as the colony grows outwards. 
This particular movie and experiment we call The Supernova, because it looks like an exploding star. 
Now, besides programming these beautiful patterns, I wondered, what else can we get these bacteria to do? 
And I decided to explore how we can program bacteria to detect and treat diseases in our bodies like cancer. 
One of the surprising facts about bacteria is that they can naturally grow inside of tumors. 
This happens because typically tumors are areas where the immune system has no access, and so bacteria find these tumors and use them as a safe haven to grow and thrive. 
We started using probiotic bacteria which are safe bacteria that have a health benefit, and found that when orally delivered to mice, these probiotics would selectively grow inside of liver tumors. 
We realized that the most convenient way to highlight the presence of the probiotics, and hence, the presence of the tumors, was to get these bacteria to produce a signal that would be detectable in the urine, and so we specifically programmed these probiotics to make a molecule that would change the color of your urine to indicate the presence of cancer. 
We went on to show that this technology could sensitively and specifically detect liver cancer, one that is challenging to detect otherwise. 
Now, since these bacteria specifically localize to tumors, we've been programming them to not only detect cancer but also to treat cancer by producing therapeutic molecules from within the tumor environment that shrink the existing tumors, and we've been doing this using quorum sensing programs like you saw in the previous movies. 
Altogether, imagine in the future taking a programmed probiotic that could detect and treat cancer, or even other diseases. 
Our ability to program bacteria and program life opens up new horizons in cancer research, and to share this vision, I worked with artist Vik Muniz to create the symbol of the universe, made entirely out of bacteria or cancer cells. 
Ultimately, my hope is that the beauty and purpose of this microscopic universe can inspire new and creative approaches for the future of cancer research. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'd like to start by asking you all to go to your happy place, please. 
Yes, your happy place, I know you've got one even if it's fake. 
(Laughter) OK, so, comfortable? 
Good. 
Now I'd like to you to mentally answer the following questions. 
Is there any strip lighting in your happy place? 
Any plastic tables? 
Polyester flooring? 
Mobile phones? 
No? 
I think we all know that our happy place is meant to be somewhere natural, outdoors — on a beach, fireside. 
We'll be reading or eating or knitting. 
And we're surrounded by natural light and organic elements. 
Natural things make us happy. 
And happiness is a great motivator; we strive for happiness. 
Perhaps that's why we're always redesigning everything, in the hopes that our solutions might feel more natural. 
So let's start there — with the idea that good design should feel natural. 
Your phone is not very natural. 
And you probably think you're addicted to your phone, but you're really not. 
We're not addicted to devices, we're addicted to the information that flows through them. 
I wonder how long you would be happy in your happy place without any information from the outside world. 
I'm interested in how we access that information, how we experience it. 
We're moving from a time of static information, held in books and libraries and bus stops, through a period of digital information, towards a period of fluid information, where your children will expect to be able to access anything, anywhere at any time, from quantum physics to medieval viticulture, from gender theory to tomorrow's weather, just like switching on a lightbulb — Imagine that. 
Humans also like simple tools. 
Your phone is not a very simple tool. 
A fork is a simple tool. 
(Laughter) And we don't like them made of plastic, in the same way I don't really like my phone very much — it's not how I want to experience information. 
I think there are better solutions than a world mediated by screens. 
I don't hate screens, but I don't feel — and I don't think any of us feel that good about how much time we spend slouched over them. 
Fortunately, the big tech companies seem to agree. 
They're actually heavily invested in touch and speech and gesture, and also in senses — things that can turn dumb objects, like cups, and imbue them with the magic of the Internet, potentially turning this digital cloud into something we might touch and move. 
The parents in crisis over screen time need physical digital toys teaching their kids to read, as well as family-safe app stores. 
And I think, actually, that's already really happening. 
Reality is richer than screens. 
For example, I love books. 
For me they are time machines — atoms and molecules bound in space, from the moment of their creation to the moment of my experience. 
But frankly, the content's identical on my phone. 
So what makes this a richer experience than a screen? 
I mean, scientifically. 
We need screens, of course. 
I'm going to show film, I need the enormous screen. 
But there's more than you can do with these magic boxes. 
Your phone is not the Internet's door bitch. 
(Laughter) We can build things — physical things, using physics and pixels, that can integrate the Internet into the world around us. 
And I'm going to show you a few examples of those. 
A while ago, I got to work with a design agency, Berg, on an exploration of what the Internet without screens might actually look like. 
And they showed us a range ways that light can work with simple senses and physical objects to really bring the Internet to life, to make it tangible. 
Like this wonderfully mechanical YouTube player. 
And this was an inspiration to me. 
Next I worked with the Japanese agency, AQ, on a research project into mental health. 
We wanted to create an object that could capture the subjective data around mood swings that's so essential to diagnosis. 
This object captures your touch, so you might press it very hard if you're angry, or stroke it if you're calm. 
It's like a digital emoji stick. 
And then you might revisit those moments later, and add context to them online. 
Most of all, we wanted to create an intimate, beautiful thing that could live in your pocket and be loved. 
The binoculars are actually a birthday present for the Sydney Opera House's 40th anniversary. 
Our friends at Tellart in Boston brought over a pair of street binoculars, the kind you might find on the Empire State Building, and they fitted them with 360-degree views of other iconic world heritage sights — (Laughter) using Street View. 
And then we stuck them under the steps. 
So, they became this very physical, simple reappropriation, or like a portal to these other icons. 
So you might see Versailles or Shackleton's Hut. 
Basically, it's virtual reality circa 1955. 
(Laughter) In our office we use hacky sacks to exchange URLs. 
This is incredibly simple, it's like your Opal card. 
You basically put a website on the little chip in here, and then you do this and... bosh! — the website appears on your phone. 
It's about 10 cents. 
Treehugger is a project that we're working on with Grumpy Sailor and Finch, here in Sydney. 
And I'm very excited about what might happen when you pull the phones apart and you put the bits into trees, and that my children might have an opportunity to visit an enchanted forest guided by a magic wand, where they could talk to digital fairies and ask them questions, and be asked questions in return. 
As you can see, we're at the cardboard stage with this one. 
(Laughter) But I'm very excited by the possibility of getting kids back outside without screens, but with all the powerful magic of the Internet at their fingertips. 
And we hope to have something like this working by the end of the year. 
So let's recap. 
Humans like natural solutions. 
Humans love information. 
Humans need simple tools. 
These principles should underpin how we design for the future, not just for the Internet. 
You may feel uncomfortable about the age of information that we're moving into. 
You may feel challenged, rather than simply excited. 
Guess what? Me too. 
It's a really extraordinary period of human history. 
We are the people that actually build our world, there are no artificial intelligences... 
yet. 
(Laughter) It's us — designers, architects, artists, engineers. 
And if we challenge ourselves, I think that actually we can have a happy place filled with the information we love that feels as natural and as simple as switching on lightbulb. 
And although it may seem inevitable, that what the public wants is watches and websites and widgets, maybe we could give a bit of thought to cork and light and hacky sacks. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Okay. 
♫ Strolling along in Central Park ♫ ♫ Everyone's out today ♫ ♫ The daisies and dogwoods are all in bloom ♫ ♫ Oh, what a glorious day ♫ ♫ For picnics and Frisbees and roller skaters, ♫ ♫ Friends and lovers and lonely sunbathers ♫ ♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January ♫ (Laughter) (Applause) ♫ I brought the iced tea; ♫ ♫ Did you bring the bug spray? ♫ ♫ The flies are the size of your head ♫ ♫ Next to the palm tree, ♫ ♫ Did you see the 'gators ♫ ♫ Looking happy and well fed? ♫ ♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January ♫ 
(Whistling) Everyone! 
(Whistling) (Laughter) ♫ My preacher said, ♫ ♫ Don't you worry ♫ ♫ The scientists have it all wrong ♫ ♫ And so, who cares it's winter here? ♫ ♫ And I have my halter-top on ♫ ♫ I have my halter-top on ♫ ♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January. ♫ (Applause) Chris Anderson: Jill Sobule! 

So it's 2006. 
My friend Harold Ford calls me. 
He's running for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, and he says, "" Mellody, I desperately need some national press. Do you have any ideas? "" So I had an idea. I called a friend who was in New York at one of the most successful media companies in the world, and she said, "" Why don't we host an editorial board lunch for Harold? 
You come with him. "" Harold and I arrive in New York. 
We are in our best suits. 
We look like shiny new pennies. 
And we get to the receptionist, and we say, "We're here for the lunch." 
She motions for us to follow her. 
We walk through a series of corridors, and all of a sudden we find ourselves in a stark room, at which point she looks at us and she says, "Where are your uniforms?" 
Just as this happens, my friend rushes in. 
The blood drains from her face. 
There are literally no words, right? 
And I look at her, and I say, "" Now, don't you think we need more than one black person in the U.S. Senate? "" Now Harold and I — (Applause) — we still laugh about that story, and in many ways, the moment caught me off guard, but deep, deep down inside, I actually wasn't surprised. 
And I wasn't surprised because of something my mother taught me about 30 years before. 
You see, my mother was ruthlessly realistic. 
I remember one day coming home from a birthday party where I was the only black kid invited, and instead of asking me the normal motherly questions like, "" Did you have fun? "" or "" How was the cake? "" my mother looked at me and she said, "How did they treat you?" 
I was seven. I did not understand. 
I mean, why would anyone treat me differently? 
But she knew. 
And she looked me right in the eye and she said, "They will not always treat you well." 
Now, race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. 
You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail. 
There is shock, followed by a long silence. 
And even coming here today, I told some friends and colleagues that I planned to talk about race, and they warned me, they told me, don't do it, that there'd be huge risks in me talking about this topic, that people might think I'm a militant black woman and I would ruin my career. 
And I have to tell you, I actually for a moment was a bit afraid. 
Then I realized, the first step to solving any problem is to not hide from it, and the first step to any form of action is awareness. 
And so I decided to actually talk about race. 
And I decided that if I came here and shared with you some of my experiences, that maybe we could all be a little less anxious and a little more bold in our conversations about race. 
Now I know there are people out there who will say that the election of Barack Obama meant that it was the end of racial discrimination for all eternity, right? 
But I work in the investment business, and we have a saying: The numbers do not lie. 
And here, there are significant, quantifiable racial disparities that cannot be ignored, in household wealth, household income, job opportunities, healthcare. 
One example from corporate America: Even though white men make up just 30 percent of the U.S. population, they hold 70 percent of all corporate board seats. 
Of the Fortune 250, there are only seven CEOs that are minorities, and of the thousands of publicly traded companies today, thousands, only two are chaired by black women, and you're looking at one of them, the same one who, not too long ago, was nearly mistaken for kitchen help. 
So that is a fact. 
Now I have this thought experiment that I play with myself, when I say, imagine if I walked you into a room and it was of a major corporation, like ExxonMobil, and every single person around the boardroom were black, you would think that were weird. 
But if I walked you into a Fortune 500 company, and everyone around the table is a white male, when will it be that we think that's weird too? 
And I know how we got here. 
(Applause) I know how we got here. 
You know, there was institutionalized, at one time legalized, discrimination in our country. 
There's no question about it. 
But still, as I grapple with this issue, my mother's question hangs in the air for me: How did they treat you? 
Now, I do not raise this issue to complain or in any way to elicit any kind of sympathy. 
I have succeeded in my life beyond my wildest expectations, and I have been treated well by people of all races more often than I have not. 
I tell the uniform story because it happened. 
I cite those statistics around corporate board diversity because they are real, and I stand here today talking about this issue of racial discrimination because I believe it threatens to rob another generation of all the opportunities that all of us want for all of our children, no matter what their color or where they come from. 
And I think it also threatens to hold back businesses. 
You see, researchers have coined this term "color blindness" to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don't notice race. 
If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you, that's purely accidental. 
Now, color blindness, in my view, doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, and there's fairness. 
It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't ensure it. 
In my view, color blindness is very dangerous because it means we're ignoring the problem. 
There was a corporate study that said that, instead of avoiding race, the really smart corporations actually deal with it head on. 
They actually recognize that embracing diversity means recognizing all races, including the majority one. 
But I'll be the first one to tell you, this subject matter can be hard, awkward, uncomfortable — but that's kind of the point. 
In the spirit of debunking racial stereotypes, the one that black people don't like to swim, I'm going to tell you how much I love to swim. 
I love to swim so much that as an adult, I swim with a coach. 
And one day my coach had me do a drill where I had to swim to one end of a 25-meter pool without taking a breath. 
And every single time I failed, I had to start over. 
And I failed a lot. 
By the end, I got it, but when I got out of the pool, I was exasperated and tired and annoyed, and I said, "" Why are we doing breath-holding exercises? "" And my coach looked me at me, and he said, "" Mellody, that was not a breath-holding exercise. 
That drill was to make you comfortable being uncomfortable, because that's how most of us spend our days. "" If we can learn to deal with our discomfort, and just relax into it, we'll have a better life. 
So I think it's time for us to be comfortable with the uncomfortable conversation about race: black, white, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, all of us, if we truly believe in equal rights and equal opportunity in America, I think we have to have real conversations about this issue. 
We cannot afford to be color blind. 
We have to be color brave. 
We have to be willing, as teachers and parents and entrepreneurs and scientists, we have to be willing to have proactive conversations about race with honesty and understanding and courage, not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the smart thing to do, because our businesses and our products and our science, our research, all of that will be better with greater diversity. 
Now, my favorite example of color bravery is a guy named John Skipper. 
He runs ESPN. 
He's a North Carolina native, quintessential Southern gentleman, white. 
He joined ESPN, which already had a culture of inclusion and diversity, but he took it up a notch. 
He demanded that every open position have a diverse slate of candidates. 
Now he says the senior people in the beginning bristled, and they would come to him and say, "" Do you want me to hire the minority, or do you want me to hire the best person for the job? "" And Skipper says his answers were always the same: "Yes." 
And by saying yes to diversity, I honestly believe that ESPN is the most valuable cable franchise in the world. 
I think that's a part of the secret sauce. 
Now I can tell you, in my own industry, at Ariel Investments, we actually view our diversity as a competitive advantage, and that advantage can extend way beyond business. 
There's a guy named Scott Page at the University of Michigan. 
He is the first person to develop a mathematical calculation for diversity. 
He says, if you're trying to solve a really hard problem, really hard, that you should have a diverse group of people, including those with diverse intellects. 
The example that he gives is the smallpox epidemic. 
When it was ravaging Europe, they brought together all these scientists, and they were stumped. 
And the beginnings of the cure to the disease came from the most unlikely source, a dairy farmer who noticed that the milkmaids were not getting smallpox. 
And the smallpox vaccination is bovine-based because of that dairy farmer. 
Now I'm sure you're sitting here and you're saying, I don't run a cable company, I don't run an investment firm, I am not a dairy farmer. 
What can I do? 
And I'm telling you, you can be color brave. 
If you're part of a hiring process or an admissions process, you can be color brave. 
If you are trying to solve a really hard problem, you can speak up and be color brave. 
Now I know people will say, but that doesn't add up to a lot, but I'm actually asking you to do something really simple: observe your environment, at work, at school, at home. 
I'm asking you to look at the people around you purposefully and intentionally. 
Invite people into your life who don't look like you, don't think like you, don't act like you, don't come from where you come from, and you might find that they will challenge your assumptions and make you grow as a person. 
You might get powerful new insights from these individuals, or, like my husband, who happens to be white, you might learn that black people, men, women, children, we use body lotion every single day. 
Now, I also think that this is very important so that the next generation really understands that this progress will help them, because they're expecting us to be great role models. 
Now, I told you, my mother, she was ruthlessly realistic. 
She was an unbelievable role model. 
She was the kind of person who got to be the way she was because she was a single mom with six kids in Chicago. 
She was in the real estate business, where she worked extraordinarily hard but oftentimes had a hard time making ends meet. 
And that meant sometimes we got our phone disconnected, or our lights turned off, or we got evicted. 
When we got evicted, sometimes we lived in these small apartments that she owned, sometimes in only one or two rooms, because they weren't completed, and we would heat our bathwater on hot plates. 
But she never gave up hope, ever, and she never allowed us to give up hope either. 
This brutal pragmatism that she had, I mean, I was four and she told me, "" Mommy is Santa. "" (Laughter) She was this brutal pragmatism. 
She taught me so many lessons, but the most important lesson was that every single day she told me, "Mellody, you can be anything." 
And because of those words, I would wake up at the crack of dawn, and because of those words, I would love school more than anything, and because of those words, when I was on a bus going to school, I dreamed the biggest dreams. 
And it's because of those words that I stand here right now full of passion, asking you to be brave for the kids who are dreaming those dreams today. 
(Applause) You see, I want them to look at a CEO on television and say, "" I can be like her, "" or, "" He looks like me. "" And I want them to know that anything is possible, that they can achieve the highest level that they ever imagined, that they will be welcome in any corporate boardroom, or they can lead any company. 
You see this idea of being the land of the free and the home of the brave, it's woven into the fabric of America. 
America, when we have a challenge, we take it head on, we don't shrink away from it. 
We take a stand. We show courage. 
So right now, what I'm asking you to do, I'm asking you to show courage. 
I'm asking you to be bold. 
As business leaders, I'm asking you not to leave anything on the table. 
As citizens, I'm asking you not to leave any child behind. 
I'm asking you not to be color blind, but to be color brave, so that every child knows that their future matters and their dreams are possible. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. (Applause) 

My dream is to build the world's first underground park in New York City. 
Now, why would someone want to build an underground park, and why in New York City? 
These three tough little buggers are, on the left, my grandmother, age five, and then her sister and brother, ages 11 and nine. 
This photo was taken just before they left from Italy to immigrate to the United States, just about a century ago. 
What was amazing about their generation was that they were not only building new lives in this new, unfamiliar area, but they were also literally building the city. 
I've always been fascinated by those decades and by that history, and I would often beg my grandmother to tell me as many stories as possible about the old New York. 
But she would often just shrug it off, tell me to eat more meatballs, more pasta, and so I very rarely got any of the history that I wanted to hear about. 
I always knew as a kid that I wanted to make a difference, and to somehow make the world more beautiful, more interesting and more just. 
I just didn't really know how. 
At first, I thought I wanted to go work abroad, so I took a job with UNICEF in Kenya. 
I took a job with the City of New York, but very quickly felt frustrated with the slowness of government bureaucracy. 
I even took a job at Google, where very fast I drank the Kool-Aid and believed almost wholeheartedly that technology could solve all social problems. 
It was in 2009 that my friend and now business partner James Ramsey alerted me to the location of a pretty spectacular site, which is this. 
This is the former trolley terminal that was the depot for passengers traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and it was open between 1908 and 1948, just around the time when my grandparents were living right in the area. 
And we learned also that the site was entirely abandoned in 1948. 
Fascinated by this discovery, we begged the authorities to draw us into the space, and we finally got a tour, and this is what we saw. 
It's kind of hard to imagine the unbelievably magical feeling that you have when you get in this space. 
It's a football field of unused land immediately below a very crowded area of the city, and it almost feels like you're Indiana Jones on an archaeological dig, and all the details are all still there. 
It's really pretty remarkable. 
Now, the site itself is located at the very heart of the Lower East Side, and today it still remains one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city. 
New York City has two thirds the green space per resident as other big cities, and this neighborhood as one tenth the green space. 
So we immediately started thinking about how we could take this site and turn it into something that could be used for the public, but also could potentially even be green. 
Our plan, in a nutshell, is to draw natural sunlight underground using a simple system that harvests sunlight above the street, directs it below the city sidewalks, and would allow plants and trees to grow with the light that's directed underneath. 
With this approach, you could take a site that looks like this today and transform it into something that looks like this. 
In 2011, we first released some of these images, and what was funny was, a lot of people said to us, "" Oh, it kind of looks like the High Line underground. "" And so what our nickname ended up becoming, and what ended up sticking, was the Lowline, so the Lowline was born. 
What was also clear was that people really wanted to know a lot more about how the technology would look and feel, and that there was really much more interest in this than we had ever thought possible. 
So, like a crazy person, I decided to quit my job and focus entirely on this project. 
Here is us with our team putting together a technology demonstration in a warehouse. 
Here's the underbelly of this solar canopy which we built to show the technology. 
And here's the full exhibit all put together in this warehouse. 
You can see the solar canopy overhead, the light streaming in, and this entirely live green space below. 
So in the course of just a few weeks, tens of thousands of people came to see our exhibit, and since that time, we've grown our numbers of supporters both locally and among design enthusiasts all over the world. 
Here's a rendering of the neighborhood just immediately above the Line's site, and a rendering of how it will look after major redevelopment that is coming over the course of the next 10 years. 
So what we're proposing is really something that will add one football field of green space underneath this neighborhood, but more importantly will introduce a really community-driven focus in a rapidly gentrifying area. 
And right now, we're focusing very closely on how we engage with the City of New York on really transforming the overall ecosystem in an integrated way. 
Here's our rendering of how we would actually invite people into the space itself. 
So here you see this iconic entrance in which we would literally peel up the street and reveal the historical layers of the city, and invite people into this warm underground space. 
If my grandparents and my parents were really focused on building the city up and out, I think my generation is focused on reclaiming the spaces that we already have, rediscovering our shared history, and reimagining how we can make our communities more interesting, more beautiful and more just. 
(Applause) 

I would be shocked if you hadn't. 
This is a technology — it's for genome editing — and it's so versatile and so controversial that it's sparking all sorts of really interesting conversations. 
Should we bring back the woolly mammoth? 
Should we edit a human embryo? 
And my personal favorite: How can we justify wiping out an entire species that we consider harmful to humans off the face of the Earth, using this technology? 
This type of science is moving much faster than the regulatory mechanisms that govern it. 
And so, for the past six years, I've made it my personal mission to make sure that as many people as possible understand these types of technologies and their implications. 
Now, CRISPR has been the subject of a huge media hype, and the words that are used most often are "" easy "" and "" cheap. "" So what I want to do is drill down a little bit deeper and look into some of the myths and the realities around CRISPR. 
If you're trying to CRISPR a genome, the first thing that you have to do is damage the DNA. 
The damage comes in the form of a double-strand break through the double helix. 
And then the cellular repair processes kick in, and then we convince those repair processes to make the edit that we want, and not a natural edit. 
That's how it works. 
It's a two-part system. 
You've got a Cas9 protein and something called a guide RNA. 
I like to think of it as a guided missile. 
So the Cas9 — I love to anthropomorphize — so the Cas9 is kind of this Pac-Man thing that wants to chew DNA, and the guide RNA is the leash that's keeping it out of the genome until it finds the exact spot where it matches. 
And the combination of those two is called CRISPR. 
It's a system that we stole from an ancient, ancient bacterial immune system. 
The part that's amazing about it is that the guide RNA, only 20 letters of it, are what target the system. 
This is really easy to design, and it's really cheap to buy. 
So that's the part that is modular in the system; everything else stays the same. 
This makes it a remarkably easy and powerful system to use. 
The guide RNA and the Cas9 protein complex together go bouncing along the genome, and when they find a spot where the guide RNA matches, then it inserts between the two strands of the double helix, it rips them apart, that triggers the Cas9 protein to cut, and all of a sudden, you've got a cell that's in total panic because now it's got a piece of DNA that's broken. 
What does it do? 
It calls its first responders. 
There are two major repair pathways. 
The first just takes the DNA and shoves the two pieces back together. 
This isn't a very efficient system, because what happens is sometimes a base drops out or a base is added. 
It's an OK way to maybe, like, knock out a gene, but it's not the way that we really want to do genome editing. 
The second repair pathway is a lot more interesting. 
In this repair pathway, it takes a homologous piece of DNA. 
And now mind you, in a diploid organism like people, we've got one copy of our genome from our mom and one from our dad, so if one gets damaged, it can use the other chromosome to repair it. 
So that's where this comes from. 
The repair is made, and now the genome is safe again. 
The way that we can hijack this is we can feed it a false piece of DNA, a piece that has homology on both ends but is different in the middle. 
So now, you can put whatever you want in the center and the cell gets fooled. 
So you can change a letter, you can take letters out, but most importantly, you can stuff new DNA in, kind of like a Trojan horse. 
CRISPR is going to be amazing, in terms of the number of different scientific advances that it's going to catalyze. 
The thing that's special about it is this modular targeting system. 
I mean, we've been shoving DNA into organisms for years, right? 
But because of the modular targeting system, we can actually put it exactly where we want it. 
The thing is that there's a lot of talk about it being cheap and it being easy. 
And I run a community lab. 
I'm starting to get emails from people that say stuff like, "" Hey, can I come to your open night and, like, maybe use CRISPR and engineer my genome? "" (Laugher) Like, seriously. 
I'm, "" No, you can't. "" (Laughter) "But I've heard it's cheap. I've heard it's easy." 
We're going to explore that a little bit. 
So, how cheap is it? 
Yeah, it is cheap in comparison. 
It's going to take the cost of the average materials for an experiment from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars, and it cuts the time a lot, too. 
It can cut it from weeks to days. 
That's great. 
You still need a professional lab to do the work in; you're not going to do anything meaningful outside of a professional lab. 
I mean, don't listen to anyone who says you can do this sort of stuff on your kitchen table. 
It's really not easy to do this kind of work. 
Not to mention, there's a patent battle going on, so even if you do invent something, the Broad Institute and UC Berkeley are in this incredible patent battle. 
It's really fascinating to watch it happen, because they're accusing each other of fraudulent claims and then they've got people saying, "Oh, well, I signed my notebook here or there." 
This isn't going to be settled for years. 
And when it is, you can bet you're going to pay someone a really hefty licensing fee in order to use this stuff. 
So, is it really cheap? 
Well, it's cheap if you're doing basic research and you've got a lab. 
How about easy? Let's look at that claim. 
The devil is always in the details. 
We don't really know that much about cells. 
They're still kind of black boxes. 
For example, we don't know why some guide RNAs work really well and some guide RNAs don't. 
We don't know why some cells want to do one repair pathway and some cells would rather do the other. 
And besides that, there's the whole problem of getting the system into the cell in the first place. 
In a petri dish, that's not that hard, but if you're trying to do it on a whole organism, it gets really tricky. 
It's OK if you use something like blood or bone marrow — those are the targets of a lot of research now. 
There was a great story of some little girl who they saved from leukemia by taking the blood out, editing it, and putting it back with a precursor of CRISPR. 
And this is a line of research that people are going to do. 
But right now, if you want to get into the whole body, you're probably going to have to use a virus. 
So you take the virus, you put the CRISPR into it, you let the virus infect the cell. 
But now you've got this virus in there, and we don't know what the long-term effects of that are. 
Plus, CRISPR has some off-target effects, a very small percentage, but they're still there. 
What's going to happen over time with that? 
These are not trivial questions, and there are scientists that are trying to solve them, and they will eventually, hopefully, be solved. 
But it ain't plug-and-play, not by a long shot. 
So: Is it really easy? 
Well, if you spend a few years working it out in your particular system, yes, it is. 
Now the other thing is, we don't really know that much about how to make a particular thing happen by changing particular spots in the genome. 
We're a long way away from figuring out how to give a pig wings, for example. 
Or even an extra leg — I'd settle for an extra leg. 
That would be kind of cool, right? 
But what is happening is that CRISPR is being used by thousands and thousands of scientists to do really, really important work, like making better models of diseases in animals, for example, or for taking pathways that produce valuable chemicals and getting them into industrial production in fermentation vats, or even doing really basic research on what genes do. 
This is the story of CRISPR we should be telling, and I don't like it that the flashier aspects of it are drowning all of this out. 
Lots of scientists did a lot of work to make CRISPR happen, and what's interesting to me is that these scientists are being supported by our society. 
Think about it. 
We've got an infrastructure that allows a certain percentage of people to spend all their time doing research. 
That makes us all the inventors of CRISPR, and I would say that makes us all the shepherds of CRISPR. 
We all have a responsibility. 
So I would urge you to really learn about these types of technologies, because, really, only in that way are we going to be able to guide the development of these technologies, the use of these technologies and make sure that, in the end, it's a positive outcome — for both the planet and for us. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

I have a question. 
Can a computer write poetry? 
This is a provocative question. 
You think about it for a minute, and you suddenly have a bunch of other questions like: What is a computer? 
What is poetry? 
What is creativity? 
But these are questions that people spend their entire lifetime trying to answer, not in a single TED Talk. 
So we're going to have to try a different approach. 
So up here, we have two poems. 
One of them is written by a human, and the other one's written by a computer. 
I'm going to ask you to tell me which one's which. 
Have a go: Poem 1: Little Fly / Thy summer's play, / My thoughtless hand / Has brush'd away. 
Am I not / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me? 
Poem 2: We can feel / Activist through your life's / morning / Pauses to see, pope I hate the / Non all the night to start a / great otherwise (...) Alright, time's up. 
Hands up if you think Poem 1 was written by a human. 
OK, most of you. 
Hands up if you think Poem 2 was written by a human. 
Very brave of you, because the first one was written by the human poet William Blake. 
The second one was written by an algorithm that took all the language from my Facebook feed on one day and then regenerated it algorithmically, according to methods that I'll describe a little bit later on. 
So let's try another test. 
Again, you haven't got ages to read this, so just trust your gut. 
Poem 1: A lion roars and a dog barks. It is interesting / and fascinating that a bird will fly and not / roar or bark. Enthralling stories about animals are in my dreams and I will sing them all if I / am not exhausted or weary. 
Poem 2: Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You are really beautiful! 
Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! All / the stuff they've always talked about (...) Alright, time's up. 
So if you think the first poem was written by a human, put your hand up. 
OK. 
And if you think the second poem was written by a human, put your hand up. 
We have, more or less, a 50 / 50 split here. 
It was much harder. 
The answer is, the first poem was generated by an algorithm called Racter, that was created back in the 1970s, and the second poem was written by a guy called Frank O'Hara, who happens to be one of my favorite human poets. 
(Laughter) So what we've just done now is a Turing test for poetry. 
The Turing test was first proposed by this guy, Alan Turing, in 1950, in order to answer the question, can computers think? 
Alan Turing believed that if a computer was able to have a to have a text-based conversation with a human, with such proficiency such that the human couldn't tell whether they are talking to a computer or a human, then the computer can be said to have intelligence. 
So in 2013, my friend Benjamin Laird and I, we created a Turing test for poetry online. 
It's called bot or not, and you can go and play it for yourselves. 
But basically, it's the game we just played. 
You're presented with a poem, you don't know whether it was written by a human or a computer and you have to guess. 
So thousands and thousands of people have taken this test online, so we have results. 
And what are the results? 
Well, Turing said that if a computer could fool a human 30 percent of the time that it was a human, then it passes the Turing test for intelligence. 
We have poems on the bot or not database that have fooled 65 percent of human readers into thinking it was written by a human. 
So, I think we have an answer to our question. 
According to the logic of the Turing test, can a computer write poetry? 
Well, yes, absolutely it can. 
But if you're feeling a little bit uncomfortable with this answer, that's OK. 
If you're having a bunch of gut reactions to it, that's also OK because this isn't the end of the story. 
Let's play our third and final test. 
Again, you're going to have to read and tell me which you think is human. 
Poem 1: Red flags the reason for pretty flags. / And ribbons. 
Ribbons of flags / And wearing material / Reasons for wearing material. (...) Poem 2: A wounded deer leaps highest, / I've heard the daffodil I've heard the flag to-day / I've heard the hunter tell; / 'Tis but the ecstasy of death, / And then the brake is almost done (...) OK, time is up. 
So hands up if you think Poem 1 was written by a human. 
Hands up if you think Poem 2 was written by a human. 
Whoa, that's a lot more people. 
So you'd be surprised to find that Poem 1 was written by the very human poet Gertrude Stein. 
And Poem 2 was generated by an algorithm called RKCP. 
Now before we go on, let me describe very quickly and simply, how RKCP works. 
So RKCP is an algorithm designed by Ray Kurzweil, who's a director of engineering at Google and a firm believer in artificial intelligence. 
So, you give RKCP a source text, it analyzes the source text in order to find out how it uses language, and then it regenerates language that emulates that first text. 
So in the poem we just saw before, Poem 2, the one that you all thought was human, it was fed a bunch of poems by a poet called Emily Dickinson it looked at the way she used language, learned the model, and then it regenerated a model according to that same structure. 
But the important thing to know about RKCP is that it doesn't know the meaning of the words it's using. 
The language is just raw material, it could be Chinese, it could be in Swedish, it could be the collected language from your Facebook feed for one day. 
It's just raw material. 
And nevertheless, it's able to create a poem that seems more human than Gertrude Stein's poem, and Gertrude Stein is a human. 
So what we've done here is, more or less, a reverse Turing test. 
So Gertrude Stein, who's a human, is able to write a poem that fools a majority of human judges into thinking that it was written by a computer. 
Therefore, according to the logic of the reverse Turing test, Gertrude Stein is a computer. 
(Laughter) Feeling confused? 
I think that's fair enough. 
So far we've had humans that write like humans, we have computers that write like computers, we have computers that write like humans, but we also have, perhaps most confusingly, humans that write like computers. 
So what do we take from all of this? 
Do we take that William Blake is somehow more of a human than Gertrude Stein? 
Or that Gertrude Stein is more of a computer than William Blake? 
(Laughter) These are questions I've been asking myself for around two years now, and I don't have any answers. 
But what I do have are a bunch of insights about our relationship with technology. 
So my first insight is that, for some reason, we associate poetry with being human. 
So that when we ask, "" Can a computer write poetry? "" we're also asking, "" What does it mean to be human and how do we put boundaries around this category? 
How do we say who or what can be part of this category? "" This is an essentially philosophical question, I believe, and it can't be answered with a yes or no test, like the Turing test. 
I also believe that Alan Turing understood this, and that when he devised his test back in 1950, he was doing it as a philosophical provocation. 
So my second insight is that, when we take the Turing test for poetry, we're not really testing the capacity of the computers because poetry-generating algorithms, they're pretty simple and have existed, more or less, since the 1950s. 
What we are doing with the Turing test for poetry, rather, is collecting opinions about what constitutes humanness. 
So, what I've figured out, we've seen this when earlier today, we say that William Blake is more of a human than Gertrude Stein. 
Of course, this doesn't mean that William Blake was actually more human or that Gertrude Stein was more of a computer. 
It simply means that the category of the human is unstable. 
This has led me to understand that the human is not a cold, hard fact. 
Rather, it is something that's constructed with our opinions and something that changes over time. 
So my final insight is that the computer, more or less, works like a mirror that reflects any idea of a human that we show it. 
We show it Emily Dickinson, it gives Emily Dickinson back to us. 
We show it William Blake, that's what it reflects back to us. 
We show it Gertrude Stein, what we get back is Gertrude Stein. 
More than any other bit of technology, the computer is a mirror that reflects any idea of the human we teach it. 
So I'm sure a lot of you have been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence recently. 
And much of the conversation is, can we build it? 
Can we build an intelligent computer? 
Can we build a creative computer? 
What we seem to be asking over and over is can we build a human-like computer? 
But what we've seen just now is that the human is not a scientific fact, that it's an ever-shifting, concatenating idea and one that changes over time. 
So that when we begin to grapple with the ideas of artificial intelligence in the future, we shouldn't only be asking ourselves, "Can we build it?" 
But we should also be asking ourselves, "What idea of the human do we want to have reflected back to us?" 
This is an essentially philosophical idea, and it's one that can't be answered with software alone, but I think requires a moment of species-wide, existential reflection. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Where do you come from? 
It's such a simple question, but these days, of course, simple questions bring ever more complicated answers. 
People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. 
Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. 
I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects. 
So I don't think I've really earned the right to call myself an Indian. 
And if "" Where do you come from? "" means "" Where were you born and raised and educated? "" then I'm entirely of that funny little country known as England, except I left England as soon as I completed my undergraduate education, and all the time I was growing up, I was the only kid in all my classes who didn't begin to look like the classic English heroes represented in our textbooks. And if "" Where do you come from? "" 
means "" Where do you pay your taxes? 
Where do you see your doctor and your dentist? "" then I'm very much of the United States, and I have been for 48 years now, since I was a really small child. 
Except, for many of those years, I've had to carry around this funny little pink card with green lines running through my face identifying me as a permanent alien. 
I do actually feel more alien the longer I live there. 
(Laughter) And if "" Where do you come from? "" means "" Which place goes deepest inside you and where do you try to spend most of your time? "" then I'm Japanese, because I've been living as much as I can for the last 25 years in Japan. 
Except, all of those years I've been there on a tourist visa, and I'm fairly sure not many Japanese would want to consider me one of them. 
And I say all this just to stress how very old-fashioned and straightforward my background is, because when I go to Hong Kong or Sydney or Vancouver, most of the kids I meet are much more international and multi-cultured than I am. 
And they have one home associated with their parents, but another associated with their partners, a third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be, a fourth connected with the place they dream of being, and many more besides. 
And their whole life will be spent taking pieces of many different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole. 
Home for them is really a work in progress. 
It's like a project on which they're constantly adding upgrades and improvements and corrections. 
And for more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. 
If somebody suddenly asks me, "" Where's your home? "" I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be. 
And I'd always felt this way, but it really came home to me, as it were, some years ago when I was climbing up the stairs in my parents' house in California, and I looked through the living room windows and I saw that we were encircled by 70-foot flames, one of those wildfires that regularly tear through the hills of California and many other such places. 
And three hours later, that fire had reduced my home and every last thing in it except for me to ash. 
And when I woke up the next morning, I was sleeping on a friend's floor, the only thing I had in the world was a toothbrush I had just bought from an all-night supermarket. 
Of course, if anybody asked me then, "Where is your home?" 
I literally couldn't point to any physical construction. 
My home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me. 
And in so many ways, I think this is a terrific liberation. 
Because when my grandparents were born, they pretty much had their sense of home, their sense of community, even their sense of enmity, assigned to them at birth, and didn't have much chance of stepping outside of that. 
And nowadays, at least some of us can choose our sense of home, create our sense of community, fashion our sense of self, and in so doing maybe step a little beyond some of the black and white divisions of our grandparents' age. 
No coincidence that the president of the strongest nation on Earth is half-Kenyan, partly raised in Indonesia, has a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law. 
The number of people living in countries not their own now comes to 220 million, and that's an almost unimaginable number, but it means that if you took the whole population of Canada and the whole population of Australia and then the whole population of Australia again and the whole population of Canada again and doubled that number, you would still have fewer people than belong to this great floating tribe. 
And the number of us who live outside the old nation-state categories is increasing so quickly, by 64 million just in the last 12 years, that soon there will be more of us than there are Americans. 
Already, we represent the fifth-largest nation on Earth. 
And in fact, in Canada's largest city, Toronto, the average resident today is what used to be called a foreigner, somebody born in a very different country. 
And I've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake. 
You can't take anything for granted. 
Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked "" on. "" Suddenly you're alert to the secret patterns of the world. 
The real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said, consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes. 
And of course, once you have new eyes, even the old sights, even your home become something different. 
Many of the people living in countries not their own are refugees who never wanted to leave home and ache to go back home. 
But for the fortunate among us, I think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities. 
Certainly when I'm traveling, especially to the major cities of the world, the typical person I meet today will be, let's say, a half-Korean, half-German young woman living in Paris. 
And as soon as she meets a half-Thai, half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh, she recognizes him as kin. 
She realizes that she probably has much more in common with him than with anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of Germany. 
So they become friends. They fall in love. 
They move to New York City. 
(Laughter) Or Edinburgh. 
And the little girl who arises out of their union will of course be not Korean or German or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian or even American, but a wonderful and constantly evolving mix of all those places. 
And potentially, everything about the way that young woman dreams about the world, writes about the world, thinks about the world, could be something different, because it comes out of this almost unprecedented blend of cultures. 
Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. 
More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. 
And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. 
It's the place where you become yourself. 
And yet, there is one great problem with movement, and that is that it's really hard to get your bearings when you're in midair. 
Some years ago, I noticed that I had accumulated one million miles on United Airlines alone. 
You all know that crazy system, six days in hell, you get the seventh day free. 
(Laughter) And I began to think that really, movement was only as good as the sense of stillness that you could bring to it to put it into perspective. 
And eight months after my house burned down, I ran into a friend who taught at a local high school, and he said, "" I've got the perfect place for you. "" "" Really? "" I said. I'm always a bit skeptical when people say things like that. 
"" No, honestly, "" he went on, "" it's only three hours away by car, and it's not very expensive, and it's probably not like anywhere you've stayed before. "" "Hmm." I was beginning to get slightly intrigued. "What is it?" 
"" Well — "" Here my friend hemmed and hawed — "Well, actually it's a Catholic hermitage." 
This was the wrong answer. 
I had spent 15 years in Anglican schools, so I had had enough hymnals and crosses to last me a lifetime. 
Several lifetimes, actually. 
But my friend assured me that he wasn't Catholic, nor were most of his students, but he took his classes there every spring. 
And as he had it, even the most restless, distractible, testosterone-addled 15-year-old Californian boy only had to spend three days in silence and something in him cooled down and cleared out. 
He found himself. 
And I thought, "" Anything that works for a 15-year-old boy ought to work for me. "" So I got in my car, and I drove three hours north along the coast, and the roads grew emptier and narrower, and then I turned onto an even narrower path, barely paved, that snaked for two miles up to the top of a mountain. 
And when I got out of my car, the air was pulsing. 
The whole place was absolutely silent, but the silence wasn't an absence of noise. 
It was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening. 
And at my feet was the great, still blue plate of the Pacific Ocean. 
All around me were 800 acres of wild dry brush. 
And I went down to the room in which I was to be sleeping. 
Small but eminently comfortable, it had a bed and a rocking chair and a long desk and even longer picture windows looking out on a small, private, walled garden, and then 1,200 feet of golden pampas grass running down to the sea. 
And I sat down, and I began to write, and write, and write, even though I'd gone there really to get away from my desk. 
And by the time I got up, four hours had passed. 
Night had fallen, and I went out under this great overturned saltshaker of stars, and I could see the tail lights of cars disappearing around the headlands 12 miles to the south. 
And it really seemed like my concerns of the previous day vanishing. 
And the next day, when I woke up in the absence of telephones and TVs and laptops, the days seemed to stretch for a thousand hours. 
It was really all the freedom I know when I'm traveling, but it also profoundly felt like coming home. 
And I'm not a religious person, so I didn't go to the services. 
I didn't consult the monks for guidance. 
I just took walks along the monastery road and sent postcards to loved ones. 
I looked at the clouds, and I did what is hardest of all for me to do usually, which is nothing at all. 
And I started to go back to this place, and I noticed that I was doing my most important work there invisibly just by sitting still, and certainly coming to my most critical decisions the way I never could when I was racing from the last email to the next appointment. 
And I began to think that something in me had really been crying out for stillness, but of course I couldn't hear it because I was running around so much. 
I was like some crazy guy who puts on a blindfold and then complains that he can't see a thing. 
And I thought back to that wonderful phrase I had learned as a boy from Seneca, in which he says, "" That man is poor not who has little but who hankers after more. "" And, of course, I'm not suggesting that anybody here go into a monastery. 
That's not the point. 
But I do think it's only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. 
And it's only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about and find a home. 
And I've noticed so many people now take conscious measures to sit quietly for 30 minutes every morning just collecting themselves in one corner of the room without their devices, or go running every evening, or leave their cell phones behind when they go to have a long conversation with a friend. 
Movement is a fantastic privilege, and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never have dreamed of doing. 
But movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. 
And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. 
It's the place where you stand. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Thank you very much. 
Now, I've got a story for you. 
When I arrived off the plane, after a very long journey from the West of England, my computer, my beloved laptop, had gone mad, and had — oh! — a bit like that! — and the display on it — anyway, the whole thing had burst. 
And I went to the IT guys here and a gentleman mended my computer, and then he said, "" What are you doing here? "" and I said "" I'm playing the cello and I'm doing a bit of singing, "" and he said, "" Oh, I sort of play the cello as well. "" And I said, "" Do you really? "" Anyway, so you're in for a treat, because he's fantastic, and his name's Mark. 
(Applause) I am also joined by my partner in crime, Thomas Dolby. (Applause) 
This song is called "" Farther than the Sun. "" (Music) ♫ Strung in the wind I called you ♫ ♫ but you did not hear... ♫ ♫ And you're a plant that needs poor soil ♫ ♫ and I have treated you too well ♫ ♫ to give up flowers... ♫ ♫ Oh, I have been too rich for you... ♫ ♫ Farther than the sun from me ♫ ♫ Farther than I'd have you be ♫ ♫ And I go north, I get so cold ♫ ♫ My heart is lava under stone ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ 
♫ You are not worthy... ♫ ♫ With your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ spinning figures ♫ ♫ you cannot see me ♫ ♫ You cannot see me... ♫ ♫ And if I tell myself enough ♫ ♫ I'll believe it ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ The sea, it freezes over... ♫ ♫ to trap the light ♫ ♫ And I'm in love with being in love ♫ ♫ and you were never quite the one ♫ ♫ In Gerda's eyes ♫ ♫ Fragments of what you've become ♫ ♫ And all the moths that fly at night ♫ 
♫ believe electric light is bright ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ With your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ Spinning figures ♫ ♫ You cannot see me, no ♫ ♫ And if I tell myself enough ♫ ♫ I'll believe it ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ Farther than the sun from me ♫ ♫ Farther than I'd have you be ♫ ♫ And I go north, I get so cold ♫ ♫ My heart is lava under stone ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ You are not worthy ♫ ♫ With your calculating eyes ♫ ♫ Spinning figures ♫ 
♫ You cannot see me, no... ♫ ♫ And if I tell myself enough, I'll believe it ♫ (Applause) Thank you very much. 

I'd like to talk about my dad. 
My dad has Alzheimer's disease. 
He started showing the symptoms about 12 years ago, and he was officially diagnosed in 2005. 
Now he's really pretty sick. He needs help eating, he needs help getting dressed, he doesn't really know where he is or when it is, and it's been really, really hard. 
My dad was my hero and my mentor for most of my life, and I've spent the last decade watching him disappear. 
My dad's not alone. There's about 35 million people globally living with some kind of dementia, and by 2030 they're expecting that to double to 70 million. 
That's a lot of people. 
Dementia scares us. The confused faces and shaky hands of people who have dementia, the big numbers of people who get it, they frighten us. 
And because of that fear, we tend to do one of two things: We go into denial: "" It's not me, it has nothing to do with me, it's never going to happen to me. "" Or, we decide that we're going to prevent dementia, and it will never happen to us because we're going to do everything right and it won't come and get us. 
I'm looking for a third way: I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's disease. 
Prevention is good, and I'm doing the things that you can do to prevent Alzheimer's. 
I'm eating right, I'm exercising every day, I'm keeping my mind active, that's what the research says you should do. 
But the research also shows that there's nothing that will 100 percent protect you. 
If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you. 
That's what happened with my dad. 
My dad was a bilingual college professor. His hobbies were chess, bridge and writing op-eds. 
(Laughter) He got dementia anyway. 
If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you. 
Especially if you're me, 'cause Alzheimer's tends to run in families. 
So I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's disease. 
Based on what I've learned from taking care of my father, and researching what it's like to live with dementia, I'm focusing on three things in my preparation: I'm changing what I do for fun, I'm working to build my physical strength, and — this is the hard one — I'm trying to become a better person. 
Let's start with the hobbies. When you get dementia, it gets harder and harder to enjoy yourself. 
You can't sit and have long talks with your old friends, because you don't know who they are. 
It's confusing to watch television, and often very frightening. 
And reading is just about impossible. 
When you care for someone with dementia, and you get training, they train you to engage them in activities that are familiar, hands-on, open-ended. 
With my dad, that turned out to be letting him fill out forms. 
He was a college professor at a state school; he knows what paperwork looks like. 
He'll sign his name on every line, he'll check all the boxes, he'll put numbers in where he thinks there should be numbers. 
But it got me thinking, what would my caregivers do with me? 
I'm my father's daughter. I read, I write, I think about global health a lot. 
Would they give me academic journals so I could scribble in the margins? 
Would they give me charts and graphs that I could color? 
So I've been trying to learn to do things that are hands-on. 
I've always liked to draw, so I'm doing it more even though I'm really very bad at it. 
I am learning some basic origami. I can make a really great box. 
(Laughter) And I'm teaching myself to knit, which so far I can knit a blob. 
But, you know, it doesn't matter if I'm actually good at it. What matters is that my hands know how to do it. 
Because the more things that are familiar, the more things my hands know how to do, the more things that I can be happy and busy doing when my brain's not running the show anymore. 
They say that people who are engaged in activities are happier, easier for their caregivers to look after, and it may even slow the progress of the disease. 
That all seems like win to me. 
I want to be as happy as I can for as long as I can. 
A lot of people don't know that Alzheimer's actually has physical symptoms, as well as cognitive symptoms. You lose your sense of balance, you get muscle tremors, and that tends to lead people to being less and less mobile. 
They get scared to walk around. They get scared to move. 
So I'm doing activities that will build my sense of balance. 
I'm doing yoga and tai chi to improve my balance, so that when I start to lose it, I'll still be able to be mobile. 
I'm doing weight-bearing exercise, so that I have the muscle strength so that when I start to wither, I have more time that I can still move around. 
Finally, the third thing. I'm trying to become a better person. 
My dad was kind and loving before he had Alzheimer's, and he's kind and loving now. 
I've seen him lose his intellect, his sense of humor, his language skills, but I've also seen this: He loves me, he loves my sons, he loves my brother and my mom and his caregivers. 
And that love makes us want to be around him, even now. 
even when it's so hard. 
When you take away everything that he ever learned in this world, his naked heart still shines. 
I was never as kind as my dad, and I was never as loving. 
And what I need now is to learn to be like that. 
I need a heart so pure that if it's stripped bare by dementia, it will survive. 
I don't want to get Alzheimer's disease. 
What I want is a cure in the next 20 years, soon enough to protect me. 
But if it comes for me, I'm going to be ready. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hello everyone. 
And so the two of us are here to give you an example of creation. 
And I'm going to be folding one of Robert Lang's models. 
And this is the piece of paper it will be made from, and you can see all of the folds that are needed for it. 
And Rufus is going to be doing some improvisation on his custom, five-string electric cello, and it's very exciting to listen to him. 
Are you ready to go? OK. 
Just to make it a little bit more exciting. 
All right. Take it away, Rufus. 
(Music) All right. There you go. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

I work with a bunch of mathematicians, philosophers and computer scientists, and we sit around and think about the future of machine intelligence, among other things. 
Some people think that some of these things are sort of science fiction-y, far out there, crazy. 
But I like to say, okay, let's look at the modern human condition. 
(Laughter) This is the normal way for things to be. 
But if we think about it, we are actually recently arrived guests on this planet, the human species. 
Think about if Earth was created one year ago, the human species, then, would be 10 minutes old. 
The industrial era started two seconds ago. 
Another way to look at this is to think of world GDP over the last 10,000 years, I've actually taken the trouble to plot this for you in a graph. 
It looks like this. 
(Laughter) It's a curious shape for a normal condition. 
I sure wouldn't want to sit on it. 
(Laughter) Let's ask ourselves, what is the cause of this current anomaly? 
Some people would say it's technology. 
Now it's true, technology has accumulated through human history, and right now, technology advances extremely rapidly — that is the proximate cause, that's why we are currently so very productive. 
But I like to think back further to the ultimate cause. 
Look at these two highly distinguished gentlemen: We have Kanzi — he's mastered 200 lexical tokens, an incredible feat. 
And Ed Witten unleashed the second superstring revolution. 
If we look under the hood, this is what we find: basically the same thing. 
One is a little larger, it maybe also has a few tricks in the exact way it's wired. 
These invisible differences cannot be too complicated, however, because there have only been 250,000 generations since our last common ancestor. 
We know that complicated mechanisms take a long time to evolve. 
So a bunch of relatively minor changes take us from Kanzi to Witten, from broken-off tree branches to intercontinental ballistic missiles. 
So this then seems pretty obvious that everything we've achieved, and everything we care about, depends crucially on some relatively minor changes that made the human mind. 
And the corollary, of course, is that any further changes that could significantly change the substrate of thinking could have potentially enormous consequences. 
Some of my colleagues think we're on the verge of something that could cause a profound change in that substrate, and that is machine superintelligence. 
Artificial intelligence used to be about putting commands in a box. 
You would have human programmers that would painstakingly handcraft knowledge items. 
You build up these expert systems, and they were kind of useful for some purposes, but they were very brittle, you couldn't scale them. 
Basically, you got out only what you put in. 
But since then, a paradigm shift has taken place in the field of artificial intelligence. 
Today, the action is really around machine learning. 
So rather than handcrafting knowledge representations and features, we create algorithms that learn, often from raw perceptual data. 
Basically the same thing that the human infant does. 
The result is A.I. that is not limited to one domain — the same system can learn to translate between any pairs of languages, or learn to play any computer game on the Atari console. 
Now of course, A.I. is still nowhere near having the same powerful, cross-domain ability to learn and plan as a human being has. 
The cortex still has some algorithmic tricks that we don't yet know how to match in machines. 
So the question is, how far are we from being able to match those tricks? 
A couple of years ago, we did a survey of some of the world's leading A.I. experts, to see what they think, and one of the questions we asked was, "" By which year do you think there is a 50 percent probability that we will have achieved human-level machine intelligence? "" We defined human-level here as the ability to perform almost any job at least as well as an adult human, so real human-level, not just within some limited domain. 
And the median answer was 2040 or 2050, depending on precisely which group of experts we asked. 
Now, it could happen much, much later, or sooner, the truth is nobody really knows. 
What we do know is that the ultimate limit to information processing in a machine substrate lies far outside the limits in biological tissue. 
This comes down to physics. 
A biological neuron fires, maybe, at 200 hertz, 200 times a second. 
But even a present-day transistor operates at the Gigahertz. 
Neurons propagate slowly in axons, 100 meters per second, tops. 
But in computers, signals can travel at the speed of light. 
There are also size limitations, like a human brain has to fit inside a cranium, but a computer can be the size of a warehouse or larger. 
So the potential for superintelligence lies dormant in matter, much like the power of the atom lay dormant throughout human history, patiently waiting there until 1945. 
In this century, scientists may learn to awaken the power of artificial intelligence. 
And I think we might then see an intelligence explosion. 
Now most people, when they think about what is smart and what is dumb, I think have in mind a picture roughly like this. 
So at one end we have the village idiot, and then far over at the other side we have Ed Witten, or Albert Einstein, or whoever your favorite guru is. 
But I think that from the point of view of artificial intelligence, the true picture is actually probably more like this: AI starts out at this point here, at zero intelligence, and then, after many, many years of really hard work, maybe eventually we get to mouse-level artificial intelligence, something that can navigate cluttered environments as well as a mouse can. 
And then, after many, many more years of really hard work, lots of investment, maybe eventually we get to chimpanzee-level artificial intelligence. 
And then, after even more years of really, really hard work, we get to village idiot artificial intelligence. 
And a few moments later, we are beyond Ed Witten. 
The train doesn't stop at Humanville Station. 
It's likely, rather, to swoosh right by. 
Now this has profound implications, particularly when it comes to questions of power. 
For example, chimpanzees are strong — pound for pound, a chimpanzee is about twice as strong as a fit human male. 
And yet, the fate of Kanzi and his pals depends a lot more on what we humans do than on what the chimpanzees do themselves. 
Once there is superintelligence, the fate of humanity may depend on what the superintelligence does. 
Think about it: Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make. 
Machines will then be better at inventing than we are, and they'll be doing so on digital timescales. 
What this means is basically a telescoping of the future. 
Think of all the crazy technologies that you could have imagined maybe humans could have developed in the fullness of time: cures for aging, space colonization, self-replicating nanobots or uploading of minds into computers, all kinds of science fiction-y stuff that's nevertheless consistent with the laws of physics. 
All of this superintelligence could develop, and possibly quite rapidly. 
Now, a superintelligence with such technological maturity would be extremely powerful, and at least in some scenarios, it would be able to get what it wants. 
We would then have a future that would be shaped by the preferences of this A.I. 
Now a good question is, what are those preferences? 
Here it gets trickier. 
To make any headway with this, we must first of all avoid anthropomorphizing. 
And this is ironic because every newspaper article about the future of A.I. has a picture of this: So I think what we need to do is to conceive of the issue more abstractly, not in terms of vivid Hollywood scenarios. 
We need to think of intelligence as an optimization process, a process that steers the future into a particular set of configurations. 
A superintelligence is a really strong optimization process. 
It's extremely good at using available means to achieve a state in which its goal is realized. 
This means that there is no necessary connection between being highly intelligent in this sense, and having an objective that we humans would find worthwhile or meaningful. 
Suppose we give an A.I. the goal to make humans smile. 
When the A.I. is weak, it performs useful or amusing actions that cause its user to smile. 
When the A.I. becomes superintelligent, it realizes that there is a more effective way to achieve this goal: take control of the world and stick electrodes into the facial muscles of humans to cause constant, beaming grins. 
Another example, suppose we give A.I. the goal to solve a difficult mathematical problem. 
When the A.I. becomes superintelligent, it realizes that the most effective way to get the solution to this problem is by transforming the planet into a giant computer, so as to increase its thinking capacity. 
And notice that this gives the A.I.s an instrumental reason to do things to us that we might not approve of. 
Human beings in this model are threats, we could prevent the mathematical problem from being solved. 
Of course, perceivably things won't go wrong in these particular ways; these are cartoon examples. 
But the general point here is important: if you create a really powerful optimization process to maximize for objective x, you better make sure that your definition of x incorporates everything you care about. 
This is a lesson that's also taught in many a myth. 
King Midas wishes that everything he touches be turned into gold. 
He touches his daughter, she turns into gold. 
He touches his food, it turns into gold. 
This could become practically relevant, not just as a metaphor for greed, but as an illustration of what happens if you create a powerful optimization process and give it misconceived or poorly specified goals. 
Now you might say, if a computer starts sticking electrodes into people's faces, we'd just shut it off. 
A, this is not necessarily so easy to do if we've grown dependent on the system — like, where is the off switch to the Internet? 
B, why haven't the chimpanzees flicked the off switch to humanity, or the Neanderthals? 
They certainly had reasons. 
We have an off switch, for example, right here. 
(Choking) The reason is that we are an intelligent adversary; we can anticipate threats and plan around them. 
But so could a superintelligent agent, and it would be much better at that than we are. 
The point is, we should not be confident that we have this under control here. 
And we could try to make our job a little bit easier by, say, putting the A.I. in a box, like a secure software environment, a virtual reality simulation from which it cannot escape. 
But how confident can we be that the A.I. couldn't find a bug. 
Given that merely human hackers find bugs all the time, I'd say, probably not very confident. 
So we disconnect the ethernet cable to create an air gap, but again, like merely human hackers routinely transgress air gaps using social engineering. 
Right now, as I speak, I'm sure there is some employee out there somewhere who has been talked into handing out her account details by somebody claiming to be from the I.T. department. 
More creative scenarios are also possible, like if you're the A.I., you can imagine wiggling electrodes around in your internal circuitry to create radio waves that you can use to communicate. 
Or maybe you could pretend to malfunction, and then when the programmers open you up to see what went wrong with you, they look at the source code — Bam! — the manipulation can take place. 
Or it could output the blueprint to a really nifty technology, and when we implement it, it has some surreptitious side effect that the A.I. had planned. 
The point here is that we should not be confident in our ability to keep a superintelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever. 
Sooner or later, it will out. 
I believe that the answer here is to figure out how to create superintelligent A.I. such that even if — when — it escapes, it is still safe because it is fundamentally on our side because it shares our values. 
I see no way around this difficult problem. 
Now, I'm actually fairly optimistic that this problem can be solved. 
We wouldn't have to write down a long list of everything we care about, or worse yet, spell it out in some computer language like C + + or Python, that would be a task beyond hopeless. 
Instead, we would create an A.I. that uses its intelligence to learn what we value, and its motivation system is constructed in such a way that it is motivated to pursue our values or to perform actions that it predicts we would approve of. 
We would thus leverage its intelligence as much as possible to solve the problem of value-loading. 
This can happen, and the outcome could be very good for humanity. 
But it doesn't happen automatically. 
The initial conditions for the intelligence explosion might need to be set up in just the right way if we are to have a controlled detonation. 
The values that the A.I. has need to match ours, not just in the familiar context, like where we can easily check how the A.I. behaves, but also in all novel contexts that the A.I. might encounter in the indefinite future. 
And there are also some esoteric issues that would need to be solved, sorted out: the exact details of its decision theory, how to deal with logical uncertainty and so forth. 
So the technical problems that need to be solved to make this work look quite difficult — not as difficult as making a superintelligent A.I., but fairly difficult. 
Here is the worry: Making superintelligent A.I. is a really hard challenge. 
Making superintelligent A.I. that is safe involves some additional challenge on top of that. 
The risk is that if somebody figures out how to crack the first challenge without also having cracked the additional challenge of ensuring perfect safety. 
So I think that we should work out a solution to the control problem in advance, so that we have it available by the time it is needed. 
Now it might be that we cannot solve the entire control problem in advance because maybe some elements can only be put in place once you know the details of the architecture where it will be implemented. 
But the more of the control problem that we solve in advance, the better the odds that the transition to the machine intelligence era will go well. 
This to me looks like a thing that is well worth doing and I can imagine that if things turn out okay, that people a million years from now look back at this century and it might well be that they say that the one thing we did that really mattered was to get this thing right. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

One of my favorite cartoon characters is Snoopy. 
I love the way he sits and lies on his kennel and contemplates the great things of life. 
So when I thought about compassion, my mind immediately went to one of the cartoon strips, where he's lying there and he says, "" I really understand, and I really appreciate how one should love one's neighbor as one love's oneself. 
The only trouble is the people next door; I can't stand them. "" This, in a way, is one of the challenges of how to interpret a really good idea. 
We all, I think, believe in compassion. 
If you look at all the world religions, all the main world religions, you'll find within them some teaching concerning compassion. 
So in Judaism, we have, from our Torah, that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself. 
And within Jewish teachings, the rabbinic teachings, we have Hillel, who taught that you shouldn't do to others what you don't like being done to yourself. 
And all the main religions have similar teachings. 
And again, within Judaism, we have a teaching about God, who is called the compassionate one, Ha-rachaman. 
After all, how could the world exist without God being compassionate? 
And we, as taught within the Torah that we are made in the image of God, so we too have to be compassionate. 
But what does it mean? How does it impact on our everyday life? 
Sometimes, of course, being compassionate can produce feelings within us that are very difficult to control. 
I know there are many times when I've gone and conducted a funeral, or when I have been sitting with the bereaved, or with people who are dying, and I am overwhelmed by the sadness, by the difficulty, the challenge that is there for the family, for the person. 
And I'm touched, so that tears come to my eyes. 
And yet, if I just allowed myself to be overwhelmed by these feelings, I wouldn't be doing my job — because I have to actually be there for them and make sure that rituals happen, that practicalities are seen to. 
And yet, on the other hand, if I didn't feel this compassion, then I feel that it would be time for me to hang up my robe and give up being a rabbi. 
And these same feelings are there for all of us as we face the world. 
Who cannot be touched by compassion when we see the terrible horrors of the results of war, or famine, or earthquakes, or tsunamis? 
I know some people who say "" Well, you know there's just so much out there — I can't do anything, I'm not going to even begin to try. "" And there are some charity workers who call this compassion fatigue. 
There are others who feel they can't confront compassion anymore, and so they turn off the television and don't watch. 
In Judaism, though, we tend to always say, there has to be a middle way. 
You have to, of course, be aware of the needs of others, but you have to be aware in such a way that you can carry on with your life and be of help to people. 
So part of compassion has to be an understanding of what makes people tick. 
And, of course, you can't do that unless you understand yourself a bit more. 
And there's a lovely rabbinic interpretation of the beginnings of creation, which says that when God created the world, God thought that it would be best to create the world only with the divine attribute of justice. 
Because, after all, God is just. 
Therefore, there should be justice throughout the world. 
And then God looked to the future and realized, if the world was created just with justice, the world couldn't exist. 
So, God thought, "" Nope, I'm going to create the world just with compassion. "" And then God looked to the future and realized that, in fact, if the world were just filled with compassion, there would be anarchy and chaos. 
There had to be limits to all things. 
The rabbis describe this as being like a king who has a beautiful, fragile glass bowl. 
If you put too much cold water in, it will shatter. 
If you put boiling water in, it will shatter. 
What do you have to do? Put in a mixture of the two. 
And so God put both of these possibilities into the world. 
There is something more though that has to be there. 
And that is the translation of the feelings that we may have about compassion into the wider world, into action. 
So, like Snoopy, we can't just lie there and think great thoughts about our neighbors. 
We actually have to do something about it. 
And so there is also, within Judaism, this notion of love and kindness that becomes very important: "" chesed. "" All these three things, then, have to be melded together. 
The idea of justice, which gives boundaries to our lives and gives us a feeling of what's right about life, what's right about living, what should we be doing, social justice. 
There has to be a willingness to do good deeds, but not, of course, at the expense of our own sanity. 
You know, there's no way that you can do anything for anyone if you overdo things. 
And balancing them all in the middle is this notion of compassion, which has to be there, if you like, at our very roots. 
This idea of compassion comes to us because we're made in the image of God, who is ultimately the compassionate one. 
What does this compassion entail? 
It entails understanding the pain of the other. 
But even more than that, it means understanding one's connection to the whole of creation: understanding that one is part of that creation, that there is a unity that underlies all that we see, all that we hear, all that we feel. 
I call that unity God. 
And that unity is something that connects all of creation. 
And, of course, in the modern world, with the environmental movement, we're becoming even more aware of the connectivity of things, that something I do here actually does matter in Africa, that if I use too much of my carbon allowance, it seems to be that we are causing a great lack of rain in central and eastern Africa. 
So there is a connectivity, and I have to understand that — as part of the creation, as part of me being made in the image of God. 
And I have to understand that my needs sometimes have to be sublimated to other needs. 
This "" 18 minutes "" business, I find quite fascinating. 
Because in Judaism, the number 18, in Hebrew letters, stands for life — the word "" life. "" So, in a sense, the 18 minutes is challenging me to say, "In life, this is what's important in terms of compassion." 
But, something else as well: actually, 18 minutes is important. 
Because at Passover, when we have to eat unleavened bread, the rabbis say, what is the difference between dough that is made into bread, and dough that is made into unleavened bread, or "" matzah ""? 
And they say "" It's 18 minutes. "" Because that's how long they say it takes for this dough to become leaven. 
What does it mean, "" dough becomes leaven ""? 
It means it gets filled with hot air. 
What's matzah? What's unleavened bread? You don't get it. 
Symbolically, what the rabbis say is that at Passover, what we have to do is try to get rid of our hot air — our pride, our feeling that we are the most important people in the whole entire world, and that everything should revolve round us. 
So we try and get rid of those, and so doing, try to get rid of the habits, the emotions, the ideas that enslave us, that make our eyes closed, give us tunnel vision so we don't see the needs of others — and free ourselves and free ourselves from that. 
And that too is a basis for having compassion, for understanding our place in the world. 
Now there is, in Judaism, a gorgeous story of a rich man who sat in synagogue one day. 
And, as many people do, he was dozing off during the sermon. 
And as he was dozing off, they were reading from the book of Leviticus in the Torah. 
And they were saying that in the ancient times in the temple in Jerusalem, the priests used to have bread, which they used to place into a special table in the temple in Jerusalem. 
The man was asleep, but he heard the words bread, temple, God, and he woke up. 
He said, "" God wants bread. That's it. God wants bread. I know what God wants. "" And he rushed home. And after the Sabbath, he made 12 loaves of bread, took them to the synagogue, went into the synagogue, opened the ark and said, "" God, I don't know why you want this bread, but here you are. "" And he put it in the ark with the scrolls of the Torah. 
Then he went home. 
The cleaner came into the synagogue. 
"" Oh God, I'm in such trouble. I've got children to feed. 
My wife's ill. I've got no money. What can I do? "" He goes into the synagogue. "" God, will you please help me? 
Ah, what a wonderful smell. "" He goes to the ark. He opens the ark. 
"There's bread! God, you've answered my plea. You've answered my question." 
Takes the bread and goes home. 
Meanwhile, the rich man thinks to himself, "" I'm an idiot. God wants bread? 
God, the one who rules the entire universe, wants my bread? "" He rushes to the synagogue. "" I'll get it out of the ark before anybody finds it. "" He goes in there, and it's not there. 
And he says, "" God, you really did want it. You wanted my bread. 
Next week, with raisins. "" This went on for years. 
Every week, the man would bring bread with raisins, with all sorts of good things, put it into the ark. 
Every week, the cleaner would come. "" God you've answered my plea again. "" Take the bread. Take it home. 
Went on until a new rabbi came. Rabbis always spoil things. 
The rabbi came in and saw what was going on. 
And he called the two of them to his office. 
And he said, you know, "" This is what's happening. "" And the rich man — oh, dear — crestfallen. 
"You mean God didn't want my bread?" 
And the poor man said, "" And you mean God didn't answer my pleas? "" And the rabbi said, "" You've misunderstood me. 
You've misunderstood totally, "" he said. 
"" Of course, what you are doing, "" he said to the rich man, "" is answering God's plea that we should be compassionate. 
And God, "" he said to the poor man, "" is answering your plea that people should be compassionate and give. "" He looked at the rich man. He held the rich man's hands and said, "Don't you understand?" He said, "These are the hands of God." 
So that is the way I feel: that I can only try to approach this notion of being compassionate, of understanding that there is a connectivity, that there is a unity in this world; that I want to try and serve that unity, and that I can try and do that by understanding, I hope, trying to understand something of the pain of others; but understanding that there are limits, that people have to bear responsibility for some of the problems that come upon them; and that I have to understand that there are limits to my energy, to the giving I can give. 
I have to reevaluate them, try and separate out the material things and my emotions that may be enslaving me, so that I can see the world clearly. 
And then I have to try to see in what ways I can make these the hands of God. 
And so try to bring compassion to life in this world. 

A herd of wildebeests, a shoal of fish, a flock of birds. 
Many animals gather in large groups that are among the most wonderful spectacles in the natural world. 
But why do these groups form? 
The common answers include things like seeking safety in numbers or hunting in packs or gathering to mate or breed, and all of these explanations, while often true, make a huge assumption about animal behavior, that the animals are in control of their own actions, that they are in charge of their bodies. 
And that is often not the case. 
This is Artemia, a brine shrimp. 
You probably know it better as a sea monkey. 
It's small, and it typically lives alone, but it can gather in these large red swarms that span for meters, and these form because of a parasite. 
These shrimp are infected with a tapeworm. 
A tapeworm is effectively a long, living gut with genitals at one end and a hooked mouth at the other. 
As a freelance journalist, I sympathize. 
(Laughter) The tapeworm drains nutrients from Artemia's body, but it also does other things. 
It castrates them, it changes their color from transparent to bright red, it makes them live longer, and as biologist Nicolas Rode has found, it makes them swim in groups. 
Why? Because the tapeworm, like many other parasites, has a complicated life cycle involving many different hosts. 
The shrimp are just one step on its journey. 
Its ultimate destination is this, the greater flamingo. 
Only in a flamingo can the tapeworm reproduce, so to get there, it manipulates its shrimp hosts into forming these conspicuous colored swarms that are easier for a flamingo to spot and to devour, and that is the secret of the Artemia swarm. 
They aren't sociable through their own volition, but because they are being controlled. 
It's not safety in numbers. 
It's actually the exact opposite. 
The tapeworm hijacks their brains and their bodies, turning them into vehicles for getting itself into a flamingo. 
And here is another example of a parasitic manipulation. 
This is a suicidal cricket. 
This cricket swallowed the larvae of a Gordian worm, or horsehair worm. 
The worm grew to adult size within it, but it needs to get into water in order to mate, and it does that by releasing proteins that addle the cricket's brain, causing it to behave erratically. 
When the cricket nears a body of water, such as this swimming pool, it jumps in and drowns, and the worm wriggles out of its suicidal corpse. 
Crickets are really roomy. Who knew? 
The tapeworm and the Gordian worm are not alone. 
They are part of an entire cavalcade of mind-controlling parasites, of fungi, viruses, and worms and insects and more that all specialize in subverting and overriding the wills of their hosts. 
Now, I first learned about this way of life through David Attenborough's "" Trials of Life "" about 20 years ago, and then later through a wonderful book called "" Parasite Rex "" by my friend Carl Zimmer. 
And I've been writing about these creatures ever since. 
Few topics in biology enthrall me more. 
It's like the parasites have subverted my own brain. 
Because after all, they are always compelling and they are delightfully macabre. 
When you write about parasites, your lexicon swells with phrases like "devoured alive" and "bursts out of its body." 
(Laughter) But there's more to it than that. 
I'm a writer, and fellow writers in the audience will know that we love stories. 
Parasites invite us to resist the allure of obvious stories. 
Their world is one of plot twists and unexpected explanations. 
Why, for example, does this caterpillar start violently thrashing about when another insect gets close to it and those white cocoons that it seems to be standing guard over? 
Is it maybe protecting its siblings? 
No. 
This caterpillar was attacked by a parasitic wasp which laid eggs inside it. 
The eggs hatched and the young wasps devoured the caterpillar alive before bursting out of its body. 
See what I mean? 
Now, the caterpillar didn't die. 
Some of the wasps seemed to stay behind and controlled it into defending their siblings which are metamorphosing into adults within those cocoons. 
This caterpillar is a head-banging zombie bodyguard defending the offspring of the creature that killed it. 
(Applause) We have a lot to get through. I only have 13 minutes. (Laughter) Now, some of you are probably just desperately clawing for some solace in the idea that these things are oddities of the natural world, that they are outliers, and that point of view is understandable, because by their nature, parasites are quite small and they spend a lot of their time inside the bodies of other things. 
They're easy to overlook, but that doesn't mean that they aren't important. 
A few years back, a man called Kevin Lafferty took a group of scientists into three Californian estuaries and they pretty much weighed and dissected and recorded everything they could find, and what they found were parasites in extreme abundance. 
Especially common were trematodes, tiny worms that specialize in castrating their hosts like this unfortunate snail. 
Now, a single trematode is tiny, microscopic, but collectively they weighed as much as all the fish in the estuaries and three to nine times more than all the birds. 
And remember the Gordian worm that I showed you, the cricket thing? 
One Japanese scientist called Takuya Sato found that in one stream, these things drive so many crickets and grasshoppers into the water that the drowned insects make up some 60 percent of the diet of local trout. 
Manipulation is not an oddity. 
It is a critical and common part of the world around us, and scientists have now found hundreds of examples of such manipulators, and more excitingly, they're starting to understand exactly how these creatures control their hosts. 
And this is one of my favorite examples. 
This is Ampulex compressa, the emerald cockroach wasp, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that an emerald cockroach wasp in possession of some fertilized eggs must be in want of a cockroach. 
When she finds one, she stabs it with a stinger that is also a sense organ. 
She stabs it with a stinger that is a sense organ equipped with small sensory bumps that allow her to feel the distinctive texture of a roach's brain. 
So like a person blindly rooting about in a bag, she finds the brain, and she injects it with venom into two very specific clusters of neurons. 
Israeli scientists Frederic Libersat and Ram Gal found that the venom is a very specific chemical weapon. 
It doesn't kill the roach, nor does it sedate it. 
The roach could walk away or fly or run if it chose to, but it doesn't choose to, because the venom nixes its motivation to walk, and only that. 
The wasp basically un-checks the escape-from-danger box in the roach's operating system, allowing her to lead her helpless victim back to her lair by its antennae like a person walking a dog. 
And once there, she lays an egg on it, egg hatches, devoured alive, bursts out of body, yadda yadda yadda, you know the drill. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now I would argue that, once stung, the cockroach isn't a roach anymore. 
It's more of an extension of the wasp, just like the cricket was an extension of the Gordian worm. 
These hosts won't get to survive or reproduce. 
They have as much control over their own fates as my car. 
Once the parasites get in, the hosts don't get a say. 
Now humans, of course, are no stranger to manipulation. 
We take drugs to shift the chemistries of our brains and to change our moods, and what are arguments or advertising or big ideas if not an attempt to influence someone else's mind? 
But our attempts at doing this are crude and blundering compared to the fine-grained specificity of the parasites. 
Don Draper only wishes he was as elegant and precise as the emerald cockroach wasp. 
Now, I think this is part of what makes parasites so sinister and so compelling. 
We place such a premium on our free will and our independence that the prospect of losing those qualities to forces unseen informs many of our deepest societal fears. 
Orwellian dystopias and shadowy cabals and mind-controlling supervillains — these are tropes that fill our darkest fiction, but in nature, they happen all the time. 
Which leads me to an obvious and disquieting question: Are there dark, sinister parasites that are influencing our behavior without us knowing about it, besides the NSA? 
If there are any — (Laughter) (Applause) I've got a red dot on my forehead now, don't I? (Laughter) 
If there are any, this is a good candidate for them. 
This is Toxoplasma gondii, or Toxo, for short, because the terrifying creature always deserves a cute nickname. 
Toxo infects mammals, a wide variety of mammals, but it can only sexually reproduce in a cat. 
And scientists like Joanne Webster have shown that if Toxo gets into a rat or a mouse, it turns the rodent into a cat-seeking missile. 
If the infected rat smells the delightful odor of cat piss, it runs towards the source of the smell rather than the more sensible direction of away. 
The cat eats the rat. Toxo gets to have sex. 
It's a classic tale of Eat, Prey, Love. 
(Laughter) (Applause) You're very charitable, generous people. 
Hi, Elizabeth, I loved your talk. 
How does the parasite control its host in this way? 
We don't really know. 
We know that Toxo releases an enzyme that makes dopamine, a substance involved in reward and motivation. 
We know it targets certain parts of a rodent's brain, including those involved in sexual arousal. 
But how those puzzle pieces fit together is not immediately clear. 
What is clear is that this thing is a single cell. 
This has no nervous system. 
It has no consciousness. 
It doesn't even have a body. 
But it's manipulating a mammal? 
We are mammals. 
We are more intelligent than a mere rat, to be sure, but our brains have the same basic structure, the same types of cells, the same chemicals running through them, and the same parasites. 
Estimates vary a lot, but some figures suggest that one in three people around the world have Toxo in their brains. 
Now typically, this doesn't lead to any overt illness. 
The parasite holds up in a dormant state for a long period of time. 
But there's some evidence that those people who are carriers score slightly differently on personality questionnaires than other people, that they have a slightly higher risk of car accidents, and there's some evidence that people with schizophrenia are more likely to be infected. 
Now, I think this evidence is still inconclusive, and even among Toxo researchers, opinion is divided as to whether the parasite is truly influencing our behavior. 
But given the widespread nature of such manipulations, it would be completely implausible for humans to be the only species that weren't similarly affected. 
And I think that this capacity to constantly subvert our way of thinking about the world makes parasites amazing. 
They're constantly inviting us to look at the natural world sideways, and to ask if the behaviors we're seeing, whether they're simple and obvious or baffling and puzzling, are not the results of individuals acting through their own accord but because they are being bent to the control of something else. 
And while that idea may be disquieting, and while parasites' habits may be very grisly, I think that ability to surprise us makes them as wonderful and as charismatic as any panda or butterfly or dolphin. 
At the end of "" On the Origin of Species, "" Charles Darwin writes about the grandeur of life, and of endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, and I like to think he could easily have been talking about a tapeworm that makes shrimp sociable or a wasp that takes cockroaches for walks. 
But perhaps, that's just a parasite talking. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi. I'm going to ask you to raise your arms and wave back, just the way I am — kind of a royal wave. 
You can mimic what you can see. 
You can program the hundreds of muscles in your arm. 
Soon, you'll be able to look inside your brain and program, control the hundreds of brain areas that you see there. 
I'm going to tell you about that technology. 
People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years. 
Well, coming out of the research labs just now, for our generation, is the possibility to do that. 
People envision this as being very difficult. 
You had to take a spaceship, shrink it down, inject it into the bloodstream. 
It was terribly dangerous. (Laughter) You could be attacked by white blood cells in the arteries. 
But now, we have a real technology to do this. 
We're going to fly into my colleague Peter's brain. 
We're going to do it non-invasively using MRI. 
We don't have to inject anything. We don't need radiation. 
We will be able to fly into the anatomy of Peter's brain — literally, fly into his body — but more importantly, we can look into his mind. 
When Peter moves his arm, that yellow spot you see there is the interface to the functioning of Peter's mind taking place. 
Now you've seen before that with electrodes you can control robotic arms, that brain imaging and scanners can show you the insides of brains. 
What's new is that that process has typically taken days or months of analysis. 
We've collapsed that through technology to milliseconds, and that allows us to let Peter to look at his brain in real time as he's inside the scanner. 
He can look at these 65,000 points of activation per second. 
If he can see this pattern in his own brain, he can learn how to control it. 
There have been three ways to try to impact the brain: the therapist's couch, pills and the knife. 
This is a fourth alternative that you are soon going to have. 
We all know that as we form thoughts, they form deep channels in our minds and in our brains. 
Chronic pain is an example. If you burn yourself, you pull your hand away. 
But if you're still in pain in six months' or six years' time, it's because these circuits are producing pain that's no longer helping you. 
If we can look at the activation in the brain that's producing the pain, we can form 3D models and watch in real time the brain process information, and then we can select the areas that produce the pain. 
So put your arms back up and flex your bicep. 
Now imagine that you will soon be able to look inside your brain and select brain areas to do that same thing. 
What you're seeing here is, we've selected the pathways in the brain of a chronic pain patient. 
This may shock you, but we're literally reading this person's brain in real time. 
They're watching their own brain activation, and they're controlling the pathway that produces their pain. 
They're learning to flex this system that releases their own endogenous opiates. 
As they do it, in the upper left is a display that's yoked to their brain activation of their own pain being controlled. 
When they control their brain, they can control their pain. 
This is an investigational technology, but, in clinical trials, we're seeing a 44 to 64 percent decrease in chronic pain patients. 
This is not "" The Matrix. "" You can only do this to yourself. You take control. 
I've seen inside my brain. You will too, soon. 
When you do, what do you want to control? 
You will be able to look at all the aspects that make you yourself, all your experiences. 
These are some of the areas we're working on today that I don't have time to go into in detail. 
But I want to leave with you the big question. 
We are the first generation that's going to be able to enter into, using this technology, the human mind and brain. 
Where will we take it? 

Now, if President Obama invited me to be the next Czar of Mathematics, then I would have a suggestion for him that I think would vastly improve the mathematics education in this country. 
And it would be easy to implement and inexpensive. 
The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra. 
And everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject. 
And at top of that pyramid, it's calculus. 
And I'm here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid... 
that the correct summit — that all of our students, every high school graduate should know — should be statistics: probability and statistics. 
(Applause) I mean, don't get me wrong. Calculus is an important subject. 
It's one of the great products of the human mind. 
The laws of nature are written in the language of calculus. 
And every student who studies math, science, engineering, economics, they should definitely learn calculus by the end of their freshman year of college. 
But I'm here to say, as a professor of mathematics, that very few people actually use calculus in a conscious, meaningful way, in their day-to-day lives. 
On the other hand, statistics — that's a subject that you could, and should, use on daily basis. Right? 
It's risk. It's reward. It's randomness. 
It's understanding data. 
I think if our students, if our high school students — if all of the American citizens — knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn't be in the economic mess that we're in today. (Laughter) (Applause) Not only — thank you — not only that... 
but if it's taught properly, it can be a lot of fun. 
I mean, probability and statistics, it's the mathematics of games and gambling. 
It's analyzing trends. It's predicting the future. 
Look, the world has changed from analog to digital. 
And it's time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital, from the more classical, continuous mathematics, to the more modern, discrete mathematics — the mathematics of uncertainty, of randomness, of data — that being probability and statistics. 
In summary, instead of our students learning about the techniques of calculus, I think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what two standard deviations from the mean means. And I mean it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I work with children with autism. 
Specifically, I make technologies to help them communicate. 
Now, many of the problems that children with autism face, they have a common source, and that source is that they find it difficult to understand abstraction, symbolism. 
And because of this, they have a lot of difficulty with language. 
Let me tell you a little bit about why this is. 
You see that this is a picture of a bowl of soup. 
All of us can see it. All of us understand this. 
These are two other pictures of soup, but you can see that these are more abstract These are not quite as concrete. 
And when you get to language, you see that it becomes a word whose look, the way it looks and the way it sounds, has absolutely nothing to do with what it started with, or what it represents, which is the bowl of soup. 
So it's essentially a completely abstract, a completely arbitrary representation of something which is in the real world, and this is something that children with autism have an incredible amount of difficulty with. 
Now that's why most of the people that work with children with autism — speech therapists, educators — what they do is, they try to help children with autism communicate not with words, but with pictures. 
So if a child with autism wanted to say, "" I want soup, "" that child would pick three different pictures, "" I, "" "" want, "" and "" soup, "" and they would put these together, and then the therapist or the parent would understand that this is what the kid wants to say. 
And this has been incredibly effective; for the last 30, 40 years people have been doing this. 
In fact, a few years back, I developed an app for the iPad which does exactly this. It's called Avaz, and the way it works is that kids select different pictures. 
These pictures are sequenced together to form sentences, and these sentences are spoken out. 
So Avaz is essentially converting pictures, it's a translator, it converts pictures into speech. 
Now, this was very effective. 
There are thousands of children using this, you know, all over the world, and I started thinking about what it does and what it doesn't do. 
And I realized something interesting: Avaz helps children with autism learn words. 
What it doesn't help them do is to learn word patterns. 
Let me explain this in a little more detail. 
Take this sentence: "" I want soup tonight. "" Now it's not just the words here that convey the meaning. 
It's also the way in which these words are arranged, the way these words are modified and arranged. 
And that's why a sentence like "" I want soup tonight "" is different from a sentence like "" Soup want I tonight, "" which is completely meaningless. 
So there is another hidden abstraction here which children with autism find a lot of difficulty coping with, and that's the fact that you can modify words and you can arrange them to have different meanings, to convey different ideas. 
Now, this is what we call grammar. 
And grammar is incredibly powerful, because grammar is this one component of language which takes this finite vocabulary that all of us have and allows us to convey an infinite amount of information, an infinite amount of ideas. 
It's the way in which you can put things together in order to convey anything you want to. 
And so after I developed Avaz, I worried for a very long time about how I could give grammar to children with autism. 
The solution came to me from a very interesting perspective. 
I happened to chance upon a child with autism conversing with her mom, and this is what happened. 
Completely out of the blue, very spontaneously, the child got up and said, "" Eat. "" Now what was interesting was the way in which the mom was trying to tease out the meaning of what the child wanted to say by talking to her in questions. 
So she asked, "" Eat what? Do you want to eat ice cream? 
You want to eat? Somebody else wants to eat? 
You want to eat cream now? You want to eat ice cream in the evening? "" And then it struck me that what the mother had done was something incredible. 
She had been able to get that child to communicate an idea to her without grammar. 
And it struck me that maybe this is what I was looking for. 
Instead of arranging words in an order, in sequence, as a sentence, you arrange them in this map, where they're all linked together not by placing them one after the other but in questions, in question-answer pairs. 
And so if you do this, then what you're conveying is not a sentence in English, but what you're conveying is really a meaning, the meaning of a sentence in English. 
Now, meaning is really the underbelly, in some sense, of language. 
It's what comes after thought but before language. 
And the idea was that this particular representation might convey meaning in its raw form. 
So I was very excited by this, you know, hopping around all over the place, trying to figure out if I can convert all possible sentences that I hear into this. 
And I found that this is not enough. 
Why is this not enough? 
This is not enough because if you wanted to convey something like negation, you want to say, "" I don't want soup, "" then you can't do that by asking a question. 
You do that by changing the word "" want. "" Again, if you wanted to say, "I wanted soup yesterday," you do that by converting the word "" want "" into "" wanted. "" It's a past tense. 
So this is a flourish which I added to make the system complete. 
This is a map of words joined together as questions and answers, and with these filters applied on top of them in order to modify them to represent certain nuances. 
Let me show you this with a different example. 
Let's take this sentence: "I told the carpenter I could not pay him." 
It's a fairly complicated sentence. 
The way that this particular system works, you can start with any part of this sentence. 
I'm going to start with the word "" tell. "" So this is the word "" tell. "" Now this happened in the past, so I'm going to make that "" told. "" Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to ask questions. 
So, who told? I told. 
I told whom? I told the carpenter. 
Now we start with a different part of the sentence. 
We start with the word "" pay, "" and we add the ability filter to it to make it "" can pay. "" Then we make it "" can't pay, "" and we can make it "" couldn't pay "" by making it the past tense. 
So who couldn't pay? I couldn't pay. 
Couldn't pay whom? I couldn't pay the carpenter. 
And then you join these two together by asking this question: What did I tell the carpenter? 
I told the carpenter I could not pay him. 
Now think about this. This is — (Applause) — this is a representation of this sentence without language. 
And there are two or three interesting things about this. 
First of all, I could have started anywhere. 
I didn't have to start with the word "" tell. "" I could have started anywhere in the sentence, and I could have made this entire thing. 
The second thing is, if I wasn't an English speaker, if I was speaking in some other language, this map would actually hold true in any language. 
So long as the questions are standardized, the map is actually independent of language. 
So I call this FreeSpeech, and I was playing with this for many, many months. 
I was trying out so many different combinations of this. 
And then I noticed something very interesting about FreeSpeech. 
I was trying to convert language, convert sentences in English into sentences in FreeSpeech, and vice versa, and back and forth. 
And I realized that this particular configuration, this particular way of representing language, it allowed me to actually create very concise rules that go between FreeSpeech on one side and English on the other. 
So I could actually write this set of rules that translates from this particular representation into English. 
And so I developed this thing. 
I developed this thing called the FreeSpeech Engine which takes any FreeSpeech sentence as the input and gives out perfectly grammatical English text. 
And by putting these two pieces together, the representation and the engine, I was able to create an app, a technology for children with autism, that not only gives them words but also gives them grammar. 
So I tried this out with kids with autism, and I found that there was an incredible amount of identification. 
They were able to create sentences in FreeSpeech which were much more complicated but much more effective than equivalent sentences in English, and I started thinking about why that might be the case. 
And I had an idea, and I want to talk to you about this idea next. 
In about 1997, about 15 years back, there were a group of scientists that were trying to understand how the brain processes language, and they found something very interesting. 
They found that when you learn a language as a child, as a two-year-old, you learn it with a certain part of your brain, and when you learn a language as an adult — for example, if I wanted to learn Japanese right now — a completely different part of my brain is used. 
Now I don't know why that's the case, but my guess is that that's because when you learn a language as an adult, you almost invariably learn it through your native language, or through your first language. 
So what's interesting about FreeSpeech is that when you create a sentence or when you create language, a child with autism creates language with FreeSpeech, they're not using this support language, they're not using this bridge language. 
They're directly constructing the sentence. 
And so this gave me this idea. 
Is it possible to use FreeSpeech not for children with autism but to teach language to people without disabilities? 
And so I tried a number of experiments. 
The first thing I did was I built a jigsaw puzzle in which these questions and answers are coded in the form of shapes, in the form of colors, and you have people putting these together and trying to understand how this works. 
And I built an app out of it, a game out of it, in which children can play with words and with a reinforcement, a sound reinforcement of visual structures, they're able to learn language. 
And this, this has a lot of potential, a lot of promise, and the government of India recently licensed this technology from us, and they're going to try it out with millions of different children trying to teach them English. 
And the dream, the hope, the vision, really, is that when they learn English this way, they learn it with the same proficiency as their mother tongue. 
All right, let's talk about something else. 
Let's talk about speech. 
This is speech. 
So speech is the primary mode of communication delivered between all of us. 
Now what's interesting about speech is that speech is one-dimensional. 
Why is it one-dimensional? 
It's one-dimensional because it's sound. 
It's also one-dimensional because our mouths are built that way. 
Our mouths are built to create one-dimensional sound. 
But if you think about the brain, the thoughts that we have in our heads are not one-dimensional. 
I mean, we have these rich, complicated, multi-dimensional ideas. 
Now, it seems to me that language is really the brain's invention to convert this rich, multi-dimensional thought on one hand into speech on the other hand. 
Now what's interesting is that we do a lot of work in information nowadays, and almost all of that is done in the language domain. 
Take Google, for example. 
Google trawls all these countless billions of websites, all of which are in English, and when you want to use Google, you go into Google search, and you type in English, and it matches the English with the English. 
What if we could do this in FreeSpeech instead? 
I have a suspicion that if we did this, we'd find that algorithms like searching, like retrieval, all of these things, are much simpler and also more effective, because they don't process the data structure of speech. 
Instead they're processing the data structure of thought. 
The data structure of thought. 
That's a provocative idea. 
But let's look at this in a little more detail. 
So this is the FreeSpeech ecosystem. 
We have the Free Speech representation on one side, and we have the FreeSpeech Engine, which generates English. 
Now if you think about it, FreeSpeech, I told you, is completely language-independent. 
It doesn't have any specific information in it which is about English. 
So everything that this system knows about English is actually encoded into the engine. 
That's a pretty interesting concept in itself. 
You've encoded an entire human language into a software program. 
But if you look at what's inside the engine, it's actually not very complicated. 
It's not very complicated code. 
And what's more interesting is the fact that the vast majority of the code in that engine is not really English-specific. 
And that gives this interesting idea. 
It might be very easy for us to actually create these engines in many, many different languages, in Hindi, in French, in German, in Swahili. 
And that gives another interesting idea. 
For example, supposing I was a writer, say, for a newspaper or for a magazine. 
I could create content in one language, FreeSpeech, and the person who's consuming that content, the person who's reading that particular information could choose any engine, and they could read it in their own mother tongue, in their native language. 
I mean, this is an incredibly attractive idea, especially for India. 
We have so many different languages. 
There's a song about India, and there's a description of the country as, it says, (in Sanskrit). 
That means "" ever-smiling speaker of beautiful languages. "" Language is beautiful. 
I think it's the most beautiful of human creations. 
I think it's the loveliest thing that our brains have invented. 
It entertains, it educates, it enlightens, but what I like the most about language is that it empowers. 
I want to leave you with this. 
This is a photograph of my collaborators, my earliest collaborators when I started working on language and autism and various other things. 
The girl's name is Pavna, and that's her mother, Kalpana. 
And Pavna's an entrepreneur, but her story is much more remarkable than mine, because Pavna is about 23. 
She has quadriplegic cerebral palsy, so ever since she was born, she could neither move nor talk. 
And everything that she's accomplished so far, finishing school, going to college, starting a company, collaborating with me to develop Avaz, all of these things she's done with nothing more than moving her eyes. 
Daniel Webster said this: He said, "" If all of my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for with it, I would regain all the rest. "" And that's why, of all of these incredible applications of FreeSpeech, the one that's closest to my heart still remains the ability for this to empower children with disabilities to be able to communicate, the power of communication, to get back all the rest. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 

(Guitar music) I was just thinking that I have been missing you way too long There's something inside this weary head that wants us to love just instead But I was just thinking, merely thinking I've got loads of pictures, I've got the one of you in that dancing dress But man I feel silly in that dim light Just after doing you by the sight of my Kodak delights, I am sinking, merely sinking I think about long distance rates instead of kissing you babe I'm a singer without a song If I wait for you longer my affection is stronger 
and I... I was just thinking, merely thinking that this boat is sinking I'm tired of postcards, especially the ones with cute dogs and cupids I'm tired of calling you and missing you and dreaming I slept with you Don't get me wrong I still desperately love you inside this weary head I just want us to love just instead But I was just thinking and thinking, merely thinking I think about long distance rates instead of kissing you babe and time is running me still If I wait for you longer my affection is stronger I... I was just thinking I... I was just thinking 
that I'm tired of calling you once a week thinking of long distance rates instead of kissing you So baby I'm sinking, merely sinking (Guitar music ends) (Applause) Thank you. 
Singing is sharing. 
When you sing, you have to know what you're talking about intimately, and you have to be willing to share this insight and give away a piece of yourself. 
I look for this intention to share in everything, and I ask: what are the intentions behind this architecture or this product or this restaurant or this meal? 
And if your intentions are to impress people or to get the big applause at the end, then you are taking, not giving. 
And this is a song that's about — it's the kind of song that everyone has their version of. 
This song is called "" Home, "" and it's sort of a "" This is where I'm from, nice to meet you all, "" kind of song. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Piano music) Home is the sound of birds early in the morning Home is a song I've always remembered Home is the memory of my first day in school Home is the books that I carry around Home is an alley in a faraway town Home is the places I ’ ve been and where I ’ d like to go Home I'm always gonna feel at home No matter where I may roam I'm always gonna find my way back home No matter how far I ’ m gone I ’ m always gonna feel this longing No matter where I might stay Home is a feather twirling in the air 
Home is flowers in a windowsill Home is all the things she said to me Home is a photo I never threw away Home is the smile on my face when I die Home is the taste of an apple pie I met a woman, she always lived in the same place And she said home is where you ’ re born and raised And I met a man, he sat looking out to the sea And he said home is where you want to be I met a girl in some downtown bar And she said I'll have whatever he's having And I asked her how come we never met before? 
And she said all my life I ’ ve been trying to get a place of my own I ’ m always gonna feel at home No matter where I may roam Always gonna find my way back home No matter how far I ’ m gone I'm always gonna feel this longing No matter where I might stay (Piano music) (Piano music ends) (Applause) 

This song is one of Thomas' favorites, called "" What You Do with What You've Got. "" ♫ You must know someone like him ♫ ♫ He was tall and strong and lean ♫ ♫ With a body like a greyhound ♫ ♫ and a mind so sharp and keen ♫ ♫ But his heart, just like laurel ♫ ♫ grew twisted around itself ♫ ♫ Till almost everything he did ♫ ♫ brought pain to someone else ♫ ♫ It's not just what you're born with ♫ ♫ It's what you choose to bear ♫ ♫ It's not how big your share is ♫ 
♫ It's how much you can share ♫ ♫ It's not the fights you dreamed of ♫ ♫ It's those you really fought ♫ ♫ It's not what you've been given ♫ ♫ It's what you do with what you've got ♫ ♫ What's the use of two strong legs ♫ ♫ if you only run away? ♫ ♫ And what's the use of the finest voice ♫ ♫ if you've nothing good to say? ♫ ♫ What's the use of strength and muscle ♫ ♫ if you only push and shove? ♫ ♫ And what's the use of two good ears ♫ 
♫ if you can't hear those you love? ♫ ♫ What's the use of two strong legs ♫ ♫ if you only run away? ♫ ♫ And what's the use of the finest voice ♫ ♫ if you've nothing good to say? ♫ ♫ What's the use of strength and muscle ♫ ♫ if you only push and shove? ♫ ♫ And what's the use of two good ears ♫ ♫ if you can't hear those you love? ♫ ♫ Between those who use their neighbors ♫ ♫ and those who use the cane ♫ ♫ Between those in constant power ♫ 
♫ and those in constant pain ♫ ♫ Between those who run to glory ♫ ♫ and those who cannot run ♫ ♫ Tell me which ones are the cripples ♫ ♫ and which ones touch the sun ♫ ♫ Which ones touch the sun ♫ ♫ Which ones touch the sun ♫ (Applause) Thank you very much. 

I believe big institutions have unique potential to create change, and I believe that we as individuals have unique power to influence the direction that those institutions take. 
Now, these beliefs did not come naturally to me, because trusting big institutions, not really part of my family legacy. 
My mother escaped North Korea when she was 10 years old. 
To do so, she had to elude every big institution in her life: repressive governments, occupying armies and even armed border patrols. 
Later, when she decided she wanted to emigrate to the United States, she had to defy an entire culture that said the girls would never be the best and brightest. 
Only because her name happens to sound like a boy's was she able to finagle her way into the government immigration exam to come to the United States. 
Because of her bravery and passion, I've had all the opportunities that she never did, and that has made my story so different. 
Instead of running away from big institutions, I've actually run toward them. 
I've had the chance over the course of my career to work for The Wall Street Journal, the White House and now one of the largest financial institutions in the world, where I lead sustainable investing. 
Now, these institutions are like tankers, and working inside of them, I've come to appreciate what large wakes they can leave, and I've become convinced that the institution of the global capital markets, the nearly 290 trillion dollars of stocks and bonds in the world, that that may be one of our most powerful forces for positive social change at our disposal, if we ask it to be. 
Now, I know some of you are thinking, global capital markets, positive social change, not usually in the same sentence or even the same paragraph. 
I think many people think of the capital markets kind of like an ocean. 
It's a vast, impersonal, uncaring force of nature that is not affected by our wishes or desires. 
So the best that our little savings accounts or retirement accounts can do is to try to catch some waves in the good cycles and hope that we don't get inundated in the turbulent ones, but certainly our decisions on how to steer our little retirement accounts don't affect the tides, don't change the shape or size or direction of the waves. 
But why is that? 
Because actually, one third of this ocean of capital actually belongs to individuals like us, and most of the rest of the capital markets is controlled by the institutions that get their power and authority and their capital from us, as members, participants, beneficiaries, shareholders or citizens. 
So if we are the ultimate owners of the capital markets, why aren't we able to make our voices heard? 
Why can't we make some waves? 
So let me ask you a different question: did any of you buy fair trade coffee the last time you were at a supermarket or at Starbucks? 
OK. Do any of you go to the restaurant and order the sustainably farmed trout instead of the miso-glazed Chilean sea bass that you really wish you could have? 
Do any of you drive hybrid cars or even electric cars? 
So why do we do these things? 
Right? One electric car doesn't amount to much in a fleet of 1.2 billion combustion engine vehicles. 
One fish is just one fish in the sea. 
And one cup of coffee doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. 
But we do these things because we believe they matter, that our actions add up, that our choices might influence others and collectively, what an impact we can have. 
So, in my bag I have a coffee mug that I bought a couple of years ago. 
It's a reusable mug. It has all these things printed on it. 
Look at some of the things that are on it, that it says. 
"This one cup can be used again and again." 
"This one cup may inspire others to use one too." 
"This one cup helps save the planet." 
I had no idea this plastic cup was so powerful. 
(Laughter) So why do we think that our choice of a four dollar shade-grown fair trade artisanal cup of coffee in a reusable mug matters, but what we do with 4,000 dollars in our investment account for our IRA doesn't? 
Why can't we tell the supermarket and the capital markets that we care, that we care about fair labor standards, that we care about sustainable production methods and about healthy communities? 
Why aren't we voting with our investment dollars, but we would vote with our lattes? 
So I think it has something to do with the myths, the fables that we all carry around in our collective consciousness. 
Do you remember the Grimm's fairy tale about the magic porridge pot? 
If you said to the pot, "" Boil, little pot, boil, "" it would fill up with sweet porridge. 
And if you said, "" Stop, little pot, stop, "" it would stop. 
But if you got the words wrong, it wouldn't listen, and things could go terribly awry. 
So I think when it comes to markets, we have a little bit of a similar fable in our heads. 
We believe that the markets is this magic pot that obeys only one command: make more money. 
Only those words said exactly that way will make the pot fill up with gold. 
Add in some extra words like "" protect the environment, "" the spell might not work. 
Put in the wrong words like "" promote social justice, "" and you might see your gold coins shrink or even vanish entirely, according to this fable. 
So we asked people, what do you really think? 
And we actually went out and polled a thousand individual investors, and we found something fascinating. 
Overwhelmingly, people wanted to add those extra words into the formula. 
71 percent of people said yes, they were interested in sustainable investing, which we define as taking the best in class investment process that you already have traditionally and adding in the extra information you get when you think about the environment and society and good governance. 
71 percent wanted that. 
72 percent said that they believe that companies who did that would actually do better financially. 
So people really do believe that you can do well by doing good. 
But here was the weird thing: 54 percent of the people still said if they put their money in those kinds of stocks, they thought that they would make less money. 
So is it true? 
Do you get less sweet porridge if you invest in shade-grown coffee instead of drinking it? 
Well, you know, the investors in companies like Burt's Bees or Ben & Jerry's wouldn't say so. 
Right? Both of those started out as small, socially conscious companies that ended up becoming so popular with consumers that the giants Unilever and Clorox bought them for hundreds of millions of dollars each. 
But here's the important thing. 
Those corporations realized that if they wanted to protect the value of their investments, they had to preserve that socially conscious mission. 
If they didn't keep adding in those extra words of environmentally friendly and socially conscious, those brands wouldn't make more money. 
But maybe this is just the exception the proves the rule, right? 
The serious companies that fund our economy and that fund our retirements and that really make the world go round, they need to stick to making more money. 
So, Harvard Business School actually researched this, and they found something fascinating. 
If you had invested a dollar 20 years ago in a portfolio of companies that focused narrowly on making more money quarter by quarter, that one dollar would have grown to 14 dollars and 46 cents. 
That's not bad until you consider that if instead you'd invested that same dollar in a portfolio of companies that focused on growing their business and on the most important environmental and social issues, that one dollar would have grown to 28 dollars and 36 cents. 
almost twice as much sweet porridge. 
Now, let's be clear, they didn't make that outperformance by giving away money to seem like a nice corporate citizen. 
They did it by focusing on the things that matter to their business, like wasting less energy and water in their manufacturing processes; like making sure the CEO contracts had the CEOs incentivized for the long-term results of the company and the communities they served, not just quarterly results; or building a first class culture that would have higher employee loyalty, retention and productivity. 
Now, Harvard's not alone. 
Oxford also did a research study where they examined 120 different studies looking at the effect of sustainability and economic results, and they found time and time and time again that the companies that cared about these kinds of important things actually had better operational efficiency, lower cost of capital and better performance in their stock price. 
And then there's Al Gore. 
So 20 years ago, when I worked for Al Gore in the White House, he was one of the early pioneers pleading with businesses and governments to pay attention to the challenges of climate change. 
Post-White House, he opened an investment firm called Generation, where he baked environmental sustainability and other things right into the core investment process. 
And at the time there was a good bit of skepticism about his views. 
Ten years later, his track record is one more proof point that sustainable investing done right can be sound investing. 
Far from making less sweet porridge because he added sustainability into the mix, he actually significantly outperformed the benchmark. 
Now, sustainable investing, the good news is it doesn't require a magic spell and it doesn't require some investment secret, and it's not just for the elite. 
It is not just about private equity for billionaires. 
It's not just groovy-sounding investments like clean technology or microfinance in emerging markets or artisanal bakeries in Brooklyn. 
It's about stocks and bonds and Fortune 500 companies. 
It's about mutual funds. 
It's about all the things we already see in the market today. 
So here's why I'm convinced that we collectively have the power to make sustainable investing the new normal. 
First, the proof points are coming out all the time that sustainable investing done right, preserving all the same good principles of investing, the traditional sphere, can pay. 
It makes sense. 
Secondly, the biggest obstacle standing in our way may actually just be in our heads. 
We just need to let go of that myth that if you add your values into your investment thinking, that you get less sweet porridge. 
And once you get rid of the fable, you can actually start appreciating those facts we've been talking about. 
And third, the future is already here. 
Sustainable investment today is a 20 trillion dollar market and it's the fastest-growing segment of the investment industry. 
In the United States, it has grown enormously, as you can see. 
It now represents one out of every six dollars under professional management in the United States. 
So what are we waiting for? 
For me, it goes back to the inspiration that I received from my mother. 
She knew that she wanted a life where she would have the freedom to make her own choices and to have her voice heard and write her own story. 
She was passionate about that goal and she was clear that she would let no army, no obstacle, no big institution stand in her way. 
She made it to the States, and she became a teacher, an award-winning author and a mother, and ended up sending her daughters to Harvard. 
And these days, you can tell that she is amply comfortable holding court in the most powerful institutions in the world. 
It seems almost too prophetic that her name in Korean means "passionate clarity." 
Passionate clarity: that's what I think we need to drive change. 
Passion about the change we want to see in the world, and clarity that we are able to help chart the course. 
We have more opportunity today than ever before to make choices. 
We have more power than ever before to make our voices heard. 
So change your perspective. 
Vote with your small change. 
Invest in the change you want to see in the world. 
Change the fables and change the markets. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Good morning. 
Let's look for a minute at the greatest icon of all, Leonardo da Vinci. 
We're all familiar with his fantastic work — his drawings, his paintings, his inventions, his writings. 
But we do not know his face. 
Thousands of books have been written about him, but there's controversy, and it remains, about his looks. 
Even this well-known portrait is not accepted by many art historians. 
So, what do you think? 
Is this the face of Leonardo da Vinci or isn't it? 
Let's find out. 
Leonardo was a man that drew everything around him. 
He drew people, anatomy, plants, animals, landscapes, buildings, water, everything. 
But no faces? 
I find that hard to believe. 
His contemporaries made faces, like the ones you see here — en face or three-quarters. 
So, surely a passionate drawer like Leonardo must have made self-portraits from time to time. 
I think that if we were to scan all of his work and look for self-portraits, we would find his face looking at us. 
So I looked at all of his drawings, more than 700, and looked for male portraits. 
There are about 120, you see them here. 
Which ones of these could be self-portraits? 
Well, for that they have to be done as we just saw, en face or three-quarters. 
So we can eliminate all the profiles. 
It also has to be sufficiently detailed. 
So we can also eliminate the ones that are very vague or very stylized. 
And we know from his contemporaries that Leonardo was a very handsome, even beautiful man. 
So we can also eliminate the ugly ones or the caricatures. 
(Laughter) And look what happens — only three candidates remain that fit the bill. 
And here they are. 
Yes, indeed, the old man is there, as is this famous pen drawing of the Homo Vitruvianus. 
And lastly, the only portrait of a male that Leonardo painted, "" The Musician. "" Before we go into these faces, I should explain why I have some right to talk about them. 
I've made more than 1,100 portraits myself for newspapers, over the course of 300 — 30 years, sorry, 30 years only. 
(Laughter) But there are 1,100, and very few artists have drawn so many faces. 
OK, now let's look at these three portraits. 
And hold onto your seats, because if we zoom in on those faces, remark how they have the same broad forehead, the horizontal eyebrows, the long nose, the curved lips and the small, well-developed chin. 
There is no reason why these portraits should look alike. 
All we did was look for portraits that had the characteristics of a self-portrait, and look, they are very similar. 
Now, are they made in the right order? 
The young man should be made first. 
And as you see here from the years that they were created, it is indeed the case. 
They are made in the right order. 
What was the age of Leonardo at the time? Does that fit? 
So we have three pictures, potentially of the same person of the same age as Leonardo at the time. 
But how do we know it's him, and not someone else? 
Well, we need a reference. 
And here's the only picture of Leonardo that's widely accepted. 
It's a statue made by Verrocchio, of David, for which Leonardo posed as a boy of 15. 
And if we now compare the face of the statue, with the face of the musician, you see the very same features again. 
The statue is the reference, and it connects the identity of Leonardo to those three faces. 
It's only proper that you here at TED hear and see it first. 
The icon of icons finally has a face. 

Tommy Mizzone: Tonight we're going to play you two songs. 
We're three brothers from New Jersey, and the funny thing is that, believe it or not, we are hooked on bluegrass and we're excited to play it for you tonight. 
(Music) (Applause) TM: Thank you, thank you. (Applause) 
Robbie Mizzone: Thank you. 
I'm Robbie Mizzone. I'm 13, and I play the fiddle. 
This is my brother, Jonny. He's 10, and he plays the banjo. 
And on guitar is my 14-year-old brother, Tommy. 
(Applause) We call ourselves the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys. 
(Music) (Applause) TM: Thank you. 
JM: Thank you all. 
TM: Thank you very much. 

So, I am indeed going to talk about the spaces men create for themselves, but first I want to tell you why I'm here. 
I'm here for two reasons. These two guys are my two sons Ford and Wren. 
When Ford was about three years old, we shared a very small room together, in a very small space. 
My office was on one half of the bedroom, and his bedroom was on the other half. 
And you can imagine, if you're a writer, that things would get really crowded around deadlines. 
So when Wren was on the way, I realized I needed to find a space of my own. 
There was no more space in the house. So I went out to the backyard, and without any previous building experience, and about 3,000 dollars and some recycled materials, I built this space. 
It had everything I needed. It was quiet. 
There was enough space. And I had control, which was very important. 
As I was building this space, I thought to myself, "" Surely I'm not the only guy to have to have carved out a space for his own. "" So I did some research. 
And I found that there was an historic precedence. 
Hemingway had his writing space. 
Elvis had two or three manspaces, which is pretty unique because he lived with both his wife and his mother in Graceland. 
In the popular culture, Superman had the Fortress of Solitude, and there was, of course, the Batcave. 
So I realized then that I wanted to go out on a journey and see what guys were creating for themselves now. 
Here is one of the first spaces I found. It is in Austin, Texas, which is where I'm from. 
On the outside it looks like a very typical garage, a nice garage. 
But on the inside, it's anything but. 
And this, to me, is a pretty classic manspace. 
It has neon concert posters, a bar and, of course, the leg lamp, which is very important. 
I soon realized that manspaces didn't have to be only inside. 
This guy built a bowling alley in his backyard, out of landscaping timbers, astroturf. 
And he found the scoreboard in the trash. 
Here's another outdoor space, a little bit more sophisticated. 
This a 1923 wooden tugboat, made completely out of Douglas fir. 
The guy did it all himself. 
And there is about 1,000 square feet of hanging-out space inside. 
So, pretty early on in my investigations I realized what I was finding was not what I expected to find, which was, quite frankly, a lot of beer can pyramids and overstuffed couches and flat-screen TVs. 
There were definitely hang-out spots. 
But some were for working, some were for playing, some were for guys to collect their things. 
Most of all, I was just surprised with what I was finding. 
Take this place for example. 
On the outside it looks like a typical northeastern garage. 
This is in Long Island, New York. 
The only thing that might tip you off is the round window. 
On the inside it's a recreation of a 16th century Japanese tea house. 
The man imported all the materials from Japan, and he hired a Japanese carpenter to build it in the traditional style. 
It has no nails or screws. 
All the joints are hand-carved and hand-scribed. 
Here is another pretty typical scene. This is a suburban Las Vegas neighborhood. 
But you open one of the garage doors and there is a professional-size boxing ring inside. 
(Laughter) And so there is a good reason for this. 
It was built by this man who is Wayne McCullough. 
He won the silver medal for Ireland in the 1992 Olympics, and he trains in this space. He trains other people. 
And right off the garage he has his own trophy room where he can sort of bask in his accomplishments, which is another sort of important part about a manspace. 
So, while this space represents someone's profession, this one certainly represents a passion. 
It's made to look like the inside of an English sailing ship. 
It's a collection of nautical antiques from the 1700s and 1800s. 
Museum quality. 
So, as I came to the end of my journey, I found over 50 spaces. 
And they were unexpected and they were surprising. 
But they were also — I was really impressed by how personalized they were, and how much work went into them. 
And I realized that's because the guys that I met were all very passionate about what they did. 
And they really loved their professions. 
And they were very passionate about their collections and their hobbies. 
And so they created these spaces to reflect what they love to do, and who they were. 
So if you don't have a space of your own, I highly recommend finding one, and getting into it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

♫ Picture yourself in a world where there's no one else, ♫ ♫ nobody anywhere. ♫ ♫ A moment ago, there were voices and faces to look upon, ♫ ♫ you can't see them anywhere. ♫ ♫ Nothing more to say ♫ ♫ and no one left to say it to, anyway. ♫ ♫ Oh, listen to what I say. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody ♫ ♫ and everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference in this world. ♫ ♫ Now picture a world where the people all feel their worth. ♫ 
♫ Children are everywhere. ♫ ♫ Now there is a reason for everyone's time on Earth. ♫ ♫ Wondering why you should care, yeah. ♫ ♫ Nothing more to say ♫ ♫ and only love can see us through, anyway. ♫ ♫ Oh, listen what I say, yeah. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody ♫ ♫ and everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ You don't have to be a big celebrity ♫ ♫ to feel the power, the power in your soul, no. ♫ 
♫ You don't have to be a big star on MTV ♫ ♫ to realize that in your eyes is a view that only you can see. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference in this world. ♫ ♫ You can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ I can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ She can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ He can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ You can, I can, she can, he can, ♫ ♫ we can make a little bit of difference in this world. ♫ 
♫ Everybody gonna make a little ♫ ♫ little difference, yeah. ♫ ♫ Talking 'bout everybody gonna make a little difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody gonna make a little difference in this world, ♫ ♫ oh yeah. ♫ (Applause) Thank you so much. (Applause) 
This is a song that came about because I think it's difficult to be in the world and not be aware of what's going on, and the wars and so forth. 
This song kind of came out of all of that. 
And I wrote a lot of happy songs on my first record, which I still stand by, but this has got something else in it. 
It's called "" Peace on Earth. "" ♫ There is no hope. ♫ ♫ There is no future. ♫ ♫ No faith in God to save the day. ♫ ♫ There is no reason, no understanding ♫ ♫ no sacred place to hide away. ♫ ♫ There is no earnest conversation. ♫ ♫ No words of wisdom from the wise. ♫ ♫ There is no reconciliation ♫ ♫ and no collective compromise. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Yet, there in the hallway ♫ 
♫ lurks the ghost of war. ♫ ♫ He wants more, and more, and more, and more, ♫ ♫ and more, and more, and more, and more. ♫ ♫ There is no darkness, no sunshine. ♫ ♫ There is no great society. ♫ ♫ There is no freedom without conviction. ♫ ♫ There is no freedom to be free. ♫ ♫ There is no heaven, no fire and brimstone. ♫ ♫ There is no brotherhood of man. ♫ ♫ There is no country, no one religion. ♫ ♫ There is no universal plan. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ 
♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Yet, there in the hallway ♫ ♫ lurks the ghost of war. ♫ ♫ He wants more, and more, and more, and more, ♫ ♫ and more, and more, and more, and more, and more. ♫ ♫ The answer is ♫ ♫ mutual-assured destruction, ♫ ♫ a balance of power, ♫ ♫ a weapon for everyone. ♫ ♫ Mutual-assured destruction ♫ ♫ bringing peace to everyone. ♫ (Trumpet sounds) (Trumpet sounds) ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ 
♫ There in the hallway, ♫ ♫ peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ (Applause) 

People back home call me a heckler, a troublemaker, an irritant, a rebel, an activist, the voice of the people. 
But that wasn't always me. 
Growing up, I had a nickname. 
They used to call me Softy, meaning the soft, harmless boy. 
Like every other human being, I avoided trouble. 
In my childhood, they taught me silence. 
Don't argue, do as you're told. 
In Sunday school, they taught me don't confront, don't argue, even if you're right, turn the other cheek. 
This was reinforced by the political climate of the time. 
(Laughter) Kenya is a country where you are guilty until proven rich. (Laughter) 
Kenya's poor are five times more likely to be shot dead by the police who are meant to protect them than by criminals. 
This was reinforced by the political climate of the day. 
We had a president, Moi, who was a dictator. 
He ruled the country with an iron fist, and anyone who dared question his authority was arrested, tortured, jailed or even killed. 
Being a coward was not an insult. 
Being a coward was a compliment. 
We used to be told that a coward goes home to his mother. 
I used to question this advice, and eight years ago we had an election in Kenya, and the results were violently disputed. 
What followed that election was terrible violence, rape, and the killing of over 1,000 people. 
My work was to document the violence. 
As a photographer, I took thousands of images, and after two months, the two politicians came together, had a cup of tea, signed a peace agreement, and the country moved on. 
I was a very disturbed man because I saw the violence firsthand. 
I saw the killings. I saw the displacement. 
I met women who had been raped, and it disturbed me, but the country never spoke about it. 
We decided to stay out of trouble and not talk about it. 
Ten months later, I quit my job. I said I could not stand it anymore. 
After quitting my job, I decided to organize my friends to speak about the violence in the country, to speak about the state of the nation, and June 1, 2009 was the day that we were meant to go to the stadium and try and get the president's attention. 
It's a national holiday, it's broadcast across the country, and I showed up at the stadium. 
My friends did not show up. 
I found myself alone, and I didn't know what to do. 
I was scared, but I knew very well that that particular day, I had to make a decision. 
Was I able to live as a coward, like everyone else, or was I going to make a stand? 
And when the president stood up to speak, I found myself on my feet shouting at the president, telling him to remember the post-election violence victims, to stop the corruption. 
And suddenly, out of nowhere, the police pounced on me like hungry lions. 
They held my mouth and dragged me out of the stadium, where they thoroughly beat me up and locked me up in jail. 
I spent that night in a cold cement floor in the jail, and that got me thinking. 
What was making me feel this way? 
My friends and family thought I was crazy because of what I did, and the images that I took were disturbing my life. 
The images that I took were just a number to many Kenyans. 
Most Kenyans did not see the violence. 
It was a story to them. 
And so I decided to actually start a street exhibition to show the images of the violence across the country and get people talking about it. 
We traveled the country and showed the images, and this was a journey that has started me to the activist path, where I decided to become silent no more, to talk about those things. 
We traveled, and our general site from our street exhibit became for political graffiti about the situation in the country, talking about corruption, bad leadership. 
We have even done symbolic burials. 
We have delivered live pigs to Kenya's parliament as a symbol of our politicians' greed. 
It has been done in Uganda and other countries, and what is most powerful is that the images have been picked by the media and amplified across the country, across the continent. 
Where I used to stand up alone seven years ago, now I belong to a community of many people who stand up with me. 
I belong to a group of young people who are passionate about the country, who want to bring about change, and they're no longer afraid, and they're no longer smart cowards. 
So that was my story. 
That day in the stadium, I stood up as a smart coward. 
There are two most powerful days in your life: the day you're born, and the day you discover why. 
That day standing up in that stadium shouting at the President, I discovered why I was truly born, that I would no longer be silent in the face of injustice. 
Do you know why you were born? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Tom Rielly: It's an amazing story. 
I just want to ask you a couple quick questions. 
So PAWA254: you've created a studio, a place where young people can go and harness the power of digital media to do some of this action. 
What's happening now with PAWA? 
Boniface Mwangi: So we have this community of filmmakers, graffiti artists, musicians, and when there's an issue in the country, we come together, we brainstorm, and take up on that issue. 
So our most powerful tool is art, because we live in a very busy world where people are so busy in their life, and they don't have time to read. 
So we package our activism and we package our message in art. 
So from the music, the graffiti, the art, that's what we do. 
Can I say one more thing? 
TR: Yeah, of course. (Applause) BM: In spite of being arrested, beaten up, threatened, the moment I discovered my voice, that I could actually stand up for what I really believed in, I'm no longer afraid. 
I used to be called softy, but I'm no longer softy, because I discovered who I really am, as in, that's what I want to do, and there's such beauty in doing that. 
There's nothing as powerful as that, knowing that I'm meant to do this, because you don't get scared, you just continue living your life. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And one of the most remarkable was the tanagra theater, which was popular in the early part of the 20th century. 
It used mirrors to create the illusion of tiny people performing on a miniature stage. Now, I won't use mirrors, but this is my digital tribute to the tanagra theater. 
So let the story begin. 
On a dark and stormy night — really! — it was the 10th of July, 1856. 
Lightning lit the sky, and a baby was born. 
His name was Nikola, Nikola Tesla. 
Now the baby grew into a very smart guy. 
Let me show you. 
Tesla, what is 236 multiplied by 501? 
Nikola Tesla: The result is 118,236. 
Marco Tempest: Now Tesla's brain worked in the most extraordinary way. 
When a word was mentioned, an image of it instantly appeared in his mind. 
Tree. Chair. Girl. 
They were hallucinations, which vanished the moment he touched them. 
Probably a form of synesthesia. 
But it was something he later turned to his advantage. 
Where other scientists would play in their laboratory, Tesla created his inventions in his mind. 
MT: And when they worked in the vivid playground of his imagination, he would build them in his workshop. 
NT: I needed no models, drawings or experiments. 
I could picture them as real in my mind, and there I run it, test it and improve it. 
Only then do I construct it. 
MT: His great idea was alternating current. 
But how could he convince the public that the millions of volts required to make it work were safe? 
To sell his idea, he became a showman. 
NT: We are at the dawn of a new age, the age of electricity. 
I have been able, through careful invention, to transmit, with the mere flick of a switch, electricity across the ether. 
It is the magic of science. 
(Applause) Tesla has over 700 patents to his name: radio, wireless telegraphy, remote control, robotics. 
He even photographed the bones of the human body. 
But the high point was the realization of a childhood dream: harnessing the raging powers of Niagara Falls, and bringing light to the city. 
But Tesla's success didn't last. 
NT: I had bigger ideas. 
Illuminating the city was only the beginning. 
A world telegraphy center — imagine news, messages, sounds, images delivered to any point in the world instantly and wirelessly. 
NT: They wouldn't give me the money. 
NT: Yes, that was a big mistake. 
He became a recluse. 
Dodged by death, he spent much of his time in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. 
NT: Everything I did, I did for mankind, for a world where there would be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich, where products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life. 
MT: Nikola Tesla died on the 7th of January, 1943. 
His final resting place is a golden globe that contains his ashes at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. 
His legacy is with us still. 
Tesla became the man who lit the world, but this was only the beginning. 
Tesla's insight was profound. 
NT: Tell me, what will man do when the forests disappear, and the coal deposits are exhausted? 
MT: Tesla thought he had the answer. 
We are still asking the question. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was nine years old, my mom asked me what I would want my house to look like, and I drew this fairy mushroom. 
And then she actually built it. 
(Laughter) I don't think I realized this was so unusual at the time, and maybe I still haven't, because I'm still designing houses. 
This is a six-story bespoke home on the island of Bali. 
It's built almost entirely from bamboo. 
The living room overlooks the valley from the fourth floor. 
You enter the house by a bridge. 
It can get hot in the tropics, so we make big curving roofs to catch the breezes. 
But some rooms have tall windows to keep the air conditioning in and the bugs out. 
This room we left open. 
We made an air-conditioned, tented bed. 
And one client wanted a TV room in the corner of her living room. 
Boxing off an area with tall walls just didn't feel right, so instead, we made this giant woven pod. 
Now, we do have all the necessary luxuries, like bathrooms. 
This one is a basket in the corner of the living room, and I've got tell you, some people actually hesitate to use it. 
We have not quite figured out our acoustic insulation. 
(Laughter) So there are lots of things that we're still working on, but one thing I have learned is that bamboo will treat you well if you use it right. 
It's actually a wild grass. 
It grows on otherwise unproductive land — deep ravines, mountainsides. 
It lives off of rainwater, spring water, sunlight, and of the 1,450 species of bamboo that grow across the world, we use just seven of them. 
That's my dad. 
He's the one who got me building with bamboo, and he is standing in a clump of Dendrocalamus asper niger that he planted just seven years ago. 
Each year, it sends up a new generation of shoots. 
That shoot, we watched it grow a meter in three days just last week, so we're talking about sustainable timber in three years. 
Now, we harvest from hundreds of family-owned clumps. 
Betung, as we call it, it's really long, up to 18 meters of usable length. 
Try getting that truck down the mountain. 
And it's strong: it has the tensile strength of steel, the compressive strength of concrete. 
Slam four tons straight down on a pole, and it can take it. 
Because it's hollow, it's lightweight, light enough to be lifted by just a few men, or, apparently, one woman. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And when my father built Green School in Bali, he chose bamboo for all of the buildings on campus, because he saw it as a promise. 
It's a promise to the kids. 
It's one sustainable material that they will not run out of. 
And when I first saw these structures under construction about six years ago, I just thought, this makes perfect sense. 
It is growing all around us. 
It's strong. It's elegant. 
It's earthquake-resistant. 
Why hasn't this happened sooner, and what can we do with it next? 
So along with some of the original builders of Green School, I founded Ibuku. 
Ibu means "" mother, "" and ku means "" mine, "" so it represents my Mother Earth, and at Ibuku, we are a team of artisans, architects and designers, and what we're doing together is creating a new way of building. 
Over the past five years together, we have built over 50 unique structures, most of them in Bali. 
Nine of them are at Green Village — you've just seen inside some of these homes — and we fill them with bespoke furniture, we surround them with veggie gardens, we would love to invite you all to come visit someday. 
And while you're there, you can also see Green School — we keep building classrooms there each year — as well as an updated fairy mushroom house. 
We're also working on a little house for export. 
This is a traditional Sumbanese home that we replicated, right down to the details and textiles. 
A restaurant with an open-air kitchen. 
It looks a lot like a kitchen, right? 
And a bridge that spans 22 meters across a river. 
Now, what we're doing, it's not entirely new. 
From little huts to elaborate bridges like this one in Java, bamboo has been in use across the tropical regions of the world for literally tens of thousands of years. 
There are islands and even continents that were first reached by bamboo rafts. 
But until recently, it was almost impossible to reliably protect bamboo from insects, and so, just about everything that was ever built out of bamboo is gone. 
Unprotected bamboo weathers. 
Untreated bamboo gets eaten to dust. 
And so that's why most people, especially in Asia, think that you couldn't be poor enough or rural enough to actually want to live in a bamboo house. 
And so we thought, what will it take to change their minds, to convince people that bamboo is worth building with, much less worth aspiring to? 
First, we needed safe treatment solutions. 
Borax is a natural salt. 
It turns bamboo into a viable building material. 
Treat it properly, design it carefully, and a bamboo structure can last a lifetime. 
Second, build something extraordinary out of it. 
Inspire people. 
Fortunately, Balinese culture fosters craftsmanship. 
It values the artisan. 
So combine those with the adventurous outliers from new generations of locally trained architects and designers and engineers, and always remember that you are designing for curving, tapering, hollow poles. 
No two poles alike, no straight lines, no two-by-fours here. 
The tried-and-true, well-crafted formulas and vocabulary of architecture do not apply here. 
We have had to invent our own rules. 
We ask the bamboo what it's good at, what it wants to become, and what it says is: respect it, design for its strengths, protect it from water, and to make the most of its curves. 
So we design in real 3D, making scale structural models out of the same material that we'll later use to build the house. 
And bamboo model-making, it's an art, as well as some hardcore engineering. 
So that's the blueprint of the house. 
(Laughter) And we bring it to site, and with tiny rulers, we measure each pole, and consider each curve, and we choose a piece of bamboo from the pile to replicate that house on site. 
When it comes down to the details, we consider everything. 
Why are doors so often rectangular? 
Why not round? 
How could you make a door better? 
Well, its hinges battle with gravity, and gravity will always win in the end, so why not have it pivot on the center where it can stay balanced? 
And while you're at it, why not doors shaped like teardrops? 
To reap the selective benefits and work within the constraints of this material, we have really had to push ourselves, and within that constraint, we have found space for something new. 
It's a challenge: how do you make a ceiling if you don't have any flat boards to work with? 
Let me tell you, sometimes I dream of sheet rock and plywood. 
(Laughter) But if what you've got is skilled craftsmen and itsy bitsy little splits, weave that ceiling together, stretch a canvas over it, lacquer it. 
How do you design durable kitchen countertops that do justice to this curving structure you've just built? 
Slice up a boulder like a loaf of bread, hand-carve each to fit the other, leave the crusts on, and what we're doing, it is almost entirely handmade. 
The structural connections of our buildings are reinforced by steel joints, but we use a lot of hand-whittled bamboo pins. 
There are thousands of pins in each floor. 
This floor is made of glossy and durable bamboo skin. 
You can feel the texture under bare feet. 
And the floor that you walk on, can it affect the way that you walk? 
Can it change the footprint that you'll ultimately leave on the world? 
I remember being nine years old and feeling wonder, and possibility, and a little bit of idealism. 
And we've got a really long way to go, there's a lot left to learn, but one thing I know is that with creativity and commitment, you can create beauty and comfort and safety and even luxury out of a material that will grow back. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The entire model of capitalism and the economic model that you and I did business in, and, in fact, continue to do business in, was built around what probably Milton Friedman put more succinctly. 
And Adam Smith, of course, the father of modern economics actually said many, many years ago, the invisible hand, which is, "" If you continue to operate in your own self-interest you will do the best good for society. "" Now, capitalism has done a lot of good things and I've talked about a lot of good things that have happened, but equally, it has not been able to meet up with some of the challenges that we've seen in society. 
The model that at least I was brought up in and a lot of us doing business were brought up in was one which talked about what I call the three G's of growth: growth that is consistent, quarter on quarter; growth that is competitive, better than the other person; and growth that is profitable, so you continue to make more and more shareholder value. 
And I'm afraid this is not going to be good enough and we have to move from this 3G model to a model of what I call the fourth G: the G of growth that is responsible. 
And it is this that has to become a very important part of creating value. 
Of not just creating economic value but creating social value. 
And companies that will thrive are those that will actually embrace the fourth G. 
And the model of 4G is quite simple: Companies cannot afford to be just innocent bystanders in what's happening around in society. 
They have to begin to play their role in terms of serving the communities which actually sustain them. 
And we have to move to a model of an and / and model which is how do we make money and do good? 
How do we make sure that we have a great business but we also have a great environment around us? 
And that model is all about doing well and doing good. 
But the question is easier said than done. 
But how do we actually get that done? 
And I do believe that the answer to that is going to be leadership. 
It is going to be to redefine the new business models which understand that the only license to operate is to combine these things. 
And for that you need businesses that can actually define their role in society in terms of a much larger purpose than the products and brands that they sell. 
And companies that actually define a true north, things that are nonnegotiable whether times are good, bad, ugly — doesn't matter. 
Values and purpose are going to be the two drivers of software that are going to create the companies of tomorrow. 
And I'm going to now shift to talking a little bit about my own experiences. 
I joined Unilever in 1976 as a management trainee in India. 
And on my first day of work I walked in and my boss tells me, "Do you know why you're here?" 
I said, "" I'm here to sell a lot of soap. "" And he said, "" No, you're here to change lives. "" You're here to change lives. 
You know, I thought it was rather facetious. 
We are a company that sells soap and soup. 
What are we doing about changing lives? 
And it's then I realized that simple acts like selling a bar of soap can save more lives than pharmaceutical companies. 
I don't know how many of you know that five million children don't reach the age of five because of simple infections that can be prevented by an act of washing their hands with soap. 
We run the largest hand-washing program in the world. 
We are running a program on hygiene and health that now touches half a billion people. 
It's not about selling soap, there is a larger purpose out there. 
And brands indeed can be at the forefront of social change. 
And the reason for that is, when two billion people use your brands that's the amplifier. 
Take another example, I was walking around in one of our villages in India. 
Now those of you who have done this will realize that this is no walk in the park. 
And we had this lady who was one of our small distributors — beautiful, very, very modest, her home — and she was out there, dressed nicely, her husband in the back, her mother-in-law behind and her sister-in-law behind her. 
The social order was changing because this lady is part of our Project Shakti that is actually teaching women how to do small business and how to carry the message of nutrition and hygiene. 
We have 60,000 such women now in India. 
It's not about selling soap, it's about making sure that in the process of doing so you can change people's lives. 
Small actions, big difference. 
Our R & D folks are not only working to give us some fantastic detergents, but they're working to make sure we use less water. 
A product that we've just launched recently, One Rinse product that allows you to save water every time you wash your clothes. 
And if we can convert all our users to using this, that's 500 billion liters of water. 
By the way, that's equivalent to one month of water for a whole huge continent. 
So just think about it. 
There are small actions that can make a big difference. 
And I can go on and on. 
Our food chain, our brilliant products — and I'm sorry I'm giving you a word from the sponsors — Knorr, Hellman's and all those wonderful products. 
We are committed to making sure that all our agricultural raw materials are sourced from sustainable sources, 100-percent sustainable sources. 
We were the first to say we are going to buy all of our palm oil from sustainable sources. 
I don't know how many of you know that palm oil, and not buying it from sustainable sources, can create deforestation that is responsible for 20 percent of the greenhouse gasses in the world. 
We were the first to embrace that, and it's all because we market soap and soup. 
And the point I'm making here is that companies like yours, companies like mine have to define a purpose which embraces responsibility and understands that we have to play our part in the communities in which we operate. 
We introduced something called The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which said, "" Our purpose is to make sustainable living commonplace, and we are gong to change the lives of one billion people over 2020. "" Now the question here is, where do we go from here? 
And the answer to that is very simple: We're not going to change the world alone. 
There are plenty of you and plenty of us who understand this. 
The question is, we need partnerships, we need coalitions and importantly, we need that leadership that will allow us to take this from here and to be the change that we want to see around us. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

It's great being here at TED. 
You know, I think there might be some presentations that will go over my head, but the most amazing concepts are the ones that go right under my feet. 
The little things in life, sometimes that we forget about, like pollination, that we take for granted. 
And you can't tell the story about pollinators — bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies — without telling the story about the invention of flowers and how they co-evolved over 50 million years. 
I've been filming time-lapse flowers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 35 years. 
To watch them move is a dance I'm never going to get tired of. 
It fills me with wonder, and it opens my heart. 
Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature's tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with. 
Their relationship is a love story that feeds the Earth. 
It reminds us that we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it. 
When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action. 
We depend on pollinators for over a third of the fruits and vegetables we eat. 
And many scientists believe it's the most serious issue facing mankind. 
It's like the canary in the coalmine. 
If they disappear, so do we. 
It reminds us that we are a part of nature and we need to take care of it. 
What motivated me to film their behavior was something that I asked my scientific advisers: "What motivates the pollinators?" 
Well, their answer was, "It's all about risk and reward." 
Like a wide-eyed kid, I'd say, "" Why is that? "" And they'd say, "" Well, because they want to survive. "" I go, "" Why? "" "Well, in order to reproduce." 
"Well, why?" 
And I thought that they'd probably say, "" Well, it's all about sex. "" And Chip Taylor, our monarch butterfly expert, he replied, "" Nothing lasts forever. 
Everything in the universe wears out. "" And that blew my mind. 
Because I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. 
Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment. 
It's the mystical moment where life regenerates itself, over and over again. 
So here is some nectar from my film. 
I hope you'll drink, tweet and plant some seeds to pollinate a friendly garden. 
And always take time to smell the flowers, and let it fill you with beauty, and rediscover that sense of wonder. 
Here are some images from the film. 
(Music) (Applause) Thank you. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

As a conceptual artist, I'm constantly looking for creative ways to spark challenging conversations. 
I do this though painting, sculpture, video and performance. 
But regardless of the format, two of my favorite materials are history and dialogue. 
In 2007, I created "" Lotus, "" a seven-and-a-half-foot diameter, 600-pound glass depiction of a lotus blossom. 
In Buddhism, the lotus is a symbol for transcendence and for purity of mind and spirit. 
But a closer look at this lotus reveals each petal to be the cross-section of a slave ship. 
This iconic diagram was taken from a British slaving manual and later used by abolitionists to show the atrocities of slavery. 
In America, we don't like to talk about slavery, nor do we look at it as a global industry. 
But by using this Buddhist symbol, I hope to universalize and transcend the history and trauma of black America and encourage discussions about our shared past. 
To create "" Lotus, "" we carved over 6,000 figures. 
And this later led to a commission by the City of New York to create a 28-foot version in steel as a permanent installation at the Eagle Academy for Young Men, a school for black and latino students, the two groups most affected by this history. 
The same two groups are very affected by a more recent phenomenon, but let me digress. 
I've been collecting wooden African figures from tourist shops and flea markets around the world. 
The authenticity and origin of them is completely debatable, but people believe these to be imbued with power, or even magic. 
Only recently have I figured out how to use this in my own work. 
(Gun shots) Since 2012, the world has witnessed the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice and literally countless other unarmed black citizens at the hands of the police, who frequently walk away with no punishment at all. 
In consideration of these victims and the several times that even I, a law-abiding, Ivy League professor, have been targeted and harassed at gunpoint by the police. 
I created this body of work simply entitled "" BAM. "" It was important to erase the identity of each of these figures, to make them all look the same and easier to disregard. 
To do this, I dip them in a thick, brown wax before taking them to a shooting range where I re-sculpted them using bullets. 
And it was fun, playing with big guns and high-speed video cameras. 
But my reverence for these figures kept me from actually pulling the trigger, somehow feeling as if I would be shooting myself. 
Finally, my cameraman, Raul, fired the shots. 
I then took the fragments of these and created molds, and cast them first in wax, and finally in bronze like the image you see here, which bears the marks of its violent creation like battle wounds or scars. 
When I showed this work recently in Miami, a woman told me she felt every gun shot to her soul. 
But she also felt that these artworks memorialized the victims of these killings as well as other victims of racial violence throughout US history. 
But "" Lotus "" and "" BAM "" are larger than just US history. 
While showing in Berlin last year, a philosophy student asked me what prompted these recent killings. 
I showed him a photo of a lynching postcard from the early 1900s and reminded him that these killings have been going on for over 500 years. 
But it's only through questions like his and more thoughtful dialogue about history and race can we evolve as individuals and society. 
I hope my artwork creates a safe space for this type of honest exchange and an opportunity for people to engage one another in real and necessary conversation. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

1.3 billion years ago, in a distant, distant galaxy, two black holes locked into a spiral, falling inexorably towards each other and collided, converting three Suns' worth of stuff into pure energy in a tenth of a second. 
For that brief moment in time, the glow was brighter than all the stars in all the galaxies in all of the known Universe. 
It was a very big bang. 
But they didn't release their energy in light. 
I mean, you know, they're black holes. 
All that energy was pumped into the fabric of space and time itself, making the Universe explode in gravitational waves. 
Let me give you a sense of the timescale at work here. 
1.3 billion years ago, Earth had just managed to evolve multicellular life. 
Since then, Earth has made and evolved corals, fish, plants, dinosaurs, people and even — God save us — the Internet. 
And about 25 years ago, a particularly audacious set of people — Rai Weiss at MIT, Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever at Caltech — decided that it would be really neat to build a giant laser detector with which to search for the gravitational waves from things like colliding black holes. 
Now, most people thought they were nuts. 
But enough people realized that they were brilliant nuts that the US National Science Foundation decided to fund their crazy idea. 
So after decades of development, construction and imagination and a breathtaking amount of hard work, they built their detector, called LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. 
For the last several years, LIGO's been undergoing a huge expansion in its accuracy, a tremendous improvement in its detection ability. 
It's now called Advanced LIGO as a result. 
In early September of 2015, LIGO turned on for a final test run while they sorted out a few lingering details. 
And on September 14 of 2015, just days after the detector had gone live, the gravitational waves from those colliding black holes passed through the Earth. 
And they passed through you and me. 
And they passed through the detector. 
(Audio) Scott Hughes: There's two moments in my life more emotionally intense than that. 
One is the birth of my daughter. 
The other is when I had to say goodbye to my father when he was terminally ill. 
You know, it was the payoff of my career, basically. 
Everything I'd been working on — it's no longer science fiction! (Laughs) Allan Adams: So that's my very good friend and collaborator, Scott Hughes, a theoretical physicist at MIT, who has been studying gravitational waves from black holes and the signals that they could impart on observatories like LIGO, for the past 23 years. 
So let me take a moment to tell you what I mean by a gravitational wave. 
A gravitational wave is a ripple in the shape of space and time. 
As the wave passes by, it stretches space and everything in it in one direction, and compresses it in the other. 
This has led to countless instructors of general relativity doing a really silly dance to demonstrate in their classes on general relativity. 
"It stretches and expands, it stretches and expands." 
So the trouble with gravitational waves is that they're very weak; they're preposterously weak. 
For example, the waves that hit us on September 14 — and yes, every single one of you stretched and compressed under the action of that wave — when the waves hit, they stretched the average person by one part in 10 to the 21. 
That's a decimal place, 20 zeroes, and a one. 
That's why everyone thought the LIGO people were nuts. 
Even with a laser detector five kilometers long — and that's already crazy — they would have to measure the length of those detectors to less than one thousandth of the radius of the nucleus of an atom. 
And that's preposterous. 
So towards the end of his classic text on gravity, LIGO co-founder Kip Thorne described the hunt for gravitational waves as follows: He said, "" The technical difficulties to be surmounted in constructing such detectors are enormous. 
But physicists are ingenious, and with the support of a broad lay public, all obstacles will surely be overcome. "" Thorne published that in 1973, 42 years before he succeeded. 
Now, coming back to LIGO, Scott likes to say that LIGO acts like an ear more than it does like an eye. 
I want to explain what that means. 
Visible light has a wavelength, a size, that's much smaller than the things around you, the features on people's faces, the size of your cell phone. 
And that's really useful, because it lets you make an image or a map of the things around you, by looking at the light coming from different spots in the scene about you. 
Sound is different. 
Audible sound has a wavelength that can be up to 50 feet long. 
And that makes it really difficult — in fact, in practical purposes, impossible — to make an image of something you really care about. 
Your child's face. 
Instead, we use sound to listen for features like pitch and tone and rhythm and volume to infer a story behind the sounds. 
That's Alice talking. 
That's Bob interrupting. 
Silly Bob. 
So, the same is true of gravitational waves. 
We can't use them to make simple images of things out in the Universe. 
But by listening to changes in the amplitude and frequency of those waves, we can hear the story that those waves are telling. 
And at least for LIGO, the frequencies that it can hear are in the audio band. 
So if we convert the wave patterns into pressure waves and air, into sound, we can literally hear the Universe speaking to us. 
For example, listening to gravity, just in this way, can tell us a lot about the collision of two black holes, something my colleague Scott has spent an awful lot of time thinking about. 
(Audio) SH: If the two black holes are non-spinning, you get a very simple chirp: whoop! 
If the two bodies are spinning very rapidly, I have that same chirp, but with a modulation on top of it, so it kind of goes: whir, whir, whir! 
It's sort of the vocabulary of spin imprinted on this waveform. 
AA: So on September 14, 2015, a date that's definitely going to live in my memory, LIGO heard this: [Whirring sound] So if you know how to listen, that is the sound of — (Audio) SH:... two black holes, each of about 30 solar masses, that were whirling around at a rate comparable to what goes on in your blender. 
AA: It's worth pausing here to think about what that means. 
Two black holes, the densest thing in the Universe, one with a mass of 29 Suns and one with a mass of 36 Suns, whirling around each other 100 times per second before they collide. 
Just imagine the power of that. 
It's fantastic. 
And we know it because we heard it. 
That's the lasting importance of LIGO. 
It's an entirely new way to observe the Universe that we've never had before. 
It's a way that lets us hear the Universe and hear the invisible. 
And there's a lot out there that we can't see — in practice or even in principle. 
So supernova, for example: I would love to know why very massive stars explode in supernovae. 
They're very useful; we've learned a lot about the Universe from them. 
The problem is, all the interesting physics happens in the core, and the core is hidden behind thousands of kilometers of iron and carbon and silicon. 
We'll never see through it, it's opaque to light. 
Gravitational waves go through iron as if it were glass — totally transparent. 
The Big Bang: I would love to be able to explore the first few moments of the Universe, but we'll never see them, because the Big Bang itself is obscured by its own afterglow. 
With gravitational waves, we should be able to see all the way back to the beginning. 
Perhaps most importantly, I'm positive that there are things out there that we've never seen that we may never be able to see and that we haven't even imagined — things that we'll only discover by listening. 
And in fact, even in that very first event, LIGO found things that we didn't expect. 
Here's my colleague and one of the key members of the LIGO collaboration, Matt Evans, my colleague at MIT, addressing exactly that: (Audio) Matt Evans: The kinds of stars which produce the black holes that we observed here are the dinosaurs of the Universe. 
They're these massive things that are old, from prehistoric times, and the black holes are kind of like the dinosaur bones with which we do this archeology. 
So it lets us really get a whole nother angle on what's out there in the Universe and how the stars came to be, and in the end, of course, how we came to be out of this whole mess. 
AA: Our challenge now is to be as audacious as possible. 
Thanks to LIGO, we know how to build exquisite detectors that can listen to the Universe, to the rustle and the chirp of the cosmos. 
Our job is to dream up and build new observatories — a whole new generation of observatories — on the ground, in space. 
I mean, what could be more glorious than listening to the Big Bang itself? 
Our job now is to dream big. 
Dream with us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Two years ago here at TED I reported that we had discovered at Saturn, with the Cassini Spacecraft, an anomalously warm and geologically active region at the southern tip of the small Saturnine moon Enceladus, seen here. 
This region seen here for the first time in the Cassini image taken in 2005. This is the south polar region, with the famous tiger-stripe fractures crossing the south pole. 
And seen just recently in late 2008, here is that region again, now half in darkness because the southern hemisphere is experiencing the onset of August and eventually winter. 
And I also reported that we'd made this mind-blowing discovery — this once-in-a-lifetime discovery of towering jets erupting from those fractures at the south pole, consisting of tiny water ice crystals accompanied by water vapor and simple organic compounds like carbon dioxide and methane. 
And at that time two years ago I mentioned that we were speculating that these jets might in fact be geysers, and erupting from pockets or chambers of liquid water underneath the surface, but we weren't really sure. 
However, the implications of those results — of a possible environment within this moon that could support prebiotic chemistry, and perhaps life itself — were so exciting that, in the intervening two years, we have focused more on Enceladus. 
We've flown the Cassini Spacecraft by this moon now several times, flying closer and deeper into these jets, into the denser regions of these jets, so that now we have come away with some very precise compositional measurements. 
And we have found that the organic compounds coming from this moon are in fact more complex than we previously reported. 
While they're not amino acids, we're now finding things like propane and benzene, hydrogen cyanide, and formaldehyde. 
And the tiny water crystals here now look for all the world like they are frozen droplets of salty water, which is a discovery that suggests that not only do the jets come from pockets of liquid water, but that that liquid water is in contact with rock. 
And that is a circumstance that could supply the chemical energy and the chemical compounds needed to sustain life. 
So we are very encouraged by these results. 
And we are much more confident now than we were two years ago that we might indeed have on this moon, under the south pole, an environment or a zone that is hospitable to living organisms. 
Whether or not there are living organisms there, of course, is an entirely different matter. 
And that will have to await the arrival, back at Enceladus, of the spacecrafts, hopefully some time in the near future, specifically equipped to address that particular question. 
But in the meantime I invite you to imagine the day when we might journey to the Saturnine system, and visit the Enceladus interplanetary geyser park, just because we can. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Music) For any of you who have visited or lived in New York City, these shots might start to look familiar. 
This is Central Park, one of the most beautifully designed public spaces in America. 
But to anyone who hasn't visited, these images can't really fully convey. 
To really understand Central Park, you have to physically be there. 
Well, the same is true of the music, which my brother and I composed and mapped specifically for Central Park. 
(Music) I'd like to talk to you today a little bit about the work that my brother Hays and I are doing — That's us there. That's both of us actually — specifically about a concept that we've been developing over the last few years, this idea of location-aware music. 
Now, my brother and I, we're musicians and music producers. 
We've been working together since, well, since we were kids, really. 
But recently, we've become more and more interested in projects where art and technology intersect, from creating sight-specific audio and video installation to engineering interactive concerts. 
But today I want to focus on this concept of composition for physical space. 
But before I go too much further into that, let me tell you a little bit about how we got started with this idea. 
My brother and I were living in New York City when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude did their temporary installation, The Gates, in Central Park. 
Hundreds of these brightly-colored sculptures decorated the park for a number of weeks, and unlike work that's exhibited in a more neutral space, like on the walls of a gallery or a museum, this was work that was really in dialogue with this place, and in a lot of ways, The Gates was really a celebration of Frederick Olmsted's incredible design. 
This was an experience that stayed with us for a long time, and years later, my brother and I moved back to Washington, D.C., and we started to ask the question, would it be possible, in the same way that The Gates responded to the physical layout of the park, to compose music for a landscape? 
Which brought us to this. 
(Music) On Memorial Day, we released "" The National Mall, "" a location-aware album released exclusively as a mobile app that uses the device's built-in GPS functionality to sonically map the entire park in our hometown of Washington, D.C. 
Hundreds of musical segments are geo-tagged throughout the entire park so that as a listener traverses the landscape, a musical score is actually unfolding around them. 
So this is not a playlist or a list of songs intended for the park, but rather an array of distinct melodies and rhythms that fit together like pieces of a puzzle and blend seamlessly based on a listener's chosen trajectory. 
So think of this as a choose-your-own-adventure of an album. 
Let's take a closer look. 
Let's look at one example here. 
So using the app, as you make your way towards the grounds surrounding the Washington Monument, you hear the sounds of instruments warming up, which then gives way to the sound of a mellotron spelling out a very simple melody. 
This is then joined by the sound of sweeping violins. 
Keep walking, and a full choir joins in, until you finally reach the top of the hill and you're hearing the sound of drums and fireworks and all sorts of musical craziness, as if all of these sounds are radiating out from this giant obelisk that punctuates the center of the park. 
But were you to walk in the opposite direction, this entire sequence happens in reverse. 
And were you to actually exit the perimeter of the park, the music would fade to silence, and the play button would disappear. 
We're sometimes contacted by people in other parts of the world who can't travel to the United States, but would like to hear this record. 
Well, unlike a normal album, we haven't been able to accommodate this request. 
When they ask for a C.D. or an MP3 version, we just can't make that happen, and the reason is because this isn't a promotional app or a game to promote or accompany the release of a traditional record. 
In this case, the app is the work itself, and the architecture of the landscape is intrinsic to the listening experience. 
Six months later, we did a location-aware album for Central Park, a park that is over two times the size of the National Mall, with music spanning from the Sheep's Meadow to the Ramble to the Reservoir. 
Currently, my brother and I are working on projects all over the country, but last spring we started a project, here actually at Stanford's Experimental Media Art Department, where we're creating our largest location-aware album to date, one that will span the entirety of Highway 1 here on the Pacific Coast. 
But what we're doing, integrating GPS with music, is really just one idea. 
But it speaks to a larger vision for a music industry that's sometimes struggled to find its footing in this digital age, that they begin to see these new technologies not simply as ways of adding bells and whistles to an existing model, but to dream up entirely new ways for people to interact with and experience music. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I was a young officer, they told me to follow my instincts, to go with my gut, and what I've learned is that often our instincts are wrong. 
In the summer of 2010, there was a massive leak of classified documents that came out of the Pentagon. 
It shocked the world, it shook up the American government, and it made people ask a lot of questions, because the sheer amount of information that was let out, and the potential impacts, were significant. 
And one of the first questions we asked ourselves was why would a young soldier have access to that much information? 
Why would we let sensitive things be with a relatively young person? 
In the summer of 2003, I was assigned to command a special operations task force, and that task force was spread across the Mideast to fight al Qaeda. 
Our main effort was inside Iraq, and our specified mission was to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. 
For almost five years I stayed there, and we focused on fighting a war that was unconventional and it was difficult and it was bloody and it often claimed its highest price among innocent people. 
We did everything we could to stop al Qaeda and the foreign fighters that came in as suicide bombers and as accelerants to the violence. 
We honed our combat skills, we developed new equipment, we parachuted, we helicoptered, we took small boats, we drove, and we walked to objectives night after night to stop the killing that this network was putting forward. 
We bled, we died, and we killed to stop that organization from the violence that they were putting largely against the Iraqi people. 
Now, we did what we knew, how we had grown up, and one of the things that we knew, that was in our DNA, was secrecy. 
It was security. It was protecting information. 
It was the idea that information was the lifeblood and it was what would protect and keep people safe. 
And we had a sense that, as we operated within our organizations, it was important to keep information in the silos within the organizations, particularly only give information to people had a demonstrated need to know. 
But the question often came, who needed to know? 
Who needed, who had to have the information so that they could do the important parts of the job that you needed? 
And in a tightly coupled world, that's very hard to predict. 
It's very hard to know who needs to have information and who doesn't. 
I used to deal with intelligence agencies, and I'd complain that they weren't sharing enough intelligence, and with a straight face, they'd look at me and they'd say, "" What aren't you getting? "" (Laughter) I said, "" If I knew that, we wouldn't have a problem. "" But what we found is we had to change. 
We had to change our culture about information. 
We had to knock down walls. We had to share. 
We had to change from who needs to know to the fact that who doesn't know, and we need to tell, and tell them as quickly as we can. 
It was a significant culture shift for an organization that had secrecy in its DNA. 
We started by doing things, by building, not working in offices, knocking down walls, working in things we called situation awareness rooms, and in the summer of 2007, something happened which demonstrated this. 
We captured the personnel records for the people who were bringing foreign fighters into Iraq. 
And when we got the personnel records, typically, we would have hidden these, shared them with a few intelligence agencies, and then try to operate with them. 
But as I was talking to my intelligence officer, I said, "" What do we do? "" And he said, "" Well, you found them. "" Our command. 
"You can just declassify them." 
And I said, "" Well, can we declassify them? 
What if the enemy finds out? "" And he says, "" They're their personnel records. "" (Laughter) So we did, and a lot of people got upset about that, but as we passed that information around, suddenly you find that information is only of value if you give it to people who have the ability to do something with it. 
The fact that I know something has zero value if I'm not the person who can actually make something better because of it. 
So as a consequence, what we did was we changed the idea of information, instead of knowledge is power, to one where sharing is power. 
It was the fundamental shift, not new tactics, not new weapons, not new anything else. 
It was the idea that we were now part of a team in which information became the essential link between us, not a block between us. 
And I want everybody to take a deep breath and let it out, because in your life, there's going to be information that leaks out you're not going to like. 
Somebody's going to get my college grades out, a that's going to be a disaster. (Laughter) But it's going to be okay, and I will tell you that I am more scared of the bureaucrat that holds information in a desk drawer or in a safe than I am of someone who leaks, because ultimately, we'll be better off if we share. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Helen Walters: So I don't know if you were here this morning, if you were able to catch Rick Ledgett, the deputy director of the NSA who was responding to Edward Snowden's talk earlier this week. 
I just wonder, do you think the American government should give Edward Snowden amnesty? 
Stanley McChrystal: I think that Rick said something very important. 
We, most people, don't know all the facts. 
I think there are two parts of this. 
Edward Snowden shined a light on an important need that people had to understand. 
He also took a lot of documents that he didn't have the knowledge to know the importance of, so I think we need to learn the facts about this case before we make snap judgments about Edward Snowden. 
HW: Thank you so much. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is my grandfather. 
And this is my son. 
My grandfather taught me to work with wood when I was a little boy, and he also taught me the idea that if you cut down a tree to turn it into something, honor that tree's life and make it as beautiful as you possibly can. 
My little boy reminded me that for all the technology and all the toys in the world, sometimes just a small block of wood, if you stack it up tall, actually is an incredibly inspiring thing. 
These are my buildings. 
I build all around the world out of our office in Vancouver and New York. 
And we build buildings of different sizes and styles and different materials, depending on where we are. 
But wood is the material that I love the most, and I'm going to tell you the story about wood. 
And part of the reason I love it is that every time people go into my buildings that are wood, I notice they react completely differently. 
I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column, but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building. 
I've actually seen how people touch the wood, and I think there's a reason for it. 
Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. 
That's a wonderful thing. 
I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. 
It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment. 
Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest that grows to 33 stories tall. 
Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall. 
But the buildings that we think about in wood are only four stories tall in most places on Earth. 
Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build much taller than four stories in many places, and that's true here in the United States. 
Now there are exceptions, but there needs to be some exceptions, and things are going to change, I'm hoping. 
And the reason I think that way is that today half of us live in cities, and that number is going to grow to 75 percent. 
Cities and density mean that our buildings are going to continue to be big, and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities. 
And I feel that way because three billion people in the world today, over the next 20 years, will need a new home. 
That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need a new building built for them in the next 20 years. 
Now, one in three people living in cities today actually live in a slum. 
That's one billion people in the world live in slums. 
A hundred million people in the world are homeless. 
The scale of the challenge for architects and for society to deal with in building is to find a solution to house these people. 
But the challenge is, as we move to cities, cities are built in these two materials, steel and concrete, and they're great materials. 
They're the materials of the last century. 
But they're also materials with very high energy and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process. 
Steel represents about three percent of man's greenhouse gas emissions, and concrete is over five percent. 
So if you think about that, eight percent of our contribution to greenhouse gases today comes from those two materials alone. 
We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately, we actually don't even think about buildings, I think, as much as we should. 
Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry, and if we look at energy, it's the same story. 
You'll notice that transportation's sort of second down that list, but that's the conversation we mostly hear about. 
And although a lot of that is about energy, it's also so much about carbon. 
The problem I see is that, ultimately, the clash of how we solve that problem of serving those three billion people that need a home, and climate change, are a head-on collision about to happen, or already happening. 
That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways, and I think wood is going to be part of that solution, and I'm going to tell you the story of why. 
As an architect, wood is the only material, big material, that I can build with that's already grown by the power of the sun. 
When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen and soaks up carbon dioxide, and it dies and it falls to the forest floor, it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground. 
If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon back to the atmosphere as well. 
But if you take that wood and you put it into a building or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy, it actually has an amazing capacity to store the carbon and provide us with a sequestration. 
One cubic meter of wood will store one tonne of carbon dioxide. 
Now our two solutions to climate are obviously to reduce our emissions and find storage. 
Wood is the only major material building material I can build with that actually does both those two things. 
So I believe that we have an ethic that the Earth grows our food, and we need to move to an ethic in this century that the Earth should grow our homes. 
Now, how are we going to do that when we're urbanizing at this rate and we think about wood buildings only at four stories? 
We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need to grow bigger, and what we've been working on is 30-story tall buildings made of wood. 
We've been engineering them with an engineer named Eric Karsh who works with me on it, and we've been doing this new work because there are new wood products out there for us to use, and we call them mass timber panels. 
These are panels made with young trees, small growth trees, small pieces of wood glued together to make panels that are enormous: eight feet wide, 64 feet long, and of various thicknesses. 
The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say that we're all used to two-by-four construction when we think about wood. 
Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little eight-dot bricks of Lego that we all played with as kids, and you can make all kinds of cool things out of Lego at that size, and out of two-by-fours. 
But do remember when you were a kid, and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement, and you found that big 24-dot brick of Lego, and you were kind of like, "" Cool, this is awesome. I can build something really big, and this is going to be great. "" That's the change. 
Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks. 
They're changing the scale of what we can do, and what we've developed is something we call FFTT, which is a Creative Commons solution to building a very flexible system of building with these large panels where we tilt up six stories at a time if we want to. 
This animation shows you how the building goes together in a very simple way, but these buildings are available for architects and engineers now to build on for different cultures in the world, different architectural styles and characters. 
In order for us to build safely, we've engineered these buildings, actually, to work in a Vancouver context, where we're a high seismic zone, even at 30 stories tall. 
Now obviously, every time I bring this up, people even, you know, here at the conference, say, "Are you serious? Thirty stories? How's that going to happen?" 
And there's a lot of really good questions that are asked and important questions that we spent quite a long time working on the answers to as we put together our report and the peer reviewed report. 
I'm just going to focus on a few of them, and let's start with fire, because I think fire is probably the first one that you're all thinking about right now. 
And the way I describe it is this. 
If I asked you to take a match and light it and hold up a log and try to get that log to go on fire, it doesn't happen, right? We all know that. 
But to build a fire, you kind of start with small pieces of wood and you work your way up, and eventually you can add the log to the fire, and when you do add the log to the fire, of course, it burns, but it burns slowly. 
Well, mass timber panels, these new products that we're using, are much like the log. 
It's hard to start them on fire, and when they do, they actually burn extraordinarily predictably, and we can use fire science in order to predict and make these buildings as safe as concrete and as safe as steel. 
The next big issue, deforestation. 
Eighteen percent of our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is the result of deforestation. 
Or, the last thing we want to do is cut down the wrong trees. 
There are models for sustainable forestry that allow us to cut trees properly, and those are the only trees appropriate to use for these kinds of systems. 
Now I actually think that these ideas will change the economics of deforestation. 
In countries with deforestation issues, we need to find a way to provide better value for the forest and actually encourage people to make money through very fast growth cycles — 10-, 12-, 15-year-old trees that make these products and allow us to build at this scale. 
We've calculated a 20-story building: We'll grow enough wood in North America every 13 minutes. 
That's how much it takes. 
The carbon story here is a really good one. 
If we built a 20-story building out of cement and concrete, the process would result in the manufacturing of that cement and 1,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide. 
If we did it in wood, in this solution, we'd sequester about 3,100 tonnes, for a net difference of 4,300 tonnes. 
That's the equivalent of about 900 cars removed from the road in one year. 
Think back to that three billion people that need a new home, and maybe this is a contributor to reducing. 
We're at the beginning of a revolution, I hope, in the way we build, because this is the first new way to build a skyscraper in probably 100 years or more. 
But the challenge is changing society's perception of possibility, and it's a huge challenge. 
And the way I describe it is this. 
The first skyscraper, technically — and the definition of a skyscraper is 10 stories tall, believe it or not — but the first skyscraper was this one in Chicago, and people were terrified to walk underneath this building. 
But only four years after it was built, Gustave Eiffel was building the Eiffel Tower, and as he built the Eiffel Tower, he changed the skylines of the cities of the world, changed and created a competition between places like New York City and Chicago, where developers started building bigger and bigger buildings and pushing the envelope up higher and higher with better and better engineering. 
We built this model in New York, actually, as a theoretical model on the campus of a technical university soon to come, and the reason we picked this site to just show you what these buildings may look like, because the exterior can change. 
It's really just the structure that we're talking about. 
The reason we picked it is because this is a technical university, and I believe that wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with. 
It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent, and we don't really feel comfortable with it. 
But that's the way it should be, nature's fingerprints in the built environment. 
I'm looking for this opportunity to create an Eiffel Tower moment, we call it. 
Buildings are starting to go up around the world. 
There's a building in London that's nine stories, a new building that just finished in Australia that I believe is 10 or 11. 
We're starting to push the height up of these wood buildings, and we're hoping, and I'm hoping, that my hometown of Vancouver actually potentially announces the world's tallest at around 20 stories in the not-so-distant future. 
That Eiffel Tower moment will break the ceiling, these arbitrary ceilings of height, and allow wood buildings to join the competition. 
And I believe the race is ultimately on. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy, and, like at least 20 other people in a room of this size, I was a stutterer. 
Do you dare raise your hand? 
And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us, because when we are treated that way, we feel invisible sometimes, or talked around and at. 
And as I started to look at people, which is mostly all I did, I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition. 
Remember, I was young then. 
So what did they do? 
What we still do perhaps too often. 
We talk about ourselves. 
And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset. 
In each situation, they found a way to talk about us and create that "" us "" idea. 
So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others. 
There's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own. 
And I want to talk to you about that, because even more than giving, even more than giving, is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale. 
That's why I'm sitting here. 
But I also want to point something else out: Each one of you is better than anybody else at something. 
That disproves that popular notion that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. 
(Laughter) So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back, and I met this up-and-coming actress, and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about: public art. 
And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it. 
She wanted a regulation for it, and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park, and people would walk up to it and they'd smile in the reflection of it, and they'd pose and they'd vamp and they'd take selfies together, and they'd laugh. 
And as she was talking, a thought came to my mind. 
I said, "" I know someone you ought to meet. 
He's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks "" — (Laughter) — "" and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect. "" He spent five years in solitary, and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin, and he's articulate and he's rather easy on the eyes because he's buff. 
He had workout regime he did every day. 
(Laughter) I think she was following me at that point. 
I said, "" He'd be an unexpected ally. "" And not just that. There's James. He's an architect and he's a professor, and he loves place-making, and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they're dotted with art, where people draw and come up and talk sometimes. 
I think they'd make good allies. 
And indeed they were. 
They met together. They prepared. 
They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council. 
And the council members not only passed the regulation, half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards. 
You can't buy that. 
What I'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become, because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect around each other's better side and bring it out. 
And I'm not saying this is easy, and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with, but what I want to suggest is, this is an opportunity. 
I started thinking about it way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle. 
So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine, because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends. 
And third, I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader's shoes, so they could see how these trends could affect their lives. 
That's what opportunity-makers do. 
And here's a strange thing: Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme, opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them, and they're building relationships, and because they do that, they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster and seize more opportunities. 
They're not affronted by differences, they're fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. 
This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset, and I believe in doing that. 
It's especially important now. 
Why is it important now? 
Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection, and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then, as we know from the news every day, they can be used for dangerous ones. 
It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling. 
But here's the icing on the cake: It's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that's probably your greatest, as an institution or an individual. 
It's after you've had that experience and you trust each other. 
It's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted. 
For example, Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned, and he watched them when they were practicing, and he was soon talking to Wally, my friend the ex-con, about that exercise regime. 
And he thought, I have a set of racquetball courts. 
That guy could teach it. 
They're frequent travelers. 
They could practice in their hotel room, no equipment provided. 
That's how Wally got hired. 
Not only that, years later he was also teaching racquetball. 
Years after that, he was teaching the racquetball teachers. 
What I'm suggesting is, when you connect with people around a shared interest and action, you're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future, and I think that's what we're looking at. 
We open ourselves up to those opportunities, and in this room are key players in technology, key players who are uniquely positioned to do this, to scale systems and projects together. 
So here's what I'm calling for you to do. 
Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers. 
Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers. 
They get involved in different worlds than their worlds so they're trusted and they can see those patterns, and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest. 
So what I'm asking you is, the world is hungry. 
I truly believe, in my firsthand experience, the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own. 
Just remember, as Dave Liniger once said, "" You can't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork. "" (Laughter) Thank you very much. 
Thank you. (Applause) 

Forrest North: The beginning of any collaboration starts with a conversation. 
And I would like to share with you some of the bits of the conversation that we started with. 
I grew up in a log cabin in Washington state with too much time on my hands. 
Yves Behar: And in scenic Switzerland for me. 
FN: I always had a passion for alternative vehicles. 
This is a land yacht racing across the desert in Nevada. 
YB: Combination of windsurfing and skiing into this invention there. 
FN: And I also had an interest in dangerous inventions. 
This is a 100,000-volt Tesla coil that I built in my bedroom, much to the dismay of my mother. 
YB: To the dismay of my mother, this is dangerous teenage fashion right there. 
(Laughter) FN: And I brought this all together, this passion with alternative energy and raced a solar car across Australia — also the U.S. and Japan. 
YB: So, wind power, solar power — we had a lot to talk about. 
We had a lot that got us excited. 
So we decided to do a special project together. 
To combine engineering and design and... 
FN: Really make a fully integrated product, something beautiful. 
YB: And we made a baby. 
(Laughter) FN: Can you bring out our baby? 
(Applause) This baby is fully electric. 
It goes 150 miles an hour. 
It's twice the range of any electric motorcycle. 
Really the exciting thing about a motorcycle is just the beautiful integration of engineering and design. 
It's got an amazing user experience. 
It was wonderful working with Yves Behar. 
He came up with our name and logo. We're Mission Motors. 
And we've only got three minutes, but we could talk about it for hours. 
YB: Thank you. 
FN: Thank you TED. And thank you Chris, for having us. 
(Applause) 

I used to have this recurring dream where I'd walk into a roomful of people, and I'd try not to make eye contact with anyone. 
Until someone notices me, and I just panic. 
And the person walks up to me, and says, "" Hi, my name is So-and-so. 
And what is your name? "" And I'm just quiet, unable to respond. 
After some awkward silence, he goes, "Have you forgotten your name?" 
And I'm still quiet. 
And then, slowly, all the other people in the room begin to turn toward me and ask, almost in unison, (Voice-over, several voices) "" Have you forgotten your name? "" As the chant gets louder, I want to respond, but I don't. 
I'm a visual artist. 
Some of my work is humorous, and some is a bit funny but in a sad way. 
And one thing that I really enjoy doing is making these little animations where I get to do the voice-over for all kinds of characters. 
I've been a bear. 
(Video) Bear (Safwat Saleem's voice): Hi. 
(Laughter) Safwat Saleem: I've been a whale. 
(Video) Whale (SS's voice): Hi. 
(Laughter) SS: I've been a greeting card. 
(Video) Greeting card (SS's voice): Hi. 
(Laughter) SS: And my personal favorite is Frankenstein's monster. 
(Video) Frankenstein's monster (SS's voice): (Grunts) (Laughter) SS: I just had to grunt a lot for that one. 
A few years ago, I made this educational video about the history of video games. 
And for that one, I got to do the voice of Space Invader. 
(Video) Space Invader (SS's voice): Hi. 
SS: A dream come true, really, (Laughter) And when that video was posted online, I just sat there on the computer, hitting "" refresh, "" excited to see the response. 
The first comment comes in. 
(Video) Comment: Great job. 
I hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: Excellent video. I look forward to the next one. 
SS: This was just the first of a two-part video. 
I was going to work on the second one next. 
I hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: Where is part TWO? WHEREEEEE? I need it NOWWWWW!: P (Laughter) SS: People other than my mom were saying nice things about me, on the Internet! 
It felt like I had finally arrived. 
I hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: His voice is annoying. No offense. 
(Video) Comment: Could you remake this without peanut butter in your mouth? 
SS: OK, at least the feedback is somewhat constructive. Hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: Please don't use this narrator again u can barely understand him. 
SS: Refresh. 
(Video) Comment: Couldn't follow because of the Indian accent. 
SS: OK, OK, OK, two things. 
Number one, I don't have an Indian accent, I have a Pakistani accent, OK? 
And number two, I clearly have a Pakistani accent. 
(Laughter) But comments like that kept coming in, so I figured I should just ignore them and start working on the second part of the video. 
I recorded my audio, but every time I sat down to edit, I just could not do it. 
Every single time, it would take me back to my childhood, when I had a much harder time speaking. 
I've stuttered for as long as I can remember. 
I was the kid in class who would never raise his hand when he had a question — or knew the answer. 
Every time the phone rang, I would run to the bathroom so I would not have to answer it. 
If it was for me, my parents would say I'm not around. 
I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. 
And I hated introducing myself, especially in groups. 
I'd always stutter on my name, and there was usually someone who'd go, "Have you forgotten your name?" 
And then everybody would laugh. 
That joke never got old. 
(Laughter) I spent my childhood feeling that if I spoke, it would become obvious that there was something wrong with me, that I was not normal. 
And so you see, eventually for me to even be able to use my voice in my work was a huge step for me. 
Every time I record audio, I fumble my way through saying each sentence many, many times, and then I go back in and pick the ones where I think I suck the least. 
(Voice-over) SS: Audio editing is like Photoshop for your voice. 
I can slow it down, speed it up, make it deeper, add an echo. 
And if I stutter along the way, and if I stutter along the way, I just go back in and fix it. 
It's magic. 
SS: Using my highly edited voice in my work was a way for me to finally sound normal to myself. 
But after the comments on the video, it no longer made me feel normal. 
And so I stopped using my voice in my work. 
Since then, I've thought a lot about what it means to be normal. 
And I've come to understand that "" normal "" has a lot to do with expectations. 
Let me give you an example. 
I came across this story about the Ancient Greek writer, Homer. 
Now, Homer mentions very few colors in his writing. 
And even when he does, he seems to get them quite a bit wrong. 
For example, the sea is described as wine red, people's faces are sometimes green and sheep are purple. 
But it's not just Homer. 
If you look at all of the ancient literature — Ancient Chinese, Icelandic, Greek, Indian and even the original Hebrew Bible — they all mention very few colors. 
And the most popular theory for why that might be the case is that cultures begin to recognize a color only once they have the ability to make that color. 
So basically, if you can make a color, only then can you see it. 
A color like red, which was fairly easy for many cultures to make — they began to see that color fairly early on. 
But a color like blue, which was much harder to make — many cultures didn't begin to learn how to make that color until much later. 
It was invisIble. 
It was not a part of their normal. 
And that story has helped put my own experience into context. 
So when I first read the comments on the video, my initial reaction was to take it all very personally. 
But the people commenting did not know how self-conscious I am about my voice. 
They were mostly reacting to my accent, that it is not normal for a narrator to have an accent. 
But what is normal, anyway? 
We know that reviewers will find more spelling errors in your writing if they think you're black. 
We know that professors are less likely to help female or minority students. 
And we know that resumes with white-sounding names get more callbacks than resumes with black-sounding names. 
Why is that? 
Because of our expectations of what is normal. 
We think it is normal when a black student has spelling errors. We think it is normal 
when a female or minority student does not succeed. 
And we think it is normal that a white employee is a better hire than a black employee. 
But studies also show that discrimination of this kind, in most cases, is simply favoritism, and it results more from wanting to help people that you can relate to than the desire to harm people that you can't relate to. 
And not relating to people starts at a very early age. 
Let me give you an example. 
One library that keeps track of characters in the children's book collection every year, found that in 2014, only about 11 percent of the books had a character of color. 
And just the year before, that number was about eight percent, even though half of American children today come from a minority background. 
Half. 
So there are two big issues here. 
Number one, children are told that they can be anything, they can do anything, and yet, most stories that children of color consume are about people who are not like them. 
Number two is that majority groups don't get to realize the great extent to which they are similar to minorities — our everyday experiences, our hopes, our dreams, our fears and our mutual love for hummus. 
It's delicious! 
(Laughter) Just like the color blue for Ancient Greeks, minorities are not a part of what we consider normal, because normal is simply a construction of what we've been exposed to, and how visible it is around us. 
And this is where things get a bit difficult. 
I can accept the preexisting notion of normal — that normal is good, and anything outside of that very narrow definition of normal is bad. 
Or I can challenge that preexisting notion of normal with my work and with my voice and with my accent and by standing here onstage, even though I'm scared shitless and would rather be in the bathroom. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Video) Sheep (SS's voice): I'm now slowly starting to use my voice in my work again. 
And it feels good. 
It does not mean I won't have a breakdown the next time a couple dozen people say that I talk (Mumbling) like I have peanut butter in my mouth. 
(Laughter) SS: It just means I now have a much better understanding of what's at stake, and how giving up is not an option. 
The Ancient Greeks didn't just wake up one day and realize that the sky was blue. 
It took centuries, even, for humans to realize what we had been ignoring for so long. 
And so we must continuously challenge our notion of normal, because doing so is going to allow us as a society to finally see the sky for what it is. 
(Video) Characters: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
Frankenstein's monster: (Grunts) (Laughter) SS: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So for the past year and a half, my team at Push Pop Press and Charlie Melcher and Melcher Media have been working on creating the first feature-length interactive book. 
It's called "" Our Choice "" and the author is Al Gore. 
It's the sequel to "" An Inconvenient Truth, "" and it explores all the solutions that will solve the climate crisis. 
The book starts like this. This is the cover. 
As the globe spins, we can see our location, and we can open the book and swipe through the chapters to browse the book. 
Or, we can scroll through the pages at the bottom. 
And if we wanted to zoom into a page, we can just open it up. 
And anything you see in the book, you can pick up with two fingers and lift off the page and open up. 
And if you want to go back and read the book again, you just fold it back up and put it back on the page. 
And so this works the same way; you pick it up and pop it open. 
(Audio) Al Gore: I consider myself among the majority who look at windmills and feel they're a beautiful addition to the landscape. 
Mike Matas: And so throughout the whole book, Al Gore will walk you through and explain the photos. 
This photo, you can you can even see on an interactive map. 
Zoom into it and see where it was taken. 
And throughout the book, there's over an hour of documentary footage and interactive animations. 
So you can open this one. 
(Audio) AG: Most modern wind turbines consist of a large... 
MM: It starts playing immediately. 
And while it's playing, we can pinch and peak back at the page, and the movie keeps playing. 
Or we can zoom out to the table of contents, and the video keeps playing. 
But one of the coolest things in this book are the interactive infographics. 
This one shows the wind potential all around the United States. 
But instead of just showing us the information, we can take our finger and explore, and see, state by state, exactly how much wind potential there is. 
We can do the same for geothermal energy and solar power. 
This is one of my favorites. 
So this shows... 
(Laughter) (Applause) When the wind is blowing, any excess energy coming from the windmill is diverted into the battery. 
And as the wind starts dying down, any excess energy will be diverted back into the house — the lights never go out. 
And this whole book, it doesn't just run on the iPad. 
It also runs on the iPhone. 
And so you can start reading on your iPad in your living room and then pick up where you left off on the iPhone. 
And it works the exact same way. 
You can pinch into any page. 
Open it up. 
So that's Push Pop Press' first title, Al Gore's "" Our Choice. "" Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: That's spectacular. 
Do you want to be a publisher, a technology licenser? 
What is the business here? 
Is this something that other people can do? 
MM: Yeah, we're building a tool that makes it really easy for publishers right now to build this content. 
So Melcher Media's team, who's on the East coast — and we're on the West coast, building the software — takes our tool and, every day, drags in images and text. 
CA: So you want to license this software to publishers to make books as beautiful as that? (MM: Yes.) All right. Mike, thanks so much. 
MM: Thank you. (CA: Good luck.) (Applause) 

When I was young, I prided myself as a nonconformist in the conservative U.S. state I live in, Kansas. 
I didn't follow along with the crowd. 
I wasn't afraid to try weird clothing trends or hairstyles. 
Even these pictures and postcards of my London semester abroad 16 years ago show that I obviously didn't care if I was perceived as weird or different. 
(Laughter) But that same year I was in London, 16 years ago, I realized something about myself that actually was somewhat unique, and that changed everything. 
I became the opposite of who I thought I once was. 
I stayed in my room instead of socializing. 
I stopped engaging in clubs and leadership activities. 
I didn't want to stand out in the crowd anymore. 
I told myself it was because I was growing up and maturing, not that I was suddenly looking for acceptance. 
I had always assumed I was immune to needing acceptance. 
After all, I was a bit unconventional. 
But I realize now that the moment I realized something was different about me was the exact same moment that I began conforming and hiding. 
Hiding is a progressive habit, and once you start hiding, it becomes harder and harder to step forward and speak out. 
In fact, even now, when I was talking to people about what this talk was about, I made up a cover story and I even hid the truth about my TED Talk. 
So it is fitting and scary that I have returned to this city 16 years later and I have chosen this stage to finally stop hiding. 
I am a lesbian. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
I've struggled to say those words, because I didn't want to be defined by them. 
Every time I would think about coming out in the past, I would think to myself, but I just want to be known as Morgana, uniquely Morgana, but not "" my lesbian friend Morgana, "" or "" my gay coworker Morgana. "" Just Morgana. 
For those of you from large metropolitan areas, this may not seem like a big deal to you. 
It may seem strange that I have suppressed the truth and hidden this for so long. 
But I was paralyzed by my fear of not being accepted. 
And I'm not alone, of course. 
A 2013 Deloitte study found that a surprisingly large number of people hide aspects of their identity. 
Of all the employees they surveyed, 61 percent reported changing an aspect of their behavior or their appearance in order to fit in at work. 
Of all the gay, lesbian and bisexual employees, 83 percent admitted to changing some aspects of themselves so they would not appear at work "" too gay. "" The study found that even in companies with diversity policies and inclusion programs, employees struggle to be themselves at work because they believe conformity is critical to their long-term career advancement. 
And while I was surprised that so many people just like me waste so much energy trying to hide themselves, I was scared when I discovered that my silence has life-or-death consequences and long-term social repercussions. 
Twelve years: the length by which life expectancy is shortened for gay, lesbian and bisexual people in highly anti-gay communities compared to accepting communities. 
Twelve years reduced life expectancy. 
When I read that in The Advocate magazine this year, I realized I could no longer afford to keep silent. 
The effects of personal stress and social stigmas are a deadly combination. 
The study found that gays in anti-gay communities had higher rates of heart disease, violence and suicide. 
What I once thought was simply a personal matter I realized had a ripple effect that went into the workplace and out into the community for every story just like mine. 
My choice to hide and not share who I really am may have inadvertently contributed to this exact same environment and atmosphere of discrimination. 
I'd always told myself there's no reason to share that I was gay, but the idea that my silence has social consequences was really driven home this year when I missed an opportunity to change the atmosphere of discrimination in my own home state of Kansas. 
In February, the Kansas House of Representatives brought up a bill for vote that would have essentially allowed businesses to use religious freedom as a reason to deny gays services. 
A former coworker and friend of mine has a father who serves in the Kansas House of Representatives. 
He voted in favor of the bill, in favor of a law that would allow businesses to not serve me. 
How does my friend feel about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning people? 
How does her father feel? 
I don't know, because I was never honest with them about who I am. 
And that shakes me to the core. 
What if I had told her my story years ago? 
Could she have told her father my experience? 
Could I have ultimately helped change his vote? 
I will never know, and that made me realize I had done nothing to try to make a difference. 
How ironic that I work in human resources, a profession that works to welcome, connect and encourage the development of employees, a profession that advocates that the diversity of society should be reflected in the workplace, and yet I have done nothing to advocate for diversity. 
When I came to this company one year ago, I thought to myself, this company has anti-discrimination policies that protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. 
Their commitment to diversity is evident through their global inclusion programs. 
When I walk through the doors of this company, I will finally come out. 
But I didn't. 
Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity, I did nothing. 
(Applause) When I was looking through my London journal and scrapbook from my London semester abroad 16 years ago, I came across this modified quote from Toni Morrison's book, "" Paradise. "" "There are more scary things inside than outside." 
And then I wrote a note to myself at the bottom: "Remember this." 
I'm sure I was trying to encourage myself to get out and explore London, but the message I missed was the need to start exploring and embracing myself. 
What I didn't realize until all these years later is that the biggest obstacles I will ever have to overcome are my own fears and insecurities. 
I believe that by facing my fears inside, I will be able to change reality outside. 
I made a choice today to reveal a part of myself that I have hidden for too long. 
I hope that this means I will never hide again, and I hope that by coming out today, I can do something to change the data and also to help others who feel different be more themselves and more fulfilled in both their professional and personal lives. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Cancer? Heart attacks? Diabetes? 
The answer is actually none of these; it's Alzheimer's disease. 
Every 67 seconds, someone in the United States is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. 
As the number of Alzheimer's patients triples by the year 2050, caring for them, as well as the rest of the aging population, will become an overwhelming societal challenge. 
My family has experienced firsthand the struggles of caring for an Alzheimer's patient. 
Growing up in a family with three generations, I've always been very close to my grandfather. 
When I was four years old, my grandfather and I were walking in a park in Japan when he suddenly got lost. 
It was one of the scariest moments I've ever experienced in my life, and it was also the first instance that informed us that my grandfather had Alzheimer's disease. 
My aunt, his primary caregiver, really struggled to stay awake at night to keep an eye on him, and even then often failed to catch him leaving the bed. 
I became really concerned about my aunt's well-being as well as my grandfather's safety. 
I searched extensively for a solution that could help my family's problems, but couldn't find one. 
Then, one night about two years ago, I was looking after my grandfather and I saw him stepping out of the bed. 
The moment his foot landed on the floor, I thought, why don't I put a pressure sensor on the heel of his foot? 
Once he stepped onto the floor and out of the bed, the pressure sensor would detect an increase in pressure caused by body weight and then wirelessly send an audible alert to the caregiver's smartphone. 
That way, my aunt could sleep much better at night without having to worry about my grandfather's wandering. 
So now I'd like to perform a demonstration of this sock. 
Great. 
So once the patient steps onto the floor — (Ringing) — an alert is sent to the caregiver's smartphone. 
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, sock model. 
So this is a drawing of my preliminary design. 
When I was six years old, an elderly family friend fell down in the bathroom and suffered severe injuries. 
I became concerned about my own grandparents and decided to invent a smart bathroom system. 
Since I was only six years old at the time and I hadn't graduated from kindergarten yet, I didn't have the necessary resources and tools to translate my idea into reality, but nonetheless, my research experience really implanted in me a firm desire to use sensors to help the elderly people. 
When I laid out my plan, I realized that I faced three main challenges: first, creating a sensor; second, designing a circuit; and third, coding a smartphone app. 
This made me realize that my project was actually much harder to realize than I initially had thought it to be. 
First, I had to create a wearable sensor that was thin and flexible enough to be worn comfortably on the bottom of the patient's foot. 
Once pressure is applied, the connectivity between the particles increases. 
Therefore, I could design a circuit that would measure pressure by measuring electrical resistance. 
Next, I had to design a wearable wireless circuit, but wireless signal transmission consumes lots of power and requires heavy, bulky batteries. 
Lastly, I had to code a smartphone app that would essentially transform the care-giver's smartphone into a remote monitor. 
For this, I had to expand upon my knowledge of coding with Java and XCode and I also had to learn about how to code for Bluetooth low energy devices by watching YouTube tutorials and reading various textbooks. 
Integrating these components, I was able to successfully create two prototypes, one in which the sensor is embedded inside a sock, and another that's a re-attachable sensor assembly that can be adhered anywhere that makes contact with the bottom of the patient's foot. 
I've tested the device on my grandfather for about a year now, and it's had a 100 percent success rate in detecting the over 900 known cases of his wandering. 
Last summer, I was able to beta test my device at several residential care facilities in California, and I'm currently incorporating the feedback to further improve the device into a marketable product. 
Testing the device on a number of patients made me realize that I needed to invent solutions for people who didn't want to wear socks to sleep at night. 
So sensor data, collected on a vast number of patients, can be useful for improving patient care and also leading to a cure for the disease, possibly. 
For example, I'm currently examining correlations between the frequency of a patient's nightly wandering and his or her daily activities and diet. 
One thing I'll never forget is when my device first caught my grandfather's wandering out of bed at night. 
At that moment, I was really struck by the power of technology to change lives for the better. 
People living happily and healthfully — that's the world that I imagine. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I suspect that every aid worker in Africa comes to a time in her career when she wants to take all the money for her project — maybe it's a school or a training program — pack it in a suitcase, get on a plane flying over the poorest villages in the country, and start throwing that money out the window. 
Because to a veteran aid worker, the idea of putting cold, hard cash into the hands of the poorest people on Earth doesn't sound crazy, it sounds really satisfying. 
I had that moment right about the 10-year mark, and luckily, that's also when I learned that this idea actually exists, and it might be just what the aid system needs. 
Economists call it an unconditional cash transfer, and it's exactly that: It's cash given with no strings attached. 
Governments in developing countries have been doing this for decades, and it's only now, with more evidence and new technology that it's possible to make this a model for delivering aid. 
It's a pretty simple idea, right? 
Well, why did I spend a decade doing other stuff for the poor? 
Honestly, I believed that I could do more good with money for the poor than the poor could do for themselves. 
I held two assumptions: One, that poor people are poor in part because they're uneducated and don't make good choices; two is that we then need people like me to figure out what they need and get it to them. 
It turns out, the evidence says otherwise. 
In recent years, researchers have been studying what happens when we give poor people cash. 
Dozens of studies show across the board that people use cash transfers to improve their own lives. 
Pregnant women in Uruguay buy better food and give birth to healthier babies. 
Sri Lankan men invest in their businesses. 
Researchers who studied our work in Kenya found that people invested in a range of assets, from livestock to equipment to home improvements, and they saw increases in income from business and farming one year after the cash was sent. 
None of these studies found that people spend more on drinking or smoking or that people work less. 
In fact, they work more. 
Now, these are all material needs. 
In Vietnam, elderly recipients used their cash transfers to pay for coffins. 
As someone who wonders if Maslow got it wrong, I find this choice to prioritize spiritual needs deeply humbling. 
I don't know if I would have chosen to give food or equipment or coffins, which begs the question: How good are we at allocating resources on behalf of the poor? 
Are we worth the cost? 
Again, we can look at empirical evidence on what happens when we give people stuff of our choosing. 
One very telling study looked at a program in India that gives livestock to the so-called ultra-poor, and they found that 30 percent of recipients had turned around and sold the livestock they had been given for cash. 
The real irony is, for every 100 dollars worth of assets this program gave someone, they spent another 99 dollars to do it. 
What if, instead, we use technology to put cash, whether from aid agencies or from any one of us directly into a poor person's hands. 
Today, three in four Kenyans use mobile money, which is basically a bank account that can run on any cell phone. 
A sender can pay a 1.6 percent fee and with the click of a button send money directly to a recipient's account with no intermediaries. 
Like the technologies that are disrupting industries in our own lives, payments technology in poor countries could disrupt aid. 
It's spreading so quickly that it's possible to imagine reaching billions of the world's poor this way. 
That's what we've started to do at GiveDirectly. 
We're the first organization dedicated to providing cash transfers to the poor. 
We've sent cash to 35,000 people across rural Kenya and Uganda in one-time payments of 1,000 dollars per family. 
So far, we've looked for the poorest people in the poorest villages, and in this part of the world, they're the ones living in homes made of mud and thatch, not cement and iron. 
So let's say that's your family. 
We show up at your door with an Android phone. 
We'll get your name, take your photo and a photo of your hut and grab the GPS coordinates. 
That night, we send all the data to the cloud, and each piece gets checked by an independent team using, for one example, satellite images. 
Then, we'll come back, we'll sell you a basic cell phone if you don't have one already, and a few weeks later, we send money to it. 
Something that five years ago would have seemed impossible we can now do efficiently and free of corruption. 
The more cash we give to the poor, and the more evidence we have that it works, the more we have to reconsider everything else we give. 
Today, the logic behind aid is too often, well, we do at least some good. 
When we're complacent with that as our bar, when we tell ourselves that giving aid is better than no aid at all, we tend to invest inefficiently, in our own ideas that strike us as innovative, on writing reports, on plane tickets and SUVs. 
What if the logic was, will we do better than cash given directly? 
Organizations would have to prove that they're doing more good for the poor than the poor can do for themselves. 
Of course, giving cash won't create public goods like eradicating disease or building strong institutions, but it could set a higher bar for how we help individual families improve their lives. 
I believe in aid. 
I believe most aid is better than just throwing money out of a plane. 
I am also absolutely certain that a lot of aid today isn't better than giving directly to the poor. 
I hope that one day, it will be. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

How does the news shape the way we see the world? 
Here's the world based on the way it looks — based on landmass. 
And here's how news shapes what Americans see. 
This map — (Applause) — this map shows the number of seconds that American network and cable news organizations dedicated to news stories, by country, in February of 2007 — just one year ago. 
Now, this was a month when North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear facilities. 
There was massive flooding in Indonesia. 
And in Paris, the IPCC released its study confirming man's impact on global warming. 
The U.S. accounted for 79 percent of total news coverage. 
And when we take out the U.S. and look at the remaining 21 percent, we see a lot of Iraq — that's that big green thing there — and little else. 
The combined coverage of Russia, China and India, for example, reached just one percent. 
When we analyzed all the news stories and removed just one story, here's how the world looked. 
What was that story? The death of Anna Nicole Smith. 
This story eclipsed every country except Iraq, and received 10 times the coverage of the IPCC report. 
And the cycle continues; as we all know, Britney has loomed pretty large lately. 
So, why don't we hear more about the world? 
One reason is that news networks have reduced the number of their foreign bureaus by half. 
Aside from one-person ABC mini-bureaus in Nairobi, New Delhi and Mumbai, there are no network news bureaus in all of Africa, India or South America — places that are home to more than two billion people. 
The reality is that covering Britney is cheaper. 
And this lack of global coverage is all the more disturbing when we see where people go for news. 
Local TV news looms large, and unfortunately only dedicates 12 percent of its coverage to international news. 
And what about the web? 
The most popular news sites don't do much better. 
Last year, Pew and the Colombia J-School analyzed the 14,000 stories that appeared on Google News' front page. 
And they, in fact, covered the same 24 news events. 
Similarly, a study in e-content showed that much of global news from U.S. news creators is recycled stories from the AP wire services and Reuters, and don't put things into a context that people can understand their connection to it. 
So, if you put it all together, this could help explain why today's college graduates, as well as less educated Americans, know less about the world than their counterparts did 20 years ago. 
And if you think it's simply because we are not interested, you would be wrong. 
In recent years, Americans who say they closely follow global news most of the time grew to over 50 percent. 
The real question: is this distorted worldview what we want for Americans in our increasingly interconnected world? 
I know we can do better. 
And can we afford not to? Thank you. 

Stephanie White: I'm going to let her introduce herself to everybody. 
Can you tell everybody your name? 
Einstein: Einstein. 
SW: This is Einstein. Can you tell everyone "" hi ""? 
E: Hello. 
SW: That's nice. Can you be polite? 
E: Hi, sweetheart. 
SW: Much better. Well, Einstein is very honored to be here at TED 2006, amongst all you modern-day Einsteins. In fact, she's very excited. 
E: Woo. 
SW: Yeah. 
(Laughter) Since we've arrived, there's been a constant buzz about all the exciting speakers here for the conference. 
This morning we've heard a lot of whispers about Tom Reilly's wrap-up on Saturday. Einstein, did you hear whispers? 
E: [Squawks] SW: Yeah. 
(Laughter) Einstein's especially interested in Penelope's talk. 
A lot of her research goes on in caves, which can get pretty dusty. 
E: Achoo! 
SW: It could make her sneeze. But more importantly, her research could help Einstein find a cure for her never-ending scratchy throat. 
Einstein: [Coughs] SW: Yeah. 
(Laughter) Well, Bob Russell was telling us about his work on nanotubes in his research at the microscopic level. 
Well, that's really cool, but what Einstein's really hoping is that maybe he'll genetically engineer a five-pound peanut. 
E: Oh, my God! My God! My God! 
SW: Yeah. She would get really, really excited. 
(Laughter) That is one big peanut. Since Einstein is a bird, she's very interested in things that fly. 
She thinks Burt Rutan is very impressive. 
E: Ooh. 
SW: Yeah. She especially likes his latest achievement, SpaceShipOne. 
Einstein, would you like to ride in Burt's spaceship? 
E: [Spaceship noise] SW: Even if it doesn't have a laser? 
E: [Laser noise] (Laughter) SW: Yeah, yeah. That was pretty funny, Einstein. 
Now, Einstein also thinks, you know, working in caves and travelling through space — it's all very dangerous jobs. 
It would be very dangerous if you fell down. 
E: Wheeeeeee! [Splat] SW: Yeah. 
(Laughter) Little splat at the end there. Einstein, did that hurt? 
E: Ow, ow, ow. 
SW: Yeah. It's all a lot of hard work. 
E: [Squawks] SW: Yeah. It can get a bird like Einstein frustrated. E: [Squawks] 
SW: Yeah, it sure can. But when Einstein needs to relax from her job educating the public, she loves to take in the arts. 
If the children of the Uganda need another dance partner, Einstein could sure fit the bill, because she loves to dance. 
Can you get down? 
E: [Bobbing head] (Laughter) SW: Let's get down for everybody. Come on now. 
She's going to make me do it, too. Ooh, ooh. 
Einstein: Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. 
SW: Do your head now. 
E: Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. 
(Laughter) SW: Or maybe Sirena Huang would like to learn some arias on her violin, and Einstein can sing along with some opera? 
E: [Operatic squawk] SW: Very good. 
(Laughter) Or maybe Stu just needs another backup singer? 
Einstein, can you also sing? 
I know, you need to get rid of that seed first. Can you sing? 
E: La, la. 
SW: There you go. And, of course, if all else fails, you can just run off and enjoy a fun fiesta. 
E: [Squawks] SW: All right. Well, Einstein was pretty embarrassed to admit this earlier, but she was telling me backstage that she had a problem. 
E: What's the matter? 
SW: No, I don't have a problem. You have the problem, remember? 
You were saying that you were really embarrassed, because you're in love with a pirate? 
E: Yar. 
SW: There you go. And what do pirates like to drink? 
E: Beer. 
SW: Yeah, that's right. But you don't like to drink beer, Einstein. 
You like to drink water. 
E: [Water sound] SW: Very good. Now, really, she is pretty nervous. 
Because one of her favorite folks from back home is here, and she's pretty nervous to meet him. 
She thinks Al Gore is a really good-looking man. 
What do you say to a good-looking man? 
E: Hey, baby. 
(Laughter) SW: And so do all the folks back home in Tennessee. 
E: Yee haw. 
(Laughter) SW: And since she's such a big fan, she knows that his birthday is coming up at the end of March. 
And we didn't think he'd be in town then, so Einstein wanted to do something special for him. 
So let's see if Einstein will sing "" Happy Birthday "" to Al Gore. 
Can you sing "" Happy Birthday "" to him? 
E: Happy birthday to you. 
SW: Again. 
E: Happy birthday to you. 
SW: Again. 
E: Happy birthday to you. 
SW: Big finish. 
E: Happy birthday to you. 
SW: Good job! 
(Applause) Well, before we wrap it up, she would like to give a shout out to all our animal friends back at the Knoxville Zoo. 
Einstein, do you want to say "" hi "" to all the owls? 
E: Woo, woo, woo. 
SW: What about the other birds? 
E: Tweet, tweet, tweet. 
SW: And the penguin? 
E: Quack, quack, quack. 
SW: There we go. 
(Laughter) Let's get that one out of there. How about a chimpanzee? 
E: Ooh, ooh, ooh. Aah, aah, aah. 
SW: Very good. 
(Laughter) What about a wolf? 
E: Ooooowww. 
SW: And a pig? 
E: Oink, oink, oink. 
SW: And the rooster? 
E: Cock-a-doodle-doo! 
SW: And how about those cats? 
E: Meow. 
(Laughter) SW: At the zoo we have big cats from the jungle. 
E: Grrrrr. 
(Laughter) SW: What about a skunk? 
E: Stinker. 
(Laughter) SW: She's a comedian. I suppose you think you're famous? Are you famous? 
E: Superstar. 
SW: Yeah. You are a superstar. 
(Laughter) Well, we would like to encourage all of you to do your part to help protect Einstein's animal friends, and to do your part to help protect their homes that they live [in]. 
Now, Einstein does say it best when we ask her. 
Why do we want to protect your home? 
E: I'm special. 
SW: You are very special. What would you like to say to all these nice people? 
E: I love you. 
SW: That's good. Can you blow them a kiss? 
E: [Kissing noise] SW: And what do you say when it's time to go? 
E: Goodbye. 
SW: Good job. Thank you all. 
(Applause) 

I love theater. 
I love the idea that you can transform, become somebody else and look at life with a completely new perspective. 
I love the idea that people will sit in one room for a couple of hours and listen. 
The idea that in that room at that moment, everyone, regardless of their age, their gender, their race, their color, their religion, comes together. 
At that moment, we transcend space and time together. 
Theater awakens our senses and opens the door to our imagination. 
And our ability to imagine is what makes us explorers. 
Our ability to imagine makes us inventors and creators and unique. 
I was commissioned in 2003 to create an original show, and began developing "" Upwake. "" "" Upwake "" tells the story of Zero, a modern-day business man, going to work with his life in a suitcase, stuck between dream and reality and not able to decipher the two. 
I wanted "" Upwake "" to have the same audiovisual qualities as a movie would. 
And I wanted to let my imagination run wild. 
So I began drawing the story that was moving in my head. 
If Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of "" The Little Prince, "" were here, he would have drawn three holes inside that box and told you your sheep was inside. 
Because, if you look closely enough, things will begin to appear. 
This is not a box; these are the renderings of my imagination from head to paper to screen to life. 
In "" Upwake "" buildings wear suits, Zero tap dances on a giant keyboard, clones himself with a scanner, tames and whips the computer mice, sails away into dreamscape from a single piece of paper and launches into space. 
I wanted to create environments that moved and morphed like an illusionist. 
Go from one world to another in a second. 
I wanted to have humor, beauty, simplicity and complexity and use metaphors to suggest ideas. 
At the beginning of the show, for example, Zero deejays dream and reality. 
Technology is an instrument that allowed me to manifest my visions in high definition, live, on stage. 
So today, I would like to talk to you about the relationship between theater and technology. 
Let's start with technology. 
(Fuse blowing) All right. Let's start with theater. 
(Laughter) (Buzzing) (Click, click, bang) (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. 
"" Upwake "" lasts 52 minutes and 54 seconds. 
I project 3D animation on all the four surfaces of the stage which I interact with. 
The use of animation and projection was a process of discovery. 
I didn't use it as a special effect, but as a partner on stage. 
There are no special effects in "" Upwake, "" no artifice. 
It's as lavish and intricate as it is simple and minimal. 
Three hundred and forty-four frames, four and a half years and commissions later, what started as a one person show became a collaborative work of nineteen most talented artists. 
And here are some excerpts. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So this is, relatively, a new show that we're now beginning to tour. 
And in Austin, Texas, I was asked to give small demonstrations in schools during the afternoon. 
When I arrived at one of the schools, I certainly did not expect this: Six hundred kids, packed in a gymnasium, waiting. 
I was a little nervous performing without animation, costume — really — and make-up. 
But the teachers came to me afterward and told me they hadn't seen the kids that attentive. 
And I think the reason why is that I was able to use their language and their reality in order to transport them into another. 
Something happened along the way. 
Zero became a person and not just a character in a play. 
Zero does not speak, is neither man nor woman. 
Zero is Zero, a little hero of the 21st Century, and Zero can touch so many more people than I possibly could. 
It's as much about bringing new disciplines inside this box as it is about taking theater out of its box. 
As a street performer, I have learned that everybody wants to connect. 
And that usually, if you're a bit extraordinary, if you're not exactly of human appearance, then people will feel inclined to participate and to feel out loud. 
It's as though you made something resonate within them. 
It's as though the mystery of the person they're interacting with and connecting allows them to be themselves just a bit more. 
Because through your mask, they let theirs go. 
Being human is an art form. 
I know theater can improve the quality of people's lives, and I know theater can heal. 
I've worked as a doctor clown in a hospital for two years. 
I have seen sick kids and sad parents and doctors be lifted and transported in moments of pure joy. 
I know theater unites us. 
Zero wants to engage the generation of today and tomorrow, tell various stories through different mediums. 
Comic books. Quantum physics video games. 
And Zero wants to go to the moon. 
In 2007, Zero launched a green campaign, suggesting his friends and fans to turn off their electricity every Sunday from 7: 53 to 8: 00 p.m. 
The idea is simple, basic. It's not original, but it's important, and it's important to participate. 
There is a revolution. 
It's a human and technological revolution. 
It's motion and emotion. 
It's information. 
It's visual. It's musical. It's sensorial. 
It's conceptual. It's universal. It's beyond words and numbers. 
It's happening. 
The natural progression of science and art finding each other to better touch and define the human experience. 
There is a revolution in the way that we think, in the way that we share, and the way that we express our stories, our evolution. 
This is a time of communication, connection and creative collaboration. 
Charlie Chaplin innovated motion pictures and told stories through music, silence, humor and poetry. 
He was social, and his character, The Tramp, spoke to millions. 
He gave entertainment, pleasure and relief to so many human beings when they needed it the most. 
We are not here to question the possible; we are here to challenge the impossible. 
In the science of today, we become artists. 
In the art of today, we become scientists. 
We design our world. We invent possibilities. 
We teach, touch and move. 
It is now that we can use the diversity of our talents to create intelligent, meaningful and extraordinary work. It's now. 
(Ringing) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I am in search of another planet in the universe where life exists. 
I can't see this planet with my naked eyes or even with the most powerful telescopes we currently possess. 
But I know that it's there. 
And understanding contradictions that occur in nature will help us find it. 
On our planet, where there's water, there's life. 
So we look for planets that orbit at just the right distance from their stars. 
At this distance, shown in blue on this diagram for stars of different temperatures, planets could be warm enough for water to flow on their surfaces as lakes and oceans where life might reside. 
Some astronomers focus their time and energy on finding planets at these distances from their stars. 
What I do picks up where their job ends. 
I model the possible climates of exoplanets. 
And here's why that's important: there are many factors besides distance from its star that control whether a planet can support life. 
Take the planet Venus. 
It's named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, because of its benign, ethereal appearance in the sky. 
But spacecraft measurements revealed a different story. 
The surface temperature is close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, 500 Celsius. 
That's hot enough to melt lead. 
Its thick atmosphere, not its distance from the sun, is the reason. 
It causes a greenhouse effect on steroids, trapping heat from the sun and scorching the planet's surface. 
The reality totally contradicted initial perceptions of this planet. 
From these lessons from our own solar system, we've learned that a planet's atmosphere is crucial to its climate and potential to host life. 
We don't know what the atmospheres of these planets are like because the planets are so small and dim compared to their stars and so far away from us. 
For example, one of the closest planets that could support surface water — it's called Gliese 667 Cc — such a glamorous name, right, nice phone number for a name — it's 23 light years away. 
So that's more than 100 trillion miles. 
Trying to measure the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet passing in front of its host star is hard. 
It's like trying to see a fruit fly passing in front of a car's headlight. 
OK, now imagine that car is 100 trillion miles away, and you want to know the precise color of that fly. 
So I use computer models to calculate the kind of atmosphere a planet would need to have a suitable climate for water and life. 
Here's an artist's concept of the planet Kepler-62f, with the Earth for reference. 
It's 1,200 light years away, and just 40 percent larger than Earth. 
Our NSF-funded work found that it could be warm enough for open water from many types of atmospheres and orientations of its orbit. 
So I'd like future telescopes to follow up on this planet to look for signs of life. 
Ice on a planet's surface is also important for climate. 
Ice absorbs longer, redder wavelengths of light, and reflects shorter, bluer light. 
That's why the iceberg in this photo looks so blue. 
The redder light from the sun is absorbed on its way through the ice. 
Only the blue light makes it all the way to the bottom. 
Then it gets reflected back to up to our eyes and we see blue ice. 
My models show that planets orbiting cooler stars could actually be warmer than planets orbiting hotter stars. 
There's another contradiction — that ice absorbs the longer wavelength light from cooler stars, and that light, that energy, heats the ice. 
Using climate models to explore how these contradictions can affect planetary climate is vital to the search for life elsewhere. 
And it's no surprise that this is my specialty. 
I'm an African-American female astronomer and a classically trained actor who loves to wear makeup and read fashion magazines, so I am uniquely positioned to appreciate contradictions in nature — (Laughter) (Applause)... and how they can inform our search for the next planet where life exists. 
My organization, Rising Stargirls, teaches astronomy to middle-school girls of color, using theater, writing and visual art. 
That's another contradiction — science and art don't often go together, but interweaving them can help these girls bring their whole selves to what they learn, and maybe one day join the ranks of astronomers who are full of contradictions, and use their backgrounds to discover, once and for all, that we are truly not alone in the universe. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Sleep. 
It's something we spend about a third of our lives doing, but do any of us really understand what it's all about? 
Two thousand years ago, Galen, one of the most prominent medical researchers of the ancient world, proposed that while we're awake, our brain's motive force, its juice, would flow out to all the other parts of the body, animating them but leaving the brain all dried up, and he thought that when we sleep, all this moisture that filled the rest of the body would come rushing back, rehydrating the brain and refreshing the mind. 
Now, that sounds completely ridiculous to us now, but Galen was simply trying to explain something about sleep that we all deal with every day. 
But while we know a great deal more about sleep now than when Galen was around, we still haven't understood why it is that sleep, of all of our activities, has this incredible restorative function for the mind. 
We've found that sleep may actually be a kind of elegant design solution to some of the brain's most basic needs, a unique way that the brain meets the high demands and the narrow margins that set it apart from all the other organs of the body. 
So almost all the biology that we observe can be thought of as a series of problems and their corresponding solutions, and the first problem that every organ must solve is a continuous supply of nutrients to fuel all those cells of the body. 
So the circulatory system solves the nutrient delivery problem by sending blood vessels to supply nutrients and oxygen to every corner of our body. 
Here, we're imaging blood vessels in the brain of a living mouse. 
The blood vessels form a complex network that fills the entire brain volume. 
They start at the surface of the brain, and then they dive down into the tissue itself, and as they spread out, they supply nutrients and oxygen to each and every cell in the brain. 
Now, just as every cell requires nutrients to fuel it, every cell also produces waste as a byproduct, and the clearance of that waste is the second basic problem that each organ has to solve. 
This diagram shows the body's lymphatic system, which has evolved to meet this need. 
It's a second parallel network of vessels that extends throughout the body. 
It takes up proteins and other waste from the spaces between the cells, it collects them, and then dumps them into the blood so they can be disposed of. 
But if you look really closely at this diagram, you'll see something that doesn't make a lot of sense. 
So if we were to zoom into this guy's head, one of the things that you would see there is that there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain. 
And yet, it lacks lymphatic vessels, which means that the approach that the rest of the body takes to clearing away its waste won't work in the brain. 
So how, then, does the brain solve its waste clearance problem? 
Well, that seemingly mundane question is where our group first jumped into this story, and what we found as we dove down into the brain, down among the neurons and the blood vessels, was that the brain's solution to the problem of waste clearance, it was really unexpected. 
It was ingenious, but it was also beautiful. 
So the brain has this large pool of clean, clear fluid called cerebrospinal fluid. 
The CSF fills the space that surrounds the brain, and wastes from inside the brain make their way out to the CSF, which gets dumped, along with the waste, into the blood. 
But what's interesting is that the fluid and the waste from inside the brain, they don't just percolate their way randomly out to these pools of CSF. 
Instead, there is a specialized network of plumbing that organizes and facilitates this process. 
Here, we're again imaging into the brain of living mice. 
The frame on your left shows what's happening at the brain's surface, and the frame on your right shows what's happening down below the surface of the brain within the tissue itself. 
We've labeled the blood vessels in red, and the CSF that's surrounding the brain will be in green. 
Now, what was surprising to us was that the fluid on the outside of the brain, it didn't stay on the outside. 
Instead, the CSF was pumped back into and through the brain along the outsides of the blood vessels, and as it flushed down into the brain along the outsides of these vessels, it was actually helping to clear away, to clean the waste from the spaces between the brain's cells. 
If you think about it, using the outsides of these blood vessels like this is a really clever design solution, because the brain is enclosed in a rigid skull and it's packed full of cells, so there is no extra space inside it for a whole second set of vessels like the lymphatic system. 
Yet the blood vessels, they extend from the surface of the brain down to reach every single cell in the brain, which means that fluid that's traveling along the outsides of these vessels can gain easy access to the entire brain's volume, so it's actually this really clever way to repurpose one set of vessels, the blood vessels, to take over and replace the function of a second set of vessels, the lymphatic vessels, to make it so you don't need them. 
And what's amazing is that no other organ takes quite this approach to clearing away the waste from between its cells. 
This is a solution that is entirely unique to the brain. 
But our most surprising finding was that all of this, everything I just told you about, with all this fluid rushing through the brain, it's only happening in the sleeping brain. 
Here, the video on the left shows how much of the CSF is moving through the brain of a living mouse while it's awake. 
It's almost nothing. 
Yet in the same animal, if we wait just a little while until it's gone to sleep, what we see is that the CSF is rushing through the brain, and we discovered that at the same time when the brain goes to sleep, the brain cells themselves seem to shrink, opening up spaces in between them, allowing fluid to rush through and allowing waste to be cleared out. 
So it seems that Galen may actually have been sort of on the right track when he wrote about fluid rushing through the brain when sleep came on. 
Our own research, now it's 2,000 years later, suggests that what's happening is that when the brain is awake and is at its most busy, it puts off clearing away the waste from the spaces between its cells until later, and then, when it goes to sleep and doesn't have to be as busy, it shifts into a kind of cleaning mode to clear away the waste from the spaces between its cells, the waste that's accumulated throughout the day. 
So it's actually a little bit like how you or I, we put off our household chores during the work week when we don't have time to get to it, and then we play catch up on all the cleaning that we have to do when the weekend rolls around. 
Now, I've just talked a lot about waste clearance, but I haven't been very specific about the kinds of waste that the brain needs to be clearing during sleep in order to stay healthy. 
My brain's making amyloid-beta right now, and so is yours. 
But in patients with Alzheimer's disease, amyloid-beta builds up and aggregates in the spaces between the brain's cells, instead of being cleared away like it's supposed to be, and it's this buildup of amyloid-beta that's thought to be one of the key steps in the development of that terrible disease. 
So we measured how fast amyloid-beta is cleared from the brain when it's awake versus when it's asleep, and we found that indeed, the clearance of amyloid-beta is much more rapid from the sleeping brain. 
So if sleep, then, is part of the brain's solution to the problem of waste clearance, then this may dramatically change how we think about the relationship between sleep, amyloid-beta, and Alzheimer's disease. 
A series of recent clinical studies suggest that among patients who haven't yet developed Alzheimer's disease, worsening sleep quality and sleep duration are associated with a greater amount of amyloid-beta building up in the brain, and while it's important to point out that these studies don't prove that lack of sleep or poor sleep cause Alzheimer's disease, they do suggest that the failure of the brain to keep its house clean by clearing away waste like amyloid-beta may contribute to the development of conditions like Alzheimer's. 
So what this new research tells us, then, is that the one thing that all of you already knew about sleep, that even Galen understood about sleep, that it refreshes and clears the mind, may actually be a big part of what sleep is all about. 
See, you and I, we go to sleep every single night, but our brains, they never rest. 
While our body is still and our mind is off walking in dreams somewhere, the elegant machinery of the brain is quietly hard at work cleaning and maintaining this unimaginably complex machine. 
In your house, if you stop cleaning your kitchen for a month, your home will become completely unlivable very quickly. 
But in the brain, the consequences of falling behind may be much greater than the embarrassment of dirty countertops, because when it comes to cleaning the brain, it is the very health and function of the mind and the body that's at stake, which is why understanding these very basic housekeeping functions of the brain today may be critical for preventing and treating diseases of the mind tomorrow. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

For me they normally happen, these career crises, often, actually, on a Sunday evening, just as the sun is starting to set, and the gap between my hopes for myself and the reality of my life starts to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow. 
I'm mentioning all this — I'm mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem; you may think I'm wrong in this, but I think we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises, by moments when what we thought we knew — about our lives, about our careers — comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality. 
It's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety. 
I want to look now, if I may, at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers. 
Why we might be victims of these career crises, as we're weeping softly into our pillows. 
One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs. 
In a way, I've got some bad news, particularly to anybody who's come to Oxford from abroad. 
The bad news is that's not true. 
The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. 
(Laughter) Now, the opposite of a snob is your mother. (Laughter) 
Not necessarily your mother, or indeed mine, but, as it were, the ideal mother, somebody who doesn't care about your achievements. 
Most people make a strict correlation between how much time, and if you like, love — not romantic love, though that may be something — but love in general, respect — they are willing to accord us, that will be strictly defined by our position in the social hierarchy. 
And that's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods. 
You know, we're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. 
I don't think we are particularly materialistic. 
Think, "" This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love. "" (Laughter) Feel sympathy, rather than contempt. 
There are other reasons — (Laughter) There are other reasons why it's perhaps harder now to feel calm than ever before. 
Along with that is a kind of spirit of equality; we're all basically equal. 
There is one really big problem with this, and that problem is envy. 
The closer two people are — in age, in background, in the process of identification — the more there's a danger of envy, which is incidentally why none of you should ever go to a school reunion, because there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with. 
So there's a spirit of equality combined with deep inequality, which can make for a very stressful situation. 
It's probably as unlikely that you would nowadays become as rich and famous as Bill Gates, as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy. 
The first kind tells you, "" You can do it! You can make it! Anything's possible! "" The other kind tells you how to cope with what we politely call "" low self-esteem, "" or impolitely call, "" feeling very bad about yourself. "" There's a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem. 
So that's another way in which something quite positive can have a nasty kickback. 
There is another reason why we might be feeling more anxious — about our careers, about our status in the world today, than ever before. 
And it's, again, linked to something nice. 
And that makes failure seem much more crushing. 
You know, in the Middle Ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an "" unfortunate "" — literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. 
Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may unkindly be described as a "" loser. "" There's a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser, and that shows 400 years of evolution in society and our belief in who is responsible for our lives. 
That's exhilarating if you're doing well, and very crushing if you're not. 
There are more suicides in developed, individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. 
This idea that everybody deserves to get where they get to, I think it's a crazy idea, completely crazy. 
But I think it's insane to believe that we will ever make a society that is genuinely meritocratic; it's an impossible dream. 
There are simply too many random factors: accidents, accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people's heads, illnesses, etc. 
We will never get to grade them, never get to grade people as they should. 
I'm drawn to a lovely quote by St. Augustine in "" The City of God, "" where he says, "" It's a sin to judge any man by his post. "" In modern English that would mean it's a sin to come to any view of who you should talk to, dependent on their business card. 
That is an unknown part of them, and we shouldn't behave as though it is known. 
Tragic art, as it developed in the theaters of ancient Greece, in the fifth century B.C., was essentially an art form devoted to tracing how people fail, and also according them a level of sympathy, which ordinary life would not necessarily accord them. 
I gave them the plotline of Madame Bovary. 
And they wrote "" Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud. "" (Laughter) And then my favorite — they really do have a kind of genius of their own, these guys — my favorite is Sophocles' Oedipus the King: "Sex With Mum Was Blinding." (Laughter) 
(Applause) In a way, if you like, at one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. 
The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. 
We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. 
It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. 
And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. 
What I think I've been talking about really is success and failure. 
So any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on, where the element of loss is. 
These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. 
When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. 
When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. 
So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. 
We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. 
But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. 
But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: That was fascinating. 
But how do you reconcile this idea of it being bad to think of someone as a "" loser, "" with the idea that a lot of people like, of seizing control of your life, and that a society that encourages that, perhaps has to have some winners and losers? 
Alain De Botton: Yes, I think it's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I want to stress, because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. 
That's what I'm trying to leave room for; otherwise, it can get quite claustrophobic. 
Or do you think that you can't, but it doesn't matter that much that we're putting too much emphasis on that? 
AB: The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge. 
And it's a very hard line to make. 
We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian disciplinarian on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no-rules option. 

I have the answer to a question that we've all asked. 
The question is, Why is it that the letter X represents the unknown? 
Now I know we learned that in math class, but now it's everywhere in the culture — The X prize, the X-Files, Project X, TEDx. 
Where'd that come from? 
About six years ago I decided that I would learn Arabic, which turns out to be a supremely logical language. 
To write a word or a phrase or a sentence in Arabic is like crafting an equation, because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information. 
That's one of the reasons so much of what we've come to think of as Western science and mathematics and engineering was really worked out in the first few centuries of the Common Era by the Persians and the Arabs and the Turks. 
This includes the little system in Arabic called al-jebra. 
And al-jebr roughly translates to "the system for reconciling disparate parts." 
Al-jebr finally came into English as algebra. 
One example among many. 
The Arabic texts containing this mathematical wisdom finally made their way to Europe — which is to say Spain — in the 11th and 12th centuries. 
And when they arrived there was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a European language. 
But there were problems. 
One problem is there are some sounds in Arabic that just don't make it through a European voice box without lots of practice. 
Trust me on that one. 
Also, those very sounds tend not to be represented by the characters that are available in European languages. 
Here's one of the culprits. 
This is the letter SHeen, and it makes the sound we think of as SH — "" sh. "" It's also the very first letter of the word shalan, which means "" something "" just like the the English word "" something "" — some undefined, unknown thing. 
Now in Arabic, we can make this definite by adding the definite article "" al. "" So this is al-shalan — the unknown thing. 
And this is a word that appears throughout early mathematics, such as this 10th century derivation of proofs. 
The problem for the Medieval Spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter SHeen and the word shalan can't be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn't have that SH, that "" sh "" sound. 
So by convention, they created a rule in which they borrowed the CK sound, "" ck "" sound, from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai. 
Later when this material was translated into a common European language, which is to say Latin, they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X. 
And once that happened, once this material was in Latin, it formed the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years. 
But now we have the answer to our question. 
Why is it that X is the unknown? X is the unknown 
because you can't say "" sh "" in Spanish. 
(Laughter) And I thought that was worth sharing. 
(Applause) 

(Music) What you just heard are the interactions of barometric pressure, wind and temperature readings that were recorded of Hurricane Noel in 2007. 
The musicians played off a three-dimensional graph of weather data like this. 
Every single bead, every single colored band, represents a weather element that can also be read as a musical note. 
I find weather extremely fascinating. 
Weather is an amalgam of systems that is inherently invisible to most of us. 
So I use sculpture and music to make it, not just visible, but also tactile and audible. 
All of my work begins very simple. 
I extract information from a specific environment using very low-tech data collecting devices — generally anything I can find in the hardware store. 
I then compare my information to the things I find on the Internet — satellite images, weather data from weather stations as well as offshore buoys. 
That's both historical as well as real data. 
And then I compile all of these numbers on these clipboards that you see here. 
These clipboards are filled with numbers. 
And from all of these numbers, I start with only two or three variables. 
That begins my translation process. 
My translation medium is a very simple basket. 
A basket is made up of horizontal and vertical elements. 
When I assign values to the vertical and horizontal elements, I can use the changes of those data points over time to create the form. 
I use natural reed, because natural reed has a lot of tension in it that I cannot fully control. 
That means that it is the numbers that control the form, not me. 
What I come up with are forms like these. 
These forms are completely made up of weather data or science data. 
Every colored bead, every colored string, represents a weather element. 
And together, these elements, not only construct the form, but they also reveal behavioral relationships that may not come across through a two-dimensional graph. 
When you step closer, you actually see that it is indeed all made up of numbers. 
The vertical elements are assigned a specific hour of the day. 
So all the way around, you have a 24-hour timeline. 
But it's also used to assign a temperature range. 
On that grid, I can then weave the high tide readings, water temperature, air temperature and Moon phases. 
I also translate weather data into musical scores. 
And musical notation allows me a more nuanced way of translating information without compromising it. 
So all of these scores are made up of weather data. 
Every single color, dot, every single line, is a weather element. 
And together, these variables construct a score. 
I use these scores to collaborate with musicians. 
This is the 1913 Trio performing one of my pieces at the Milwaukee Art Museum. 
Meanwhile, I use these scores as blueprints to translate into sculptural forms like this, that function still in the sense of being a three-dimensional weather visualization, but now they're embedding the visual matrix of the musical score, so it can actually be read as a musical score. 
What I love about this work is that it challenges our assumptions of what kind of visual vocabulary belongs in the world of art, versus science. 
This piece here is read very differently depending on where you place it. 
You place it in an art museum, it becomes a sculpture. 
You place it in a science museum, it becomes a three-dimensional visualization of data. 
You place it in a music hall, it all of a sudden becomes a musical score. 
And I really like that, because the viewer is really challenged as to what visual language is part of science versus art versus music. 
The other reason why I really like this is because it offers an alternative entry point into the complexity of science. 
And not everyone has a Ph.D. in science. 
So for me, that was my way into it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

How much do you get paid? 
Don't answer that out loud. 
But put a number in your head. 
Now: How much do you think the person sitting next to you gets paid? 
Again, don't answer out loud. 
(Laughter) At work, how much do you think the person sitting in the cubicle or the desk next to you gets paid? 
Do you know? 
Should you know? 
Notice, it's a little uncomfortable for me to even ask you those questions. 
But admit it — you kind of want to know. 
Most of us are uncomfortable with the idea of broadcasting our salary. 
We're not supposed to tell our neighbors, and we're definitely not supposed to tell our office neighbors. 
The assumed reason is that if everybody knew what everybody got paid, then all hell would break loose. 
There'd be arguments, there'd be fights, there might even be a few people who quit. 
But what if secrecy is actually the reason for all that strife? 
And what would happen if we removed that secrecy? 
What if openness actually increased the sense of fairness and collaboration inside a company? 
What would happen if we had total pay transparency? 
For the past several years, I've been studying the corporate and entrepreneurial leaders who question the conventional wisdom about how to run a company. 
And the question of pay keeps coming up. 
And the answers keep surprising. 
It turns out that pay transparency — sharing salaries openly across a company — makes for a better workplace for both the employee and for the organization. 
When people don't know how their pay compares to their peers', they're more likely to feel underpaid and maybe even discriminated against. 
Do you want to work at a place that tolerates the idea that you feel underpaid or discriminated against? 
But keeping salaries secret does exactly that, and it's a practice as old as it is common, despite the fact that in the United States, the law protects an employee's right to discuss their pay. 
In one famous example from decades ago, the management of Vanity Fair magazine actually circulated a memo entitled: "Forbidding Discussion Among Employees of Salary Received." 
"" Forbidding "" discussion among employees of salary received. 
Now that memo didn't sit well with everybody. 
New York literary figures Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, all writers in the Algonquin Round Table, decided to stand up for transparency and showed up for work the next day with their salary written on signs hanging from their neck. 
(Laughter) Imagine showing up for work with your salary just written across your chest for all to see. 
But why would a company even want to discourage salary discussions? 
Why do some people go along with it, while others revolt against it? 
It turns out that in addition to the assumed reasons, pay secrecy is actually a way to save a lot of money. 
You see, keeping salaries secret leads to what economists call "" information asymmetry. "" This is a situation where, in a negotiation, one party has loads more information than the other. 
And in hiring or promotion or annual raise discussions, an employer can use that secrecy to save a lot of money. 
Imagine how much better you could negotiate for a raise if you knew everybody's salary. 
Economists warn that information asymmetry can cause markets to go awry. 
Someone leaves a pay stub on the copier, and suddenly everybody is shouting at each other. 
In fact, they even warn that information asymmetry can lead to a total market failure. 
And I think we're almost there. 
Here's why: first, most employees have no idea how their pay compares to their peers'. 
In a 2015 survey of 70,000 employees, two-thirds of everyone who is paid at the market rate said that they felt they were underpaid. 
And of everybody who felt that they were underpaid, 60 percent said that they intended to quit, regardless of where they were — underpaid, overpaid or right at the market rate. 
If you were part of this survey, what would you say? 
Are you underpaid? 
Well, wait — how do you even know, because you're not allowed to talk about it? 
Next, information asymmetry, pay secrecy, makes it easier to ignore the discrimination that's already present in the market today. 
In a 2011 report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research, the gender wage gap between men and women was 23 percent. 
This is where that 77 cents on the dollar comes from. 
But in the Federal Government, where salaries are pinned to certain levels and everybody knows what those levels are, the gender wage gap shrinks to 11 percent — and this is before controlling for any of the factors that economists argue over whether or not to control for. 
If we really want to close the gender wage gap, maybe we should start by opening up the payroll. 
If this is what total market failure looks like, then openness remains the only way to ensure fairness. 
Now, I realize that letting people know what you make might feel uncomfortable, but isn't it less uncomfortable than always wondering if you're being discriminated against, or if your wife or your daughter or your sister is being paid unfairly? 
Openness remains the best way to ensure fairness, and pay transparency does that. 
That's why entrepreneurial leaders and corporate leaders have been experimenting with sharing salaries for years. 
Like Dane Atkinson. 
Dane is a serial entrepreneur who started many companies in a pay secrecy condition and even used that condition to pay two equally qualified people dramatically different salaries, depending on how well they could negotiate. 
And Dane saw the strife that happened as a result of this. 
So when he started his newest company, SumAll, he committed to salary transparency from the beginning. 
And the results have been amazing. 
And in study after study, when people know how they're being paid and how that pay compares to their peers', they're more likely to work hard to improve their performance, more likely to be engaged, and they're less likely to quit. 
That's why Dane's not alone. 
From technology start-ups like Buffer, to the tens of thousands of employees at Whole Foods, where not only is your salary available for everyone to see, but the performance data for the store and for your department is available on the company intranet for all to see. 
Now, pay transparency takes a lot of forms. 
It's not one size fits all. 
Some post their salaries for all to see. 
Some only keep it inside the company. 
Some post the formula for calculating pay, and others post the pay levels and affix everybody to that level. 
So you don't have to make signs for all of your employees to wear around the office. 
And you don't have to be the only one wearing a sign that you made at home. 
But we can all take greater steps towards pay transparency. 
For those of you that have the authority to move forward towards transparency: it's time to move forward. 
And for those of you that don't have that authority: it's time to stand up for your right to. 
So how much do you get paid? 
And how does that compare to the people you work with? 
You should know. 
And so should they. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

It was less than a year after September 11, and I was at the Chicago Tribune writing about shootings and murders, and it was leaving me feeling pretty dark and depressed. 
I had done some activism in college, so I decided to help a local group hang door knockers against animal testing. 
I thought it would be a safe way to do something positive, but of course I have the absolute worst luck ever, and we were all arrested. 
Police took this blurry photo of me holding leaflets as evidence. 
My charges were dismissed, but a few weeks later, two FBI agents knocked on my door, and they told me that unless I helped them by spying on protest groups, they would put me on a domestic terrorist list. 
I'd love to tell you that I didn't flinch, but I was terrified, and when my fear subsided, I became obsessed with finding out how this happened, how animal rights and environmental activists who have never injured anyone could become the FBI's number one domestic terrorism threat. 
A few years later, I was invited to testify before Congress about my reporting, and I told lawmakers that, while everybody is talking about going green, some people are risking their lives to defend forests and to stop oil pipelines. 
They're physically putting their bodies on the line between the whalers' harpoons and the whales. 
These are everyday people, like these protesters in Italy who spontaneously climbed over barbed wire fences to rescue beagles from animal testing. 
And these movements have been incredibly effective and popular, so in 1985, their opponents made up a new word, eco-terrorist, to shift how we view them. 
They just made it up. 
Now these companies have backed new laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which turns activism into terrorism if it causes a loss of profits. 
Now most people never even heard about this law, including members of Congress. 
Less than one percent were in the room when it passed the House. 
The rest were outside at a new memorial. 
They were praising Dr. King as his style of activism was branded as terrorism if done in the name of animals or the environment. 
Supporters say laws like this are needed for the extremists: the vandals, the arsonists, the radicals. 
But right now, companies like TransCanada are briefing police in presentations like this one about how to prosecute nonviolent protesters as terrorists. 
The FBI's training documents on eco-terrorism are not about violence, they're about public relations. 
Today, in multiple countries, corporations are pushing new laws that make it illegal to photograph animal cruelty on their farms. 
The latest was in Idaho just two weeks ago, and today we released a lawsuit challenging it as unconstitutional as a threat to journalism. 
The first of these ag-gag prosecutions, as they're called, was a young woman named Amy Meyer, and Amy saw a sick cow being moved by a bulldozer outside of a slaughterhouse as she was on the public street. 
And Amy did what any of us would: She filmed it. 
When I found out about her story, I wrote about it, and within 24 hours, it created such an uproar that the prosecutors just dropped all the charges. 
But apparently, even exposing stuff like that is a threat. 
Through the Freedom of Information Act, I learned that the counter-terrorism unit has been monitoring my articles and speeches like this one. 
They even included this nice little write-up of my book. 
They described it as "" compelling and well-written. "" (Applause) Blurb on the next book, right? 
The point of all of this is to make us afraid, but as a journalist, I have an unwavering faith in the power of education. 
Our best weapon is sunlight. 
Dostoevsky wrote that the whole work of man is to prove he's a man and not a piano key. 
Over and over throughout history, people in power have used fear to silence the truth and to silence dissent. 
It's time we strike a new note. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Some of us won't. 
As a medical provider, I'm trained to respond to this symptom like any other, so when a patient having a heart attack looks at me and says, "" I'm going to die today, "" we are trained to reevaluate the patient's condition. 
Throughout my career, I have responded to a number of incidents where the patient had minutes left to live and there was nothing I could do for them. 
With this, I was faced with a dilemma: Do I tell the dying that they are about to face death, or do I lie to them to comfort them? 
Early in my career, I faced this dilemma by simply lying. 
I was afraid. 
I was afraid if I told them the truth, that they would die in terror, in fear, just grasping for those last moments of life. 
That all changed with one incident. 
Five years ago, I responded to a motorcycle accident. 
The rider had suffered critical, critical injuries. 
As I assessed him, I realized that there was nothing that could be done for him, and like so many other cases, he looked me in the eye and asked that question: "" Am I going to die? "" In that moment, I decided to do something different. 
I decided to tell him the truth. 
I decided to tell him that he was going to die and that there was nothing I could do for him. 
His reaction shocked me to this day. 
He simply laid back and had a look of acceptance on his face. 
He was not met with that terror or fear that I thought he would be. 
He simply laid there, and as I looked into his eyes, I saw inner peace and acceptance. 
Having responded to many cases since then where patients were in their last moments and there was nothing I could do for them, in almost every case, they have all had the same reaction to the truth, of inner peace and acceptance. 
In fact, there are three patterns I have observed in all these cases. 
The first pattern always kind of shocked me. 
Regardless of religious belief or cultural background, there's a need for forgiveness. 
Whether they call it sin or they simply say they have a regret, their guilt is universal. 
As I prepared myself and my equipment for his imminent cardiac arrest, I began to tell the patient of his imminent demise. 
He already knew by my tone of voice and body language. 
As I placed the defibrillator pads on his chest, prepping for what was going to happen, he looked me in the eye and said, "" I wish I had spent more time with my children and grandchildren instead of being selfish with my time. "" Faced with imminent death, all he wanted was forgiveness. 
The second pattern I observe is the need for remembrance. 
Countless times, I have had a patient look me in the eyes and say, "" Will you remember me? "" The final pattern I observe always touched me the deepest, to the soul. 
The dying need to know that their life had meaning. 
They need to know that they did not waste their life on meaningless tasks. 
I had responded to a call. 
There was a female in her late 50s severely pinned within a vehicle. 
She had been t-boned at a high rate of speed, critical, critical condition. 
As the fire department worked to remove her from the car, I climbed in to begin to render care. 
As we talked, she had said to me, "There was so much more I wanted to do with my life." 
She had felt she had not left her mark on this Earth. 
As we talked further, it would turn out that she was a mother of two adopted children who were both on their way to medical school. 
Because of her, two children had a chance they never would have had otherwise and would go on to save lives in the medical field as medical doctors. 
It would end up taking 45 minutes to free her from the vehicle. 
However, she perished prior to freeing her. 
I believed what you saw in the movies: when you're in those last moments that it's strictly terror, fear. 
I have come to realize, regardless of the circumstance, it's generally met with peace and acceptance, that it's the littlest things, the littlest moments, the littlest things you brought into the world that give you peace in those final moments. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm an artist and I cut books. 
This is one of my first book works. 
It's called "" Alternate Route to Knowledge. "" I wanted to create a stack of books so that somebody could come into the gallery and think they're just looking at a regular stack of books, but then as they got closer they would see this rough hole carved into it, and wonder what was happening, wonder why, and think about the material of the book. 
In most of my work, what I do is I seal the edges of a book with a thick varnish so it's creating sort of a skin on the outside of the book so it becomes a solid material, but then the pages inside are still loose, and then I carve into the surface of the book, and I'm not moving or adding anything. 
I'm thinking also about breaking out of the box of the traditional book and pushing that linear format, and try to push the structure of the book itself so that the book can become fully sculptural. 
I'm using clamps and ropes and all sorts of materials, weights, in order to hold things in place before I varnish so that I can push the form before I begin, so that something like this can become a piece like this, which is just made from a single dictionary. 
Or something like this, which who knows what that's going to be or why that's in my studio, will become a piece like this. 
So I think one of the reasons people are disturbed by destroying books, people don't want to rip books and nobody really wants to throw away a book, is that we think about books as living things, we think about them as a body, and they're created to relate to our body, as far as scale, but they also have the potential to continue to grow and to continue to become new things. 
So books really are alive. 
So I think of the book as a body, and I think of the book as a technology. 
I think of the book as a tool. 
And I also think of the book as a machine. 
I also think of the book as a landscape. 
This is a full set of encyclopedias that's been connected and sanded together, and as I carve through it, I'm deciding what I want to choose. 
So with encyclopedias, I could have chosen anything, but I specifically chose images of landscapes. 
And with the material itself, I'm using sandpaper and sanding the edges so not only the images suggest landscape, but the material itself suggests a landscape as well. 
So one of the things I do is when I'm carving through the book, I'm thinking about images, but I'm also thinking about text, and I think about them in a very similar way, because what's interesting is that when we're reading text, when we're reading a book, it puts images in our head, so we're sort of filling that piece. 
So there's sort of a yin-yang that happens, sort of a flip flop. 
So I'm creating a piece that the viewer is completing themselves. 
I'm excavating and I'm trying to maximize the potential and discover as much as I possibly can and exposing it within my own work. 
But at the same time, I'm thinking about this idea of erasure, and what's happening now that most of our information is intangible, and this idea of loss, and this idea that not only is the format constantly shifting within computers, but the information itself, now that we don't have a physical backup, has to be constantly updated in order to not lose it. 
And I have several dictionaries in my own studio, and I do use a computer every day, and if I need to look up a word, I'll go on the computer, because I can go directly and instantly to what I'm looking up. 
I think that the book was never really the right format for nonlinear information, which is why we're seeing reference books becoming the first to be endangered or extinct. 
So I don't think that the book will ever really die. 
People think that now that we have digital technology, the book is going to die, and we are seeing things shifting and things evolving. 
I think that the book will evolve, and just like people said painting would die when photography and printmaking became everyday materials, but what it really allowed painting to do was it allowed painting to quit its day job. 
It allowed painting to not have to have that everyday chore of telling the story, and painting became free and was allowed to tell its own story, and that's when we saw Modernism emerge, and we saw painting go into different branches. 
And I think that's what's happening with books now, now that most of our technology, most of our information, most of our personal and cultural records are in digital form, I think it's really allowing the book to become something new. 
So I think it's a very exciting time for an artist like me, and it's very exciting to see what will happen with the book in the future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

How many times have you used the word "" awesome "" today? 
Once? Twice? Seventeen times? 
Do you remember what you were describing when you used the word? 
No, I didn't think so, because it's come down to this, people: You're using the word incorrectly, and tonight I hope to show you how to put the "" awe "" back in "" awesome. "" Recently, I was dining at an outdoor cafe, and the server came up to our table, and asked us if we had dined there before, and I said, "" Yes, yes, we have. "" And she said, "" Awesome. "" And I thought, "" Really? 
Awesome or just merely good that we decided to visit your restaurant again? "" The other day, one of my coworkers asked me if I could save that file as a PDF, and I said, "" Well, of course, "" and he said, "" Awesome. "" Seriously, can saving anything as a PDF be awesome? 
Sadly, the frequent overuse of the word "" awesome "" has now replaced words like "" great "" and "" thank you. "" So Webster's dictionary defines the word "" awesome "" as fear mingled with admiration or reverence, a feeling produced by something majestic. 
Now, with that in mind, was your Quiznos sandwich awesome? 
How about that parking space? Was that awesome? 
Or that game the other day? Was that awesome? 
The answer is no, no and no. 
A sandwich can be delicious, that parking space can be nearby, and that game can be a blowout, but not everything can be awesome. 
(Laughter) So when you use the word "" awesome "" to describe the most mundane of things, you're taking away the very power of the word. 
This author says, "" Snowy days or finding money in your pants is awesome. "" (Laughter) Um, no, it is not, and we need to raise the bar for this poor schmuck. (Laughter) So in other words, if you have everything, you value nothing. 
It's a lot like drinking from a firehose like this jackass right here. 
There's no dynamic, there's no highs or lows, if everything is awesome. 
Ladies and gentlemen, here are 10 things that are truly awesome. 
Imagine, if you will, having to schlep everything on your back. 
Wouldn't this be easier for me if I could roll this home? 
Yes, so I think I'll invent the wheel. 
The wheel, ladies and gentlemen. 
Is the wheel awesome? Say it with me. 
Yes, the wheel is awesome! 
The Great Pyramids were the tallest man-made structure in the world for 4,000 years. 
Pharaoh had his slaves move millions of blocks just to this site to erect a big freaking headstone. 
Were the Great Pyramids awesome? 
Yes, the pyramids were awesome. 
The Grand Canyon. Come on. 
It's almost 80 million years old. 
Is the Grand Canyon awesome? 
Yes, the Grand Canyon is. 
Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1829, and earlier today, when you whipped out your smartphone and you took a shot of your awesome sandwich, and you know who you are — (Laughter) — wasn't that easier than exposing the image to copper plates coated with iodized silver? 
I mean, come on. Is photography awesome? 
Yes, photography is awesome. 
D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy, the largest amphibious invasion in world history. 
Was D-Day awesome? Yes, it was awesome. 
Did you eat food today? Did you eat? 
Then you can thank the honeybee, that's the one, because if crops aren't pollinated, we can't grow food, and then we're all going to die. 
It's just like that. 
But it's not like a flower can just get up and have sex with another flower, although that would be awesome. 
(Laughter) Bees are awesome. Are you kidding me? 
Landing on the moon! Come on! 
Apollo 11. Are you kidding me? 
Sixty-six years after the Wright Brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Neil Armstrong was 240,000 miles away. 
That's like from here to the moon. 
(Laughter) That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for awesome! 
You're damn right, it was. 
Woodstock, 1969: Rolling Stone Magazine said this changed the history of rock and roll. 
Tickets were only 24 dollars back then. 
You can't even buy a freaking t-shirt for that now. 
Jimi Hendrix's version of "" The Star-Spangled Banner "" was the most iconic. 
Was Woodstock awesome? Yes, it was awesome. 
Sharks! They're at the top of the food chain. 
Sharks have multiple rows of teeth that grow in their jaw and they move forward like a conveyor belt. 
Some sharks can lose 30,000 teeth in their lifetime. 
Does awesome inspire fear? 
Oh, hell yeah, sharks are awesome! 
The Internet was born in 1982 and it instantly took over global communication, and later tonight, when all these PowerPoints are uplifted to the Internet so that a guy in Siberia can get drunk and watch this crap, the Internet is awesome. 
And finally, finally some of you can't wait to come up and tell me how awesome my PowerPoint was. 
I will save you the time. 
It was not awesome, but it was true, and I hope it was entertaining, and out of all the audiences I've ever had, y'all are the most recent. Thank you and good night. 
(Applause) 

Seven years ago, a student came to me and asked me to invest in his company. 
He said, "" I'm working with three friends, and we're going to try to disrupt an industry by selling stuff online. "" And I said, "" OK, you guys spent the whole summer on this, right? "" "No, we all took internships just in case it doesn't work out." 
"All right, but you're going to go in full time once you graduate." 
"Not exactly. We've all lined up backup jobs." 
Six months go by, it's the day before the company launches, and there is still not a functioning website. 
"" You guys realize, the entire company is a website. 
That's literally all it is. "" So I obviously declined to invest. 
And they ended up naming the company Warby Parker. 
(Laughter) They sell glasses online. 
They were recently recognized as the world's most innovative company and valued at over a billion dollars. 
And now? My wife handles our investments. 
Why was I so wrong? 
To find out, I've been studying people that I come to call "" originals. "" Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them. 
They are people who stand out and speak up. 
Originals drive creativity and change in the world. 
They're the people you want to bet on. 
And they look nothing like I expected. 
I want to show you today three things I've learned about recognizing originals and becoming a little bit more like them. 
So the first reason that I passed on Warby Parker was they were really slow getting off the ground. 
Now, you are all intimately familiar with the mind of a procrastinator. 
Well, I have a confession for you. I'm the opposite. I'm a precrastinator. 
Yes, that's an actual term. 
You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet. 
I just feel that a few months ahead of time. 
(Laughter) So this started early: when I was a kid, I took Nintendo games very seriously. 
I would wake up at 5am, start playing and not stop until I had mastered them. 
Eventually it got so out of hand that a local newspaper came and did a story on the dark side of Nintendo, starring me. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Since then, I have traded hair for teeth. (Laughter) 
But this served me well in college, because I finished my senior thesis four months before the deadline. 
And I was proud of that, until a few years ago. 
I had a student named Jihae, who came to me and said, "I have my most creative ideas when I'm procrastinating." 
And I was like, "" That's cute, where are the four papers you owe me? "" (Laughter) No, she was one of our most creative students, and as an organizational psychologist, this is the kind of idea that I test. 
So I challenged her to get some data. 
She goes into a bunch of companies. 
She has people fill out surveys about how often they procrastinate. 
Then she gets their bosses to rate how creative and innovative they are. 
And sure enough, the precrastinators like me, who rush in and do everything early are rated as less creative than people who procrastinate moderately. 
So I want to know what happens to the chronic procrastinators. 
She was like, "" I don't know. They didn't fill out my survey. "" (Laughter) No, here are our results. 
You actually do see that the people who wait until the last minute are so busy goofing off that they don't have any new ideas. 
And on the flip side, the people who race in are in such a frenzy of anxiety that they don't have original thoughts either. 
There's a sweet spot where originals seem to live. 
Why is this? 
Maybe original people just have bad work habits. 
Maybe procrastinating does not cause creativity. 
To find out, we designed some experiments. 
We asked people to generate new business ideas, and then we get independent readers to evaluate how creative and useful they are. 
And some of them are asked to do the task right away. 
Others we randomly assign to procrastinate by dangling Minesweeper in front of them for either five or 10 minutes. 
And sure enough, the moderate procrastinators are 16 percent more creative than the other two groups. 
Now, Minesweeper is awesome, but it's not the driver of the effect, because if you play the game first before you learn about the task, there's no creativity boost. 
It's only when you're told that you're going to be working on this problem, and then you start procrastinating, but the task is still active in the back of your mind, that you start to incubate. 
Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps. 
So just as we were finishing these experiments, I was starting to write a book about originals, and I thought, "" This is the perfect time to teach myself to procrastinate, while writing a chapter on procrastination. "" So I metaprocrastinated, and like any self-respecting precrastinator, I woke up early the next morning and I made a to-do list with steps on how to procrastinate. 
(Laughter) And then I worked diligently toward my goal of not making progress toward my goal. 
I started writing the procrastination chapter, and one day — I was halfway through — I literally put it away in mid-sentence for months. 
It was agony. 
But when I came back to it, I had all sorts of new ideas. 
As Aaron Sorkin put it, "You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking." 
And along the way I discovered that a lot of great originals in history were procrastinators. 
Take Leonardo da Vinci. 
He toiled on and off for 16 years on the Mona Lisa. 
He felt like a failure. 
He wrote as much in his journal. 
But some of the diversions he took in optics transformed the way that he modeled light and made him into a much better painter. 
What about Martin Luther King, Jr.? 
The night before the biggest speech of his life, the March on Washington, he was up past 3am, rewriting it. 
He's sitting in the audience waiting for his turn to go onstage, and he is still scribbling notes and crossing out lines. 
When he gets onstage, 11 minutes in, he leaves his prepared remarks to utter four words that changed the course of history: "I have a dream." 
That was not in the script. 
By delaying the task of finalizing the speech until the very last minute, he left himself open to the widest range of possible ideas. 
And because the text wasn't set in stone, he had freedom to improvise. 
Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity. 
What you see with a lot of great originals is that they are quick to start but they're slow to finish. 
And this is what I missed with Warby Parker. 
When they were dragging their heels for six months, I looked at them and said, "You know, a lot of other companies are starting to sell glasses online." 
They missed the first-mover advantage. 
But what I didn't realize was they were spending all that time trying to figure out how to get people to be comfortable ordering glasses online. 
And it turns out the first-mover advantage is mostly a myth. 
Look at a classic study of over 50 product categories, comparing the first movers who created the market with the improvers who introduced something different and better. 
What you see is that the first movers had a failure rate of 47 percent, compared with only 8 percent for the improvers. 
Look at Facebook, waiting to build a social network until after Myspace and Friendster. 
Look at Google, waiting for years after Altavista and Yahoo. 
It's much easier to improve on somebody else's idea than it is to create something new from scratch. 
So the lesson I learned is that to be original you don't have to be first. 
You just have to be different and better. 
But that wasn't the only reason I passed on Warby Parker. 
They were also full of doubts. 
They had backup plans lined up, and that made me doubt that they had the courage to be original, because I expected that originals would look something like this. 
(Laughter) Now, on the surface, a lot of original people look confident, but behind the scenes, they feel the same fear and doubt that the rest of us do. 
They just manage it differently. 
Let me show you: this is a depiction of how the creative process works for most of us. 
(Laughter) Now, in my research, I discovered there are two different kinds of doubt. 
There's self-doubt and idea doubt. 
Self-doubt is paralyzing. 
It leads you to freeze. 
But idea doubt is energizing. 
It motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine, just like MLK did. 
And so the key to being original is just a simple thing of avoiding the leap from step three to step four. 
Instead of saying, "" I'm crap, "" you say, "" The first few drafts are always crap, and I'm just not there yet. "" So how do you get there? 
Well, there's a clue, it turns out, in the Internet browser that you use. 
We can predict your job performance and your commitment just by knowing what web browser you use. 
Now, some of you are not going to like the results of this study — (Laughter) But there is good evidence that Firefox and Chrome users significantly outperform Internet Explorer and Safari users. 
Yes. 
(Applause) They also stay in their jobs 15 percent longer, by the way. 
Why? It's not a technical advantage. 
The four browser groups on average have similar typing speed and they also have similar levels of computer knowledge. 
It's about how you got the browser. 
Because if you use Internet Explorer or Safari, those came preinstalled on your computer, and you accepted the default option that was handed to you. 
If you wanted Firefox or Chrome, you had to doubt the default and ask, is there a different option out there, and then be a little resourceful and download a new browser. 
So people hear about this study and they're like, "Great, if I want to get better at my job, I just need to upgrade my browser?" 
(Laughter) No, it's about being the kind of person who takes the initiative to doubt the default and look for a better option. 
And if you do that well, you will open yourself up to the opposite of déjà vu. 
There's a name for it. It's called vuja de. 
(Laughter) Vuja de is when you look at something you've seen many times before and all of a sudden see it with fresh eyes. 
It's a screenwriter who looks at a movie script that can't get the green light for more than half a century. 
In every past version, the main character has been an evil queen. 
But Jennifer Lee starts to question whether that makes sense. 
She rewrites the first act, reinvents the villain as a tortured hero and Frozen becomes the most successful animated movie ever. 
So there's a simple message from this story. 
When you feel doubt, don't let it go. 
(Laughter) What about fear? 
Originals feel fear, too. 
They're afraid of failing, but what sets them apart from the rest of us is that they're even more afraid of failing to try. 
They know you can fail by starting a business that goes bankrupt or by failing to start a business at all. 
They know that in the long run, our biggest regrets are not our actions but our inactions. 
The things we wish we could redo, if you look at the science, are the chances not taken. 
Elon Musk told me recently, he didn't expect Tesla to succeed. 
He was sure the first few SpaceX launches would fail to make it to orbit, let alone get back, but it was too important not to try. 
And for so many of us, when we have an important idea, we don't bother to try. 
But I have some good news for you. 
You are not going to get judged on your bad ideas. 
A lot of people think they will. 
If you look across industries and ask people about their biggest idea, their most important suggestion, 85 percent of them stayed silent instead of speaking up. 
They were afraid of embarrassing themselves, of looking stupid. 
But guess what? Originals have lots and lots of bad ideas, tons of them, in fact. 
Take the guy who invented this. 
Do you care that he came up with a talking doll so creepy that it scared not only kids but adults, too? 
No. You celebrate Thomas Edison for pioneering the light bulb. 
(Laughter) If you look across fields, the greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most. 
Take classical composers, the best of the best. 
Why do some of them get more pages in encyclopedias than others and also have their compositions rerecorded more times? 
One of the best predictors is the sheer volume of compositions that they generate. 
The more output you churn out, the more variety you get and the better your chances of stumbling on something truly original. 
Even the three icons of classical music — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart — had to generate hundreds and hundreds of compositions to come up with a much smaller number of masterpieces. 
Now, you may be wondering, how did this guy become great without doing a whole lot? 
I don't know how Wagner pulled that off. 
But for most of us, if we want to be more original, we have to generate more ideas. 
The Warby Parker founders, when they were trying to name their company, they needed something sophisticated, unique, with no negative associations to build a retail brand, and they tested over 2,000 possibilities before they finally put together Warby and Parker. 
So if you put all this together, what you see is that originals are not that different from the rest of us. 
They feel fear and doubt. They procrastinate. 
They have bad ideas. 
And sometimes, it's not in spite of those qualities but because of them that they succeed. 
So when you see those things, don't make the same mistake I did. 
Don't write them off. 
And when that's you, don't count yourself out either. 
Know that being quick to start but slow to finish can boost your creativity, that you can motivate yourself by doubting your ideas and embracing the fear of failing to try, and that you need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones. 
Look, being original is not easy, but I have no doubt about this: it's the best way to improve the world around us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In the year 1901, a woman called Auguste was taken to a medical asylum in Frankfurt. 
Auguste was delusional and couldn't remember even the most basic details of her life. 
Her doctor was called Alois. 
Alois didn't know how to help Auguste, but he watched over her until, sadly, she passed away in 1906. 
After she died, Alois performed an autopsy and found strange plaques and tangles in Auguste's brain — the likes of which he'd never seen before. 
Now here's the even more striking thing. 
If Auguste had instead been alive today, we could offer her no more help than Alois was able to 114 years ago. 
Alois was Dr. Alois Alzheimer. 
And Auguste Deter was the first patient to be diagnosed with what we now call Alzheimer's disease. 
Since 1901, medicine has advanced greatly. 
We've discovered antibiotics and vaccines to protect us from infections, many treatments for cancer, antiretrovirals for HIV, statins for heart disease and much more. 
But we've made essentially no progress at all in treating Alzheimer's disease. 
I'm part of a team of scientists who has been working to find a cure for Alzheimer's for over a decade. 
So I think about this all the time. 
Alzheimer's now affects 40 million people worldwide. 
But by 2050, it will affect 150 million people — which, by the way, will include many of you. 
If you're hoping to live to be 85 or older, your chance of getting Alzheimer's will be almost one in two. 
In other words, odds are you'll spend your golden years either suffering from Alzheimer's or helping to look after a friend or loved one with Alzheimer's. 
Already in the United States alone, Alzheimer's care costs 200 billion dollars every year. 
One out of every five Medicare dollars get spent on Alzheimer's. 
It is today the most expensive disease, and costs are projected to increase fivefold by 2050, as the baby boomer generation ages. 
It may surprise you that, put simply, Alzheimer's is one of the biggest medical and social challenges of our generation. 
But we've done relatively little to address it. 
Today, of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, Alzheimer's is the only one we cannot prevent, cure or even slow down. 
We understand less about the science of Alzheimer's than other diseases because we've invested less time and money into researching it. 
The US government spends 10 times more every year on cancer research than on Alzheimer's despite the fact that Alzheimer's costs us more and causes a similar number of deaths each year as cancer. 
The lack of resources stems from a more fundamental cause: a lack of awareness. 
Because here's what few people know but everyone should: Alzheimer's is a disease, and we can cure it. 
For most of the past 114 years, everyone, including scientists, mistakenly confused Alzheimer's with aging. 
We thought that becoming senile was a normal and inevitable part of getting old. 
But we only have to look at a picture of a healthy aged brain compared to the brain of an Alzheimer's patient to see the real physical damage caused by this disease. 
As well as triggering severe loss of memory and mental abilities, the damage to the brain caused by Alzheimer's significantly reduces life expectancy and is always fatal. 
Remember Dr. Alzheimer found strange plaques and tangles in Auguste's brain a century ago. 
For almost a century, we didn't know much about these. 
Today we know they're made from protein molecules. 
You can imagine a protein molecule as a piece of paper that normally folds into an elaborate piece of origami. 
There are spots on the paper that are sticky. 
And when it folds correctly, these sticky bits end up on the inside. 
But sometimes things go wrong, and some sticky bits are on the outside. 
This causes the protein molecules to stick to each other, forming clumps that eventually become large plaques and tangles. 
That's what we see in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. 
We've spent the past 10 years at the University of Cambridge trying to understand how this malfunction works. 
There are many steps, and identifying which step to try to block is complex — like defusing a bomb. 
Cutting one wire might do nothing. 
Cutting others might make the bomb explore. 
We have to find the right step to block, and then create a drug that does it. 
Until recently, we for the most part have been cutting wires and hoping for the best. 
But now we've got together a diverse group of people — medics, biologists, geneticists, chemists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians. 
And together, we've managed to identify a critical step in the process and are now testing a new class of drugs which would specifically block this step and stop the disease. 
Now let me show you some of our latest results. 
No one outside of our lab has seen these yet. 
Let's look at some videos of what happened when we tested these new drugs in worms. 
So these are healthy worms, and you can see they're moving around normally. 
These worms, on the other hand, have protein molecules sticking together inside them — like humans with Alzheimer's. 
And you can see they're clearly sick. 
But if we give our new drugs to these worms at an early stage, then we see that they're healthy, and they live a normal lifespan. 
This is just an initial positive result, but research like this shows us that Alzheimer's is a disease that we can understand and we can cure. 
After 114 years of waiting, there's finally real hope for what can be achieved in the next 10 or 20 years. 
But to grow that hope, to finally beat Alzheimer's, we need help. 
This isn't about scientists like me — it's about you. 
We need you to raise awareness that Alzheimer's is a disease and that if we try, we can beat it. 
In the case of other diseases, patients and their families have led the charge for more research and put pressure on governments, the pharmaceutical industry, scientists and regulators. 
That was essential for advancing treatment for HIV in the late 1980s. 
Today, we see that same drive to beat cancer. 
But Alzheimer's patients are often unable to speak up for themselves. 
And their families, the hidden victims, caring for their loved ones night and day, are often too worn out to go out and advocate for change. 
So, it really is down to you. 
Alzheimer's isn't, for the most part, a genetic disease. 
Everyone with a brain is at risk. 
Today, there are 40 million patients like Auguste, who can't create the change they need for themselves. 
Help speak up for them, and help demand a cure. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Can I get a show of hands — how many of you in this room have been on a plane in this past year? 
That's pretty good. 
Well, it turns out that you share that experience with more than three billion people every year. 
And when we put so many people in all these metal tubes that fly all over the world, sometimes, things like this can happen and you get a disease epidemic. 
I first actually got into this topic when I heard about the Ebola outbreak last year. 
And it turns out that, although Ebola spreads through these more range-limited, large-droplet routes, there's all these other sorts of diseases that can be spread in the airplane cabin. 
The worst part is, when we take a look at some of the numbers, it's pretty scary. 
So with H1N1, there was this guy that decided to go on the plane and in the matter of a single flight actually spread the disease to 17 other people. 
And then there was this other guy with SARS, who managed to go on a three-hour flight and spread the disease to 22 other people. 
That's not exactly my idea of a great superpower. 
When we take a look at this, what we also find is that it's very difficult to pre-screen for these diseases. 
So when someone actually goes on a plane, they could be sick and they could actually be in this latency period in which they could actually have the disease but not exhibit any symptoms, and they could, in turn, spread the disease to many other people in the cabin. 
How that actually works is that right now we've got air coming in from the top of the cabin and from the side of the cabin, as you see in blue. 
And then also, that air goes out through these very efficient filters that eliminate 99.97 percent of pathogens near the outlets. 
What happens right now, though, is that we have this mixing airflow pattern. 
So if someone were to actually sneeze, that air would get swirled around multiple times before it even has a chance to go out through the filter. 
So I thought: clearly, this is a pretty serious problem. 
I didn't have the money to go out and buy a plane, so I decided to build a computer instead. 
It actually turns out that with computational fluid dynamics, what we're able to do is create these simulations that give us higher resolutions than actually physically going in and taking readings in the plane. 
And so how, essentially, this works is you would start out with these 2D drawings — these are floating around in technical papers around the Internet. 
I take that and then I put it into this 3D-modeling software, really building that 3D model. 
And then I divide that model that I just built into these tiny pieces, essentially meshing it so that the computer can better understand it. 
And then I tell the computer where the air goes in and out of the cabin, throw in a bunch of physics and basically sit there and wait until the computer calculates the simulation. 
So what we get, actually, with the conventional cabin is this: you'll notice the middle person sneezing, and we go "" Splat! "" — it goes right into people's faces. 
It's pretty disgusting. 
From the front, you'll notice those two passengers sitting next to the central passenger not exactly having a great time. 
And when we take a look at that from the side, you'll also notice those pathogens spreading across the length of the cabin. 
The first thing I thought was, "" This is no good. "" So I actually conducted more than 32 different simulations and ultimately, I came up with this solution right here. 
This is what I call a — patent pending — Global Inlet Director. 
With this, we're able to reduce pathogen transmission by about 55 times, and increase fresh-air inhalation by about 190 percent. 
So how this actually works is we would install this piece of composite material into these existing spots that are already in the plane. 
So it's very cost-effective to install and we can do this directly overnight. 
All we have to do is put a couple of screws in there and you're good to go. 
And the results that we get are absolutely amazing. 
Instead of having those problematic swirling airflow patterns, we can create these walls of air that come down in-between the passengers to create personalized breathing zones. 
So you'll notice the middle passenger here is sneezing again, but this time, we're able to effectively push that down to the filters for elimination. 
And same thing from the side, you'll notice we're able to directly push those pathogens down. 
So if you take a look again now at the same scenario but with this innovation installed, you'll notice the middle passenger sneezes, and this time, we're pushing that straight down into the outlet before it gets a chance to infect any other people. 
So you'll notice the two passengers sitting next to the middle guy are breathing virtually no pathogens at all. 
Take a look at that from the side as well, you see a very efficient system. 
And in short, with this system, we win. 
When we take a look at what this means, what we see is that this not only works if the middle passenger sneezes, but also if the window-seat passenger sneezes or if the aisle-seat passenger sneezes. 
And so with this solution, what does this mean for the world? 
Well, when we take a look at this from the computer simulation into real life, we can see with this 3D model that I built over here, essentially using 3D printing, we can see those same airflow patterns coming down, right to the passengers. 
In the past, the SARS epidemic actually cost the world about 40 billion dollars. 
And in the future, a big disease outbreak could actually cost the world in excess of three trillion dollars. 
So before, it used to be that you had to take an airplane out of service for one to two months, spend tens of thousands of man hours and several million dollars to try to change something. 
But now, we're able to install something essentially overnight and see results right away. 
So it's really now a matter of taking this through to certification, flight testing, and going through all of these regulatory approvals processes. 
But it just really goes to show that sometimes the best solutions are the simplest solutions. 
And two years ago, even, this project would not have happened, just because the technology then wouldn't have supported it. 
But now with advanced computing and how developed our Internet is, it's really the golden era for innovation. 
And so the question I ask all of you today is: why wait? 
Together, we can build the future today. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to talk a little bit about where technology's going. 
And often technology comes to us, we're surprised by what it brings. 
But there's actually a large aspect of technology that's much more predictable, and that's because technological systems of all sorts have leanings, they have urgencies, they have tendencies. 
And those tendencies are derived from the very nature of the physics, chemistry of wires and switches and electrons, and they will make reoccurring patterns again and again. 
And so those patterns produce these tendencies, these leanings. 
You can almost think of it as sort of like gravity. 
Imagine raindrops falling into a valley. 
The actual path of a raindrop as it goes down the valley is unpredictable. 
We cannot see where it's going, but the general direction is very inevitable: it's downward. 
And so these baked-in tendencies and urgencies in technological systems give us a sense of where things are going at the large form. 
So in a large sense, I would say that telephones were inevitable, but the iPhone was not. 
The Internet was inevitable, but Twitter was not. 
So we have many ongoing tendencies right now, and I think one of the chief among them is this tendency to make things smarter and smarter. 
I call it cognifying — cognification — also known as artificial intelligence, or AI. 
And I think that's going to be one of the most influential developments and trends and directions and drives in our society in the next 20 years. 
So, of course, it's already here. 
We already have AI, and often it works in the background, in the back offices of hospitals, where it's used to diagnose X-rays better than a human doctor. 
It's in legal offices, where it's used to go through legal evidence better than a human paralawyer. 
It's used to fly the plane that you came here with. 
Human pilots only flew it seven to eight minutes, the rest of the time the AI was driving. 
And of course, in Netflix and Amazon, it's in the background, making those recommendations. 
That's what we have today. 
And we have an example, of course, in a more front-facing aspect of it, with the win of the AlphaGo, who beat the world's greatest Go champion. 
But it's more than that. 
But recently, Google taught their AI to actually learn how to play video games. 
Again, teaching video games was already done, but learning how to play a video game is another step. 
That's artificial smartness. 
What we're doing is taking this artificial smartness and we're making it smarter and smarter. 
There are three aspects to this general trend that I think are underappreciated; I think we would understand AI a lot better if we understood these three things. 
I think these things also would help us embrace AI, because it's only by embracing it that we actually can steer it. 
We can actually steer the specifics by embracing the larger trend. 
The first one is: our own intelligence has a very poor understanding of what intelligence is. 
We tend to think of intelligence as a single dimension, that it's kind of like a note that gets louder and louder. 
It starts like with IQ measurement. 
It starts with maybe a simple low IQ in a rat or mouse, and maybe there's more in a chimpanzee, and then maybe there's more in a stupid person, and then maybe an average person like myself, and then maybe a genius. 
That's completely wrong. 
That's not what intelligence is — not what human intelligence is, anyway. 
It's much more like a symphony of different notes, and each of these notes is played on a different instrument of cognition. 
There are many types of intelligences in our own minds. 
We have deductive reasoning, we have emotional intelligence, we have spatial intelligence; we have maybe 100 different types that are all grouped together, and they vary in different strengths with different people. 
And of course, if we go to animals, they also have another basket — another symphony of different kinds of intelligences, and sometimes those same instruments are the same that we have. 
They can think in the same way, but they may have a different arrangement, and maybe they're higher in some cases than humans, like long-term memory in a squirrel is actually phenomenal, so it can remember where it buried its nuts. 
When we go to make machines, we're going to engineer them in the same way, where we'll make some of those types of smartness much greater than ours, and many of them won't be anywhere near ours, because they're not needed. 
So we're going to take these things, these artificial clusters, and we'll be adding more varieties of artificial cognition to our AIs. 
We're going to make them very, very specific. 
So your calculator is smarter than you are in arithmetic already; your GPS is smarter than you are in spatial navigation; Google, Bing, are smarter than you are in long-term memory. 
And we're going to take, again, these kinds of different types of thinking and we'll put them into, like, a car. 
The reason why we want to put them in a car so the car drives, is because it's not driving like a human. 
It's not thinking like us. 
It's not being distracted, it's not worrying about whether it left the stove on, or whether it should have majored in finance. 
And we actually might even come to advertise these as "" consciousness-free. "" They're without consciousness, they're not concerned about those things, they're not distracted. 
So in general, what we're trying to do is make as many different types of thinking as we can. 
We're going to populate the space of all the different possible types, or species, of thinking. 
And there actually may be some problems that are so difficult in business and science that our own type of human thinking may not be able to solve them alone. 
We may need a two-step program, which is to invent new kinds of thinking that we can work alongside of to solve these really large problems, say, like dark energy or quantum gravity. 
What we're doing is making alien intelligences. 
You might even think of this as, sort of, artificial aliens in some senses. 
And they're going to help us think different, because thinking different is the engine of creation and wealth and new economy. 
The second aspect of this is that we are going to use AI to basically make a second Industrial Revolution. 
The first Industrial Revolution was based on the fact that we invented something I would call artificial power. 
Previous to that, during the Agricultural Revolution, everything that was made had to be made with human muscle or animal power. 
The great innovation during the Industrial Revolution was, we harnessed steam power, fossil fuels, to make this artificial power that we could use to do anything we wanted to do. 
So today when you drive down the highway, you are, with a flick of the switch, commanding 250 horses — 250 horsepower — which we can use to build skyscrapers, to build cities, to build roads, to make factories that would churn out lines of chairs or refrigerators way beyond our own power. 
And that artificial power can also be distributed on wires on a grid to every home, factory, farmstead, and anybody could buy that artificial power, just by plugging something in. 
So this was a source of innovation as well, because a farmer could take a manual hand pump, and they could add this artificial power, this electricity, and he'd have an electric pump. 
And you multiply that by thousands or tens of thousands of times, and that formula was what brought us the Industrial Revolution. 
That's the auto-driven car. 
It's like a new commodity; it's a new utility. 
The AI is going to flow across the grid — the cloud — in the same way electricity did. 
So everything that we had electrified, we're now going to cognify. 
And I would suggest, then, that the formula for the next 10,000 start-ups is very, very simple, which is to take x and add AI. 
That is the formula, that's what we're going to be doing. 
And that is the way in which we're going to make this second Industrial Revolution. 
And by the way — right now, this minute, you can log on to Google and you can purchase AI for six cents, 100 hits. 
That's available right now. 
So the third aspect of this is that when we take this AI and embody it, we get robots. 
And robots are going to be bots, they're going to be doing many of the tasks that we have already done. 
A job is just a bunch of tasks, so they're going to redefine our jobs because they're going to do some of those tasks. 
But they're also going to create whole new categories, a whole new slew of tasks that we didn't know we wanted to do before. 
They're going to actually engender new kinds of jobs, new kinds of tasks that we want done, just as automation made up a whole bunch of new things that we didn't know we needed before, and now we can't live without them. 
So they're going to produce even more jobs than they take away, but it's important that a lot of the tasks that we're going to give them are tasks that can be defined in terms of efficiency or productivity. 
If you can specify a task, either manual or conceptual, that can be specified in terms of efficiency or productivity, that goes to the bots. 
Productivity is for robots. 
What we're really good at is basically wasting time. 
(Laughter) We're really good at things that are inefficient. 
It runs on that fact that you have one failure after another. 
It runs on the fact that you make tests and experiments that don't work, otherwise you're not learning. It runs on the fact 
Innovation by definition is inefficient, because you make prototypes, because you try stuff that fails, that doesn't work. 
Exploration is inherently inefficiency. 
Art is not efficient. 
Human relationships are not efficient. 
These are all the kinds of things we're going to gravitate to, because they're not efficient. 
When Deep Blue beat the world's best chess champion, people thought it was the end of chess. 
But actually, it turns out that today, the best chess champion in the world is not an AI. 
And it's not a human. 
It's the team of a human and an AI. 
The best medical diagnostician is not a doctor, it's not an AI, it's the team. 
So that's the third thing, is that they're different, they're utility and they are going to be something we work with rather than against. 
So, the future: Where does that take us? 
I think that 25 years from now, they'll look back and look at our understanding of AI and say, "" You didn't have AI. In fact, you didn't even have the Internet yet, compared to what we're going to have 25 years from now. "" There are no AI experts right now. 
There's a lot of money going to it, there are billions of dollars being spent on it; it's a huge business, but there are no experts, compared to what we'll know 20 years from now. 
So we are just at the beginning of the beginning, we're in the first hour of all this. 
We're in the first hour of the Internet. 
The most popular AI product in 20 years from now, that everybody uses, has not been invented yet. 
That means that you're not late. 
Thank you. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

Every year in the United States alone, 2,077,000 couples make a legal and spiritual decision to spend the rest of their lives together — (Laughter) And not to have sex with anyone else. 
We even live longer, which is a pretty compelling argument for marrying someone you like a lot in the first place. 
(Laughter) Now, if you're not currently experiencing the joy of the joint tax return, I can't tell you how to find a chore-loving person of the approximately ideal size and attractiveness, who prefers horror movies and doesn't have a lot of friends hovering on the brink of divorce, but I can only encourage you to try, because the benefits, as I've pointed out, are significant. 

Hi. I'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise, admiration and thank you, and having it be specific and genuine. 
And the way I got interested in this was, I noticed in myself, when I was growing up, and until about a few years ago, that I would want to say thank you to someone, I would want to praise them, I would want to take in their praise of me and I'd just stop it. 
And I asked myself, why? 
I felt shy, I felt embarrassed. 
And then my question became, am I the only one who does this? 
So, I decided to investigate. 
But then, they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him, but he never told the son. 
It's because he didn't know that his son needed to hear it. 
I know a gentleman, married for 25 years, who's longing to hear his wife say, "Thank you for being the breadwinner, so I can stay home with the kids," but won't ask. 
I know a woman who's good at this. 
She, once a week, meets with her husband and says, "I'd really like you to thank me for all these things I did in the house and with the kids." 
And he goes, "" Oh, this is great, this is great. "" And praise really does have to be genuine, but she takes responsibility for that. 
Why were other people blocking it? 
Why can I say, "" I'll take my steak medium rare, I need size six shoes, "" but I won't say, "Would you praise me this way?" 
And it's because I'm giving you critical data about me. 
I'm telling you where I'm insecure. 
I'm telling you where I need your help. 
And I'm treating you, my inner circle, like you're the enemy. 
Because what can you do with that data? 
You could neglect me. 
You could abuse it. 
Or you could actually meet my need. 
And I took my bike into the bike store — I love this — same bike, and they'd do something called "" truing "" the wheels. 
The guy said, "" You know, when you true the wheels, it's going to make the bike so much better. "" I get the same bike back, and they've taken all the little warps out of those same wheels I've had for two and a half years, and my bike is like new. 
I want you to true your wheels: be honest about the praise that you need to hear. 
What do you need to hear? Go home to your wife — go ask her, what does she need? 
Go home to your husband — what does he need? 
And it's simple. 
And why should we care about this? 
We talk about world peace. 
And I want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands, great mothers, friends, daughters, sons. 
And maybe somebody's never said that to you, but you've done a really, really good job. 
And thank you for being here, just showing up and changing the world with your ideas. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A month ago today I stood there: 90 degrees south, the top of the bottom of the world, the Geographic South Pole. 
And I stood there beside two very good friends of mine, Richard Weber and Kevin Vallely. 
Together we had just broken the world speed record for a trek to the South Pole. 
It took us 33 days, 23 hours and 55 minutes to get there. 
We shaved five days off the previous best time. 
And in the process, I became the first person in history to make the entire 650-mile journey, from Hercules Inlet to South Pole, solely on feet, without skis. 
Now, many of you are probably saying, "" Wait a sec, is this tough to do? "" (Laughter) Imagine, if you will, dragging a sled, as you just saw in that video clip, with 170 pounds of gear, in it everything you need to survive on your Antarctic trek. 
It's going to be 40 below, every single day. 
You'll be in a massive headwind. 
And at some point you're going to have to cross these cracks in the ice, these crevasses. 
Some of them have a very precarious thin footbridge underneath them that could give way at a moment's notice, taking your sled, you, into the abyss, never to be seen again. 
The punchline to your journey? Look at the horizon. 
Yes, it's uphill the entire way, because the South Pole is at 10,000 feet, and you're starting at sea level. 
Our journey did not, in fact, begin at Hercules Inlet, where frozen ocean meets the land of Antarctica. 
It began a little less than two years ago. 
A couple of buddies of mine and I had finished a 111-day run across the entire Sahara desert. 
And while we were there we learned the seriousness of the water crisis in Northern Africa. 
We also learned that many of the issues facing the people of Northern Africa affected young people the most. 
I came home to my wife after 111 days of running in the sand, and I said, "" You know, there's no doubt if this bozo can get across the desert, we are capable of doing anything we set our minds to. "" But if I'm going to continue doing these adventures, there has to be a reason for me to do them beyond just getting there. 
Around that time I met an extraordinary human being, Peter Thum, who inspired me with his actions. 
He's trying to find and solve water issues, the crisis around the world. 
His dedication inspired me to come up with this expedition: a run to the South Pole where, with an interactive website, I will be able to bring young people, students and teachers from around the world on board the expedition with me, as active members. 
So we would have a live website, that every single day of the 33 days, we would be blogging, telling stories of, you know, depleted ozone forcing us to cover our faces, or we will burn. 
Crossing miles and miles of sastrugi — frozen ice snowdrifts that could be hip-deep. 
I'm telling you, crossing these things with 170-pound sled, that sled may as well have weighed 1,700 pounds, because that's what it felt like. 
We were blogging to this live website daily to these students that were tracking us as well, about 10-hour trekking days, 15-hour trekking days, sometimes 20 hours of trekking daily to meet our goal. 
We'd catch cat-naps at 40 below on our sled, incidentally. 
In turn, students, people from around the world, would ask us questions. 
Young people would ask the most amazing questions. 
One of my favorite: It's 40 below, you've got to go to the bathroom, where are you going to go and how are you going to do it? 
I'm not going to answer that. But I will answer some of the more popular questions. 
Where do you sleep? We slept in a tent that was very low to the ground, because the winds on Antarctica were so extreme, it would blow anything else away. 
What do you eat? One of my favorite dishes on expedition: butter and bacon. It's about a million calories. 
We were burning about 8,500 a day, so we needed it. 
How many batteries do you carry for all the equipment that you have? 
Virtually none. All of our equipment, including film equipment, was charged by the sun. 
And do you get along? I certainly hope so, because at some point or another on this expedition, one of your teammates is going to have to take a very big needle, and put it in an infected blister, and drain it for you. 
But seriously, seriously, we did get along, because we had a common goal of wanting to inspire these young people. 
They were our teammates! They were inspiring us. 
The stories we were hearing got us to the South Pole. 
The website worked brilliantly as a two-way street of communication. 
Young people in northern Canada, kids in an elementary school, dragging sleds across the school-yard, pretending they were Richard, Ray and Kevin. Amazing. 
We arrived at the South Pole. We huddled into that tent, 45 below that day, I'll never forget it. 
We looked at each other with these looks of disbelief at what we had just completed. 
And I remember looking at the guys thinking, "" What do I take from this journey? "" You know? Seriously. 
That I'm this uber-endurance guy? 
As I stand here today talking to you guys, I've been running for the grand sum of five years. 
And a year before that I was a pack-a-day smoker, living a very sedentary lifestyle. 
What I take from this journey, from my journeys, is that, in fact, within every fiber of my belief standing here, I know that we can make the impossible possible. 
I'm learning this at 40. 
Can you imagine? Seriously, can you imagine? 
I'm learning this at 40 years of age. 
Imagine being 13 years old, hearing those words, and believing it. 
Thank you very much. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What's in the box? 
Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I've traveled with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Sound familiar? 
Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago? 
Three times. 
So you'd think, with all this extra space, we'd have plenty of room for all our stuff. 
Nope. 
There's a new industry in town, a 22 billion-dollar, 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry: that of personal storage. 
So we've got triple the space, but we've become such good shoppers that we need even more space. 
So where does this lead? 
Lots of credit card debt, huge environmental footprints, and perhaps not coincidentally, our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years. 
Well I'm here to suggest there's a better way, that less might actually equal more. 
I bet most of us have experienced at some point the joys of less: college — in your dorm, traveling — in a hotel room, camping — rig up basically nothing, maybe a boat. 
Whatever it was for you, I bet that, among other things, this gave you a little more freedom, a little more time. 
So I'm going to suggest that less stuff and less space are going to equal a smaller footprint. 
It's actually a great way to save you some money. 
And it's going to give you a little more ease in your life. 
So I started a project called Life Edited at lifeedited.org to further this conversation and to find some great solutions in this area. 
First up: crowd-sourcing my 420 sq. ft. apartment in Manhattan with partners Mutopo and Jovoto.com. 
I wanted it all — home office, sit down dinner for 10, room for guests, and all my kite surfing gear. 
With over 300 entries from around the world, I got it, my own little jewel box. 
By buying a space that was 420 sq. ft. 
instead of 600, immediately I'm saving 200 grand. 
Smaller space is going to make for smaller utilities — save some more money there, but also a smaller footprint. 
And because it's really designed around an edited set of possessions — my favorite stuff — and really designed for me, I'm really excited to be there. 
So how can you live little? 
Three main approaches. 
First of all, you have to edit ruthlessly. 
And that shirt that I hadn't worn in years? 
It's time for me to let it go. 
We've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we've got to learn to stem the inflow. 
We need to think before we buy. 
Ask ourselves, "Is that really going to make me happier? Truly?" 
By all means, we should buy and own some great stuff. 
But we want stuff that we're going to love for years, not just stuff. 
Secondly, our new mantra: small is sexy. 
We want space efficiency. 
We want things that are designed for how they're used the vast majority of the time, not that rare event. 
Why have a six burner stove when you rarely use three? 
So we want things that nest, we want things that stack, and we want it digitized. 
You can take paperwork, books, movies, and you can make it disappear — it's magic. 
Finally, we want multifunctional spaces and housewares — a sink combined with a toilet, a dining table becomes a bed — same space, a little side table stretches out to seat 10. 
In the winning Life Edited scheme in a render here, we combine a moving wall with transformer furniture to get a lot out of the space. 
Look at the coffee table — it grows in height and width to seat 10. 
My office folds away, easily hidden. 
Guests? Move the moving wall, have some fold-down guest beds. 
And of course, my own movie theater. 
So I'm not saying that we all need to live in 420 sq. ft. 
Go from 3,000 to 2,000, from 1,500 to 1,000. 
Most of us, maybe all of us, are here pretty happily for a bunch of days with a couple of bags, maybe a small space, a hotel room. 
So when you go home and you walk through your front door, take a second and ask yourselves, "" Could I do with a little life editing? 
Would that give me a little more freedom? 
Maybe a little more time? "" What's in the box? 
It doesn't really matter. 
I know I don't need it. 
What's in yours? 
Maybe, just maybe, less might equal more. 
So let's make room for the good stuff. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Music by Anna Oxygen) (Music: "" Shells "" by Mirah) ♪ You learned how to be a diver ♪ ♪ Put on a mask and believe ♪ ♪ Gather a dinner of shells for me ♪ ♪ Take the tank down so you can breathe ♪ ♪ Below ♪ ♪ Movements slow ♪ ♪ You are an island ♪ ♪ All the secrets until then ♪ ♪ Pried open I held them ♪ ♪ Until they were still ♪ ♪ Until they were still ♪ ♪ Until they were still ♪ (Music) (Music by Caroline Lufkin) (Music by Anna Oxygen) ♪ Dream time, I will find you ♪ 
♪ You are shady, you are new ♪ ♪ I'm not so good at mornings ♪ ♪ I can see too clearly ♪ ♪ I prefer the nighttime ♪ ♪ Dark and blurry ♪ ♪ Falling night ♪ ♪ Hovering light ♪ ♪ Calling night ♪ ♪ Hovering light ♪ ♪ In the moontime I will give up my life ♪ ♪ And in the deep dreams ♪ ♪ You will find me ♪ (Applause) [Excerpts from "" Myth and Infrastructure ""] Bruno Giussani: Come back. 
Miwa Matreyek! 
(Applause) 

So imagine, you're in the supermarket, you're buying some groceries, and you get given the option for a plastic or a paper shopping bag. 
Which one do you choose if you want to do the right thing by the environment? 
Most people do pick the paper. 
Okay, let's think of why. 
It's brown to start with. 
Therefore, it must be good for the environment. 
It's biodegradable. It's reusable. 
In some cases, it's recyclable. 
So when people are looking at the plastic bag, it's likely they're thinking of something like this, which we all know is absolutely terrible, and we should be avoiding at all expenses these kinds of environmental damages. 
But people are often not thinking of something like this, which is the other end of the spectrum. 
When we produce materials, we need to extract them from the environment, and we need a whole bunch of environmental impacts. 
You see, what happens is, when we need to make complex choices, us humans like really simple solutions, and so we often ask for simple solutions. 
And I work in design. 
I advise designers and innovators around sustainability, and everyone always says to me, "" Oh Leyla, I just want the eco-materials. "" And I say, "" Well, that's very complex, and we'll have to spend four hours talking about what exactly an eco-material means, because everything at some point comes from nature, and it's how you use the material that dictates the environmental impact. 
So what happens is, we have to rely on some sort of intuitive framework when we make decisions. 
So I like to call that intuitive framework our environmental folklore. 
It's either the little voice at the back of your head, or it's that gut feeling you get when you've done the right thing, so when you've picked the paper bag or when you've bought a fuel-efficient car. 
And environmental folklore is a really important thing because we're trying to do the right thing. 
But how do we know if we're actually reducing the net environmental impacts that our actions as individuals and as professionals and as a society are actually having on the natural environment? 
So the thing about environmental folklore is it tends to be based on our experiences, the things we've heard from other people. 
It doesn't tend to be based on any scientific framework. 
And this is really hard, because we live in incredibly complex systems. 
We have the human systems of how we communicate and interrelate and have our whole constructed society, We have the industrial systems, which is essentially the entire economy, and then all of that has to operate within the biggest system, and, I would argue, the most important, the ecosystem. 
And you see, the choices that we make as an individual, but the choices that we make in every single job that we have, no matter how high or low you are in the pecking order, has an impact on all of these systems. 
And the thing is that we have to find ways if we're actually going to address sustainability of interlocking those complex systems and making better choices that result in net environmental gains. 
What we need to do is we need to learn to do more with less. 
We have an increasing population, and everybody likes their mobile phones, especially in this situation here. 
So we need to find innovative ways of solving some of these problems that we face. 
And that's where this process called life cycle thinking comes in. 
So essentially, everything that is created goes through a series of life cycle stages, and we use this scientific process called life cycle assessment, or in America, you guys say life cycle analysis, in order to have a clearer picture of how everything that we do in the technical part of those systems affects the natural environment. 
So we go all the way back to the extraction of raw materials, and then we look at manufacturing, we look at packaging and transportation, use, and end of life, and at every single one of these stages, the things that we do have an interaction with the natural environment, and we can monitor how that interaction is actually affecting the systems and services that make life on Earth possible. 
And through doing this, we've learned some absolutely fascinating things. 
And we've busted a bunch of myths. 
So to start with, there's a word that's used a lot. 
It's used a lot in marketing, and it's used a lot, I think, in our conversation when we're talking about sustainability, and that's the word biodegradability. 
Now biodegradability is a material property; it is not a definition of environmental benefits. 
Allow me to explain. 
When something natural, something that's made from a cellulose fiber like a piece of bread, even, or any food waste, or even a piece of paper, when something natural ends up in the natural environment, it degrades normally. 
Its little carbon molecules that it stored up as it was growing are naturally released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but this is a net situation. 
Most natural things don't actually end up in nature. 
Most of the things, the waste that we produce, end up in landfill. 
Landfill is a different environment. 
In landfill, those same carbon molecules degrade in a different way, because a landfill is anaerobic. 
It's got no oxygen. It's tightly compacted and hot. 
Those same molecules, they become methane, and methane is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. 
So our old lettuces and products that we have thrown out that are made out of biodegradable materials, if they end up in landfill, contribute to climate change. 
You see, there are facilities now that can actually capture that methane and generate power, displacing the need for fossil fuel power, but we need to be smart about this. 
We need to identify how we can start to leverage these types of things that are already happening and start to design systems and services that alleviate these problems. 
Because right now, what people do is they turn around and they say, "" Let's ban plastic bags. We'll give people paper because that is better for the environment. "" But if you're throwing it in the bin, and your local landfill facility is just a normal one, then we're having what's called a double negative. 
I'm a product designer by trade. 
I then did social science. 
And so I'm absolutely fascinated by consumer goods and how the consumer goods that we have kind of become immune to that fill our lives have an impact on the natural environment. 
And these guys are, like, serial offenders, and I'm pretty sure everyone in this room has a refrigerator. 
Now America has this amazing ability to keep growing refrigerators. 
In the last few years, they've grown one cubic foot on average, the standard size of a refrigerator. 
And the problem is, they're so big now, it's easier for us to buy more food that we can't eat or find. 
I mean, I have things at the back of my refrigerator that have been there for years, all right? 
And so what happens is, we waste more food. 
And as I was just explaining, food waste is a problem. 
In fact, here in the U.S., 40 percent of food purchased for the home is wasted. 
Half of the world's produced food is wasted. 
That's the latest U.N. stats. Up to half of the food. 
It's insane. It's 1.3 billion tons of food per annum. 
And I blame it on the refrigerator, well, especially in Western cultures, because it makes it easier. 
I mean, there's a lot of complex systems going on here. 
I don't want to make it so simplistic. 
But the refrigerator is a serious contributor to this, and one of the features of it is the crisper drawer. 
You all got crisper drawers? 
The drawer that you put your lettuces in? 
Lettuces have a habit of going soggy in the crisper drawers, don't they? 
Yeah? Soggy lettuces? 
In the U.K., this is such a problem that there was a government report a few years ago that actually said the second biggest offender of wasted food in the U.K. is the soggy lettuce. 
It was called the Soggy Lettuce Report. 
Okay? So this is a problem, people. 
These poor little lettuces are getting thrown out left, right and center because the crisper drawers are not designed to actually keep things crisp. 
Okay. You need a tight environment. 
You need, like, an airless environment to prevent the degrading that would happen naturally. 
But the crisper drawers, they're just a drawer with a slightly better seal. 
Anyway, I'm clearly obsessed. 
Don't ever invite me over because I'll just start going through your refrigerator and looking at all sorts of things like that. 
But essentially, this is a big problem. 
Because when we lose something like the lettuce from the system, not only do we have that impact I just explained at the end of life, but we actually have had to grow that lettuce. 
The life cycle impact of that lettuce is astronomical. 
We've had to clear land. 
We've had to plant seeds, phosphorus, fertilizers, nutrients, water, sunlight. 
All of the embodied impacts in that lettuce get lost from the system, which makes it a far bigger environmental impact than the loss of the energy from the fridge. 
So we need to design things like this far better if we're going to start addressing serious environmental problems. 
We could start with the crisper drawer and the size. 
For those of you in the room who do design fridges, that would be great. 
The problem is, imagine if we actually started to reconsider how we designed things. 
So I look at the refrigerator as a sign of modernity, but we actually haven't really changed the design of them that much since the 1950s. 
A little bit, but essentially they're still big boxes, cold boxes that we store stuff in. 
So imagine if we actually really started to identify these problems and use that as the foundation for finding innovative and elegant design solutions that will solve those problems. 
This is design-led system change, design dictating the way in which the system can be far more sustainable. 
Forty percent food waste is a major problem. 
Imagine if we designed fridges that halved that. 
Another item that I find fascinating is the electric tea kettle, which I found out that you don't do tea kettles in this country, really, do you? 
But that's really big in the U.K. 
Ninety-seven percent of households in the United Kingdom own an electric tea kettle. 
So they're very popular. 
And, I mean, if I were to work with a design firm or a designer, and they were designing one of these, and they wanted to do it eco, they'd usually ask me two things. 
They'd say, "" Leyla, how do I make it technically efficient? "" Because obviously energy's a problem with this product. 
Or, "" How do I make it green materials? 
How do I make the materials green in the manufacturing? "" Would you ask me those questions? 
They seem logical, right? Yeah. 
Well I'd say, "" You're looking at the wrong problems. "" Because the problem is with use. 
It's with how people use the product. 
Sixty-five percent of Brits admit to over-filling their kettle when they only need one cup of tea. 
All of this extra water that's being boiled requires energy, and it's been calculated that in one day of extra energy use from boiling kettles is enough to light all of the streetlights in England for a night. 
But this is the thing. 
This is what I call a product-person failure. 
But we've got a product-system failure going on with these little guys, and they're so ubiquitous, you don't even notice they're there. 
And this guy over here, though, he does. He's named Simon. 
Simon works for the national electricity company in the U.K. 
He has a very important job of monitoring all of the electricity coming into the system to make sure there is enough so it powers everybody's homes. 
He's also watching television. 
The reason is because there's a unique phenomenon that happens in the U.K. 
the moment that very popular TV shows end. 
The minute the ad break comes on, this man has to rush to buy nuclear power from France, because everybody turns their kettles on at the same time. 
(Laughter) 1.5 million kettles, seriously problematic. 
So imagine if you designed kettles, you actually found a way to solve these system failures, because this is a huge amount of pressure on the system, just because the product hasn't thought about the problem that it's going to have when it exists in the world. 
Now, I looked at a number of kettles available on the market, and found the minimum fill lines, so the little piece of information that tells you how much you need to put in there, was between two and a five-and-a-half cups of water just to make one cup of tea. 
So this kettle here is an example of one where it actually has two reservoirs. 
One's a boiling chamber, and one's the water holder. 
The user actually has to push that button to get their hot water boiled, which means, because we're all lazy, you only fill exactly what you need. 
And this is what I call behavior-changing products: products, systems or services that intervene and solve these problems up front. 
Now, this is a technology arena, so obviously these things are quite popular, but I think if we're going to keep designing, buying and using and throwing out these kinds of products at the rate we currently do, which is astronomically high, there are seven billion people who live in the world right now. 
There are six billion mobile phone subscriptions as of last year. 
Every single year, 1.5 billion mobile phones roll off production lines, and some companies report their production rate as being greater than the human birth rate. 
One hundred fifty-two million phones were thrown out in the U.S. last year; only 11 percent were recycled. 
I'm from Australia. We have a population of 22 million — don't laugh — and it's been reported that 22 million phones are in people's drawers. 
We need to find ways of solving the problems around this, because these things are so complicated. 
They have so much locked up inside them. 
Gold! Did you know that it's actually cheaper now to get gold out of a ton of old mobile phones than it is out of a ton of gold ore? 
There's a number of highly complex and valuable materials embodied inside these things, so we need to find ways of encouraging disassembly, because this is otherwise what happens. 
This is a community in Ghana, and e-waste is reported, or electronic waste is reported by the U.N. 
as being up to 50 million tons trafficked. 
This is how they get the gold and the other valuable materials out. 
They burn the electronic waste in open spaces. 
These are communities, and this is happening all over the world. 
And because we don't see the ramifications of the choices that we make as designers, as businesspeople, as consumers, then these kinds of externalities happen, and these are people's lives. 
So we need to find smarter, more systems-based, innovative solutions to these problems, if we're going to start to live sustainably within this world. 
So imagine if, when you bought your mobile phone, your new one because you replaced your old one — after 15 to 18 months is the average time that people replace their phones, by the way — so if we're going to keep this kind of expedient mobile phone replacing, then we should be looking at closing the loop on these systems. 
The people who produce these phones, and some of which I'm sure are in the room right now, could potentially look at doing what we call closed-loop systems, or product system services, so identifying that there is a market demand and that market demand's not going to go anywhere, so you design the product to solve the problem. 
Design for disassembly, design for light-weighting. 
We heard some of those kinds of strategies being used in the Tesla Motors car today. 
These kinds of approaches are not hard, but understanding the system and then looking for viable, market-driven consumer demand alternatives is how we can start radically altering the sustainability agenda, because I hate to break it to you all: Consumption is the biggest problem. 
But design is one of the best solutions. 
These kinds of products are everywhere. 
By identifying alternative ways of doing things, we can actually start to innovate, and I say actually start to innovate. 
I'm sure everyone in this room is very innovative. 
But in the regards to using sustainability as a parameter, as a criteria for fueling systems-based solutions, because as I've just demonstrated with these simple products, they're participating in these major problems. 
So we need to look across the entire life of the things that we do. 
If you just had paper or plastic — obviously reusable is far more beneficial — then the paper is worse, and the paper is worse because it weighs four to 10 times more than the plastic, and when we actually compare, from a life cycle perspective, a kilo of plastic and a kilo of paper, the paper is far better, but the functionality of a plastic or a paper bag to carry your groceries home is not done with a kilo of each material. 
It's done with a very small amount of plastic and quite a lot more paper. 
Because functionality defines environmental impact, and I said earlier that the designers always ask me for the eco-materials. 
I say, there's only a few materials that you should completely avoid. 
The rest of them, it's all about application, and at the end of the day, everything we design and produce in the economy or buy as consumers is done so for function. 
We want something, therefore we buy it. 
So breaking things back down and delivering smartly, elegantly, sophisticated solutions that take into consideration the entire system and the entire life of the thing, everything, all the way back to the extraction through to the end of life, we can start to actually find really innovative solutions. 
And I'll just leave you with one very quick thing that a designer said to me recently who I work with, a senior designer. 
I said, "" How come you're not doing sustainability? I know you know this. "" And he said, "" Well, recently I pitched a sustainability project to a client, and turned and he said to me, 'I know it's going to cost less, I know it's going to sell more, but we're not pioneers, because pioneers have arrows in their backs.' "" I think we've got a roomful of pioneers, and I hope there are far more pioneers out there, because we need to solve these problems. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I have spent my entire life either at the schoolhouse, on the way to the schoolhouse, or talking about what happens in the schoolhouse. 
(Laughter) Both my parents were educators, my maternal grandparents were educators, and for the past 40 years, I've done the same thing. 
And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of perspectives. 
Some of those reforms have been good. 
Some of them have been not so good. 
And we know why kids drop out. 
We know why kids don't learn. 
It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences... 
We know why. 
But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection. 
Relationships. 
James Comer says that no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship. 
George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. 
Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult. 
For years, I have watched people teach. 
I have looked at the best and I've looked at some of the worst. 
A colleague said to me one time, "" They don't pay me to like the kids. 
They pay me to teach a lesson. 
The kids should learn it. 
I should teach it, they should learn it, Case closed. "" Well, I said to her, "You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like." 
(Laughter) (Applause) She said, "" That's just a bunch of hooey. "" And I said to her, "Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear." 
Needless to say, it was. 
Some people think that you can either have it in you to build a relationship, or you don't. 
I think Stephen Covey had the right idea. 
He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to understand, as opposed to being understood. 
Simple things, like apologizing. 
You ever thought about that? 
Tell a kid you're sorry, they're in shock. 
(Laughter) I taught a lesson once on ratios. 
I'm not real good with math, but I was working on it. 
(Laughter) And I got back and looked at that teacher edition. 
I'd taught the whole lesson wrong. 
(Laughter) So I came back to class the next day and I said, "" Look, guys, I need to apologize. 
I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry. "" They said, "" That's okay, Ms. Pierson. 
You were so excited, we just let you go. "" I have had classes that were so low, so academically deficient, that I cried. 
I wondered, "" How am I going to take this group, in nine months, from where they are to where they need to be? 
And it was difficult, it was awfully hard. 
How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time? 
One year I came up with a bright idea. 
I told all my students, "" You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it. "" One of the students said, "" Really? "" (Laughter) I said, "" Really. We have to show the other classes how to do it, so when we walk down the hall, people will notice us, so you can't make noise. 
You just have to strut. "" (Laughter) And I gave them a saying to say: "" I am somebody. 
I was somebody when I came. 
I'll be a better somebody when I leave. 
I am powerful, and I am strong. 
I deserve the education that I get here. 
I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go. "" And they said, "" Yeah! "" (Laughter) You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you. 
(Applause) I gave a quiz, 20 questions. 
A student missed 18. 
I put a "" + 2 "" on his paper and a big smiley face. 
(Laughter) He said, "" Ms. Pierson, is this an F? "" I said, "" Yes. "" (Laughter) He said, "" Then why'd you put a smiley face? "" I said, "" Because you're on a roll. 
You got two right. You didn't miss them all. "" (Laughter) I said, "" And when we review this, won't you do better? "" He said, "" Yes, ma'am, I can do better. "" You see, "" -18 "" sucks all the life out of you. 
"+ 2" said, "I ain't all bad." 
For years, I watched my mother take the time at recess to review, go on home visits in the afternoon, buy combs and brushes and peanut butter and crackers to put in her desk drawer for kids that needed to eat, and a washcloth and some soap for the kids who didn't smell so good. 
See, it's hard to teach kids who stink. 
(Laughter) And kids can be cruel. 
And so she kept those things in her desk, and years later, after she retired, I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her, "" You know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life. 
You made it work for me. 
You made me feel like I was somebody, when I knew, at the bottom, I wasn't. 
And I want you to just see what I've become. "" And when my mama died two years ago at 92, there were so many former students at her funeral, it brought tears to my eyes, not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear. 
Can we stand to have more relationships? 
Absolutely. 
Will you like all your children? Of course not. 
(Laughter) And you know your toughest kids are never absent. (Laughter) 
Never. 
You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason. 
It's the connection. It's the relationships. 
So teachers become great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway. 
We teach anyway, because that's what we do. 
Teaching and learning should bring joy. 
How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? 
Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. 
Is this job tough? You betcha. 
Oh God, you betcha. 
But it is not impossible. 
We can do this. We're educators. 
We're born to make a difference. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

Doesn't it feel good to say it out loud? 
1926: Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called this "" substitution. "" 1933: Wera Mahler found when it was acknowledged by others, it felt real in the mind. 
1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this, and in 2009, he did some new tests that were published. 
Now, those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt that they had a long way to go still to achieve their goal. 
But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes, on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal. 
You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings, and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

Okay, it's great to be back at TED. 
Why don't I just start by firing away with the video? 
(Music) (Video) Man: Okay, Glass, record a video. 
Woman: This is it. We're on in two minutes. 
Man 2: Okay Glass, hang out with The Flying Club. 
Man 3: Google "" photos of tiger heads. "" Hmm. 
Man 4: You ready? You ready? (Barking) Woman 2: Right there. Okay, Glass, take a picture. 
(Child shouting) Man 5: Go! 
Man 6: Holy [beep]! That is awesome. 
Child: Whoa! Look at that snake! 
Woman 3: Okay, Glass, record a video! 
Man 7: After this bridge, first exit. 
Man 8: Okay, A12, right there! 
(Applause) (Children singing) Man 9: Google, say "" delicious "" in Thai. 
Google Glass: อร ่ อยMan 9: Mmm, อร ่ อย. 
Woman 4: Google "" jellyfish. "" (Music) Man 10: It's beautiful. 
(Applause) Sergey Brin: Oh, sorry, I just got this message from a Nigerian prince. 
He needs help getting 10 million dollars. 
I like to pay attention to these because that's how we originally funded the company, and it's gone pretty well. 
Though in all seriousness, this position that you just saw me in, looking down at my phone, that's one of the reasons behind this project, Project Glass. 
Because we ultimately questioned whether this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life, how you want to connect to information. 
Should it be by just walking around looking down? 
But that was the vision behind Glass, and that's why we've created this form factor. 
Okay. And I don't want to go through all the things it does and whatnot, but I want to tell you a little bit more about the motivation behind what led to it. 
In addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you're out and about looking at your phone, it's kind of, is this what you're meant to do with your body? 
You're standing around there and you're just rubbing this featureless piece of glass. 
You're just kind of moving around. 
So when we developed Glass, we thought really about, can we make something that frees your hands? 
You saw all of the things people are doing in the video back there. 
They were all wearing Glass, and that's how we got that footage. 
And also you want something that frees your eyes. 
That's why we put the display up high, out of your line of sight, so it wouldn't be where you're looking and it wouldn't be where you're making eye contact with people. 
And also we wanted to free up the ears, so the sound actually goes through, conducts straight to the bones in your cranium, which is a little bit freaky at first, but you get used to it. 
And ironically, if you want to hear it better, you actually just cover your ear, which is kind of surprising, but that's how it works. 
My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn't have to have a search query at all. 
You'd just have information come to you as you needed it. 
And this is now, 15 years later, sort of the first form factor that I think can deliver that vision when you're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth. 
This project has lasted now, been just over two years. 
We've learned an amazing amount. 
It's been really important to make it comfortable. 
So our first prototypes we built were huge. 
It was like cell phones strapped to your head. 
It was very heavy, pretty uncomfortable. 
We had to keep it secret from our industrial designer until she actually accepted the job, and then she almost ran away screaming. 
But we've come a long way. 
And the other really unexpected surprise was the camera. 
Our original prototypes didn't have cameras at all, but it's been really magical to be able to capture moments spent with my family, my kids. 
I just never would have dug out a camera or a phone or something else to take that moment. 
And lastly I've realized, in experimenting with this device, that I also kind of have a nervous tic. 
The cell phone is — yeah, you have to look down on it and all that, but it's also kind of a nervous habit. 
Like if I smoked, I'd probably just smoke instead. 
I would just light up a cigarette. It would look cooler. 
You know, I'd be like — But in this case, you know, I whip this out and I sit there and look as if I have something very important to do or attend to. 
But it really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent just secluding away, be it email or social posts or whatnot, even though it wasn't really — there's nothing really that important or that pressing. 
And with this, I know I will get certain messages if I really need them, but I don't have to be checking them all the time. 
Yeah, I've really enjoyed actually exploring the world more, doing more of the crazy things like you saw in the video. 
Thank you all very much. 
(Applause) 

When my first children's book was published in 2001, I returned to my old elementary school to talk to the students about being an author and an illustrator, and when I was setting up my slide projector in the cafetorium, I looked across the room, and there she was: my old lunch lady. 
She was still there at the school and she was busily preparing lunches for the day. 
So I approached her to say hello, and I said, "" Hi, Jeannie! How are you? "" And she looked at me, and I could tell that she recognized me, but she couldn't quite place me, and she looked at me and she said, "Stephen Krosoczka?" 
And I was amazed that she knew I was a Krosoczka, but Stephen is my uncle who is 20 years older than I am, and she had been his lunch lady when he was a kid. 
And she started telling me about her grandkids, and that blew my mind. 
My lunch lady had grandkids, and therefore kids, and therefore left school at the end of the day? 
I thought she lived in the cafeteria with the serving spoons. 
I had never thought about any of that before. 
Well, that chance encounter inspired my imagination, and I created the Lunch Lady graphic novel series, a series of comics about a lunch lady who uses her fish stick nunchucks to fight off evil cyborg substitutes, a school bus monster, and mutant mathletes, and the end of every book, they get the bad guy with their hairnet, and they proclaim, "" Justice is served! "" (Laughter) (Applause) And it's been amazing, because the series was so welcomed into the reading lives of children, and they sent me the most amazing letters and cards and artwork. 
And I would notice as I would visit schools, the lunch staff would be involved in the programming in a very meaningful way. 
And coast to coast, all of the lunch ladies told me the same thing: "Thank you for making a superhero in our likeness." 
Because the lunch lady has not been treated very kindly in popular culture over time. 
But it meant the most to Jeannie. 
When the books were first published, I invited her to the book launch party, and in front of everyone there, everyone she had fed over the years, I gave her a piece of artwork and some books. 
And two years after this photo was taken, she passed away, and I attended her wake, and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there, because next to her casket was this painting, and her husband told me it meant so much to her that I had acknowledged her hard work, I had validated what she did. 
And that inspired me to create a day where we could recreate that feeling in cafeterias across the country: School Lunch Hero Day, a day where kids can make creative projects for their lunch staff. 
And I partnered with the School Nutrition Association, and did you know that a little over 30 million kids participate in school lunch programs every day. 
That equals up to a little over five billion lunches made every school year. 
And the stories of heroism go well beyond just a kid getting a few extra chicken nuggets on their lunch tray. 
There is Ms. Brenda in California, who keeps a close eye on every student that comes through her line and then reports back to the guidance counselor if anything is amiss. 
There are the lunch ladies in Kentucky who realized that 67 percent of their students relied on those meals every day, and they were going without food over the summer, so they retrofitted a school bus to create a mobile feeding unit, and they traveled around the neighborhoods feedings 500 kids a day during the summer. 
And kids made the most amazing projects. 
I knew they would. 
Kids made hamburger cards that were made out of construction paper. 
They took photos of their lunch lady's head and plastered it onto my cartoon lunch lady and fixed that to a milk carton and presented them with flowers. 
And they made their own comics, starring the cartoon lunch lady alongside their actual lunch ladies. 
And they made thank you pizzas, where every kid signed a different topping of a construction paper pizza. 
For me, I was so moved by the response that came from the lunch ladies, because one woman said to me, she said, "" Before this day, I felt like I was at the end of the planet at this school. 
I didn't think that anyone noticed us down here. "" Another woman said to me, "" You know, what I got out of this is that what I do is important. "" And of course what she does is important. 
What they all do is important. 
They're feeding our children every single day, and before a child can learn, their belly needs to be full, and these women and men are working on the front lines to create an educated society. 
So I hope that you don't wait for School Lunch Hero Day to say thank you to your lunch staff, and I hope that you remember how powerful a thank you can be. 
A thank you can change a life. 
It changes the life of the person who receives it, and it changes the life of the person who expresses it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Back in New York, I am the head of development for a non-profit called Robin Hood. 
When I'm not fighting poverty, I'm fighting fires as the assistant captain of a volunteer fire company. 
Now in our town, where the volunteers supplement a highly skilled career staff, you have to get to the fire scene pretty early to get in on any action. 
I remember my first fire. 
I was the second volunteer on the scene, so there was a pretty good chance I was going to get in. 
But still it was a real footrace against the other volunteers to get to the captain in charge to find out what our assignments would be. 
When I found the captain, he was having a very engaging conversation with the homeowner, who was surely having one of the worst days of her life. 
Here it was, the middle of the night, she was standing outside in the pouring rain, under an umbrella, in her pajamas, barefoot, while her house was in flames. 
The other volunteer who had arrived just before me — let's call him Lex Luther — (Laughter) got to the captain first and was asked to go inside and save the homeowner's dog. 
The dog! I was stunned with jealousy. 
Here was some lawyer or money manager who, for the rest of his life, gets to tell people that he went into a burning building to save a living creature, just because he beat me by five seconds. 
Well, I was next. 
The captain waved me over. 
He said, "" Bezos, I need you to go into the house. 
I need you to go upstairs, past the fire, and I need you to get this woman a pair of shoes. "" (Laughter) I swear. 
So, not exactly what I was hoping for, but off I went — up the stairs, down the hall, past the 'real' firefighters, who were pretty much done putting out the fire at this point, into the master bedroom to get a pair of shoes. 
Now I know what you're thinking, but I'm no hero. 
(Laughter) I carried my payload back downstairs where I met my nemesis and the precious dog by the front door. 
We took our treasures outside to the homeowner, where, not surprisingly, his received much more attention than did mine. 
A few weeks later, the department received a letter from the homeowner thanking us for the valiant effort displayed in saving her home. 
The act of kindness she noted above all others: someone had even gotten her a pair of shoes. 
(Laughter) In both my vocation at Robin Hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter, I am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale, but I'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis. 
And you know what I've learned? 
They all matter. 
So as I look around this room at people who either have achieved, or are on their way to achieving, remarkable levels of success, I would offer this reminder: don't wait. 
Don't wait until you make your first million to make a difference in somebody's life. 
If you have something to give, give it now. 
Serve food at a soup kitchen. Clean up a neighborhood park. 
Be a mentor. 
Not every day is going to offer us a chance to save somebody's life, but every day offers us an opportunity to affect one. 
So get in the game. Save the shoes. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Mark, Mark, come back. (Applause) 
Mark Bezos: Thank you. 

I have a tough job to do. 
You know, when I looked at the profile of the audience here, with their connotations and design, in all its forms, and with so much and so many people working on collaborative and networks, and so on, that I wanted to tell you, I wanted to build an argument for primary education in a very specific context. 
In order to do that in 20 minutes, I have to bring out four ideas — it's like four pieces of a puzzle. 
And if I succeed in doing that, maybe you would go back with the thought that you could build on, and perhaps help me do my work. 
The first piece of the puzzle is remoteness and the quality of education. 
Now, by remoteness, I mean two or three different kinds of things. 
Of course, remoteness in its normal sense, which means that as you go further and further away from an urban center, you get to remoter areas. 
What happens to education? 
The second, or a different kind of remoteness is that within the large metropolitan areas all over the world, you have pockets, like slums, or shantytowns, or poorer areas, which are socially and economically remote from the rest of the city, so it's us and them. 
What happens to education in that context? 
So keep both of those ideas of remoteness. 
We made a guess. The guess was that schools in remote areas do not have good enough teachers. 
If they do have, they cannot retain those teachers. 
They do not have good enough infrastructure. 
And if they had some infrastructure, they have difficulty maintaining it. 
But I wanted to check if this is true. So what I did last year was we hired a car, looked up on Google, found a route into northern India from New Delhi which, you know, which did not cross any big cities or any big metropolitan centers. Drove out about 300 kilometers, and wherever we found a school, administered a set of standard tests, and then took those test results and plotted them on a graph. 
The graph was interesting, although you need to consider it carefully. 
I mean, this is a very small sample; you should not generalize from it. 
But it was quite obvious, quite clear, that for this particular route that I had taken, the remoter the school was, the worse its results seemed to be. 
That seemed a little damning, and I tried to correlate it with things like infrastructure, or with the availability of electricity, and things like that. 
To my surprise, it did not correlate. 
It did not correlate with the size of classrooms. 
It did not correlate with the quality of the infrastructure. 
It did not correlate with the poverty levels. It did not correlate. 
But what happened was that when I administered a questionnaire to each of these schools, with one single question for the teachers — which was, "" Would you like to move to an urban, metropolitan area? "" — 69 percent of them said yes. And as you can see from that, they say yes just a little bit out of Delhi, and they say no when you hit the rich suburbs of Delhi — because, you know, those are relatively better off areas — and then from 200 kilometers out of Delhi, the answer is consistently yes. 
I would imagine that a teacher who comes or walks into class every day thinking that, I wish I was in some other school, probably has a deep impact on what happens to the results. 
So it looked as though teacher motivation and teacher migration was a powerfully correlated thing with what was happening in primary schools, as opposed to whether the children have enough to eat, and whether they are packed tightly into classrooms and that sort of thing. It appears that way. 
When you take education and technology, then I find in the literature that, you know, things like websites, collaborative environments — you've been listening to all that in the morning — it's always piloted first in the best schools, the best urban schools, and, according to me, biases the result. 
The literature — one part of it, the scientific literature — consistently blames ET as being over-hyped and under-performing. 
The teachers always say, well, it's fine, but it's too expensive for what it does. 
Because it's being piloted in a school where the students are already getting, let's say, 80 percent of whatever they could do. 
You put in this new super-duper technology, and now they get 83 percent. 
So the principal looks at it and says, 3 percent for 300,000 dollars? Forget it. 
If you took the same technology and piloted it into one of those remote schools, where the score was 30 percent, and, let's say, took that up to 40 percent — that will be a completely different thing. 
So the relative change that ET, Educational Technology, would make, would be far greater at the bottom of the pyramid than at the top, but we seem to be doing it the other way about. 
So I came to this conclusion that ET should reach the underprivileged first, not the other way about. 
And finally came the question of, how do you tackle teacher perception? 
Whenever you go to a teacher and show them some technology, the teacher's first reaction is, you cannot replace a teacher with a machine — it's impossible. 
I don't know why it's impossible, but, even for a moment, if you did assume that it's impossible — I have a quotation from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer whom I met in Colombo, and he said something which completely solves this problem. 
He said a teacher than can be replaced by a machine, should be. 
So, you know, it puts the teacher into a tough bind, you have to think. 
Anyway, so I'm proposing that an alternative primary education, whatever alternative you want, is required where schools don't exist, where schools are not good enough, where teachers are not available or where teachers are not good enough, for whatever reason. 
If you happen to live in a part of the world where none of this applies, then you don't need an alternative education. 
So far I haven't come across such an area, except for one case. I won't name the area, but somewhere in the world people said, we don't have this problem, because we have perfect teachers and perfect schools. 
There are such areas, but — anyway, I'd never heard that anywhere else. 
I'm going to talk about children and self-organization, and a set of experiments which sort of led to this idea of what might an alternative education be like. 
They're called the hole-in-the-wall experiments. 
I'll have to really rush through this. They're a set of experiments. 
The first one was done in New Delhi in 1999. 
And what we did over there was pretty much simple. 
I had an office in those days which bordered a slum, an urban slum, so there was a dividing wall between our office and the urban slum. 
They cut a hole inside that wall — which is how it has got the name hole-in-the-wall — and put a pretty powerful PC into that hole, sort of embedded into the wall so that its monitor was sticking out at the other end, a touchpad similarly embedded into the wall, put it on high-speed Internet, put the Internet Explorer there, put it on Altavista.com — in those days — and just left it there. 
And this is what we saw. 
So that was my office in IIT. Here's the hole-in-the-wall. 
About eight hours later, we found this kid. 
To the right is this eight-year-old child who — and to his left is a six-year-old girl, who is not very tall. 
And what he was doing was, he was teaching her to browse. 
So it sort of raised more questions than it answered. 
Is this real? Does the language matter, because he's not supposed to know English? 
Will the computer last, or will they break it and steal it — and did anyone teach them? 
The last question is what everybody said, but you know, I mean, they must have poked their head over the wall and asked the people in your office, can you show me how to do it, and then somebody taught him. 
So I took the experiment out of Delhi and repeated it, this time in a city called Shivpuri in the center of India, where I was assured that nobody had ever taught anybody anything. 
(Laughter) So it was a warm day, and the hole in the wall was on that decrepit old building. This is the first kid who came there; he later on turned out to be a 13-year-old school dropout. 
He came there and he started to fiddle around with the touchpad. 
Very quickly, he noticed that when he moves his finger on the touchpad something moves on the screen — and later on he told me, "" I have never seen a television where you can do something. "" So he figured that out. It took him over two minutes to figure out that he was doing things to the television. 
And then, as he was doing that, he made an accidental click by hitting the touchpad — you'll see him do that. 
He did that, and the Internet Explorer changed page. 
Eight minutes later, he looked from his hand to the screen, and he was browsing: he was going back and forth. 
When that happened, he started calling all the neighborhood children, like, children would come and see what's happening over here. 
And by the evening of that day, 70 children were all browsing. 
So eight minutes and an embedded computer seemed to be all that we needed there. 
So we thought that this is what was happening: that children in groups can self-instruct themselves to use a computer and the Internet. But under what circumstances? 
At this time there was a — the main question was about English. 
People said, you know, you really ought to have this in Indian languages. 
So I said, have what, shall I translate the Internet into some Indian language? That's not possible. 
So, it has to be the other way about. 
But let's see, how do the children tackle the English language? 
I took the experiment out to northeastern India, to a village called Madantusi, where, for some reason, there was no English teacher, so the children had not learned English at all. 
And I built a similar hole-in-the-wall. 
One big difference in the villages, as opposed to the urban slums: there were more girls than boys who came to the kiosk. 
In the urban slums, the girls tend to stay away. 
I left the computer there with lots of CDs — I didn't have any Internet — and came back three months later. 
So when I came back there, I found these two kids, eight- and 12-year-olds, who were playing a game on the computer. 
And as soon as they saw me they said, "We need a faster processor and a better mouse." 
(Laughter) I was real surprised. 
You know, how on earth did they know all this? 
And they said, "" Well, we've picked it up from the CDs. "" So I said, "" But how did you understand what's going on over there? "" So they said, "" Well, you've left this machine which talks only in English, so we had to learn English. "" So then I measured, and they were using 200 English words with each other — mispronounced, but correct usage — words like exit, stop, find, save, that kind of thing, not only to do with the computer but in their day-to-day conversations. 
So, Madantusi seemed to show that language is not a barrier; in fact they may be able to teach themselves the language if they really wanted to. 
Finally, I got some funding to try this experiment out to see if these results are replicable, if they happen everywhere else. 
India is a good place to do such an experiment in, because we have all the ethnic diversities, all the — you know, the genetic diversity, all the racial diversities, and also all the socio-economic diversities. 
So, I could actually choose samples to cover a cross section that would cover practically the whole world. 
So I did this for almost five years, and this experiment really took us all the way across the length and breadth of India. 
This is the Himalayas. Up in the north, very cold. 
I also had to check or invent an engineering design which would survive outdoors, and I was using regular, normal PCs, so I needed different climates, for which India is also great, because we have very cold, very hot, and so on. 
This is the desert to the west. Near the Pakistan border. 
And you see here a little clip of — one of these villages — the first thing that these children did was to find a website to teach themselves the English alphabet. 
Then to central India — very warm, moist, fishing villages, where humidity is a very big killer of electronics. 
So we had to solve all the problems we had without air conditioning and with very poor power, so most of the solutions that came out used little blasts of air put at the right places to keep the machines running. 
I want to just cut this short. We did this over and over again. 
This sequence is also nice. This is a small child, a six-year-old, telling his eldest sister what to do. 
And this happens very often with these computers, that the younger children are found teaching the older ones. 
What did we find? We found that six- to 13-year-olds can self-instruct in a connected environment, irrespective of anything that we could measure. 
So if they have access to the computer, they will teach themselves, including intelligence. 
I couldn't find a single correlation with anything, but it had to be in groups. 
And that may be of great, you know, interest to this group, because all of you are talking about groups. 
So here was the power of what a group of children can do, if you lift the adult intervention. 
Just a quick idea of the measurements. 
We took standard statistical techniques, so I'm going to not talk about that. 
But we got a clean learning curve, almost exactly the same as what you would get in a school. 
I'll leave it at that, because, I mean, it sort of says it all, doesn't it? 
What could they learn to do? 
Basic Windows functions, browsing, painting, chatting and email, games and educational material, music downloads, playing video. 
In short, what all of us do. 
And over 300 children will become computer literate and be able to do all of these things in six months with one computer. 
So, how do they do that? 
If you calculated the actual time of access, it would work out to minutes per day, so that's not how it's happening. 
What you have, actually, is there is one child operating the computer. 
And surrounding him are usually three other children, who are advising him on what they should do. 
If you test them, all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them. 
Around these four are usually a group of about 16 children, who are also advising, usually wrongly, about everything that's going on on the computer. 
And all of them also will clear a test given on that subject. 
So they are learning as much by watching as they learn by doing. 
It seems counter-intuitive to adult learning, but remember, eight-year-olds live in a society where most of the time they are told, don't do this, you know, don't touch the whiskey bottle. 
So what does the eight-year-old do? 
He observes very carefully how a whiskey bottle should be touched. 
And if you tested him, he would answer every question correctly on that topic. 
So, they seem to be able to acquire very quickly. 
So what was the conclusion over the six years of work? 
It was that primary education can happen on its own, or parts of it can happen on its own. 
It does not have to be imposed from the top downwards. 
It could perhaps be a self-organizing system, so that was the second bit that I wanted to tell you, that children can self-organize and attain an educational objective. 
The third piece was on values, and again, to put it very briefly, I conducted a test over 500 children spread across all over India, and asked them — I gave them about 68 different values-oriented questions and simply asked them their opinions. 
We got all sorts of opinions. Yes, no or I don't know. 
I simply took those questions where I got 50 percent yeses and 50 percent noes — so I was able to get a collection of 16 such statements. 
These were areas where the children were clearly confused, because half said yes and half said no. 
A typical example being, "" Sometimes it is necessary to tell lies. "" They don't have a way to determine which way to answer this question; perhaps none of us do. 
So I leave you with this third question. 
Can technology alter the acquisition of values? 
Finally, self-organizing systems, about which, again, I won't say too much because you've been hearing all about it. 
Natural systems are all self-organizing: galaxies, molecules, cells, organisms, societies — except for the debate about an intelligent designer. 
But at this point in time, as far as science goes, it's self-organization. 
But other examples are traffic jams, stock market, society and disaster recovery, terrorism and insurgency. 
And you know about the Internet-based self-organizing systems. 
So here are my four sentences then. 
Remoteness affects the quality of education. 
Educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first, and other areas later. 
Values are acquired; doctrine and dogma are imposed — the two opposing mechanisms. 
And learning is most likely a self-organizing system. 
If you put all the four together, then it gives — according to me — it gives us a goal, a vision, for educational technology. 
An educational technology and pedagogy that is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organized. 
As educationists, we have never asked for technology; we keep borrowing it. 
PowerPoint is supposed to be considered a great educational technology, but it was not meant for education, it was meant for making boardroom presentations. 
We borrowed it. Video conferencing. The personal computer itself. 
I think it's time that the educationists made their own specs, and I have such a set of specs. This is a brief look at that. 
And such a set of specs should produce the technology to address remoteness, values and violence. 
So I thought I'd give it a name — why don't we call it "" outdoctrination. "" And could this be a goal for educational technology in the future? 
So I want to leave that as a thought with you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

With all the legitimate concerns about AIDS and avian flu — and we'll hear about that from the brilliant Dr. Brilliant later today — I want to talk about the other pandemic, which is cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension — all of which are completely preventable for at least 95 percent of people just by changing diet and lifestyle. 
And what's happening is that there's a globalization of illness occurring, that people are starting to eat like us, and live like us, and die like us. And in one generation, for example, Asia's gone from having one of the lowest rates of heart disease and obesity and diabetes to one of the highest. And in Africa, cardiovascular disease equals the HIV and AIDS deaths in most countries. 
So there's a critical window of opportunity we have to make an important difference that can affect the lives of literally millions of people, and practice preventive medicine on a global scale. 
Heart and blood vessel diseases still kill more people — not only in this country, but also worldwide — than everything else combined, and yet it's completely preventable for almost everybody. 
It's not only preventable; it's actually reversible. And for the last almost 29 years, we've been able to show that by simply changing diet and lifestyle, using these very high-tech, expensive, state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost interventions can be like — quantitative arteriography, before and after a year, and cardiac PET scans. 
We showed a few months ago — we published the first study showing you can actually stop or reverse the progression of prostate cancer by making changes in diet and lifestyle, and 70 percent regression in the tumor growth, or inhibition of the tumor growth, compared to only nine percent in the control group. 
And in the MRI and MR spectroscopy here, the prostate tumor activity is shown in red — you can see it diminishing after a year. 
Now there is an epidemic of obesity: two-thirds of adults and 15 percent of kids. What's really concerning to me is that diabetes has increased 70 percent in the past 10 years, and this may be the first generation in which our kids live a shorter life span than we do. That's pitiful, and it's preventable. 
Now these are not election returns, these are the people — the number of the people who are obese by state, beginning in '85,' 86, '87 — these are from the CDC website —' 88, '89,' 90, '91 — you get a new category —' 92, '93,' 94, '95,' 96, '97,' 98, '99, 2000, 2001 — it gets worse. We're kind of devolving. (Laughter) Now what can we do about this? Well, you know, the diet that we've found that can reverse heart disease and cancer is an Asian diet. 
But the people in Asia are starting to eat like we are, which is why they're starting to get sick like we are. 
So I've been working with a lot of the big food companies. They can make it fun and sexy and hip and crunchy and convenient to eat healthier foods, like — I chair the advisory boards to McDonald's, and PepsiCo, and ConAgra, and Safeway, and soon Del Monte, and they're finding that it's good business. 
The salads that you see at McDonald's came from the work — they're going to have an Asian salad. At Pepsi, two-thirds of their revenue growth came from their better foods. 
And so if we can do that, then we can free up resources for buying drugs that you really do need for treating AIDS and HIV and malaria and for preventing avian flu. Thank you. 

You may want to take a closer look. 
There's more to this painting than meets the eye. 
And yes, it's an acrylic painting of a man, but I didn't paint it on canvas. 
I painted it directly on top of the man. 
What I do in my art is I skip the canvas altogether, and if I want to paint your portrait, I'm painting it on you, physically on you. 
That also means you're probably going to end up with an earful of paint, because I need to paint your ear on your ear. 
Everything in this scene, the person, the clothes, chairs, wall, gets covered in a mask of paint that mimics what's directly below it, and in this way, I'm able to take a three-dimensional scene and make it look like a two-dimensional painting. 
I can photograph it from any angle, and it will still look 2D. 
There's no Photoshop here. 
This is just a photo of one of my three-dimensional paintings. 
You might be wondering how I came up with this idea of turning people into paintings. 
But originally, this had nothing to do with either people or paint. 
It was about shadows. 
I was fascinated with the absence of light, and I wanted to find a way that I could give it materiality and pin it down before it changed. 
I came up with the idea of painting shadows. 
I loved that I could hide within this shadow my own painted version, and it would be almost invisible until the light changed, and all of a sudden my shadow would be brought to the light. 
I wanted to think about what else I could put shadows on, and I thought of my friend Bernie. 
But I didn't just want to paint the shadows. 
I also wanted to paint the highlights and create a mapping on his body in greyscale. 
I had a very specific vision of what this would look like, and as I was painting him, I made sure to follow that very closely. 
But something kept on flickering before my eyes. 
I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at. 
And then when I took that moment to take a step back, magic. 
I couldn't have foreseen that when I wanted to paint a shadow, I would pull out this whole other dimension, that I would collapse it, that I would take a painting and make it my friend and then bring him back to a painting. 
I was a little conflicted though, because I was so excited about what I'd found, but I was just about to graduate from college with a degree in political science, and I'd always had this dream of going to Washington, D.C., and sitting at a desk and working in government. 
(Laughter) Why did this have to get in the way of all that? 
I made the tough decision of going home after graduation and not going up to Capitol Hill, but going down to my parents' basement and making it my job to learn how to paint. 
I had no idea where to begin. 
The last time I'd painted, I was 16 years old at summer camp, and I didn't want to teach myself how to paint by copying the old masters or stretching a canvas and practicing over and over again on that surface, because that's not what this project was about for me. 
It was about space and light. 
My early canvases ended up being things that you wouldn't expect to be used as canvas, like fried food. 
It's nearly impossible to get paint to stick to the grease in an egg. 
(Laughter) Even harder was getting paint to stick to the acid in a grapefruit. 
It just would erase my brush strokes like invisible ink. 
I'd put something down, and instantly it would be gone. 
And if I wanted to paint on people, well, I was a little bit embarrassed to bring people down into my studio and show them that I spent my days in a basement putting paint on toast. 
It just seemed like it made more sense to practice by painting on myself. 
One of my favorite models actually ended up being a retired old man who not only didn't mind sitting still and getting the paint in his ears, but he also didn't really have much embarrassment about being taken out into very public places for exhibition, like the Metro. 
I was having so much fun with this process. 
I was teaching myself how to paint in all these different styles, and I wanted to see what else I could do with it. 
I came together with a collaborator, Sheila Vand, and we had the idea of creating paintings in a more unusual surface, and that was milk. 
We got a pool. We filled it with milk. 
We filled it with Sheila. And I began painting. 
And the images were always completely unexpected in the end, because I could have a very specific image about how it would turn out, I could paint it to match that, but the moment that Sheila laid back into the milk, everything would change. 
It was in constant flux, and we had to, rather than fight it, embrace it, see where the milk would take us and compensate to make it even better. 
Sometimes, when Sheila would lay down in the milk, it would wash all the paint off of her arms, and it might seem a little bit clumsy, but our solution would be, okay, hide your arms. 
And one time, she got so much milk in her hair that it just smeared all the paint off of her face. 
All right, well, hide your face. 
And we ended up with something far more elegant than we could have imagined, even though this is essentially the same solution that a frustrated kid uses when he can't draw hands, just hiding them in the pockets. 
When we started out on the milk project, and when I started out, I couldn't have foreseen that I would go from pursuing my dream in politics and working at a desk to tripping over a shadow and then turning people into paintings and painting on people in a pool of milk. 
But then again, I guess it's also not unforeseeable that you can find the strange in the familiar, as long as you're willing to look beyond what's already been brought to light, that you can see what's below the surface, hiding in the shadows, and recognize that there can be more there than meets the eye. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Pat Mitchell: What is the story of this pin? 
Madeleine Albright: This is "" Breaking the Glass Ceiling. "" PM: Oh. 
That was well chosen, I would say, for TEDWomen. 
MA: Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen. 
And none of this pin stuff would have happened if it hadn't been for Saddam Hussein. 
I'll tell you what happened. 
I went to the United Nations as an ambassador, and it was after the Gulf War, and I was an instructed ambassador. 
And the cease-fire had been translated into a series of sanctions resolutions, and my instructions were to say perfectly terrible things about Saddam Hussein constantly, which he deserved — he had invaded another country. 
And so all of a sudden, a poem appeared in the papers in Baghdad comparing me to many things, but among them an "" unparalleled serpent. "" And so I happened to have a snake pin. 
So I wore it when we talked about Iraq. 
(Laughter) And when I went out to meet the press, they zeroed in, said, "" Why are you wearing that snake pin? "" I said, "" Because Saddam Hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent. "" And then I thought, well this is fun. 
So I went out and I bought a lot of pins that would, in fact, reflect what I thought we were going to do on any given day. 
So that's how it all started. 
PM: So how large is the collection? 
MA: Pretty big. 
It's now traveling. 
At the moment it's in Indianapolis, but it was at the Smithsonian. 
And it goes with a book that says, "" Read My Pins. "" (Laughter) PM: So is this a good idea. 
I remember when you were the first woman as Secretary of State, and there was a lot of conversation always about what you were wearing, how you looked — the thing that happens to a lot of women, especially if they're the first in a position. 
So how do you feel about that — the whole — MA: Well, it's pretty irritating actually because nobody ever describes what a man is wearing. 
But people did pay attention to what clothes I had. 
What was interesting was that, before I went up to New York as U.N. ambassador, I talked to Jeane Kirkpatrick, who'd been ambassador before me, and she said, "" You've got to get rid of your professor clothes. 
Go out and look like a diplomat. "" So that did give me a lot of opportunities to go shopping. 
But still, there were all kinds of questions about — "" did you wear a hat? "" "" How short was your skirt? "" And one of the things — if you remember Condoleezza Rice was at some event and she wore boots, and she got criticized over that. 
And no guy ever gets criticized. But that's the least of it. 
PM: It is, for all of us, men and women, finding our ways of defining our roles, and doing them in ways that make a difference in the world and shape the future. 
How did you handle that balance between being the tough diplomatic and strong voice of this country to the rest of the world and also how you felt about yourself as a mother, a grandmother, nurturing... 
and so how did you handle that? 
MA: Well the interesting part was I was asked what it was like to be the first woman Secretary of State a few minutes after I'd been named. 
And I said, "" Well I've been a woman for 60 years, but I've only been Secretary of State for a few minutes. "" So it evolved. 
(Laughter) But basically I love being a woman. 
And so what happened — and I think there will probably be some people in the audience that will identify with this — I went to my first meeting, first at the U.N., and that's when this all started, because that is a very male organization. 
And I'm sitting there — there are 15 members of the Security Council — so 14 men sat there staring at me, and I thought — well you know how we all are. 
You want to get the feeling of the room, and "" do people like me? "" and "" will I really say something intelligent? "" And all of a sudden I thought, "" Well, wait a minute. 
I am sitting behind a sign that says' The United States, 'and if I don't speak today then the voice of the United States will not be heard, "" and it was the first time that I had that feeling that I had to step out of myself in my normal, reluctant female mode and decide that I had to speak on behalf of our country. 
And so that happened more at various times, but I really think that there was a great advantage in many ways to being a woman. 
I think we are a lot better at personal relationships, and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it's necessary. 
But I have to tell you, I have my youngest granddaughter, when she turned seven last year, said to her mother, my daughter, "" So what's the big deal about Grandma Maddie being Secretary of State? 
Only girls are Secretary of State. "" (Laughter) (Applause) PM: Because in her lifetime — MA: That would be so. 
PM: What a change that is. 
As you travel now all over the world, which you do frequently, how do you assess this global narrative around the story of women and girls? 
Where are we? 
MA: I think we're slowly changing, but obviously there are whole pockets in countries where nothing is different. 
And therefore it means that we have to remember that, while many of us have had huge opportunities — and Pat, you have been a real leader in your field — is that there are a lot of women that are not capable of worrying and taking care of themselves and understanding that women have to help other women. 
And so what I have felt — and I have looked at this from a national security issue — when I was Secretary of State, I decided that women's issues had to be central to American foreign policy, not just because I'm a feminist, but because I believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered, that values are passed down, the health situation is better, education is better, there is greater economic prosperity. 
So I think that it behooves us — those of us that live in various countries where we do have economic and political voice — that we need to help other women. 
And I really dedicated myself to that, both at the U.N. and then as Secretary of State. 
PM: And did you get pushback from making that a central tenant of foreign policy? 
MA: From some people. 
I think that they thought that it was a soft issue. 
The bottom line that I decided was actually women's issues are the hardest issues, because they are the ones that have to do with life and death in so many aspects, and because, as I said, it is really central to the way that we think about things. 
Now for instance, some of the wars that took place when I was in office, a lot of them, the women were the main victims of it. 
For instance, when I started, there were wars in the Balkans. 
The women in Bosnia were being raped. 
We then managed to set up a war crimes tribunal to deal specifically with those kinds of issues. 
And by the way, one of the things that I did at that stage was, I had just arrived at the U.N., and when I was there, there were 183 countries in the U.N. 
Now there are 192. 
But it was one of the first times that I didn't have to cook lunch myself. 
So I said to my assistant, "Invite the other women permanent representatives." 
And I thought when I'd get to my apartment that there'd be a lot of women there. 
I get there, and there are six other women, out of 183. 
So the countries that had women representatives were Canada, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Trinidad Tobago, Jamaica, Lichtenstein and me. 
So being an American, I decided to set up a caucus. 
(Laughter) And so we set it up, and we called ourselves the G7. (Laughter) 
PM: Is that "" Girl 7? "" MA: Girl 7. 
And we lobbied on behalf of women's issues. 
So we managed to get two women judges on this war crimes tribunal. 
And then what happened was that they were able to declare that rape was a weapon of war, that it was against humanity. 
(Applause) PM: So when you look around the world and you see that, in many cases — certainly in the Western world — women are evolving into more leadership positions, and even other places some barriers are being brought down, but there's still so much violence, still so many problems, and yet we hear there are more women at the negotiating tables. 
Now you were at those negotiating tables when they weren't, when there was maybe you — one voice, maybe one or two others. 
Do you believe, and can you tell us why, there is going to be a significant shift in things like violence and peace and conflict and resolution on a sustainable basis? 
MA: Well I do think, when there are more women, that the tone of the conversation changes, and also the goals of the conversation change. 
But it doesn't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women. 
If you think that, you've forgotten high school. 
(Laughter) But the bottom line is that there is a way, when there are more women at the table, that there's an attempt to develop some understanding. 
So for instance, what I did when I went to Burundi, we'd got Tutsi and Hutu women together to talk about some of the problems that had taken place in Rwanda. 
And so I think the capability of women to put themselves — I think we're better about putting ourselves into the other guy's shoes and having more empathy. 
I think it helps in terms of the support if there are other women in the room. 
When I was Secretary of State, there were only 13 other women foreign ministers. 
And so it was nice when one of them would show up. 
For instance, she is now the president of Finland, but Tarja Halonen was the foreign minister of Finland and, at a certain stage, head of the European Union. 
And it was really terrific. 
Because one of the things I think you'll understand. 
We went to a meeting, and the men in my delegation, when I would say, "" Well I feel we should do something about this, "" and they'd say, "" What do you mean, you feel? "" And so then Tarja was sitting across the table from me. 
And all of a sudden we were talking about arms control, and she said, "" Well I feel we should do this. "" And my male colleagues kind of got it all of a sudden. 
But I think it really does help to have a critical mass of women in a series of foreign policy positions. 
The other thing that I think is really important: A lot of national security policy isn't just about foreign policy, but it's about budgets, military budgets, and how the debts of countries work out. 
So if you have women in a variety of foreign policy posts, they can support each other when there are budget decisions being made in their own countries. 
PM: So how do we get this balance we're looking for, then, in the world? 
More women's voices at the table? 
More men who believe that the balance is best? 
MA: Well I think one of the things — I'm chairman of the board of an organization called the National Democratic Institute that works to support women candidates. 
I think that we need to help in other countries to train women to be in political office, to figure out how they can in fact develop political voices. 
I think we also need to be supportive when businesses are being created and just make sure that women help each other. 
Now I have a saying that I feel very strongly about, because I am of a certain age where, when I started in my career, believe it or not, there were other women who criticized me: "Why aren't you in the carpool line?" 
or "" Aren't your children suffering because you're not there all the time? "" And I think we have a tendency to make each other feel guilty. 
In fact, I think "" guilt "" is every woman's middle name. 
And so I think what needs to happen is we need to help each other. 
And my motto is that there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other. 
(Applause) PM: Well Secretary Albright, I guess you'll be going to heaven. 
Thank you for joining us today. 
MA: Thank you all. Thanks Pat. 
(Applause) 

When I was only three or four, I fell in love with poetry, with the rhythms and the music of language; with the power of metaphor and of imagery, poetry being the essence of communication — the discipline, the distillation. 
And all these years later, the poems I'll read today are from my just-finished seventh book of poetry. 
Well, five years ago, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. 
Though there's no cure yet, advances in treatment are really impressive. 
But you can imagine that I was appalled to learn that women are largely left out of research trials, despite gender-specific medical findings having demonstrated that we are not actually just small men — (Laughter) who happen to have different reproductive systems. 
Gender-specific medicine is good for men, too. 
But you bring to a crisis the person you already are, including the, yes, momentum that you've learned to invoke through passionate caring and through action, both of which require but also create energy. 
So as an activist, I began working with the Parkinson's Disease Foundation — that's pdf.org — to create a major initiative to put women on the Parkinson's disease map. 
And as a poet, I began working with this subject matter, finding it tragic, hilarious, sometimes even joyful. 
I do not feel diminished by Parkinson's; I feel distilled by it, and I actually very much like the woman I'm distilling into. 
"No Signs of Struggle" Growing small requires enormity of will: just sitting still in the doctor's waiting room watching the future shuffle in and out, watching it stoop; stare at you while you try not to look. 
Rare is an exchange: a smile of brief, wry recognition. 
You are the new kid on the block. 
Everyone here was you once. 
You are still learning that growing small requires a largeness of spirit you can't fit into yet: acceptance of irritating help from those who love you; giving way and over, but not up. 
You've swallowed hard the contents of the "" Drink Me "" bottle, and felt yourself shrink. 
Now, familiar furniture looms, floors tilt, and doorknobs yield only when wrestled round with both hands. 
It demands colossal patience, all this growing small: your diminished sleep at night, your handwriting, your voice, your height. 
You are more the incredible shrinking woman than the Buddhist mystic, serene, making do with less. 
Less is not always more. 
Yet in this emptying space, space glimmers, becoming visible. 
Here is a place behind the eyes of those accustomed by what some would call diminishment. 
It is a place of merciless poetry, a gift of presence previously ignored, drowned in the daily clutter. 
Here every gesture needs intention, is alive with consciousness. 
Nothing is automatic. 
You can spot it in the provocation of a button, an arm poking at a sleeve, a balancing act at a night-time curb while negotiating the dark. 
Feats of such modest valor, who would suspect them to be exercises in an intimate, fierce discipline, a metaphysics of being relentlessly aware? 
Such understated power here, in these tottering dancers who exert stupendous effort on tasks most view as insignificant. 
Such quiet beauty here, in these, my soft-voiced, stiff-limbed people; such resolve masked by each placid face. 
There is immensity required in growing small, so bent on such unbending grace. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
This one is called "" On Donating My Brain to Science. "" (Laughter) Not a problem. 
Skip over all the pages reassuring religious people. 
Already a universal donor: kidneys, corneas, liver, lungs, tissue, heart, veins, whatever. 
Odd that the modest brain never imagined its unique value in research, maybe saving someone else from what it is they're not quite sure I have. 
Flattering, that. 
So fill in the forms, drill through the answers, trill out a blithe spirit. 
And slice me, dice me, spread me on your slides. 
Find what I'm trying to tell you. 
Earn me, learn me, scan me, squint through your lens. 
Uncover what I'd hint at if I could. 
Be my guest, do your best, harvest me, track the clues. 
This was a good brain while alive. 
This was a brain that paid its dues. 
So slice me, dice me, smear me on your slides, stain me, explain me, drain me like a cup. 
Share me, hear me: I want to be used I want to be used I want to be used up. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) And this one's called "" The Ghost Light. "" Lit from within is the sole secure way to traverse dark matter. 
Some life forms — certain mushrooms, snails, jellyfish, worms — glow bioluminescent, and people as well; we emit infra-red light from our most lucent selves. 
Our tragedy is we can't see it. 
We see by reflecting. 
We need biofluorescence to show our true colors. 
External illumination can distort, though. 
When gravity bends light, huge galaxy clusters can act as telescopes, elongating background images of star systems to faint arcs — a lensing effect like viewing distant street lamps through a glass of wine. 
A glass of wine or two now makes me weave as if acting the drunkard's part; as if, besotted with unrequited love for the dynamic Turner canvasses spied out by the Hubble, I could lurch down a city street set without provoking every pedestrian walk-on stare. 
Stare as long as you need to. 
If you think about it, walking, even standing, is illogical — such tiny things, feet! — (Laughter) especially when one's body is not al dente anymore. (Laughter) 
Besides, creature of extremes and excess, I've always thought Apollo beautiful but boring, and a bit of a dumb blonde. 
Dionysians don't do balance. 
Balance, in other words, has never been my strong point. 
But I digress. 
More and more these days, digression seems the most direct route through from where I've lost or found myself out of place, mind, turn, time. 
Place your foot just so, mind how you turn: too swift a swivel can bring you down. 
Take your time ushering the audience out, saying goodbye to the actors. 
The ghost light is what they call the single bulb hanging above the bare stage in an empty theater. 
In the empty theater of such a night, waking to meet no external radiance, this is the final struggle left to win, this the sole beacon to beckon the darkness in and let the rest begin, this the lens through which at last to see both Self and Other arrayed with the bright stain of original sin: lit from within. 
(Applause) And this is the last one. 
"This Dark Hour" Late summer, 4 A.M. 
The rain slows to a stop, dripping still from the broad leaves of blue hostas unseen in the garden's dark. 
Barefoot, careful on the slick slate slabs, I need no light, I know the way, stoop by the mint bed, scoop a fistful of moist earth, then grope for a chair, spread a shawl, and sit, breathing in the wet green August air. 
This is the small, still hour before the newspaper lands in the vestibule like a grenade, the phone shrills, the computer screen blinks and glares awake. 
There is this hour: poem in my head, soil in my hand: unnamable fullness. 
This hour, when blood of my blood bone of bone, child grown to manhood now — stranger, intimate, not distant but apart — lies safe, off dreaming melodies while love sleeps, safe, in his arms. 
To have come to this place, lived to this moment: immeasurable lightness. 
The density of black starts to blur umber. 
Tentative, a cardinal's coloratura, then the mourning dove's elegy. 
Sable glimmers toward grey; objects emerge, trailing shadows; night ages toward day. 
The city stirs. 
There will be other dawns, nights, gaudy noons. 
Likely, I'll lose my way. 
There will be stumbling, falling, cursing the dark. 
Whatever comes, there was this hour when nothing mattered, all was unbearably dear. 
And when I'm done with daylights, should those who loved me grieve too long a while, let them remember that I had this hour — this dark, perfect hour — and smile. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I wrote this poem after hearing a pretty well known actress tell a very well known interviewer on television, "" I'm really getting into the Internet lately. 
I just wish it were more organized. "" So... 
(Laughter) If I controlled the Internet, you could auction your broken heart on eBay. 
Take the money; go to Amazon; buy a phonebook for a country you've never been to — call folks at random until you find someone who flirts really well in a foreign language. 
(Laughter) If I were in charge of the Internet, you could Mapquest your lover's mood swings. 
Hang left at cranky, right at preoccupied, U-turn on silent treatment, all the way back to tongue kissing and good lovin '. 
You could navigate and understand every emotional intersection. 
Some days, I'm as shallow as a baking pan, but I still stretch miles in all directions. 
If I owned the Internet, Napster, Monster and Friendster.com would be one big website. 
That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job and you're really just chattin 'with your pals. 
(Laughter) Heck, if I ran the Web, you could email dead people. (Laughter) 
They would not email you back (Laughter) — but you'd get an automated reply. (Laughter) 
Their name in your inbox (Laughter) — it's all you wanted anyway. 
And a message saying, "" Hey, it's me. I miss you. 
(Laughter) Listen, you'll see being dead is dandy. 
Now you go back to raising kids and waging peace and craving candy. "" If I designed the Internet, childhood.com would be a loop of a boy in an orchard, with a ski pole for a sword, trashcan lid for a shield, shouting, "" I am the emperor of oranges. 
I am the emperor of oranges. I am the emperor of oranges. "" Now follow me, OK? 
(Laughter) Grandma.com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit-bath instructions. 
One, two, three. 
That links with hotdiggitydog.com. 
That is my grandfather. 
They take you to gruff-ex-cop-on-his-fourth-marriage.dad. 
He forms an attachment to kind-of-ditzy-but-still-sends-ginger-snaps-for-Christmas.mom, who downloads the boy in the orchard, the emperor of oranges, who grows up to be me — the guy who usually goes too far. 
So if I were emperor of the Internet, I guess I'd still be mortal, huh? 
But at that point, I would probably already have the lowest possible mortgage and the most enlarged possible penis (Laughter) — so I would outlaw spam on my first day in office. 
I wouldn't need it. 
I'd be like some kind of Internet genius, and me, I'd like to upgrade to deity and maybe just like that — pop! — I'd go wireless. 
(Laughter) Huh? Maybe Google would hire this. 
I could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus until the World Wide Web is as wise, as wild and as organized as I think a modern-day miracle / oracle can get, but, ooh-eee, you want to bet just how whack and un-PC your Mac or PC is going to be when I'm rocking hot-shit-hot-shot-god.net? 
I guess it's just like life. 
It is not a question of if you can — it's: do ya? 
We can interfere with the interface. 
We can make "" You've got Hallelujah "" the national anthem of cyberspace every lucky time we log on. 
You don't say a prayer. 
You don't write a psalm. 
You don't chant an "" om. "" You send one blessed email to whomever you're thinking of at dah-da-la-dat-da-dah-da-la-dat.com. 
Thank you, TED. 
(Applause) 

So I thought, "" I will talk about death. "" Seemed to be the passion today. 
Actually, it's not about death. 
It's inevitable, terrible, but really what I want to talk about is, I'm just fascinated by the legacy people leave when they die. 
That's what I want to talk about. 
So Art Buchwald left his legacy of humor with a video that appeared soon after he died, saying, "Hi! I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died." 
And Mike, who I met at Galapagos, a trip which I won at TED, is leaving notes on cyberspace where he is chronicling his journey through cancer. 
And my father left me a legacy of his handwriting through letters and a notebook. 
In the last two years of his life, when he was sick, he filled a notebook with his thoughts about me. 
He wrote about my strengths, weaknesses, and gentle suggestions for improvement, quoting specific incidents, and held a mirror to my life. 
After he died, I realized that no one writes to me anymore. 
Handwriting is a disappearing art. 
I'm all for email and thinking while typing, but why give up old habits for new? 
Why can't we have letter writing and email exchange in our lives? 
There are times when I want to trade all those years that I was too busy to sit with my dad and chat with him, and trade all those years for one hug. 
But too late. 
But that's when I take out his letters and I read them, and the paper that touched his hand is in mine, and I feel connected to him. 
So maybe we all need to leave our children with a value legacy, and not a financial one. 
A value for things with a personal touch — an autographed book, a soul-searching letter. 
If a fraction of this powerful TED audience could be inspired to buy a beautiful paper — John, it'll be a recycled one — and write a beautiful letter to someone they love, we actually may start a revolution where our children may go to penmanship classes. 
So what do I plan to leave for my son? 
I collect autographed books, and those of you authors in the audience know I hound you for them — and CDs too, Tracy. 
I plan to publish my own notebook. 
As I witnessed my father's body being swallowed by fire, I sat by his funeral pyre and wrote. 
I have no idea how I'm going to do it, but I am committed to compiling his thoughts and mine into a book, and leave that published book for my son. 
I'd like to end with a few verses of what I wrote at my father's cremation. 
And those linguists, please pardon the grammar, because I've not looked at it in the last 10 years. 
I took it out for the first time to come here. 
"" Picture in a frame, ashes in a bottle, boundless energy confined in the bottle, forcing me to deal with reality, forcing me to deal with being grown up. 
I hear you and I know that you would want me to be strong, but right now, I am being sucked down, surrounded and suffocated by these raging emotional waters, craving to cleanse my soul, trying to emerge on a firm footing one more time, to keep on fighting and flourishing just as you taught me. 
Your encouraging whispers in my whirlpool of despair, holding me and heaving me to shores of sanity, to live again and to love again. "" Thank you. 

Thomas Dolby: For pure pleasure please welcome the lovely, the delectable, and the bilingual Rachelle Garniez. 
(Applause) (Bells) (Trumpet) Rachelle Garniez: ♫ Quand il me prend dans ses bras ♫ ♫ Il me parle tout bas, ♫ ♫ Je vois la vie en rose. ♫ ♫ Il me dit des mots d'amour, ♫ ♫ Des mots de tous les jours, ♫ ♫ Et ca me fait quelque chose. ♫ ♫ Il est entre dans mon coeur ♫ ♫ Une part de bonheur ♫ ♫ Dont je connais la cause. ♫ ♫ C'est lui pour moi. Moi pour lui ♫ ♫ Dans la vie, ♫ ♫ Il me l'a dit, l'a jure [pour] la vie. ♫ ♫ Et des que je l'apercois ♫ 
♫ Alors je sens en moi ♫ ♫ Mon coeur qui bat ♫ (Applause) 

What you're doing, right now, at this very moment, is killing you. 
More than cars or the Internet or even that little mobile device we keep talking about, the technology you're using the most almost every day is this, your tush. 
Nowadays people are sitting 9.3 hours a day, which is more than we're sleeping, at 7.7 hours. 
Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don't even question how much we're doing it, and because everyone else is doing it, it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay. 
In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation. 
Of course there's health consequences to this, scary ones, besides the waist. 
Things like breast cancer and colon cancer are directly tied to our lack of physical [activity], Ten percent in fact, on both of those. 
Six percent for heart disease, seven percent for type 2 diabetes, which is what my father died of. 
Now, any of those stats should convince each of us to get off our duff more, but if you're anything like me, it won't. 
What did get me moving was a social interaction. 
Someone invited me to a meeting, but couldn't manage to fit me in to a regular sort of conference room meeting, and said, "I have to walk my dogs tomorrow. Could you come then?" 
It seemed kind of odd to do, and actually, that first meeting, I remember thinking, "I have to be the one to ask the next question," because I knew I was going to huff and puff during this conversation. 
And yet, I've taken that idea and made it my own. 
So instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings, I ask people to go on a walking meeting, to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week. 
It's changed my life. 
But before that, what actually happened was, I used to think about it as, you could take care of your health, or you could take care of obligations, and one always came at the cost of the other. 
So now, several hundred of these walking meetings later, I've learned a few things. 
First, there's this amazing thing about actually getting out of the box that leads to out-of-the-box thinking. 
Whether it's nature or the exercise itself, it certainly works. 
And second, and probably the more reflective one, is just about how much each of us can hold problems in opposition when they're really not that way. 
And if we're going to solve problems and look at the world really differently, whether it's in governance or business or environmental issues, job creation, maybe we can think about how to reframe those problems as having both things be true. 
Because it was when that happened with this walk-and-talk idea that things became doable and sustainable and viable. 
So I started this talk talking about the tush, so I'll end with the bottom line, which is, walk and talk. 
Walk the talk. 
You'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking, and in the way that you do, you'll bring into your life an entirely new set of ideas. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In India, we have these huge families. 
I bet a lot of you all must have heard about it. 
Which means that there are a lot of family events. 
So as a child, my parents used to drag me to these family events. 
But the one thing that I always looked forward to was playing around with my cousins. 
And there was always this one uncle who used to be there, always ready, jumping around with us, having games for us, making us kids have the time of our lives. 
This man was extremely successful: he was confident and powerful. 
But then I saw this hale and hearty person deteriorate in health. 
He was diagnosed with Parkinson's. 
Parkinson's is a disease that causes degeneration of the nervous system, which means that this person who used to be independent suddenly finds tasks like drinking coffee, because of tremors, much more difficult. 
My uncle started using a walker to walk, and to take a turn, he literally had to take one step at a time, like this, and it took forever. 
So this person, who used to be the center of attention in every family gathering, was suddenly hiding behind people. 
He was hiding from the pitiful look in people's eyes. 
And he's not the only one in the world. 
Every year, 60,000 people are newly diagnosed with Parkinson's, and this number is only rising. 
As designers, we dream that our designs solve these multifaceted problems, one solution that solves it all, but it need not always be like that. 
You can also target simple problems and create small solutions for them and eventually make a big impact. 
So my aim here was to not cure Parkinson's, but to make their everyday tasks much more simple, and then make an impact. 
Well, the first thing I targeted was tremors, right? 
My uncle told me that he had stopped drinking coffee or tea in public just out of embarrassment, so, well, I designed the no-spill cup. 
It works just purely on its form. 
The curve on top deflects the liquid back inside every time they have tremors, and this keeps the liquid inside compared to a normal cup. 
But the key here is that it is not tagged as a Parkinson's patient product. 
It looks like a cup that could be used by you, me, any clumsy person, and that makes it much more comforting for them to use, to blend in. 
So, well, one problem solved, many more to go. 
All this while, I was interviewing him, questioning him, and then I realized that I was getting very superficial information, or just answers to my questions. 
But I really needed to dig deeper to get a new perspective. 
So I thought, well, let's observe him in his daily tasks, while he's eating, while he's watching TV. 
And then, when I was actually observing him walking to his dining table, it struck me, this man who finds it so difficult to walk on flat land, how does he climb a staircase? 
Because in India we do not have a fancy rail that takes you up a staircase like in the developed countries. 
One actually has to climb the stairs. 
So he told me, "Well, let me show you how I do it." 
Let's take a look at what I saw. 
So he took really long to reach this position, and then all this while, I'm thinking, "" Oh my God, is he really going to do it? 
Is he really, really going to do it without his walker? "" And then... 
(Laughter) And the turns, he took them so easily. 
So — shocked? 
Well, I was too. 
So this person who could not walk on flat land was suddenly a pro at climbing stairs. 
On researching this, I realized that it's because it's a continuous motion. 
There's this other man who also suffers from the same symptoms and uses a walker, but the moment he's put on a cycle, all his symptoms vanish, because it is a continuous motion. 
So the key for me was to translate this feeling of walking on a staircase back to flat land. 
And a lot of ideas were tested and tried on him, but the one that finally worked was this one. Let's take a look. 
(Laughter) (Applause) He walked faster, right? (Applause) 
I call this the staircase illusion, and actually when the staircase illusion abruptly ended, he froze, and this is called freezing of gait. 
So it happens a lot, so why not have a staircase illusion flowing through all their rooms, making them feel much more confident? 
You know, technology is not always it. 
What we need are human-centered solutions. 
I could have easily made it into a projection, or a Google Glass, or something like that. 
But I stuck to simple print on the floor. 
This print could be taken into hospitals to make them feel much more welcome. 
What I wish to do is make every Parkinson's patient feel like my uncle felt that day. 
He told me that I made him feel like his old self again. 
"" Smart "" in today's world has become synonymous to high tech, and the world is only getting smarter and smarter day by day. 
But why can't smart be something that's simple and yet effective? 
All we need is a little bit of empathy and some curiosity, to go out there, observe. 
But let's not stop at that. 
Let's find these complex problems. Don't be scared of them. 
Break them, boil them down into much smaller problems, and then find simple solutions for them. 
Test these solutions, fail if needed, but with newer insights to make it better. 
Imagine what we all could do if we all came up with simple solutions. 
What would the world be like if we combined all our simple solutions? 
Let's make a smarter world, but with simplicity. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we're always doing something. 
So with that in mind, I'd like you just to take a moment to think, when did you last take any time to do nothing? 
Not even sitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future. 
The mind, our most valuable and precious resource, through which we experience every single moment of our life. 
This is the same mind that we depend upon to be focused, creative, spontaneous, and to perform at our very best in everything that we do. 
We miss out on the things that are most important to us, and the crazy thing is that everybody just assumes, that's the way life is, so we've just kind of got to get on with it. 
So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class. 
And trust me, it had all the stereotypes that you can imagine, the sitting cross-legged on the floor, the incense, the herbal tea, the vegetarians, the whole deal, but my mom was going and I was intrigued, so I went along with her. 
I'd also seen a few kung fu movies, and secretly I kind of thought I might be able to learn how to fly, but I was very young at the time. 
Now as I was there, I guess, like a lot of people, I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind. 
You get stressed, you do some meditation. 
I hadn't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature, until I was about 20, when a number of things happened in my life in quite quick succession, really serious things which just flipped my life upside down and all of a sudden I was inundated with thoughts, inundated with difficult emotions that I didn't know how to cope with. 
Every time I sort of pushed one down, another one would pop back up again. 
Others will turn to their friends, their family, looking for support. 
People often ask me what I learned from that time. 
Well, obviously it changed things. 
It taught me — it gave me a greater appreciation, an understanding for the present moment. 
By that I mean not being lost in thought, not being distracted, not being overwhelmed by difficult emotions, but instead learning how to be in the here and now, how to be mindful, how to be present. 
It sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary. 
There was a research paper that came out of Harvard, just recently, that said on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time. 
Now we're not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, I don't know, it just kind of seems tragic, actually, especially when there's something we can do about it, when there's a positive, practical, achievable, scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be more mindful and less distracted. 
And the beauty of it is that even though it need only take about 10 minutes a day, it impacts our entire life. 
We need an exercise. 
And that's what these are for, in case you've been wondering, because most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it's quite different from that. 
It's more about stepping back, sort of seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and going without judgment, but with a relaxed, focused mind. 
It's a very uncomfortable way to live life, when you get this tight and stressed. 
So we're looking for a balance, a focused relaxation where we can allow thoughts to come and go without all the usual involvement. 
I really am worried. Wow, there's so much anxiety. "" And before we know it, right, we're anxious about feeling anxious. 
If you think about the last time you had a wobbly tooth. 
You know it's wobbly, and you know that it hurts. 
But what do you do every 20, 30 seconds? 
Don't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to do nothing and your mind feels like that. 
You might find a mind that's very dull and boring, and it's just, almost mechanical, it just seems it's as if you're getting up, going to work, eat, sleep, get up, work. 
Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round your mind. 
Well, whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear. 
We can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. 
All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life. 

(Applause) Thank you. 
(Music) ♫ Slide into the shimmering surface ♫ ♫ between two worlds. ♫ ♫ Standing at the center of time ♫ ♫ as it uncurls. ♫ ♫ Cutting through the veil of illusion. ♫ ♫ Moving beyond past conclusions. ♫ ♫ Wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere right now, ♫ ♫ I would want to be here. ♫ ♫ Searching for the future ♫ ♫ among the things we're throwing away. ♫ ♫ Trying to see the world ♫ 
♫ through the junk we produce everyday. ♫ ♫ They say nothing lasts forever, ♫ ♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here. ♫ ♫ And no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in history, ♫ ♫ I would want to be here. ♫ ♫ The Romans, the Spanish ♫ ♫ the British, the Dutch, ♫ ♫ American exceptionalism, so out of touch. ♫ ♫ The folly of empire repeating its course, ♫ 
♫ imposing its will ♫ ♫ and ruling by force ♫ ♫ on and on through time. ♫ ♫ But the world can't take it very much longer. ♫ ♫ We're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we're smarter and stronger. ♫ ♫ The world is going to shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in time, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere and change things, ♫ ♫ it would have to be now. ♫ ♫ They say nothing last forever, ♫ 
♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here. ♫ ♫ And no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear. ♫ ♫ And the world can't take it ♫ ♫ very much longer. ♫ ♫ We're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we're smarter and stronger. ♫ ♫ The world's gonna shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ And the world can't take it, that you can see. ♫ ♫ If the oceans don't make it, neither will we. ♫ ♫ The world's gonna shake itself all the way free ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ 
♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in time, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere and change the outcome, ♫ ♫ it would have to be now. ♫ (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

My first love was for the night sky. 
Love is complicated. 
You're looking at a fly-through of the Hubble Space Telescope Ultra-Deep Field, one of the most distant images of our universe ever observed. 
Everything you see here is a galaxy, comprised of billions of stars each. 
And the farthest galaxy is a trillion, trillion kilometers away. 
As an astrophysicist, I have the awesome privilege of studying some of the most exotic objects in our universe. 
The objects that have captivated me from first crush throughout my career are supermassive, hyperactive black holes. 
Weighing one to 10 billion times the mass of our own sun, these galactic black holes are devouring material, at a rate of upwards of 1,000 times more than your "" average "" supermassive black hole. 
(Laughter) These two characteristics, with a few others, make them quasars. 
At the same time, the objects I study are producing some of the most powerful particle streams ever observed. 
These narrow streams, called jets, are moving at 99.99 percent of the speed of light, and are pointed directly at the Earth. 
These jetted, Earth-pointed, hyperactive and supermassive black holes are called blazars, or blazing quasars. 
What makes blazars so special is that they're some of the universe's most efficient particle accelerators, transporting incredible amounts of energy throughout a galaxy. 
Here, I'm showing an artist's conception of a blazar. 
The dinner plate by which material falls onto the black hole is called the accretion disc, shown here in blue. 
Some of that material is slingshotted around the black hole and accelerated to insanely high speeds in the jet, shown here in white. 
Although the blazar system is rare, the process by which nature pulls in material via a disk, and then flings some of it out via a jet, is more common. 
We'll eventually zoom out of the blazar system to show its approximate relationship to the larger galactic context. 
Beyond the cosmic accounting of what goes in to what goes out, one of the hot topics in blazar astrophysics right now is where the highest-energy jet emission comes from. 
In this image, I'm interested in where this white blob forms and if, as a result, there's any relationship between the jet and the accretion disc material. 
Clear answers to this question were almost completely inaccessible until 2008, when NASA launched a new telescope that better detects gamma ray light — that is, light with energies a million times higher than your standard x-ray scan. 
I simultaneously compare variations between the gamma ray light data and the visible light data from day to day and year to year, to better localize these gamma ray blobs. 
My research shows that in some instances, these blobs form much closer to the black hole than we initially thought. 
As we more confidently localize where these gamma ray blobs are forming, we can better understand how jets are being accelerated, and ultimately reveal the dynamic processes by which some of the most fascinating objects in our universe are formed. 
This all started as a love story. 
And it still is. 
This love transformed me from a curious, stargazing young girl to a professional astrophysicist, hot on the heels of celestial discovery. 
Who knew that chasing after the universe would ground me so deeply to my mission here on Earth. 
Then again, when do we ever know where love's first flutter will truly take us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So a while ago, I tried an experiment. 
For one year, I would say yes to all the things that scared me. 
Anything that made me nervous, took me out of my comfort zone, I forced myself to say yes to. 
Did I want to speak in public? 
No, but yes. 
Did I want to be on live TV? 
No, but yes. 
Did I want to try acting? 
No, no, no, but yes, yes, yes. 
And a crazy thing happened: the very act of doing the thing that scared me undid the fear, made it not scary. 
My fear of public speaking, my social anxiety, poof, gone. 
It's amazing, the power of one word. 
"" Yes "" changed my life. 
"" Yes "" changed me. 
But there was one particular yes that affected my life in the most profound way, in a way I never imagined, and it started with a question from my toddler. 
I have these three amazing daughters, Harper, Beckett and Emerson, and Emerson is a toddler who inexplicably refers to everyone as "" honey. "" as though she's a Southern waitress. 
(Laughter) "Honey, I'm gonna need some milk for my sippy cup." (Laughter) 
The Southern waitress asked me to play with her one evening when I was on my way somewhere, and I said, "" Yes. "" And that yes was the beginning of a new way of life for my family. 
I made a vow that from now on, every time one of my children asks me to play, no matter what I'm doing or where I'm going, I say yes, every single time. 
Almost. I'm not perfect at it, but I try hard to practice it. 
And it's had a magical effect on me, on my children, on our family. 
But it's also had a stunning side effect, and it wasn't until recently that I fully understood it, that I understood that saying yes to playing with my children likely saved my career. 
See, I have what most people would call a dream job. 
I'm a writer. I imagine. I make stuff up for a living. 
Dream job. 
No. 
I'm a titan. 
Dream job. 
I create television. I executive produce television. 
I make television, a great deal of television. 
In one way or another, this TV season, I'm responsible for bringing about 70 hours of programming to the world. 
Four television programs, 70 hours of TV — (Applause) Three shows in production at a time, sometimes four. 
Each show creates hundreds of jobs that didn't exist before. 
The budget for one episode of network television can be anywhere from three to six million dollars. 
Let's just say five. 
A new episode made every nine days times four shows, so every nine days that's 20 million dollars worth of television, four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four, 16 episodes going on at all times: 24 episodes of "" Grey's, "" 21 episodes of "" Scandal, "" 15 episodes of "" How To Get Away With Murder, "" 10 episodes of "" The Catch, "" that's 70 hours of TV, that's 350 million dollars for a season. 
In America, my television shows are back to back to back on Thursday night. 
Around the world, my shows air in 256 territories in 67 languages for an audience of 30 million people. 
My brain is global, and 45 hours of that 70 hours of TV are shows I personally created and not just produced, so on top of everything else, I need to find time, real quiet, creative time, to gather my fans around the campfire and tell my stories. 
Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four, 350 million dollars, campfires burning all over the world. 
You know who else is doing that? 
Nobody, so like I said, I'm a titan. 
Dream job. 
(Applause) Now, I don't tell you this to impress you. 
I tell you this because I know what you think of when you hear the word "" writer. "" I tell you this so that all of you out there who work so hard, whether you run a company or a country or a classroom or a store or a home, take me seriously when I talk about working, so you'll get that I don't peck at a computer and imagine all day, so you'll hear me when I say that I understand that a dream job is not about dreaming. 
It's all job, all work, all reality, all blood, all sweat, no tears. 
I work a lot, very hard, and I love it. 
When I'm hard at work, when I'm deep in it, there is no other feeling. 
For me, my work is at all times building a nation out of thin air. 
It is manning the troops. It is painting a canvas. 
It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon. 
It is being Beyoncé. 
And it is all of those things at the same time. 
I love working. 
It is creative and mechanical and exhausting and exhilarating and hilarious and disturbing and clinical and maternal and cruel and judicious, and what makes it all so good is the hum. 
There is some kind of shift inside me when the work gets good. 
A hum begins in my brain, and it grows and it grows and that hum sounds like the open road, and I could drive it forever. 
And a lot of people, when I try to explain the hum, they assume that I'm talking about the writing, that my writing brings me joy. 
And don't get me wrong, it does. 
But the hum — it wasn't until I started making television that I started working, working and making and building and creating and collaborating, that I discovered this thing, this buzz, this rush, this hum. 
The hum is more than writing. 
The hum is action and activity. The hum is a drug. 
The hum is music. The hum is light and air. 
The hum is God's whisper right in my ear. 
And when you have a hum like that, you can't help but strive for greatness. 
That feeling, you can't help but strive for greatness at any cost. 
That's called the hum. 
Or, maybe it's called being a workaholic. 
(Laughter) Maybe it's called genius. 
Maybe it's called ego. 
Maybe it's just fear of failure. 
I don't know. 
I just know that I'm not built for failure, and I just know that I love the hum. 
I just know that I want to tell you I'm a titan, and I know that I don't want to question it. 
But here's the thing: the more successful I become, the more shows, the more episodes, the more barriers broken, the more work there is to do, the more balls in the air, the more eyes on me, the more history stares, the more expectations there are. 
The more I work to be successful, the more I need to work. 
And what did I say about work? 
I love working, right? 
The nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the hum. 
I like that hum. I love that hum. 
I need that hum. I am that hum. 
Am I nothing but that hum? 
And then the hum stopped. 
Overworked, overused, overdone, burned out. 
The hum stopped. 
Now, my three daughters are used to the truth that their mother is a single working titan. 
Harper tells people, "My mom won't be there, but you can text my nanny." 
And Emerson says, "" Honey, I'm wanting to go to ShondaLand. "" They're children of a titan. 
They're baby titans. 
They were 12, 3, and 1 when the hum stopped. 
The hum of the engine died. 
I stopped loving work. I couldn't restart the engine. 
The hum would not come back. 
My hum was broken. 
I was doing the same things I always did, all the same titan work, 15-hour days, working straight through the weekends, no regrets, never surrender, a titan never sleeps, a titan never quits, full hearts, clear eyes, yada, whatever. 
But there was no hum. 
Inside me was silence. 
Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four. 
Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time... 
I was the perfect titan. 
I was a titan you could take home to your mother. 
All the colors were the same, and I was no longer having any fun. 
And it was my life. 
It was all I did. 
I was the hum, and the hum was me. 
So what do you do when the thing you do, the work you love, starts to taste like dust? 
Now, I know somebody's out there thinking, "Cry me a river, stupid writer titan lady." 
(Laughter) But you know, you do, if you make, if you work, if you love what you do, being a teacher, being a banker, being a mother, being a painter, being Bill Gates, if you simply love another person and that gives you the hum, if you know the hum, if you know what the hum feels like, if you have been to the hum, when the hum stops, who are you? 
What are you? 
What am I? 
Am I still a titan? 
If the song of my heart ceases to play, can I survive in the silence? 
And then my Southern waitress toddler asks me a question. 
I'm on my way out the door, I'm late, and she says, "Momma, wanna play?" 
And I'm just about to say no, when I realize two things. 
One, I'm supposed to say yes to everything, and two, my Southern waitress didn't call me "" honey. "" She's not calling everyone "" honey "" anymore. 
When did that happen? 
I'm missing it, being a titan and mourning my hum, and here she is changing right before my eyes. 
And so she says, "" Momma, wanna play? "" And I say, "" Yes. "" There's nothing special about it. 
We play, and we're joined by her sisters, and there's a lot of laughing, and I give a dramatic reading from the book Everybody Poops. 
Nothing out of the ordinary. 
(Laughter) And yet, it is extraordinary, because in my pain and my panic, in the homelessness of my humlessness, I have nothing to do but pay attention. 
I focus. 
I am still. 
The nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note does not exist. 
All that exists are sticky fingers and gooey kisses and tiny voices and crayons and that song about letting go of whatever it is that Frozen girl needs to let go of. 
(Laughter) It's all peace and simplicity. 
The air is so rare in this place for me that I can barely breathe. 
I can barely believe I'm breathing. 
Play is the opposite of work. 
And I am happy. 
Something in me loosens. 
A door in my brain swings open, and a rush of energy comes. 
And it's not instantaneous, but it happens, it does happen. 
I feel it. 
A hum creeps back. 
Not at full volume, barely there, it's quiet, and I have to stay very still to hear it, but it is there. 
Not the hum, but a hum. 
And now I feel like I know a very magical secret. 
Well, let's not get carried away. 
It's just love. That's all it is. 
No magic. No secret. It's just love. 
It's just something we forgot. 
The hum, the work hum, the hum of the titan, that's just a replacement. 
If I have to ask you who I am, if I have to tell you who I am, if I describe myself in terms of shows and hours of television and how globally badass my brain is, I have forgotten what the real hum is. 
The hum is not power and the hum is not work-specific. 
The hum is joy-specific. 
The real hum is love-specific. 
The hum is the electricity that comes from being excited by life. 
The real hum is confidence and peace. 
The real hum ignores the stare of history, and the balls in the air, and the expectation, and the pressure. 
The real hum is singular and original. 
The real hum is God's whisper in my ear, but maybe God was whispering the wrong words, because which one of the gods was telling me I was the titan? 
It's just love. 
We could all use a little more love, a lot more love. 
Any time my child asks me to play, I will say yes. 
I make it a firm rule for one reason, to give myself permission, to free me from all of my workaholic guilt. 
It's a law, so I don't have a choice, and I don't have a choice, not if I want to feel the hum. 
I wish it were that easy, but I'm not good at playing. 
I don't like it. 
I'm not interested in doing it the way I'm interested in doing work. 
The truth is incredibly humbling and humiliating to face. 
I don't like playing. 
I work all the time because I like working. 
I like working more than I like being at home. 
Facing that fact is incredibly difficult to handle, because what kind of person likes working more than being at home? 
Well, me. 
I mean, let's be honest, I call myself a titan. 
I've got issues. 
(Laughter) And one of those issues isn't that I am too relaxed. (Laughter) 
We run around the yard, up and back and up and back. 
We have 30-second dance parties. 
We sing show tunes. We play with balls. 
I blow bubbles and they pop them. 
And I feel stiff and delirious and confused most of the time. 
I itch for my cell phone always. 
But it is OK. 
My tiny humans show me how to live and the hum of the universe fills me up. 
I play and I play until I begin to wonder why we ever stop playing in the first place. 
You can do it too, say yes every time your child asks you to play. 
Are you thinking that maybe I'm an idiot in diamond shoes? 
You're right, but you can still do this. 
You have time. 
You know why? Because you're not Rihanna and you're not a Muppet. 
Your child does not think you're that interesting. 
(Laughter) You only need 15 minutes. 
My two- and four-year-old only ever want to play with me for about 15 minutes or so before they think to themselves they want to do something else. 
It's an amazing 15 minutes, but it's 15 minutes. 
If I'm not a ladybug or a piece of candy, I'm invisible after 15 minutes. 
(Laughter) And my 13-year-old, if I can get a 13-year-old to talk to me for 15 minutes I'm Parent of the Year. (Laughter) 
15 minutes is all you need. 
I can totally pull off 15 minutes of uninterrupted time on my worst day. 
Uninterrupted is the key. 
No cell phone, no laundry, no anything. 
You have a busy life. You have to get dinner on the table. 
You have to force them to bathe. But you can do 15 minutes. 
My kids are my happy place, they're my world, but it doesn't have to be your kids, the fuel that feeds your hum, the place where life feels more good than not good. 
It's not about playing with your kids, it's about joy. 
It's about playing in general. 
Give yourself the 15 minutes. 
Find what makes you feel good. 
Just figure it out and play in that arena. 
I'm not perfect at it. In fact, I fail as often as I succeed, seeing friends, reading books, staring into space. 
"" Wanna play? "" starts to become shorthand for indulging myself in ways I'd given up on right around the time I got my first TV show, right around the time I became a titan-in-training, right around the time I started competing with myself for ways unknown. 
15 minutes? What could be wrong with giving myself my full attention for 15 minutes? 
Turns out, nothing. 
The very act of not working has made it possible for the hum to return, as if the hum's engine could only refuel while I was away. 
Work doesn't work without play. 
It takes a little time, but after a few months, one day the floodgates open and there's a rush, and I find myself standing in my office filled with an unfamiliar melody, full on groove inside me, and around me, and it sends me spinning with ideas, and the humming road is open, and I can drive it and drive it, and I love working again. 
But now, I like that hum, but I don't love that hum. 
I don't need that hum. 
I am not that hum. That hum is not me, not anymore. 
I am bubbles and sticky fingers and dinners with friends. 
I am that hum. 
Life's hum. 
Love's hum. 
Work's hum is still a piece of me, it is just no longer all of me, and I am so grateful. 
And I don't give a crap about being a titan, because I have never once seen a titan play Red Rover, Red Rover. 
I said yes to less work and more play, and somehow I still run my world. 
My brain is still global. My campfires still burn. 
The more I play, the happier I am, and the happier my kids are. 
The more I play, the more I feel like a good mother. 
The more I play, the freer my mind becomes. 
The more I play, the better I work. 
The more I play, the more I feel the hum, the nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the other hum, the real hum, life's hum. 
The more I feel that hum, the more this strange, quivering, uncocooned, awkward, brand new, alive non-titan feels like me. 
The more I feel that hum, the more I know who I am. 
I'm a writer, I make stuff up, I imagine. 
That part of the job, that's living the dream. 
That's the dream of the job. 
Because a dream job should be a little bit dreamy. 
I said yes to less work and more play. 
Titans need not apply. 
Wanna play? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. 
I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. 
I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. 
It was all very normal. 
And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to nominate me for a community achievement award. 
And my parents said, "" Hm, that's really nice, but there's kind of one glaring problem with that. 
She hasn't actually achieved anything. "" (Laughter) And they were right, you know. 
I went to school, I got good marks, I had a very low-key after school job in my mum's hairdressing salon, and I spent a lot of time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek." 
Yeah, I know. What a contradiction. 
But they were right, you know. 
I wasn't doing anything that was out of the ordinary at all. 
I wasn't doing anything that could be considered an achievement if you took disability out of the equation. 
Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, "Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?" 
And I said, "" What speech? "" You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes. 
And he said, "" You know, like, your motivational speaking. 
You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff? "" (Laughter) "It's usually in the big hall." 
And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration. 
We are not, to this kid — and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us. 
For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. 
We're not real people. We are there to inspire. 
And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? (Laughter) Yeah. 
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. 
I am not here to inspire you. 
I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. 
Yeah, we've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. 
It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. 
It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional. 
And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. 
You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." 
Or this one: "" Your excuse is invalid. "" Indeed. 
Or this one: "" Before you quit, try! "" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. 
You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. 
You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. 
And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. 
(Laughter) And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. 
So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. 
The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "" Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. 
I could be that person. "" But what if you are that person? 
I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. 
They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. (Laughter) And it is objectifying. 
These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. 
They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective. 
And life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult. 
We do overcome some things. 
But the things that we're overcoming are not the things that you think they are. 
They are not things to do with our bodies. 
I use the term "" disabled people "" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses. 
So I have lived in this body a long time. 
I'm quite fond of it. 
It does the things that I need it to do, and I've learned to use it to the best of its capacity just as you have, and that's the thing about those kids in those pictures as well. 
They're not doing anything out of the ordinary. 
They are just using their bodies to the best of their capacity. 
So is it really fair to objectify them in the way that we do, to share those images? 
People, when they say, "" You're an inspiration, "" they mean it as a compliment. 
And I know why it happens. 
It's because of the lie, it's because we've been sold this lie that disability makes you exceptional. 
And it honestly doesn't. 
And I know what you're thinking. 
You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration, and you're thinking, "" Jeez, Stella, aren't you inspired sometimes by some things? "" And the thing is, I am. 
I learn from other disabled people all the time. 
I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though. 
I am learning that it's a genius idea to use a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up things that you dropped. (Laughter) I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge your mobile phone battery from your chair battery. 
Genius. 
We are learning from each others' strength and endurance, not against our bodies and our diagnoses, but against a world that exceptionalizes and objectifies us. 
I really think that this lie that we've been sold about disability is the greatest injustice. 
It makes life hard for us. 
And that quote, "" The only disability in life is a bad attitude, "" the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. 
No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. 
Never. (Laughter) (Applause) Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. 
No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. 
It's just not going to happen. 
I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm. 
I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom watching "" Buffy the Vampire Slayer "" isn't referred to as achieving anything because she's doing it sitting down. I want to live in a world 
where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. 
I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people, and I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user. 
Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

How much do you need to know about a person before you'd feel comfortable making a loan? 
Suppose you wanted to lend 1,000 dollars to the person sitting two rows behind you. 
What would you need to know about that person before you'd feel comfortable? 
My mom came to the US from India in her late thirties. 
She's a doctor in Brooklyn, and she often lets friends and neighbors come to see her for health services, whether they can pay right away or not. 
I remember running into her patients with her at the grocery store or on the sidewalk, and sometimes they would come and pay her right on the spot for previous appointments. 
She would thank them, and ask them about their families and their health. 
She gave them credit because she trusted them. 
Most of us are like my mom. 
We would give credit to someone we know or that we live next to. 
But most of us are probably not going to lend to a stranger unless we know a little something about them. 
Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions don't know us on a personal level, but they do have a way of trusting us, and that's through our credit scores. 
Our credit scores have been created through an aggregation and analysis of our public consumer credit data. 
And because of them, we have pretty much easy access to all of the goods and services that we need, from getting electricity to buying a home, or taking a risk and starting a business. 
But... 
there are 2.5 billion people around the world that don't have a credit score. 
That's a third of the world's population. 
They don't have a score because there are no formal public records on them — no bank accounts, no credit histories and no social security numbers. 
And because they don't have a score, they don't have access to the credit or financial products that can improve their lives. 
They are not trusted. 
So we wanted to find a way to build trust and to open up financial access for these 2.5 billion. 
So we created a mobile application that builds credit scores for them using mobile data. 
There are currently over one billion smartphones in emerging markets. 
And people are using them the same way that we do. 
They're texting their friends, they're looking up directions, they're browsing the Internet and they're even making financial transactions. 
Over time, this data is getting captured on our phones, and it provides a really rich picture of a person's life. 
Our customers give us access to this data and we capture it through our mobile application. 
It helps us understand the creditworthiness of people like Jenipher, a small-business owner in Nairobi, Kenya. 
Jenipher is 65 years old, and for decades has been running a food stall in the central business district. 
She has three sons who she put through vocational school, and she's also the leader of her local chama, or savings group. 
Jenipher's food stall does well. 
She makes just enough every day to cover her expenses. 
But she's not financially secure. 
Any emergency could force her into debt. 
And she has no discretionary income to improve her family's way of living, for emergencies, or for investing into growing her business. 
If Jenipher wants credit, her options are limited. 
She could get a microloan, but she'd have to form a group that could help vouch for her credibility. 
And even then, the loan sizes would be way too small to really have an impact on her business, averaging around 150 dollars. 
Loan sharks are always an option, but with interest rates that are well above 300 percent, they're financially risky. 
And because Jenipher doesn't have collateral or a credit history, she can't walk into a bank and ask for a business loan. 
But one day, Jenipher's son convinced her to download our application and apply for a loan. 
Jenipher answered a few questions on her phone and she gave us access to a few key data points on her device. 
And here's what we saw. 
So, bad news first. 
Jenipher had a low savings balance and no previous loan history. 
These are factors that would have thrown up a red flag to a traditional bank. 
But there were other points in her history that showed us a much richer picture of her potential. 
So for one, we saw that she made regular phone calls to her family in Uganda. 
Well, it turns out that the data shows a four percent increase in repayment among people who consistently communicate with a few close contacts. 
We could also see that though she traveled around a lot throughout the day, she actually had pretty regular travel patterns, and she was either at home or at her food stall. 
And the data shows a six percent increase in repayment among customers who are consistent with where they spend most of their time. 
We could also see that she communicated a lot with many different people throughout the day and that she had a strong support network. 
Our data shows that people who communicate with more than 58 different contacts tend to be more likely to be good borrowers. 
In Jenipher's case, she communicated with 89 different individuals, which showed a nine percent increase in her repayment. 
These are just some of the thousands of different data points that we look at to understand a person's creditworthiness. 
And after analyzing all of these different data points, we took the first risk and gave Jenipher a loan. 
This is data that would not be found on a paper trail or in any formal financial record. 
But it proves trust. 
By looking beyond income, we can see that people in emerging markets that may seem risky and unpredictable on the surface are actually willing and have the capacity to repay. 
Our credit scores have helped us deliver over 200,000 loans in Kenya in just the past year. 
And our repayment rates are above 90 percent — which, by the way, is in line with traditional bank repayment rates. 
With something as simple as a credit score, we're giving people the power to build their own futures. 
Our customers have used their loans for family expenses, emergencies, travel and for investing back into growing their businesses. 
They're now building better economies and communities where more people can succeed. 
Over the past two years of using our product, Jenipher has increased her savings by 60 percent. 
She's also started two additional food stalls and is now making plans for her own restaurant. 
She's applying for a small-business loan from a commercial bank, because she now has the credit history to prove she deserves it. 
I saw Jenipher in Nairobi just last week, and she told me how excited she was to get started. 
She said, "Only my son believed I could do this. I didn't think this was for me." 
She's lived her whole life believing that there was a part of the world that was closed off to her. 
Our job now is to open the world to Jenipher and the billions like her that deserve to be trusted. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

♫ Where do we go from here? ♫ ♫ How do we carry on? ♫ ♫ I can't get beyond the questions ♫ ♫ Clambering for the scraps ♫ ♫ in the shatter of us, collapsed ♫ ♫ It cuts me with every could have been ♫ ♫ Pain on pain on play, repeating ♫ ♫ With the backup, makeshift life in waiting ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫ ♫ What of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ There is nothing to see here now ♫ 
♫ Turning the sign around ♫ ♫ We're closed to the Earth 'til further notice ♫ ♫ A crumbling cliche case ♫ ♫ crumpled and puffy faced ♫ ♫ caught dead in the stare of a thousand miles ♫ ♫ All I want, only one street level miracle ♫ ♫ I'll be an out and out born again ♫ ♫ from none more cynical ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ that time heals everything ♫ ♫ But what of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ And sit here cold? ♫ 
♫ We will be long gone by then ♫ ♫ In lackluster ♫ ♫ In dust we lay around old magazines ♫ ♫ Fluorescent lighting sets the scene ♫ ♫ for all we could and should be being ♫ ♫ in the one life that we've got ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫ ♫ And what of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ Just going to sweat it out? ♫ ♫ Just going to sweat it out? ♫ ♫ Wait it out ♫ 
(Applause) 

At 7: 45 a.m., I open the doors to a building dedicated to building, yet only breaks me down. 
I march down hallways cleaned up after me every day by regular janitors, but I never have the decency to honor their names. 
Lockers left open like teenage boys' mouths when teenage girls wear clothes that covers their insecurities but exposes everything else. 
Masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers, camouflage worn by bullies who are dangerously armed but need hugs. 
Teachers paid less than what it costs them to be here. 
Oceans of adolescents come here to receive lessons but never learn to swim, part like the Red Sea when the bell rings. 
This is a training ground. 
My high school is Chicago, diverse and segregated on purpose. 
Social lines are barbed wire. 
Labels like "" Regulars "" and "" Honors "" resonate. 
I am an Honors but go home with Regular students who are soldiers in territory that owns them. 
This is a training ground to sort out the Regulars from the Honors, a reoccurring cycle built to recycle the trash of this system. 
Trained at a young age to capitalize, letters taught now that capitalism raises you but you have to step on someone else to get there. 
This is a training ground where one group is taught to lead and the other is made to follow. 
No wonder so many of my people spit bars, because the truth is hard to swallow. 
The need for degrees has left so many people frozen. 
Homework is stressful, but when you go home every day and your home is work, you don't want to pick up any assignments. 
Reading textbooks is stressful, but reading does not matter when you feel your story is already written, either dead or getting booked. 
Taking tests is stressful, but bubbling in a Scantron does not stop bullets from bursting. 
I hear education systems are failing, but I believe they're succeeding at what they're built to do — to train you, to keep you on track, to track down an American dream that has failed so many of us all. 
(Applause) 

We've evolved with tools, and tools have evolved with us. 
Our ancestors created these hand axes 1.5 million years ago, shaping them to not only fit the task at hand but also their hand. 
However, over the years, tools have become more and more specialized. 
These sculpting tools have evolved through their use, and each one has a different form which matches its function. 
And they leverage the dexterity of our hands in order to manipulate things with much more precision. 
But as tools have become more and more complex, we need more complex controls to control them. 
And so designers have become very adept at creating interfaces that allow you to manipulate parameters while you're attending to other things, such as taking a photograph and changing the focus or the aperture. 
But the computer has fundamentally changed the way we think about tools because computation is dynamic. 
So it can do a million different things and run a million different applications. 
However, computers have the same static physical form for all of these different applications and the same static interface elements as well. 
And I believe that this is fundamentally a problem, because it doesn't really allow us to interact with our hands and capture the rich dexterity that we have in our bodies. 
And my belief is that, then, we must need new types of interfaces that can capture these rich abilities that we have and that can physically adapt to us and allow us to interact in new ways. 
And so that's what I've been doing at the MIT Media Lab and now at Stanford. 
So with my colleagues, Daniel Leithinger and Hiroshi Ishii, we created inFORM, where the interface can actually come off the screen and you can physically manipulate it. 
Or you can visualize 3D information physically and touch it and feel it to understand it in new ways. 
Or you can interact through gestures and direct deformations to sculpt digital clay. 
Or interface elements can arise out of the surface and change on demand. 
And the idea is that for each individual application, the physical form can be matched to the application. 
And I believe this represents a new way that we can interact with information, by making it physical. 
So the question is, how can we use this? 
Traditionally, urban planners and architects build physical models of cities and buildings to better understand them. 
So with Tony Tang at the Media Lab, we created an interface built on inFORM to allow urban planners to design and view entire cities. 
And now you can walk around it, but it's dynamic, it's physical, and you can also interact directly. 
Or you can look at different views, such as population or traffic information, but it's made physical. 
We also believe that these dynamic shape displays can really change the ways that we remotely collaborate with people. 
So when we're working together in person, I'm not only looking at your face but I'm also gesturing and manipulating objects, and that's really hard to do when you're using tools like Skype. 
And so using inFORM, you can reach out from the screen and manipulate things at a distance. 
So we used the pins of the display to represent people's hands, allowing them to actually touch and manipulate objects at a distance. 
And you can also manipulate and collaborate on 3D data sets as well, so you can gesture around them as well as manipulate them. 
And that allows people to collaborate on these new types of 3D information in a richer way than might be possible with traditional tools. 
And so you can also bring in existing objects, and those will be captured on one side and transmitted to the other. 
Or you can have an object that's linked between two places, so as I move a ball on one side, the ball moves on the other as well. 
And so we do this by capturing the remote user using a depth-sensing camera like a Microsoft Kinect. 
Now, you might be wondering how does this all work, and essentially, what it is, is 900 linear actuators that are connected to these mechanical linkages that allow motion down here to be propagated in these pins above. 
So it's not that complex compared to what's going on at CERN, but it did take a long time for us to build it. 
And so we started with a single motor, a single linear actuator, and then we had to design a custom circuit board to control them. 
And then we had to make a lot of them. 
And so the problem with having 900 of something is that you have to do every step 900 times. 
And so that meant that we had a lot of work to do. 
So we sort of set up a mini-sweatshop in the Media Lab and brought undergrads in and convinced them to do "" research "" — (Laughter) and had late nights watching movies, eating pizza and screwing in thousands of screws. 
You know — research. 
(Laughter) But anyway, I think that we were really excited by the things that inFORM allowed us to do. 
Increasingly, we're using mobile devices, and we interact on the go. 
But mobile devices, just like computers, are used for so many different applications. 
So you use them to talk on the phone, to surf the web, to play games, to take pictures or even a million different things. 
But again, they have the same static physical form for each of these applications. 
And so we wanted to know how can we take some of the same interactions that we developed for inFORM and bring them to mobile devices. 
So at Stanford, we created this haptic edge display, which is a mobile device with an array of linear actuators that can change shape, so you can feel in your hand where you are as you're reading a book. 
Or you can feel in your pocket new types of tactile sensations that are richer than the vibration. 
Or buttons can emerge from the side that allow you to interact where you want them to be. 
Or you can play games and have actual buttons. 
And so we were able to do this by embedding 40 small, tiny linear actuators inside the device, and that allow you not only to touch them but also back-drive them as well. 
But we've also looked at other ways to create more complex shape change. 
So we've used pneumatic actuation to create a morphing device where you can go from something that looks a lot like a phone... 
to a wristband on the go. 
And so together with Ken Nakagaki at the Media Lab, we created this new high-resolution version that uses an array of servomotors to change from interactive wristband to a touch-input device to a phone. 
(Laughter) And we're also interested in looking at ways that users can actually deform the interfaces to shape them into the devices that they want to use. 
So you can make something like a game controller, and then the system will understand what shape it's in and change to that mode. 
So, where does this point? 
How do we move forward from here? 
I think, really, where we are today is in this new age of the Internet of Things, where we have computers everywhere — they're in our pockets, they're in our walls, they're in almost every device that you'll buy in the next five years. 
But what if we stopped thinking about devices and think instead about environments? 
And so how can we have smart furniture or smart rooms or smart environments or cities that can adapt to us physically, and allow us to do new ways of collaborating with people and doing new types of tasks? 
So for the Milan Design Week, we created TRANSFORM, which is an interactive table-scale version of these shape displays, which can move physical objects on the surface; for example, reminding you to take your keys. 
But it can also transform to fit different ways of interacting. 
So if you want to work, then it can change to sort of set up your work system. 
And so as you bring a device over, it creates all the affordances you need and brings other objects to help you accomplish those goals. 
So, in conclusion, I really think that we need to think about a new, fundamentally different way of interacting with computers. 
We need computers that can physically adapt to us and adapt to the ways that we want to use them and really harness the rich dexterity that we have of our hands, and our ability to think spatially about information by making it physical. 
But looking forward, I think we need to go beyond this, beyond devices, to really think about new ways that we can bring people together, and bring our information into the world, and think about smart environments that can adapt to us physically. 
So with that, I will leave you. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

(Music) (Applause) Thank you. 
Imagining a solo cello concert, one would most likely think of Johann Sebastian Bach unaccompanied cello suites. 
As a child studying these eternal masterpieces, Bach's music would intermingle with the singing voices of Muslim prayers from the neighboring Arab village of the northern Kibbutz in Israel where I grew up. 
Late at night, after hours of practicing, I would listen to Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday as the sounds of tango music would be creeping from my parents' stereo. 
It all became music to me. 
I didn't hear the boundaries. 
I still start every day practicing playing Bach. 
His music never ceases to sound fresh and surprising to me. 
But as I was moving away from the traditional classical repertoire and trying to find new ways of musical expression, I realized that with today's technological resources, there's no reason to limit what can be produced at one time from a single string instrument. 
The power and coherency that comes from one person hearing, perceiving and playing all the voices makes a very different experience. 
The excitement of a great orchestra performance comes from the attempt to have a collective of musicians producing one unified whole concept. 
The excitement from using multi-tracking, the way I did in the piece you will hear next, comes from the attempt to build and create a whole universe with many diverse layers, all generated from a single source. 
My cello and my voice are layered to create this large sonic canvas. 
When composers write music for me, I ask them to forget what they know about the cello. 
I hope to arrive at new territories to discover sounds I have never heard before. 
I want to create endless possibilities with this cello. 
I become the medium through which the music is being channeled, and in the process, when all is right, the music is transformed and so am I. 
(Music) (Applause) 

If you're at all like me, this is what you do with the sunny summer weekends in San Francisco: you build experimental kite-powered hydrofoils capable of more than 30 knots. 
And you realize that there is incredible power in the wind, and it can do amazing things. 
And one day, a vessel not unlike this will probably break the world speed record. 
But kites aren't just toys like this. 
Kites: I'm going to give you a brief history, and tell you about the magnificent future of every child's favorite plaything. 
So, kites are more than a thousand years old, and the Chinese used them for military applications, and even for lifting men. 
So they knew at that stage they could carry large weights. 
I'm not sure why there is a hole in this particular man. 
(Laughter) In 1827, a fellow called George Pocock actually pioneered the use of kites for towing buggies in races against horse carriages across the English countryside. 
Then of course, at the dawn of aviation, all of the great inventors of the time — like Hargreaves, like Langley, even Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, who was flying this kite — were doing so in the pursuit of aviation. 
Then these two fellows came along, and they were flying kites to develop the control systems that would ultimately enable powered human flight. 
So this is of course Orville and Wilbur Wright, and the Wright Flyer. 
And their experiments with kites led to this momentous occasion, where we powered up and took off for the first-ever 12-second human flight. 
And that was fantastic for the future of commercial aviation. 
But unfortunately, it relegated kites once again to be considered children's toys. 
That was until the 1970s, where we had the last energy crisis. 
And a fabulous man called Miles Loyd who lives on the outskirts of San Francisco, wrote this seminal paper that was completely ignored in the Journal of Energy about how to use basically an airplane on a piece of string to generate enormous amounts of electricity. 
The real key observation he made is that a free-flying wing can sweep through more sky and generate more power in a unit of time than a fixed-wing turbine. 
So turbines grew. And they can now span up to three hundred feet at the hub height, but they can't really go a lot higher, and more height is where the more wind is, and more power — as much as twice as much. 
So cut to now. We still have an energy crisis, and now we have a climate crisis as well. You know, so humans generate about 12 trillion watts, or 12 terawatts, from fossil fuels. 
And Al Gore has spoken to why we need to hit one of these targets, and in reality what that means is in the next 30 to 40 years, we have to make 10 trillion watts or more of new clean energy somehow. 
Wind is the second-largest renewable resource after solar: 3600 terawatts, more than enough to supply humanity 200 times over. 
The majority of it is in the higher altitudes, above 300 feet, where we don't have a technology as yet to get there. 
So this is the dawn of the new age of kites. 
This is our test site on Maui, flying across the sky. 
I'm now going to show you the first autonomous generation of power by every child's favorite plaything. 
As you can tell, you need to be a robot to fly this thing for thousands of hours. 
It makes you a little nauseous. 
And here we're actually generating about 10 kilowatts — so, enough to power probably five United States households — with a kite not much larger than this piano. 
And the real significant thing here is we're developing the control systems, as did the Wright brothers, that would enable sustained, long-duration flight. 
And it doesn't hurt to do it in a location like this either. 
So this is the equivalent for a kite flier of peeing in the snow — that's tracing your name in the sky. 
And this is where we're actually going. 
So we're beyond the 12-second steps. 
And we're working towards megawatt-scale machines that fly at 2000 feet and generate tons of clean electricity. 
So you ask, how big are those machines? 
Well, this paper plane would be maybe a — oop! 
That would be enough to power your cell phone. 
Your Cessna would be 230 killowatts. 
If you'd loan me your Gulfstream, I'll rip its wings off and generate you a megawatt. 
If you give me a 747, I'll make six megawatts, which is more than the largest wind turbines today. 
And the Spruce Goose would be a 15-megawatt wing. 
So that is audacious, you say. I agree. 
But audacious is what has happened many times before in history. 
This is a refrigerator factory, churning out airplanes for World War II. 
Prior to World War II, they were making 1000 planes a year. 
By 1945, they were making 100,000. 
With this factory and 100,000 planes a year, we could make all of America's electricity in about 10 years. 
So really this is a story about the audacious plans of young people with these dreams. There are many of us. 
I am lucky enough to work with 30 of them. 
And I think we need to support all of the dreams of the kids out there doing these crazy things. 
Thank you. 

I'm Jessi, and this is my suitcase. 
But before I show you what I've got inside, I'm going to make a very public confession, and that is, I'm outfit-obsessed. 
I love finding, wearing, and more recently, photographing and blogging a different, colorful, crazy outfit for every single occasion. 
But I don't buy anything new. 
I get all my clothes secondhand from flea markets and thrift stores. 
Aww, thank you. 
Secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet. 
I get to meet all kinds of great people; my dollars usually go to a good cause; I look pretty unique; and it makes shopping like my own personal treasure hunt. 
I mean, what am I going to find today? 
Is it going to be my size? 
Will I like the color? 
Will it be under $20? 
If all the answers are yes, I feel as though I've won. 
I want to get back to my suitcase and tell you what I packed for this exciting week here at TED. 
I mean, what does somebody with all these outfits bring with her? 
I brought seven pairs of underpants and that's it. 
Exactly one week's worth of undies is all I put in my suitcase. 
I was betting that I'd be able to find everything else I could possible want to wear once I got here to Palm Springs. 
And since you don't know me as the woman walking around TED in her underwear — (Laughter) that means I found a few things. 
And I'd really love to show you my week's worth of outfits right now. 
Does that sound good? 
(Applause) So as I do this, I'm also going to tell you a few of the life lessons that, believe it or not, I have picked up in these adventures wearing nothing new. 
So let's start with Sunday. 
I call this "" Shiny Tiger. "" You do not have to spend a lot of money to look great. 
This whole outfit, including the jacket, cost me $55, and it was the most expensive thing that I wore the entire week. 
Monday: Color is powerful. 
It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants. 
(Laughter) If you are happy, you are going to attract other happy people to you. 
Tuesday: Fitting in is way overrated. 
I've spent a whole lot of my life trying to be myself and at the same time fit in. 
Just be who you are. 
If you are surrounding yourself with the right people, they will not only get it, they will appreciate it. 
Wednesday: Embrace your inner child. 
Sometimes people tell me that I look like I'm playing dress-up, or that I remind them of their seven-year-old. 
I like to smile and say, "" Thank you. "" Thursday: Confidence is key. 
If you think you look good in something, you almost certainly do. 
And if you don't think you look good in something, you're also probably right. 
I grew up with a mom who taught me this day-in and day-out. 
But it wasn't until I turned 30 that I really got what this meant. 
And I'm going to break it down for you for just a second. 
If you believe you're a beautiful person inside and out, there is no look that you can't pull off. 
We should be able to rock anything we want to rock. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Friday: A universal truth — five words for you: Gold sequins go with everything. 
And finally, Saturday: Developing your own unique personal style is a really great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word. 
It's been proven to me time and time again as people have walked up to me this week simply because of what I'm wearing, and we've had great conversations. 
So obviously this is not all going to fit back in my tiny suitcase. 
So before I go home to Brooklyn, I'm going to donate everything back. 
Because the lesson I'm trying to learn myself this week is that it's okay to let go. 
I don't need to get emotionally attached to these things because around the corner, there is always going to be another crazy, colorful, shiny outfit just waiting for me, if I put a little love in my heart and look. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) 

18 minutes is an absolutely brutal time limit, so I'm going to dive straight in, right at the point where I get this thing to work. 
Here we go. I'm going to talk about five different things. 
I'm going to talk about why defeating aging is desirable. 
I'm going to talk about why we have to get our shit together, and actually talk about this a bit more than we do. 
I'm going to talk about feasibility as well, of course. 
I'm going to talk about why we are so fatalistic about doing anything about aging. 
And then I'm going spend perhaps the second half of the talk talking about, you know, how we might actually be able to prove that fatalism is wrong, namely, by actually doing something about it. 
I'm going to do that in two steps. 
The first one I'm going to talk about is how to get from a relatively modest amount of life extension — which I'm going to define as 30 years, applied to people who are already in middle-age when you start — to a point which can genuinely be called defeating aging. 
Namely, essentially an elimination of the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year — or indeed, to get sick in the first place. 
And of course, the last thing I'm going to talk about is how to reach that intermediate step, that point of maybe 30 years life extension. 
So I'm going to start with why we should. 
Now, I want to ask a question. 
Hands up: anyone in the audience who is in favor of malaria? 
That was easy. OK. 
OK. Hands up: anyone in the audience who's not sure whether malaria is a good thing or a bad thing? 
OK. So we all think malaria is a bad thing. 
That's very good news, because I thought that was what the answer would be. 
Now the thing is, I would like to put it to you that the main reason why we think that malaria is a bad thing is because of a characteristic of malaria that it shares with aging. 
And here is that characteristic. 
The only real difference is that aging kills considerably more people than malaria does. 
Now, I like in an audience, in Britain especially, to talk about the comparison with foxhunting, which is something that was banned after a long struggle, by the government not very many months ago. 
I mean, I know I'm with a sympathetic audience here, but, as we know, a lot of people are not entirely persuaded by this logic. 
And this is actually a rather good comparison, it seems to me. 
You know, a lot of people said, "" Well, you know, city boys have no business telling us rural types what to do with our time. 
It's a traditional part of the way of life, and we should be allowed to carry on doing it. 
It's ecologically sound; it stops the population explosion of foxes. "" But ultimately, the government prevailed in the end, because the majority of the British public, and certainly the majority of members of Parliament, came to the conclusion that it was really something that should not be tolerated in a civilized society. 
And I think that human aging shares all of these characteristics in spades. 
What part of this do people not understand? 
It's not just about life, of course — (Laughter) — it's about healthy life, you know — getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun, whether or not dying may be fun. 
So really, this is how I would like to describe it. 
It's a global trance. 
These are the sorts of unbelievable excuses that people give for aging. 
And, I mean, OK, I'm not actually saying that these excuses are completely valueless. 
There are some good points to be made here, things that we ought to be thinking about, forward planning so that nothing goes too — well, so that we minimize the turbulence when we actually figure out how to fix aging. 
But these are completely crazy, when you actually remember your sense of proportion. 
You know, these are arguments; these are things that would be legitimate to be concerned about. 
But the question is, are they so dangerous — these risks of doing something about aging — that they outweigh the downside of doing the opposite, namely, leaving aging as it is? 
Are these so bad that they outweigh condemning 100,000 people a day to an unnecessarily early death? 
You know, if you haven't got an argument that's that strong, then just don't waste my time, is what I say. 
(Laughter) Now, there is one argument that some people do think really is that strong, and here it is. 
People worry about overpopulation; they say, "" Well, if we fix aging, no one's going to die to speak of, or at least the death toll is going to be much lower, only from crossing St. Giles carelessly. 
And therefore, we're not going to be able to have many kids, and kids are really important to most people. "" And that's true. 
And you know, a lot of people try to fudge this question, and give answers like this. 
I don't agree with those answers. I think they basically don't work. 
I think it's true, that we will face a dilemma in this respect. 
We will have to decide whether to have a low birth rate, or a high death rate. 
A high death rate will, of course, arise from simply rejecting these therapies, in favor of carrying on having a lot of kids. 
And, I say that that's fine — the future of humanity is entitled to make that choice. 
What's not fine is for us to make that choice on behalf of the future. 
If we vacillate, hesitate, and do not actually develop these therapies, then we are condemning a whole cohort of people — who would have been young enough and healthy enough to benefit from those therapies, but will not be, because we haven't developed them as quickly as we could — we'll be denying those people an indefinite life span, and I consider that that is immoral. 
That's my answer to the overpopulation question. 
Right. So the next thing is, now why should we get a little bit more active on this? 
And the fundamental answer is that the pro-aging trance is not as dumb as it looks. 
It's actually a sensible way of coping with the inevitability of aging. 
Aging is ghastly, but it's inevitable, so, you know, we've got to find some way to put it out of our minds, and it's rational to do anything that we might want to do, to do that. 
Like, for example, making up these ridiculous reasons why aging is actually a good thing after all. 
But of course, that only works when we have both of these components. 
And as soon as the inevitability bit becomes a little bit unclear — and we might be in range of doing something about aging — this becomes part of the problem. 
This pro-aging trance is what stops us from agitating about these things. 
And that's why we have to really talk about this a lot — evangelize, I will go so far as to say, quite a lot — in order to get people's attention, and make people realize that they are in a trance in this regard. 
So that's all I'm going to say about that. 
I'm now going to talk about feasibility. 
And the fundamental reason, I think, why we feel that aging is inevitable is summed up in a definition of aging that I'm giving here. 
A very simple definition. 
Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place, which is to say, metabolism. 
This is not a completely tautological statement; it's a reasonable statement. 
Aging is basically a process that happens to inanimate objects like cars, and it also happens to us, despite the fact that we have a lot of clever self-repair mechanisms, because those self-repair mechanisms are not perfect. 
So basically, metabolism, which is defined as basically everything that keeps us alive from one day to the next, has side effects. 
Those side effects accumulate and eventually cause pathology. 
That's a fine definition. So we can put it this way: we can say that, you know, we have this chain of events. 
And there are really two games in town, according to most people, with regard to postponing aging. 
They're what I'm calling here the "" gerontology approach "" and the "" geriatrics approach. "" The geriatrician will intervene late in the day, when pathology is becoming evident, and the geriatrician will try and hold back the sands of time, and stop the accumulation of side effects from causing the pathology quite so soon. 
Of course, it's a very short-term-ist strategy; it's a losing battle, because the things that are causing the pathology are becoming more abundant as time goes on. 
The gerontology approach looks much more promising on the surface, because, you know, prevention is better than cure. 
But unfortunately the thing is that we don't understand metabolism very well. 
In fact, we have a pitifully poor understanding of how organisms work — even cells we're not really too good on yet. 
We've discovered things like, for example, RNA interference only a few years ago, and this is a really fundamental component of how cells work. 
Basically, gerontology is a fine approach in the end, but it is not an approach whose time has come when we're talking about intervention. 
So then, what do we do about that? 
I mean, that's a fine logic, that sounds pretty convincing, pretty ironclad, doesn't it? 
But it isn't. 
Before I tell you why it isn't, I'm going to go a little bit into what I'm calling step two. 
Just suppose, as I said, that we do acquire — let's say we do it today for the sake of argument — the ability to confer 30 extra years of healthy life on people who are already in middle age, let's say 55. 
I'm going to call that "" robust human rejuvenation. "" OK. 
What would that actually mean for how long people of various ages today — or equivalently, of various ages at the time that these therapies arrive — would actually live? 
In order to answer that question — you might think it's simple, but it's not simple. 
We can't just say, "" Well, if they're young enough to benefit from these therapies, then they'll live 30 years longer. "" That's the wrong answer. 
And the reason it's the wrong answer is because of progress. 
There are two sorts of technological progress really, for this purpose. 
There are fundamental, major breakthroughs, and there are incremental refinements of those breakthroughs. 
Now, they differ a great deal in terms of the predictability of time frames. 
Fundamental breakthroughs: very hard to predict how long it's going to take to make a fundamental breakthrough. 
It was a very long time ago that we decided that flying would be fun, and it took us until 1903 to actually work out how to do it. 
But after that, things were pretty steady and pretty uniform. 
I think this is a reasonable sequence of events that happened in the progression of the technology of powered flight. 
We can think, really, that each one is sort of beyond the imagination of the inventor of the previous one, if you like. 
The incremental advances have added up to something which is not incremental anymore. 
This is the sort of thing you see after a fundamental breakthrough. 
And you see it in all sorts of technologies. 
Computers: you can look at a more or less parallel time line, happening of course a bit later. 
You can look at medical care. I mean, hygiene, vaccines, antibiotics — you know, the same sort of time frame. 
So I think that actually step two, that I called a step a moment ago, isn't a step at all. 
That in fact, the people who are young enough to benefit from these first therapies that give this moderate amount of life extension, even though those people are already middle-aged when the therapies arrive, will be at some sort of cusp. 
They will mostly survive long enough to receive improved treatments that will give them a further 30 or maybe 50 years. 
In other words, they will be staying ahead of the game. 
The therapies will be improving faster than the remaining imperfections in the therapies are catching up with us. 
This is a very important point for me to get across. 
Because, you know, most people, when they hear that I predict that a lot of people alive today are going to live to 1,000 or more, they think that I'm saying that we're going to invent therapies in the next few decades that are so thoroughly eliminating aging that those therapies will let us live to 1,000 or more. 
I'm not saying that at all. 
I'm saying that the rate of improvement of those therapies will be enough. 
They'll never be perfect, but we'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of, before we have any 200-year-olds. 
And the same for 300 and 400 and so on. 
I decided to give this a little name, which is "" longevity escape velocity. "" (Laughter) Well, it seems to get the point across. 
So, these trajectories here are basically how we would expect people to live, in terms of remaining life expectancy, as measured by their health, for given ages that they were at the time that these therapies arrive. 
If you're already 100, or even if you're 80 — and an average 80-year-old, we probably can't do a lot for you with these therapies, because you're too close to death's door for the really initial, experimental therapies to be good enough for you. 
You won't be able to withstand them. 
But if you're only 50, then there's a chance that you might be able to pull out of the dive and, you know — (Laughter) — eventually get through this and start becoming biologically younger in a meaningful sense, in terms of your youthfulness, both physical and mental, and in terms of your risk of death from age-related causes. 
And of course, if you're a bit younger than that, then you're never really even going to get near to being fragile enough to die of age-related causes. 
So this is a genuine conclusion that I come to, that the first 150-year-old — we don't know how old that person is today, because we don't know how long it's going to take to get these first-generation therapies. 
But irrespective of that age, I'm claiming that the first person to live to 1,000 — subject of course, to, you know, global catastrophes — is actually, probably, only about 10 years younger than the first 150-year-old. 
And that's quite a thought. 
Alright, so finally I'm going to spend the rest of the talk, my last seven-and-a-half minutes, on step one; namely, how do we actually get to this moderate amount of life extension that will allow us to get to escape velocity? 
And in order to do that, I need to talk about mice a little bit. 
I have a corresponding milestone to robust human rejuvenation. 
I'm calling it "" robust mouse rejuvenation, "" not very imaginatively. 
And this is what it is. 
I say we're going to take a long-lived strain of mouse, which basically means mice that live about three years on average. 
We do exactly nothing to them until they're already two years old. 
And then we do a whole bunch of stuff to them, and with those therapies, we get them to live, on average, to their fifth birthday. 
So, in other words, we add two years — we treble their remaining lifespan, starting from the point that we started the therapies. 
The question then is, what would that actually mean for the time frame until we get to the milestone I talked about earlier for humans? 
Which we can now, as I've explained, equivalently call either robust human rejuvenation or longevity escape velocity. 
Secondly, what does it mean for the public's perception of how long it's going to take for us to get to those things, starting from the time we get the mice? 
And thirdly, the question is, what will it do to actually how much people want it? 
And it seems to me that the first question is entirely a biology question, and it's extremely hard to answer. 
One has to be very speculative, and many of my colleagues would say that we should not do this speculation, that we should simply keep our counsel until we know more. 
I say that's nonsense. 
I say we absolutely are irresponsible if we stay silent on this. 
We need to give our best guess as to the time frame, in order to give people a sense of proportion so that they can assess their priorities. 
So, I say that we have a 50 / 50 chance of reaching this RHR milestone, robust human rejuvenation, within 15 years from the point that we get to robust mouse rejuvenation. 
15 years from the robust mouse. 
The public's perception will probably be somewhat better than that. 
The public tends to underestimate how difficult scientific things are. 
So they'll probably think it's five years away. 
They'll be wrong, but that actually won't matter too much. 
And finally, of course, I think it's fair to say that a large part of the reason why the public is so ambivalent about aging now is the global trance I spoke about earlier, the coping strategy. 
That will be history at this point, because it will no longer be possible to believe that aging is inevitable in humans, since it's been postponed so very effectively in mice. 
So we're likely to end up with a very strong change in people's attitudes, and of course that has enormous implications. 
So in order to tell you now how we're going to get these mice, I'm going to add a little bit to my description of aging. 
I'm going to use this word "" damage "" to denote these intermediate things that are caused by metabolism and that eventually cause pathology. 
Because the critical thing about this is that even though the damage only eventually causes pathology, the damage itself is caused ongoing-ly throughout life, starting before we're born. 
But it is not part of metabolism itself. 
And this turns out to be useful. 
Because we can re-draw our original diagram this way. 
We can say that, fundamentally, the difference between gerontology and geriatrics is that gerontology tries to inhibit the rate at which metabolism lays down this damage. 
And I'm going to explain exactly what damage is in concrete biological terms in a moment. 
And geriatricians try to hold back the sands of time by stopping the damage converting into pathology. 
And the reason it's a losing battle is because the damage is continuing to accumulate. 
So there's a third approach, if we look at it this way. 
We can call it the "" engineering approach, "" and I claim that the engineering approach is within range. 
The engineering approach does not intervene in any processes. 
It does not intervene in this process or this one. 
And that's good because it means that it's not a losing battle, and it's something that we are within range of being able to do, because it doesn't involve improving on evolution. 
The engineering approach simply says, "" Let's go and periodically repair all of these various types of damage — not necessarily repair them completely, but repair them quite a lot, so that we keep the level of damage down below the threshold that must exist, that causes it to be pathogenic. "" We know that this threshold exists, because we don't get age-related diseases until we're in middle age, even though the damage has been accumulating since before we were born. 
Why do I say that we're in range? Well, this is basically it. 
The point about this slide is actually the bottom. 
If we try to say which bits of metabolism are important for aging, we will be here all night, because basically all of metabolism is important for aging in one way or another. 
This list is just for illustration; it is incomplete. 
The list on the right is also incomplete. 
It's a list of types of pathology that are age-related, and it's just an incomplete list. 
But I would like to claim to you that this list in the middle is actually complete — this is the list of types of thing that qualify as damage, side effects of metabolism that cause pathology in the end, or that might cause pathology. 
And there are only seven of them. 
They're categories of things, of course, but there's only seven of them. 
Cell loss, mutations in chromosomes, mutations in the mitochondria and so on. 
First of all, I'd like to give you an argument for why that list is complete. 
Of course one can make a biological argument. 
One can say, "" OK, what are we made of? "" We're made of cells and stuff between cells. 
What can damage accumulate in? 
The answer is: long-lived molecules, because if a short-lived molecule undergoes damage, but then the molecule is destroyed — like by a protein being destroyed by proteolysis — then the damage is gone, too. 
It's got to be long-lived molecules. 
So, these seven things were all under discussion in gerontology a long time ago and that is pretty good news, because it means that, you know, we've come a long way in biology in these 20 years, so the fact that we haven't extended this list is a pretty good indication that there's no extension to be done. 
However, it's better than that; we actually know how to fix them all, in mice, in principle — and what I mean by in principle is, we probably can actually implement these fixes within a decade. 
Some of them are partially implemented already, the ones at the top. 
I haven't got time to go through them at all, but my conclusion is that, if we can actually get suitable funding for this, then we can probably develop robust mouse rejuvenation in only 10 years, but we do need to get serious about it. 
We do need to really start trying. 
So of course, there are some biologists in the audience, and I want to give some answers to some of the questions that you may have. 
You may have been dissatisfied with this talk, but fundamentally you have to go and read this stuff. 
I've published a great deal on this; I cite the experimental work on which my optimism is based, and there's quite a lot of detail there. 
The detail is what makes me confident of my rather aggressive time frames that I'm predicting here. 
So if you think that I'm wrong, you'd better damn well go and find out why you think I'm wrong. 
And of course the main thing is that you shouldn't trust people who call themselves gerontologists because, as with any radical departure from previous thinking within a particular field, you know, you expect people in the mainstream to be a bit resistant and not really to take it seriously. 
So, you know, you've got to actually do your homework, in order to understand whether this is true. 
And we'll just end with a few things. 
One thing is, you know, you'll be hearing from a guy in the next session who said some time ago that he could sequence the human genome in half no time, and everyone said, "" Well, it's obviously impossible. "" And you know what happened. 
So, you know, this does happen. 
We have various strategies — there's the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which is basically an incentive to innovate, and to do what you think is going to work, and you get money for it if you win. 
There's a proposal to actually put together an institute. 
This is what's going to take a bit of money. 
But, I mean, look — how long does it take to spend that on the war in Iraq? 
Not very long. OK. 
(Laughter) It's got to be philanthropic, because profits distract biotech, but it's basically got a 90 percent chance, I think, of succeeding in this. 
And I think we know how to do it. And I'll stop there. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: OK. I don't know if there's going to be any questions but I thought I would give people the chance. 
Audience: Since you've been talking about aging and trying to defeat it, why is it that you make yourself appear like an old man? 
(Laughter) AG: Because I am an old man. I am actually 158. (Laughter) 
(Applause) Audience: Species on this planet have evolved with immune systems to fight off all the diseases so that individuals live long enough to procreate. 
However, as far as I know, all the species have evolved to actually die, so when cells divide, the telomerase get shorter, and eventually species die. 
So, why does — evolution has — seems to have selected against immortality, when it is so advantageous, or is evolution just incomplete? 
AG: Brilliant. Thank you for asking a question that I can answer with an uncontroversial answer. 
I'm going to tell you the genuine mainstream answer to your question, which I happen to agree with, which is that, no, aging is not a product of selection, evolution; [aging] is simply a product of evolutionary neglect. 
In other words, we have aging because it's hard work not to have aging; you need more genetic pathways, more sophistication in your genes in order to age more slowly, and that carries on being true the longer you push it out. 
So, to the extent that evolution doesn't matter, doesn't care whether genes are passed on by individuals, living a long time or by procreation, there's a certain amount of modulation of that, which is why different species have different lifespans, but that's why there are no immortal species. 
CA: The genes don't care but we do? 
AG: That's right. 
Audience: Hello. I read somewhere that in the last 20 years, the average lifespan of basically anyone on the planet has grown by 10 years. 
If I project that, that would make me think that I would live until 120 if I don't crash on my motorbike. 
That means that I'm one of your subjects to become a 1,000-year-old? 
AG: If you lose a bit of weight. 
(Laughter) Your numbers are a bit out. 
The standard numbers are that lifespans have been growing at between one and two years per decade. 
So, it's not quite as good as you might think, you might hope. 
But I intend to move it up to one year per year as soon as possible. 
Audience: I was told that many of the brain cells we have as adults are actually in the human embryo, and that the brain cells last 80 years or so. 
If that is indeed true, biologically are there implications in the world of rejuvenation? 
If there are cells in my body that live all 80 years, as opposed to a typical, you know, couple of months? 
AG: There are technical implications certainly. 
Basically what we need to do is replace cells in those few areas of the brain that lose cells at a respectable rate, especially neurons, but we don't want to replace them any faster than that — or not much faster anyway, because replacing them too fast would degrade cognitive function. 
What I said about there being no non-aging species earlier on was a little bit of an oversimplification. 
There are species that have no aging — Hydra for example — but they do it by not having a nervous system — and not having any tissues in fact that rely for their function on very long-lived cells. 

I haven't told many people this, but in my head, I've got thousands of secret worlds all going on all at the same time. 
I am also autistic. 
People tend to diagnose autism with really specific check-box descriptions, but in reality, it's a whole variation as to what we're like. 
For instance, my little brother, he's very severely autistic. 
He's nonverbal. He can't talk at all. 
But I love to talk. 
People often associate autism with liking maths and science and nothing else, but I know so many autistic people who love being creative. 
But that is a stereotype, and the stereotypes of things are often, if not always, wrong. 
For instance, a lot of people think autism and think "" Rain Man "" immediately. 
That's the common belief, that every single autistic person is Dustin Hoffman, and that's not true. 
But that's not just with autistic people, either. 
I've seen it with LGBTQ people, with women, with POC people. 
People are so afraid of variety that they try to fit everything into a tiny little box with really specific labels. 
This is something that actually happened to me in real life: I googled "" autistic people are... "" and it comes up with suggestions as to what you're going to type. I googled "" autistic people are... "" 
and the top result was "" demons. "" That is the first thing that people think when they think autism. 
They know. 
(Laughter) One of the things I can do because I'm autistic — it's an ability rather than a disability — is I've got a very, very vivid imagination. 
Let me explain it to you a bit. 
It's like I'm walking in two worlds most of the time. 
There's the real world, the world that we all share, and there's the world in my mind, and the world in my mind is often so much more real than the real world. 
Like, it's very easy for me to let my mind loose because I don't try and fit myself into a tiny little box. 
That's one of the best things about being autistic. 
You don't have the urge to do that. 
You find what you want to do, you find a way to do it, and you get on with it. 
If I was trying to fit myself into a box, I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't have achieved half the things that I have now. 
There are problems, though. 
There are problems with being autistic, and there are problems with having too much imagination. 
School can be a problem in general, but having also to explain to a teacher on a daily basis that their lesson is inexplicably dull and you are secretly taking refuge in a world inside your head in which you are not in that lesson, that adds to your list of problems. 
(Laughter) Also, when my imagination takes hold, my body takes on a life of its own. 
When something very exciting happens in my inner world, I've just got to run. 
I've got to rock backwards and forwards, or sometimes scream. 
This gives me so much energy, and I've got to have an outlet for all that energy. 
But I've done that ever since I was a child, ever since I was a tiny little girl. 
And my parents thought it was cute, so they didn't bring it up, but when I got into school, they didn't really agree that it was cute. 
It can be that people don't want to be friends with the girl that starts screaming in an algebra lesson. 
And this doesn't normally happen in this day and age, but it can be that people don't want to be friends with the autistic girl. 
It can be that people don't want to associate with anyone who won't or can't fit themselves into a box that's labeled normal. 
But that's fine with me, because it sorts the wheat from the chaff, and I can find which people are genuine and true and I can pick these people as my friends. 
But if you think about it, what is normal? 
What does it mean? 
Imagine if that was the best compliment you ever received. 
"Wow, you are really normal." 
(Laughter) But compliments are, "you are extraordinary" or "" you step outside the box. "" It's "" you're amazing. "" So if people want to be these things, why are so many people striving to be normal? 
Why are people pouring their brilliant individual light into a mold? 
People are so afraid of variety that they try and force everyone, even people who don't want to or can't, to become normal. 
There are camps for LGBTQ people or autistic people to try and make them this "" normal, "" and that's terrifying that people would do that in this day and age. 
All in all, I wouldn't trade my autism and my imagination for the world. 
Because I am autistic, I've presented documentaries to the BBC, I'm in the midst of writing a book, I'm doing this — this is fantastic — and one of the best things that I've achieved, that I consider to have achieved, is I've found ways of communicating with my little brother and sister, who as I've said are nonverbal. They can't speak. 
And people would often write off someone who's nonverbal, but that's silly, because my little brother and sister are the best siblings that you could ever hope for. 
They're just the best, and I love them so much and I care about them more than anything else. 
I'm going to leave you with one question: If we can't get inside the person's minds, no matter if they're autistic or not, instead of punishing anything that strays from normal, why not celebrate uniqueness and cheer every time someone unleashes their imagination? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I have spent the past 38 years trying to be invisible. 
I'm a copy editor. 
I work at The New Yorker, and copyediting for The New Yorker is like playing shortstop for a Major League Baseball team: every little movement gets picked over by the critics — God forbid you should commit an error. 
Just to clarify: copy editors don't choose what goes into the magazine. 
We work at the level of the sentence, maybe the paragraph, the words, the punctuation. 
Our business is in the details. 
We put the diaeresis, the double dot, over the "" i "" in "" naïve. "" We impose house style. 
Every publication has a house style. 
The New Yorker's is particularly distinctive. 
We sometimes get teased for our style. 
Imagine — we still spell "" teen-ager "" with a hyphen, as if that word had just been coined. 
But you see that hyphen in "" teen-age "" and that diaeresis over "" coöperate, "" and you know you're reading The New Yorker. 
Copyediting at The New Yorker is a mechanical process. 
There is a related role called query proofreading, or page-OK'ing. 
Whereas copyediting is mechanical, query proofreading is interpretive. 
We make suggestions to the author through the editor to improve the emphasis of a sentence or point out unintentional repetitions and supply compelling alternatives. 
Our purpose is to make the author look good. 
Note that we give our proofs not directly to the author, but to the editor. 
This often creates a good cop / bad cop dynamic in which the copy editor — I'll use that as an umbrella term — is invariably the bad cop. 
If we do our job well, we're invisible, but as soon as we make a mistake, we copy editors become glaringly visible. 
Here is the most recent mistake that was laid at my door. 
[Last Tuesday, Sarah Palin, the pre-Trump embodiment of populist no-nothingism in the Republican Party, endorsed Trump.] "" Where were The New Yorker's fabled copy editors? "" a reader wrote. 
"Didn't the writer mean 'know-nothingism'?" 
Ouch. 
There's no excuse for this mistake. 
But I like it: "" no-nothingism. "" It might be American vernacular for "" nihilism. "" (Laughter) Here, another reader quotes a passage from the magazine: [Ruby was seventy-six, but she retained her authoritative bearing; only her unsteady gait belied her age.] He added: "" Surely, someone at The New Yorker knows the meaning of 'belied,' and that it is the opposite of how it is used in this sentence. 
Come on! Get it together. "" Belie: to give a false impression. 
It should have been "" betrayed. "" E.B. White once wrote of commas in The New Yorker: "They fall with the precision of knives outlining a body." 
(Laughter) And it's true — we get a lot of complaints about commas. 
"Are there really two commas in 'Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard'?" 
There may not be on the sign, but yes, that is New Yorker style for "" Jr. "" One wag wrote: ["" Please, could you expel, or, at least, restrain, the comma-maniac, on your editorial staff? ""] (Laughter) Ah, well. 
In this case, those commas are well-placed, except that there should not be one between "" maniac "" and "" on. "" (Laughter) Also, if we must have commas around "" at least, "" we might change it up by using dashes around that phrase: "... — or, at least, restrain —" Perfect. 
(Applause) Then there's this: "" Love you, love your magazine, but can you please stop writing massive numbers as text? "" [two and a half million...] No. 
(Laughter) One last cri de coeur from a spelling stickler: ["" Those long stringy things are vocal cords, not chords. ""] The outraged reader added, "" I'm sure I'm not the first to write regarding this egregious proofreading error, but I'm equally sure I won't be the last. 
Fie! "" (Laughter) I used to like getting mail. 
There is a pact between writers and editors. 
The editor never sells out the writer, never goes public about bad jokes that had to be cut or stories that went on too long. 
A great editor saves a writer from her excesses. 
Copy editors, too, have a code; we don't advertise our oversights. 
I feel disloyal divulging them here, so let's have look at what we do right. 
Somehow, I've gotten a reputation for sternness. 
But I work with writers who know how to have their way with me. 
I've known Ian Frazier, or "" Sandy, "" since the early 80s. 
And he's one of my favorites, even though he sometimes writes a sentence that gives a copy editor pause. 
Here is one from a story about Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy: [A dock that had been broken in the middle and lost its other half sloped down toward the water, its support pipes and wires leaning forward like when you open a box of linguine and it slides out.] (Laughter) This would never have got past the grammarian in the days of yore. 
But what could I do? 
Technically, the "" like "" should be an "" as, "" but it sounds ridiculous, as if the author were about to embark on an extended Homeric simile — "as when you open a box of linguine." 
(Laughter) I decided that the hurricane conferred poetic justice on Sandy and let the sentence stand. (Laughter) 
Generally, if I think something is wrong, I query it three times. 
I told Sandy that not long ago in a moment of indiscretion and he said, "Only three?" 
So, he has learned to hold out. 
Recently, he wrote a story for "" Talk of the Town, "" that's the section at the front of the magazine with short pieces on subjects ranging from Ricky Jay's exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum to the introduction of doggie bags in France. 
Sandy's story was about the return to the Bronx of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. 
There were three things in it that I had to challenge. 
First, a grammar query. 
The justice was wearing black and Sandy wrote, [Her face and hands stood out like in an old, mostly dark painting.] Now, unlike with the hurricane, with this "" like, "" the author didn't have the excuse of describing hurricane damage. 
"" Like "" in this sense is a preposition, and a preposition takes an object, which is a noun. 
This "" like "" had to be an "" as. "" "As in an old, mostly dark painting." 
Second, a spelling issue. 
The author was quoting someone who was assisting the justice: ["" It will be just a minute. 
We are getting the justice mic'ed, ""] Mic'ed? 
The music industry spells it "" mic "" because that's how it's spelled on the equipment. 
I'd never seen it used as a verb with this spelling, and I was distraught to think that "" mic'ed "" would get into the magazine on my watch. 
(Laughter) New Yorker style for "" microphone "" in its abbreviated form is "" mike. "" Finally, there was a sticky grammar and usage issue in which the pronoun has to have the same grammatical number as its antecedent. 
[everyone in the vicinity held their breath] "" Their "" is plural and "" everyone, "" its antecedent, is singular. 
You would never say, "" Everyone were there. "" Everyone was there. Everyone is here. 
But people say things like, "" Everyone held their breath "" all the time. 
To give it legitimacy, copy editors call it "" the singular 'their,' "" as if calling it singular makes it no longer plural. 
(Laughter) It is my job when I see it in print to do my best to eliminate it. 
I couldn't make it, "" Everyone held her breath, "" or "" Everyone held his breath, "" or "" Everyone held his or her breath. "" Whatever I suggested had to blend in. 
I asked, through the editor, if the author would consider changing it to "" All in the vicinity held their breath, "" because "" all "" is plural. 
Nope. 
I tried again: "" All those present held their breath? "" I thought this sounded vaguely judicial. 
But the editor pointed out that we could not have "" present "" and "" presence "" in the same sentence. 
When the final proof came back, the author had accepted "" as "" for "" like, "" and "" miked "" for "" mic'ed. "" But on "" Everyone held their breath, "" he stood his ground. 
Two out of three isn't bad. 
In the same issue, in that piece on doggie bags in France, there was the gratuitous use of the f-word by a Frenchman. 
I wonder, when the mail comes in, which will have offended the readers more. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Every summer, my family and I travel across the world, 3,000 miles away to the culturally diverse country of India. 
Now, India is a country infamous for its scorching heat and humidity. 
For me, the only relief from this heat is to drink plenty of water. 
Now, while in India, my parents always remind me to only drink boiled or bottled water, because unlike here in America, where I can just turn on a tap and easily get clean, potable water, in India, the water is often contaminated. 
So my parents have to make sure that the water we drink is safe. 
However, I soon realized that not everyone is fortunate enough to enjoy the clean water we did. 
Outside my grandparents' house in the busy streets of India, I saw people standing in long lines under the hot sun filling buckets with water from a tap. 
I even saw children, who looked the same age as me, filling up these clear plastic bottles with dirty water from streams on the roadside. 
Watching these kids forced to drink water that I felt was too dirty to touch changed my perspective on the world. 
This unacceptable social injustice compelled me to want to find a solution to our world's clean water problem. 
I wanted to know why these kids lacked water, a substance that is essential for life. 
And I learned that we are facing a global water crisis. 
Now, this may seem surprising, as 75 percent of our planet is covered in water, but only 2.5 percent of that is freshwater, and less than one percent of Earth's freshwater supply is available for human consumption. 
With rising populations, industrial development and economic growth, our demand for clean water is increasing, yet our freshwater resources are rapidly depleting. 
According to the World Health Organization, 660 million people in our world lack access to a clean water source. 
Lack of access to clean water is a leading cause of death in children under the age of five in developing countries, and UNICEF estimates that 3,000 children die every day from a water-related disease. 
So after returning home one summer in eighth grade, I decided that I wanted to combine my passion for solving the global water crisis with my interest in science. 
So I decided that the best thing to do would be to convert my garage into a laboratory. 
(Laughter) Actually, at first I converted my kitchen into a laboratory, but my parents didn't really approve and kicked me out. 
I also read a lot of journal papers on water-related research, and I learned that currently in developing countries, something called solar disinfection, or SODIS, is used to purify water. 
In SODIS, clear plastic bottles are filled with contaminated water and then exposed to sunlight for six to eight hours. 
The UV radiation from the sun destroys the DNA of these harmful pathogens and decontaminates the water. 
Now, while SODIS is really easy to use and energy-efficient, as it only uses solar energy, it's really slow, as it can take up to two days when it's cloudy. 
So in order to make the SODIS process faster, this new method called photocatalysis has recently been used. 
So what exactly is this photocatalysis? 
Let's break it down: "" photo "" means from the sun, and a catalyst is something that speeds up a reaction. 
So what photocatalysis is doing is it's just speeding up this solar disinfection process. 
When sunlight comes in and strikes a photocatalyst, like TiO2, or titanium dioxide, it creates these really reactive oxygen species, like superoxides, hydrogen peroxide and hydroxyl radicals. 
These reactive oxygen species are able to remove bacteria and organics and a whole lot of contaminants from drinking water. 
But unfortunately, there are several disadvantages to the way photocatalytic SODIS is currently deployed. 
See, what they do is they take the clear plastic bottles and they coat the inside with this photocatalytic coating. 
But photocatalysts like titanium dioxide are actually commonly used in sunscreens to block UV radiation. 
So when they're coated on the inside of these bottles, they're actually blocking some of the UV radiation and diminishing the efficiency of the process. 
Also, these photocatalytic coatings are not tightly bound to the plastic bottle, which means they wash off, and people end up drinking the catalyst. 
While TiO2 is safe and inert, it's really inefficient if you keep drinking the catalyst, because then you have to continue to replenish it, even after a few uses. 
So my goal was to overcome the disadvantages of these current treatment methods and create a safe, sustainable, cost-effective and eco-friendly method of purifying water. 
What started off as an eighth grade science fair project is now my photocatalytic composite for water purification. 
The composite combines titanium dioxide with cement. 
The cement-like composite can be formed into several different shapes, which results in an extremely versatile range of deployment methods. 
For example, you could create a rod that can easily be placed inside water bottles for individual use or you could create a porous filter that can filter water for families. 
You can even coat the inside of an existing water tank to purify larger amounts of water for communities over a longer period of time. 
Now, over the course of this, my journey hasn't really been easy. 
You know, I didn't have access to a sophisticated laboratory. 
I was 14 years old when I started, but I didn't let my age deter me in my interest in pursuing scientific research and wanting to solve the global water crisis. 
See, water isn't just the universal solvent. 
Water is a universal human right. 
And for that reason, I'm continuing to work on this science fair project from 2012 to bring it from the laboratory into the real world. 
And this summer, I founded Catalyst for World Water, a social enterprise aimed at catalyzing solutions to the global water crisis. 
(Applause) Alone, a single drop of water can't do much, but when many drops come together, they can sustain life on our planet. 
Just as water drops come together to form oceans, I believe that we all must come together when tackling this global problem. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

From all outward appearances, John had everything going for him. 
He had just signed the contract to sell his New York apartment at a six-figure profit, and he'd only owned it for five years. 
The school where he graduated from with his master's had just offered him a teaching appointment, which meant not only a salary, but benefits for the first time in ages. 
And yet, despite everything going really well for John, he was struggling, fighting addiction and a gripping depression. 
On the night of June 11th, 2003, he climbed up to the edge of the fence on the Manhattan Bridge and he leaped to the treacherous waters below. 
Remarkably — no, miraculously — he lived. 
The fall shattered his right arm, broke every rib that he had, punctured his lung, and he drifted in and out of consciousness as he drifted down the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge and out into the pathway of the Staten Island Ferry, where passengers on the ferry heard his cries of pain, contacted the boat's captain who contacted the Coast Guard who fished him out of the East River and took him to Bellevue Hospital. 
And that's actually where our story begins. 
Because once John committed himself to putting his life back together — first physically, then emotionally, and then spiritually — he found that there were very few resources available to someone who has attempted to end their life in the way that he did. 
Research shows that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail. 
But the people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time. 
This truly is an at-risk population with very few resources to support them. 
And what happens when people try to assemble themselves back into life, because of our taboos around suicide, we're not sure what to say, and so quite often we say nothing. 
And that furthers the isolation that people like John found themselves in. 
I know John's story very well because I'm John. 
And this is, today, the first time in any sort of public setting I've ever acknowledged the journey that I have been on. 
But after having lost a beloved teacher in 2006 and a good friend last year to suicide, and sitting last year at TEDActive, I knew that I needed to step out of my silence and past my taboos to talk about an idea worth spreading — and that is that people who have made the difficult choice to come back to life need more resources and need our help. 
As the Trevor Project says, it gets better. 
It gets way better. 
And I'm choosing to come out of a totally different kind of closet today to encourage you, to urge you, that if you are someone who has contemplated or attempted suicide, or you know somebody who has, talk about it; get help. 
It's a conversation worth having and an idea worth spreading. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, there's an actor called Dustin Hoffman. 
And years ago, he made this movie which some of you may have heard of, called "" The Graduate. "" And there's two key scenes in that movie. 
The first one is the seduction scene. 
I'm not going to talk about that tonight. 
(Laughter) The second scene is where he's taken out by the old guy to the pool, and as a young college graduate, the old guy basically says one word, just one word. 
And of course, all of you know what that word is. 
It's "" plastics. "" (Laughter) And the only problem with that is, it was completely the wrong advice. (Laughter) 
Let me tell you why it was so wrong. 
The word should have been "" silicon. "" And the reason it should have been silicon is because the basic patents for semiconductors had already been made, had already been filed, and they were already building them. 
So Silicon Valley was just being built in 1967, when this movie was released. 
And the year after the movie was released, Intel was founded. 
So had the graduate heard the right one word, maybe he would have ended up onstage — oh, I don't know — maybe with these two. 
(Laughter) So as you're thinking of that, let's see what bit of advice we might want to give so that your next graduate doesn't become a Tupperware salesman. (Laughter) 
So in 2015, what word of advice would you give people, when you took a college graduate out by the pool and you said one word, just one word? 
I think the answer would be "" lifecode. "" So what is "" lifecode? "" Lifecode is the various ways we have of programming life. 
So instead of programming computers, we're using things to program viruses or retroviruses or proteins or DNA or RNA or plants or animals, or a whole series of creatures. 
And as you're thinking about this incredible ability to make life do what you want it to do, what it's programmed to do, what you end up doing is taking what we've been doing for thousands of years, which is breeding, changing, mixing, matching all kinds of life-forms, and we accelerate it. 
And this is not something new. 
This humble mustard weed has been modified so that if you change it in one way, you get broccoli. 
And if you change it in a second way, you get kale. 
And if you change it in a third way, you get cauliflower. 
So when you go to these all-natural, organic markets, you're really going to a place where people have been changing the lifecode of plants for a long time. 
The difference today, to pick a completely politically neutral term — [Intelligent design] (Laughter) We're beginning to practice intelligent design. 
That means that instead of doing this at random and seeing what happens over generations, we're inserting specific genes, we're inserting specific proteins, and we're changing lifecode for very deliberate purposes. 
And that allows us to accelerate how this stuff happens. 
Let me just give you one example. 
Some of you occasionally might think about sex. 
And we kind of take it for granted how we've changed sex. 
So we think it's perfectly normal and natural to change it. 
What's happened with sex over time is — normally, sex equals baby, eventually. 
But in today's world, sex plus pill equals no baby. 
(Laughter) And again, we think that's perfectly normal and natural, but that has not been the case for most of human history. 
And it's not the case for animals. 
What it is does is it gives us control, so sex becomes separate from conception. 
And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, then we've been playing with stuff that's a little bit more advanced, like art. 
Not in the sense of painting and sculpture, but in the sense of assisted reproductive technologies. 
So what are assisted reproductive technologies? 
Assisted reproductive technologies are things like in vitro fertilization. 
And when you do in vitro fertilization, there's very good reasons to do it. 
Sometimes you just can't conceive otherwise. 
But when you do that, what you ’ re doing is separating sex, conception, baby. 
So you haven't just taken control of when you have a baby, you've separated when the baby and where the baby is fertilized. 
So you've separated the baby from the body from the act. 
And as you're thinking of other things we've been doing, think about twins. 
So you can freeze sperm, you can freeze eggs, you can freeze fertilized eggs. 
And what does that mean? 
Well, that's a good thing if you're a cancer patient. 
You're about to go under chemotherapy or under radiation, so you save these things. 
You don't irradiate them. 
But if you can save them and you can freeze them, and you can have a surrogate mother, it means that you've decoupled sex from time. 
It means you can have twins born — oh, in 50 years? 
(Laughter) In a hundred years? 
Two hundred years? 
And these are three really profound changes that are not, like, future stuff. 
This is stuff we take for granted today. 
So this lifecode stuff turns out to be a superpower. 
It turns out to be this incredibly powerful way of changing viruses, of changing plants, of changing animals, perhaps even of evolving ourselves. 
It's something that Steve Gullans and I have been thinking about for a while. 
Let's have some risks. 
Like every powerful technology, like electricity, like an automobile, like computers, this stuff potentially can be misused. 
And that scares a lot of people. 
And as you apply these technologies, you can even turn human beings into chimeras. 
Remember the Greek myth where you mix animals? 
Well, some of these treatments actually end up changing your blood type. 
Or they'll put male cells in a female body or vice versa, which sounds absolutely horrible until you realize, the reason you're doing that is you're substituting bone marrow during cancer treatments. 
So by taking somebody else's bone marrow, you may be changing some fundamental aspects of yourself, but you're also saving your life. 
And as you're thinking about this stuff, here's something that happened 20 years ago. 
This is Emma Ott. 
She's a recent college admittee. 
She's studying accounting. 
She played two varsity sports. She graduated as a valedictorian. 
And that's not particularly extraordinary, except that she's the first human being born to three parents. 
Why? 
Because she had a deadly mitochondrial disease that she might have inherited. 
So when you swap out a third person's DNA and you put it in there, you save the lives of people. 
But you also are doing germline engineering, which means her kids, if she has kids, will be saved and won't go through this. 
And [their] kids will be saved, and their grandchildren will be saved, and this passes on. 
That makes people nervous. 
So 20 years ago, the various authorities said, why don't we study this for a while? 
There are risks to doing stuff, and there are risks to not doing stuff, because there were a couple dozen people saved by this technology, and then we've been thinking about it for the next 20 years. 
So as we think about it, as we take the time to say, "" Hey, maybe we should have longer studies, maybe we should do this, maybe we should do that, "" there are consequences to acting, and there are consequences to not acting. 
Like curing deadly diseases — which, by the way, is completely unnatural. 
It is normal and natural for humans to be felled by massive epidemics of polio, of smallpox, of tuberculosis. 
When we put vaccines into people, we are putting unnatural things into their body because we think the benefit outweighs the risk. 
Because we've built unnatural plants, unnatural animals, we can feed about seven billion people. 
We can do things like create new life-forms. 
And as you create new life-forms, again, that sounds terribly scary and terribly bothersome, until you realize that those life-forms live on your dining room table. 
Those flowers you've got on your dining room table — there's not a lot that's natural about them, because people have been breeding the flowers to make this color, to be this size, to last for a week. 
You don't usually give your loved one wildflowers because they don't last a whole lot of time. 
What all this does is it flips Darwin completely on his head. 
See, for four billion years, what lived and died on this planet depended on two principles: on natural selection and random mutation. 
And so what lived and died, what was structured, has now been flipped on its head. 
And what we've done is created this completely parallel evolutionary system where we are practicing unnatural selection and non-random mutation. 
So let me explain these things. 
This is natural selection. 
This is unnatural selection. 
(Laughter) So what happens with this stuff is, we started breeding wolves thousands of years ago in central Asia to turn them into dogs. 
And then we started turning them into big dogs and into little dogs. 
But if you take one of the chihuahuas you see in the Hermès bags on Fifth Avenue and you let it loose on the African plain, you can watch natural selection happen. 
(Laughter) Few things on Earth are less natural than a cornfield. 
You will never, under any scenario, walk through a virgin forest and see the same plant growing in orderly rows at the same time, nothing else living there. 
When you do a cornfield, you're selecting what lives and what dies. 
And you're doing that through unnatural selection. 
It's the same with a wheat field, it's the same with a rice field. 
It's the same with a city, it's the same with a suburb. 
In fact, half the surface of Earth has been unnaturally engineered so that what lives and what dies there is what we want, which is the reason why you don't have grizzly bears walking through downtown Manhattan. 
How about this random mutation stuff? 
Well, this is random mutation. 
This is Antonio Alfonseca. 
He's otherwise known as the Octopus, his nickname. 
He was the Relief Pitcher of the Year in 2000. 
And he had a random mutation that gave him six fingers on each hand, which turns out to be really useful if you're a pitcher. 
(Laughter) How about non-random mutation? 
A non-random mutation is beer. 
It's wine. It's yogurt. 
How many times have you walked through the forest and found all-natural cheese? 
Or all-natural yogurt? 
So we've been engineering this stuff. 
Now, the interesting thing is, we get to know the stuff better. 
We found one of the single most powerful gene-editing instruments, CRISPR, inside yogurt. 
And as we start engineering cells, we're producing eight out of the top 10 pharmaceutical products, including the stuff that you use to treat arthritis, which is the number one best-selling drug, Humira. 
So this lifecode stuff. 
It really is a superpower. 
It really is a way of programming stuff, and there's nothing that's going to change us more than this lifecode. 
So as you're thinking of lifecode, let's think of five principles as to how we start guiding, and I'd love you to give me more. 
So, principle number one: we have to take responsibility for this stuff. 
The reason we have to take responsibility is because we're in charge. 
These aren't random mutations. 
This is what we are doing, what we are choosing. 
It's not, "" Stuff happened. "" It didn't happen at random. 
It didn't come down by a verdict of somebody else. 
We engineer this stuff, and it's the Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it. 
Principle number two: we have to recognize and celebrate diversity in this stuff. 
There have been at least 33 versions of hominids that have walked around this Earth. 
Most all of them went extinct except us. 
But the normal and natural state of this Earth is we have various versions of humans walking around at the same time, which is why most of us have some Neanderthal in us. 
Some of us have some Denisova in us. 
And some in Washington have a lot more of it. 
(Laughter) Principle number three: we have to respect other people's choices. 
Some people will choose to never alter. 
Some people will choose to alter all. 
Some people will choose to alter plants but not animals. 
Some people will choose to alter themselves. 
Some people will choose to evolve themselves. 
Diversity is not a bad thing, because even though we think of humans as very diverse, we came so close to extinction that all of us descend from a single African mother and the consequence of that is there's more genetic diversity in 55 African chimpanzees than there are in seven billion humans. 
Principle number four: we should take about a quarter of the Earth and only let Darwin run the show there. 
It doesn't have to be contiguous, doesn't have to all be tied together. 
It should be part in the oceans, part on land. 
But we should not run every evolutionary decision on this planet. 
We want to have our evolutionary system running. 
We want to have Darwin's evolutionary system running. 
And it's just really important to have these two things running in parallel and not overwhelm evolution. 
(Applause) Last thing I'll say. 
This is the single most exciting adventure human beings have been on. 
This is the single greatest superpower humans have ever had. 
It would be a crime for you not to participate in this stuff because you're scared of it, because you're hiding from it. 
You can participate in the ethics. You can participate in the politics. 
You can participate in the business. 
You can participate in just thinking about where medicine is going, where industry is going, where we're going to take the world. 
It would be a crime for all of us not to be aware when somebody shows up at a swimming pool and says one word, just one word, if you don't listen if that word is "" lifecode. "" Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

There are things we say when we catch the eye of a stranger or a neighbor walking by. 
We say, "" Hello, how are you? 
It's a beautiful day. 
How do you feel? "" These sound kind of meaningless, right? And, in some ways, they are. 
They have no semantic meaning. 
It doesn't matter how you are or what the day is like. 
They have something else. 
They have social meaning. 
What we mean when we say those things is: I see you there. 
I'm obsessed with talking to strangers. 
I make eye contact, say hello, I offer help, I listen. 
I get all kinds of stories. 
About seven years ago, I started documenting my experiences to try to figure out why. 
What I found was that something really beautiful was going on. 
This is almost poetic. 
These were really profound experiences. 
They were unexpected pleasures. 
They were genuine emotional connections. 
They were liberating moments. 
So one day, I was standing on a corner waiting for the light to change, which, I'm a New Yorker, so that means I was actually standing in the street on the storm drain, as if that could get me across faster. 
And there's an old man standing next to me. 
So he's wearing, like, a long overcoat and sort of an old-man hat, and he looked like somebody from a movie. 
And he says to me, "Don't stand there. You might disappear." 
So this is absurd, right? 
But I did what he said. I stepped back onto the sidewalk. 
And he smiled, and he said, "" Good. You never know. 
I might have turned around, and zoop, you're gone. "" This was weird, and also really wonderful. 
He was so warm, and he was so happy that he'd saved me. 
We had this little bond. 
For a minute, I felt like my existence as a person had been noticed, and I was worth saving. 
The really sad thing is, in many parts of the world, we're raised to believe that strangers are dangerous by default, that we can't trust them, that they might hurt us. 
But most strangers aren't dangerous. 
We're uneasy around them because we have no context. 
We don't know what their intentions are. 
So instead of using our perceptions and making choices, we rely on this category of "" stranger. "" I have a four-year-old. 
When I say hello to people on the street, she asks me why. 
She says, "" Do we know them? "" I say, "" No, they're our neighbor. "" "Are they our friend?" 
"No, it's just good to be friendly." 
I think twice every time I say that to her, because I mean it, but as a woman, particularly, I know that not every stranger on the street has the best intentions. 
It is good to be friendly, and it's good to learn when not to be, but none of that means we have to be afraid. 
There are two huge benefits to using our senses instead of our fears. 
The first one is that it liberates us. 
When you think about it, using perception instead of categories is much easier said than done. 
Categories are something our brains use. 
When it comes to people, it's sort of a shortcut for learning about them. 
We see male, female, young, old, black, brown, white, stranger, friend, and we use the information in that box. 
It's quick, it's easy and it's a road to bias. 
And it means we're not thinking about people as individuals. 
I know an American researcher who travels frequently in Central Asia and Africa, alone. 
She's entering into towns and cities as a complete stranger. 
She has no bonds, no connections. 
She's a foreigner. 
Her survival strategy is this: get one stranger to see you as a real, individual person. 
If you can do that, it'll help other people see you that way, too. 
The second benefit of using our senses has to do with intimacy. 
I know it sounds a little counterintuitive, intimacy and strangers, but these quick interactions can lead to a feeling that sociologists call "" fleeting intimacy. "" So, it's a brief experience that has emotional resonance and meaning. 
It's the good feeling I got from being saved from the death trap of the storm drain by the old man, or how I feel like part of a community when I talk to somebody on my train on the way to work. 
Sometimes it goes further. 
Researchers have found that people often feel more comfortable being honest and open about their inner selves with strangers than they do with their friends and their families — that they often feel more understood by strangers. 
This gets reported in the media with great lament. 
"Strangers communicate better than spouses!" 
It's a good headline, right? 
I think it entirely misses the point. 
The important thing about these studies is just how significant these interactions can be; how this special form of closeness gives us something we need as much as we need our friends and our families. 
So how is it possible that we communicate so well with strangers? 
There are two reasons. 
The first one is that it's a quick interaction. 
It has no consequences. 
It's easy to be honest with someone you're never going to see again, right? 
That makes sense. 
The second reason is where it gets more interesting. 
We have a bias when it comes to people we're close to. 
We expect them to understand us. 
We assume they do, and we expect them to read our minds. 
So imagine you're at a party, and you can't believe that your friend or your spouse isn't picking up on it that you want to leave early. 
And you're thinking, "I gave you the look." 
With a stranger, we have to start from scratch. 
We tell the whole story, we explain who the people are, how we feel about them; we spell out all the inside jokes. 
And guess what? 
Sometimes they do understand us a little better. 
OK. 
So now that we know that talking to strangers matters, how does it work? 
There are unwritten rules we tend to follow. 
The rules are very different depending on what country you're in, what culture you're in. 
In most parts of the US, the baseline expectation in public is that we maintain a balance between civility and privacy. 
This is known as civil inattention. 
So, imagine two people are walking towards each other on the street. 
They'll glance at each other from a distance. 
That's the civility, the acknowledgment. 
And then as they get closer, they'll look away, to give each other some space. 
In other cultures, people go to extraordinary lengths not to interact at all. 
People from Denmark tell me that many Danes are so averse to talking to strangers, that they would rather miss their stop on the bus than say "" excuse me "" to someone that they need to get around. 
Instead, there's this elaborate shuffling of bags and using your body to say that you need to get past, instead of using two words. 
In Egypt, I'm told, it's rude to ignore a stranger, and there's a remarkable culture of hospitality. 
Strangers might ask each other for a sip of water. 
Or, if you ask someone for directions, they're very likely to invite you home for coffee. 
We see these unwritten rules most clearly when they're broken, or when you're in a new place and you're trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. 
Sometimes breaking the rules a little bit is where the action is. 
In case it's not clear, I really want you to do this. OK? 
So here's how it's going to go. 
Find somebody who is making eye contact. 
That's a good signal. 
The first thing is a simple smile. 
If you're passing somebody on the street or in the hallway here, smile. 
See what happens. 
Another is triangulation. 
There's you, there's a stranger, there's some third thing that you both might see and comment on, like a piece of public art or somebody preaching in the street or somebody wearing funny clothes. 
Give it a try. 
Make a comment about that third thing, and see if starts a conversation. 
Another is what I call noticing. 
This is usually giving a compliment. 
I'm a big fan of noticing people's shoes. 
I'm actually not wearing fabulous shoes right now, but shoes are fabulous in general. 
And they're pretty neutral as far as giving compliments goes. 
People always want to tell you things about their awesome shoes. 
You may have already experienced the dogs and babies principle. 
It can be awkward to talk to someone on the street; you don't know how they're going to respond. 
But you can always talk to their dog or their baby. 
The dog or the baby is a social conduit to the person, and you can tell by how they respond whether they're open to talking more. 
The last one I want to challenge you to is disclosure. 
This is a very vulnerable thing to do, and it can be very rewarding. 
So next time you're talking to a stranger and you feel comfortable, tell them something true about yourself, something really personal. 
You might have that experience I talked about of feeling understood. 
Sometimes in conversation, it comes up, people ask me, "" What does your dad do? "" or, "" Where does he live? "" And sometimes I tell them the whole truth, which is that he died when I was a kid. 
Always in those moments, they share their own experiences of loss. 
We tend to meet disclosure with disclosure, even with strangers. 
So, here it is. 
When you talk to strangers, you're making beautiful interruptions into the expected narrative of your daily life and theirs. 
You're making unexpected connections. 
If you don't talk to strangers, you're missing out on all of that. 
We spend a lot of time teaching our children about strangers. 
What would happen if we spent more time teaching ourselves? 
We could reject all the ideas that make us so suspicious of each other. 
We could make a space for change. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm here because I have a very important message: I think we have found the most important factor for success. 
And it was found close to here, Stanford. 
Psychology professor took kids that were four years old and put them in a room all by themselves. 
And he would tell the child, a four-year-old kid, "" Johnny, I am going to leave you here with a marshmallow for 15 minutes. 
If, after I come back, this marshmallow is here, you will get another one. So you will have two. "" To tell a four-year-old kid to wait 15 minutes for something that they like, is equivalent to telling us, "" We'll bring you coffee in two hours. "" (Laughter) Exact equivalent. 
So what happened when the professor left the room? 
As soon as the door closed... 
two out of three ate the marshmallow. 
Five seconds, 10 seconds, 40 seconds, 50 seconds, two minutes, four minutes, eight minutes. 
Some lasted 14-and-a-half minutes. 
(Laughter) Couldn't do it. Could not wait. 
What's interesting is that one out of three would look at the marshmallow and go like this... 
Would look at it. 
Put it back. 
They would walk around. They would play with their skirts and pants. 
That child already, at four, understood the most important principle for success, which is the ability to delay gratification. 
Self-discipline: the most important factor for success. 
15 years later, 14 or 15 years later, follow-up study. 
What did they find? 
They went to look for these kids who were now 18 and 19. 
And they found that 100 percent of the children that had not eaten the marshmallow were successful. 
They had good grades. They were doing wonderful. 
They were happy. They had their plans. 
They had good relationships with the teachers, students. 
They were doing fine. 
A great percentage of the kids that ate the marshmallow, they were in trouble. 
They did not make it to university. 
They had bad grades. Some of them dropped out. 
A few were still there with bad grades. 
A few had good grades. 
I had a question in my mind: Would Hispanic kids react the same way as the American kids? 
So I went to Colombia. And I reproduced the experiment. 
And it was very funny. I used four, five and six years old kids. 
And let me show you what happened. 
(Spanish) (Laughter) So what happened in Colombia? 
Hispanic kids, two out of three ate the marshmallow; one out of three did not. 
This little girl was interesting; she ate the inside of the marshmallow. 
(Laughter) In other words, she wanted us to think that she had not eaten it, so she would get two. 
But she ate it. 
So we know she'll be successful. But we have to watch her. 
(Laughter) She should not go into banking, for example, or work at a cash register. 
But she will be successful. 
And this applies for everything. Even in sales. 
The sales person that — the customer says, "" I want that. "" And the person says, "" Okay, here you are. "" That person ate the marshmallow. 
If the sales person says, "" Wait a second. 
Let me ask you a few questions to see if this is a good choice. "" Then you sell a lot more. 
So this has applications in all walks of life. 
I end with — the Koreans did this. 
You know what? This is so good that we want a marshmallow book for children. 
We did one for children. And now it is all over Korea. 
They are teaching these kids exactly this principle. 
And we need to learn that principle here in the States, because we have a big debt. 
We are eating more marshmallows than we are producing. 
Thank you so much. 

So a few years ago, I did something really brave, or some would say really stupid. 
I ran for Congress. 
For years, I had existed safely behind the scenes in politics as a fundraiser, as an organizer, but in my heart, I always wanted to run. 
The sitting congresswoman had been in my district since 1992. 
She had never lost a race, and no one had really even run against her in a Democratic primary. 
But in my mind, this was my way to make a difference, to disrupt the status quo. 
The polls, however, told a very different story. 
My pollsters told me that I was crazy to run, that there was no way that I could win. 
But I ran anyway, and in 2012, I became an upstart in a New York City congressional race. 
I swore I was going to win. 
I had the endorsement from the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal snapped pictures of me on election day, and CNBC called it one of the hottest races in the country. 
I raised money from everyone I knew, including Indian aunties that were just so happy an Indian girl was running. 
But on election day, the polls were right, and I only got 19 percent of the vote, and the same papers that said I was a rising political star now said I wasted 1.3 million dollars on 6,321 votes. 
Don't do the math. 
It was humiliating. 
Now, before you get the wrong idea, this is not a talk about the importance of failure. 
Nor is it about leaning in. 
I tell you the story of how I ran for Congress because I was 33 years old and it was the first time in my entire life that I had done something that was truly brave, where I didn't worry about being perfect. 
And I'm not alone: so many women I talk to tell me that they gravitate towards careers and professions that they know they're going to be great in, that they know they're going to be perfect in, and it's no wonder why. 
Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. 
We're taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A's. 
Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars and then just jump off headfirst. 
And by the time they're adults, whether they're negotiating a raise or even asking someone out on a date, they're habituated to take risk after risk. 
They're rewarded for it. 
It's often said in Silicon Valley, no one even takes you seriously unless you've had two failed start-ups. 
In other words, we're raising our girls to be perfect, and we're raising our boys to be brave. 
Some people worry about our federal deficit, but I, I worry about our bravery deficit. 
Our economy, our society, we're just losing out because we're not raising our girls to be brave. 
The bravery deficit is why women are underrepresented in STEM, in C-suites, in boardrooms, in Congress, and pretty much everywhere you look. 
In the 1980s, psychologist Carol Dweck looked at how bright fifth graders handled an assignment that was too difficult for them. 
She found that bright girls were quick to give up. 
The higher the IQ, the more likely they were to give up. 
Bright boys, on the other hand, found the difficult material to be a challenge. 
They found it energizing. 
They were more likely to redouble their efforts. 
What's going on? 
Well, at the fifth grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science, so it's not a question of ability. 
The difference is in how boys and girls approach a challenge. 
And it doesn't just end in fifth grade. 
An HP report found that men will apply for a job if they meet only 60 percent of the qualifications, but women, women will apply only if they meet 100 percent of the qualifications. 
100 percent. 
This study is usually invoked as evidence that, well, women need a little more confidence. 
But I think it's evidence that women have been socialized to aspire to perfection, and they're overly cautious. 
(Applause) And even when we're ambitious, even when we're leaning in, that socialization of perfection has caused us to take less risks in our careers. 
And so those 600,000 jobs that are open right now in computing and tech, women are being left behind, and it means our economy is being left behind on all the innovation and problems women would solve if they were socialized to be brave instead of socialized to be perfect. 
(Applause) So in 2012, I started a company to teach girls to code, and what I found is that by teaching them to code I had socialized them to be brave. 
Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure. 
Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life. 
It requires perseverance. 
It requires imperfection. 
We immediately see in our program our girls' fear of not getting it right, of not being perfect. 
Every Girls Who Code teacher tells me the same story. 
During the first week, when the girls are learning how to code, a student will call her over and she'll say, "I don't know what code to write." 
The teacher will look at her screen, and she'll see a blank text editor. 
If she didn't know any better, she'd think that her student spent the past 20 minutes just staring at the screen. 
But if she presses undo a few times, she'll see that her student wrote code and then deleted it. 
She tried, she came close, but she didn't get it exactly right. 
Instead of showing the progress that she made, she'd rather show nothing at all. 
Perfection or bust. 
It turns out that our girls are really good at coding, but it's not enough just to teach them to code. 
My friend Lev Brie, who is a professor at the University of Columbia and teaches intro to Java tells me about his office hours with computer science students. 
When the guys are struggling with an assignment, they'll come in and they'll say, "Professor, there's something wrong with my code." 
The girls will come in and say, "Professor, there's something wrong with me." 
We have to begin to undo the socialization of perfection, but we've got to combine it with building a sisterhood that lets girls know that they are not alone. 
Because trying harder is not going to fix a broken system. 
I can't tell you how many women tell me, "" I'm afraid to raise my hand, I'm afraid to ask a question, because I don't want to be the only one who doesn't understand, the only one who is struggling. 
When we teach girls to be brave and we have a supportive network cheering them on, they will build incredible things, and I see this every day. 
Take, for instance, two of our high school students who built a game called Tampon Run — yes, Tampon Run — to fight against the menstruation taboo and sexism in gaming. 
Or the Syrian refugee who dared show her love for her new country by building an app to help Americans get to the polls. 
Or a 16-year-old girl who built an algorithm to help detect whether a cancer is benign or malignant in the off chance that she can save her daddy's life because he has cancer. 
These are just three examples of thousands, thousands of girls who have been socialized to be imperfect, who have learned to keep trying, who have learned perseverance. 
And whether they become coders or the next Hillary Clinton or Beyoncé, they will not defer their dreams. 
And those dreams have never been more important for our country. 
For the American economy, for any economy to grow, to truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half our population. 
We have to socialize our girls to be comfortable with imperfection, and we've got to do it now. 
We cannot wait for them to learn how to be brave like I did when I was 33 years old. 
We have to teach them to be brave in schools and early in their careers, when it has the most potential to impact their lives and the lives of others, and we have to show them that they will be loved and accepted not for being perfect but for being courageous. 
And so I need each of you to tell every young woman you know — your sister, your niece, your employee, your colleague — to be comfortable with imperfection, because when we teach girls to be imperfect, and we help them leverage it, we will build a movement of young women who are brave and who will build a better world for themselves and for each and every one of us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Chris Anderson: Reshma, thank you. 
It's such a powerful vision you have. You have a vision. 
Tell me how it's going. 
How many girls are involved now in your program? 
Reshma Saujani: Yeah. So in 2012, we taught 20 girls. 
This year we'll teach 40,000 in all 50 states. 
(Applause) And that number is really powerful, because last year we only graduated 7,500 women in computer science. 
Like, the problem is so bad that we can make that type of change quickly. 
CA: And you're working with some of the companies in this room even, who are welcoming graduates from your program? 
RS: Yeah, we have about 80 partners, from Twitter to Facebook to Adobe to IBM to Microsoft to Pixar to Disney, I mean, every single company out there. 
And if you're not signed up, I'm going to find you, because we need every single tech company to embed a Girls Who Code classroom in their office. 
CA: And you have some stories back from some of those companies that when you mix in more gender balance in the engineering teams, good things happen. 
RS: Great things happen. 
I mean, I think that it's crazy to me to think about the fact that right now 85 percent of all consumer purchases are made by women. 
Women use social media at a rate of 600 percent more than men. 
We own the Internet, and we should be building the companies of tomorrow. 
And I think when companies have diverse teams, and they have incredible women that are part of their engineering teams, they build awesome things, and we see it every day. 
CA: Reshma, you saw the reaction there. You're doing incredibly important work. 
This whole community is cheering you on. More power to you. Thank you. 
RS: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So what I want to try to do is tell a quick story about a 404 page and a lesson that was learned as a result of it. 
But to start it probably helps to have an understanding of what a 404 page actually is. 
The 404 page is that. 
It's that broken experience on the Web. 
It's effectively the default page when you ask a website for something and it can't find it. 
And it serves you the 404 page. 
It's inherently a feeling of being broken when you go through it. 
And I just want you to think a little bit about, remember for yourself, it's annoying when you hit this thing. 
Because it's the feeling of a broken relationship. 
And that's where it's actually also interesting to think about, where does 404 come from? 
It's from a family of errors actually — a whole set of relationship errors, which, when I started digging into them, it looks almost like a checklist for a sex therapist or a couples counselor. 
You sort of get down there to the bottom and things get really dicey. 
(Laughter) Yes. 
But these things are everywhere. 
They're on sites big, they're on sites small. 
This is a global experience. 
What a 404 page tells you is that you fell through the cracks. 
And that's not a good experience when you're used to experiences like this. 
You can get on your Kinect and you can have unicorns dancing and rainbows spraying out of your mobile phone. 
A 404 page is not what you're looking for. 
You get that, and it's like a slap in the face. 
Trying to think about how a 404 felt, and it would be like if you went to Starbucks and there's the guy behind the counter and you're over there and there's no skim milk. 
And you say, "" Hey, could you bring the skim milk? "" And they walk out from behind the counter and they've got no pants on. 
And you're like, "" Oh, I didn't want to see that. "" That's the 404 feeling. 
(Laughter) I mean, I've heard about that. 
So where this comes into play and why this is important is I head up a technology incubator, and we had eight startups sitting around there. 
And those startups are focused on what they are, not what they're not, until one day Athletepath, which is a website that focuses on services for extreme athletes, found this video. 
(Video) Guy: Joey! 
Crowd: Whoa! 
Renny Gleeson: You just... no, he's not okay. 
They took that video and they embedded it in their 404 page and it was like a light bulb went off for everybody in the place. 
Because finally there was a page that actually felt like what it felt like to hit a 404. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So this turned into a contest. 
Dailypath that offers inspiration put inspiration on their 404 page. 
Stayhound, which helps you find pet sitters through your social network, commiserated with your pet. 
Each one of them found this. 
It turned into a 24-hour contest. 
At 4: 04 the next day, we gave out $404 in cash. 
And what they learned was that those little things, done right, actually matter, and that well-designed moments can build brands. 
So you take a look out in the real world, and the fun thing is you can actually hack these yourself. 
You can type in an URL and put in a 404 and these will pop. 
This is one that commiserates with you. 
This is one that blames you. 
This is one that I loved. 
This is an error page, but what if this error page was also an opportunity? 
So it was a moment in time where all of these startups had to sit and think and got really excited about what they could be. 
Because back to the whole relationship issue, what they figured out through this exercise was that a simple mistake can tell me what you're not, or it can remind me of why I should love you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So I'm here to tell you a story of success from Africa. 
A year and a half ago, four of the five people who are full time members at Ushahidi, which means "" testimony "" in Swahili, were TED Fellows. 
A year ago in Kenya we had post-election violence. 
And in that time we prototyped and built, in about three days, a system that would allow anybody with a mobile phone to send in information and reports on what was happening around them. 
We took what we knew about Africa, the default device, the mobile phone, as our common denominator, and went from there. 
We got reports like this. 
This is just a couple of them from January 17th, last year. 
And our system was rudimentary. It was very basic. 
It was a mash-up that used data that we collected from people, and we put it on our map. 
But then we decided we needed to do something more. 
We needed to take what we had built and create a platform out of it so that it could be used elsewhere in the world. 
And so there is a team of developers from all over Africa, who are part of this team now — from Ghana, from Malawi, from Kenya. 
There is even some from the U.S. 
We're building for smartphones, so that it can be used in the developed world, as well as the developing world. 
We are realizing that this is true. 
If it works in Africa then it will work anywhere. 
And so we build for it in Africa first and then we move to the edges. 
It's now been deployed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 
It's being used by NGOs all over East Africa, small NGOs doing their own little projects. 
Just this last month it was deployed by Al Jazeera in Gaza. 
But that's actually not what I'm here to talk about. 
I'm here to talk about the next big thing, because what we're finding out is that we have this capacity to report eyewitness accounts of what's going on in real time. 
We're seeing this in events like Mumbai recently, where it's so much easier to report now than it is to consume it. 
There is so much information; what do you do? 
This is the Twitter reports for over three days just covering Mumbai. 
How do you decide what is important? 
What is the veracity level of what you're looking at? 
So what we find is that there is this great deal of wasted crisis information because there is just too much information for us to actually do anything with right now. 
And what we're actually really concerned with is this first three hours. 
What we are looking at is the first three hours. 
How do we deal with that information that is coming in? 
You can't understand what is actually happening. 
On the ground and around the world people are still curious, and trying to figure out what is going on. But they don't know. 
So what we built of course, Ushahidi, is crowdsourcing this information. 
You see this with Twitter, too. You get this information overload. 
So you've got a lot of information. That's great. 
But now what? 
So we think that there is something interesting we can do here. 
And we have a small team who is working on this. 
We think that we can actually create a crowdsourced filter. 
Take the crowd and apply them to the information. 
And by rating it and by rating the different people who submit information, we can get refined results and weighted results. 
So that we have a better understanding of the probability of something being true or not. 
This is the kind of innovation that is, quite frankly — it's interesting that it's coming from Africa. 
It's coming from places that you wouldn't expect. 
From young, smart developers. 
And it's a community around it that has decided to build this. 
So, thank you very much. 
And we are very happy to be part of the TED family. 
(Applause) 

I am a writer. 
Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. 
It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. 
And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. 
But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. 
And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called "" Eat, Pray, Love "" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. 
The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. 
Seriously — doomed, doomed! 
Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, "" Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? 
Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again? "" So that's reassuring, you know. 
But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, when I first started telling people that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction. 
And people would say, "" Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? 
Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? 
Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure? "" (Laughter) Like that, you know. 
The answer — the short answer to all those questions is, "" Yes. "" Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. 
And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and other things that are scary. 
But, when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? 
You know, is it rational? 
Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. 
And what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? 
Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? 
"That chemical-engineering block, John, how's it going?" 
It just didn't come up like that, you know? 
But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. 
(Laughter) We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. 
And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? 
And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. 
Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said, "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." 
An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work. 
But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish. 
And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? 
Are you comfortable with that? 
Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know — I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. 
I think it's odious. 
And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. 
I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live. 
And I definitely know that, in my case — in my situation — it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. 
Which is — you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. 
I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. 
And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? 
I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now — it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. 
So Jesus, what a thought! 
That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there. 
(Laughter) I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love. 
And so, the question becomes, how? 
And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? 
I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. 
And, as I've been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. 
And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. 
So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. 
But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? 
People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. 
The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "" daemons. "" Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. 
The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. 
Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. 
They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. 
So brilliant — there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about — that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. 
And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? 
So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? 
If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. 
If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? 
Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. 
(Laughter) And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. 
And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was, let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. 
And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. 
And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius. 
And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. 
You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. 
It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. 
It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. 
And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. 
And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? 
Can we do this differently? 
Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. 
Maybe not. 
Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. 
And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically, fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. 
I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this. 
But the question that I kind of want to pose is — you know, why not? 
Why not think about it this way? 
Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. 
A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something — which is to say basically everyone here — - knows does not always behave rationally. 
And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal. 
I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. 
And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. 
And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. 
And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. 
She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "" run like hell. "" And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. 
And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "" for another poet. "" And then there were these times — this is the piece I never forgot — she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? 
So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. 
She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. 
And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first. 
(Laughter) So when I heard that I was like — that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like. (Laughter) 
That's not at all what my creative process is — I'm not the pipeline! 
I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. 
But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. 
And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. 
You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. 
And what is that thing? 
And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane? 
And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. 
And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized. 
But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and this is when it all changed for him. 
And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. 
He doesn't have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder. 
So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, "" I'm going to lose this thing, and I'll be be haunted by this song forever. 
I'm not good enough, and I can't do it. "" And instead of panicking, he just stopped. 
He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. 
He just looked up at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?" 
(Laughter) "" Do I look like I can write down a song right now? 
If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. 
Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. 
Go bother Leonard Cohen. "" And his whole work process changed after that. 
Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. 
But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. 
It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration, kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom. 
When I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and this idea already saved me once. 
It saved me when I was in the middle of writing "" Eat, Pray, Love, "" and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, the worst book ever written. 
Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. 
And I started to think I should just dump this project. 
But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. 
So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. 
And I said aloud, "" Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? 
Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. 
If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal. 
But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. 
I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. 
And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job. "" (Laughter) Because — (Applause) Because in the end it's like this, OK — centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. 
They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? 
But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. 
And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. 
It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. 
And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. 
He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. 
And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. 
They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." 
That's God, you know. 
Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "" Allah, Allah, Allah, "" to "" Olé, olé, olé, "" which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. 
In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is — a glimpse of God. 
Which is great, because we need that. 
But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. 
He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. 
And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? 
This is hard. 
This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. 
But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. 
But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. 
And, you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything. 
This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success. 
And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid. 
Don't be daunted. Just do your job. 
Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. 
If your job is to dance, do your dance. 
If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "" Olé! "" And if not, do your dance anyhow. 
And "" Olé! "" to you, nonetheless. 
I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. 
"" Olé! "" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
June Cohen: Olé! (Applause) 

And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. 
And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. 
And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! 
Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun. "" Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes! 
I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, "My mother pushed me." (Laughter) 
TEDster Bill Gates says, "" I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company. "" I'd say it was a pretty good idea. 
And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas — it's just doing some very simple things. 

That all depends on our motivation. 
Therefore, it is all the more important to foster an altruistic motivation rather than a selfish one. 
There's also societal challenges: poverty in the midst of plenty, inequalities, conflict, injustice. 
And then there are the new challenges, which we don't expect. 
Ten thousand years ago, there were about five million human beings on Earth. 
Whatever they could do, the Earth's resilience would soon heal human activities. 
After the Industrial and Technological Revolutions, that's not the same anymore. 
We enter the Anthropocene, the era of human beings. 
So in a way, if we were to say we need to continue this endless growth, endless use of material resources, it's like if this man was saying — and I heard a former head of state, I won't mention who, saying — "" Five years ago, we were at the edge of the precipice. 
Today we made a big step forward. "" So this edge is the same that has been defined by scientists as the planetary boundaries. 
We can still prosper, humanity can still prosper for 150,000 years if we keep the same stability of climate as in the Holocene for the last 10,000 years. 
But this depends on choosing a voluntary simplicity, growing qualitatively, not quantitatively. 
Now, in 1950 came the great acceleration. 
Now we have vastly overrun some of the planetary boundaries. 
Just to take biodiversity, at the current rate, by 2050, 30 percent of all species on Earth will have disappeared. 
So here I am sitting in front of a 7,000-meter-high, 21,000-foot glacier in Bhutan. 
So what can we do in that situation? 
Well, however complex politically, economically, scientifically the question of the environment is, it simply boils down to a question of altruism versus selfishness. 
(Laughter) Groucho Marx said, "" Why should I care about future generations? 
What have they ever done for me? "" (Laughter) Unfortunately, I heard the billionaire Steve Forbes, on Fox News, saying exactly the same thing, but seriously. 
He was told about the rise of the ocean, and he said, "" I find it absurd to change my behavior today for something that will happen in a hundred years. "" So if you don't care for future generations, just go for it. 
So one of the main challenges of our times is to reconcile three time scales: the short term of the economy, the ups and downs of the stock market, the end-of-the-year accounts; the midterm of the quality of life — what is the quality every moment of our life, over 10 years and 20 years? — and the long term of the environment. 
When the environmentalists speak with economists, it's like a schizophrenic dialogue, completely incoherent. 
They don't speak the same language. 
Now, for the last 10 years, I went around the world meeting economists, scientists, neuroscientists, environmentalists, philosophers, thinkers in the Himalayas, all over the place. 
It seems to me, there's only one concept that can reconcile those three time scales. 
It is simply having more consideration for others. 
If you have more consideration for others, you will have a caring economics, where finance is at the service of society and not society at the service of finance. 
You will not play at the casino with the resources that people have entrusted you with. 
If you have more consideration for others, you will make sure that you remedy inequality, that you bring some kind of well-being within society, in education, at the workplace. 
Otherwise, a nation that is the most powerful and the richest but everyone is miserable, what's the point? 
And if you have more consideration for others, you are not going to ransack that planet that we have and at the current rate, we don't have three planets to continue that way. 
So the question is, okay, altruism is the answer, it's not just a novel ideal, but can it be a real, pragmatic solution? 
And first of all, does it exist, true altruism, or are we so selfish? 
That's good news, isn't it? 
But not everyone looks like a rascal. 
Or is man a wolf for man? 
But this guy doesn't seem too bad. 
He's one of my friends in Tibet. 
He's very kind. 
So now, we love cooperation. 
There's no better joy than working together, is there? 
And then not only humans. 
Then, of course, there's the struggle for life, the survival of the fittest, social Darwinism. 
So now, on top of that, the quality of human relationships. 
The first one that people said, that's the main thing for my happiness, is quality of social relationships. 
Not only in humans. 
And look at those great-grandmothers. 
So now, this idea that if we go deep within, we are irredeemably selfish, this is armchair science. 
There is not a single sociological study, psychological study, that's ever shown that. 
Rather, the opposite. 
My friend, Daniel Batson, spent a whole life putting people in the lab in very complex situations. 
But he found that systematically, no matter what, there's a significant number of people who do behave altruistically, no matter what. 
If you see someone deeply wounded, great suffering, you might just help out of empathic distress — you can't stand it, so it's better to help than to keep on looking at that person. 
So that's good news. 
And even further, we should look at the banality of goodness. 
There was no fistfight while this mob was thinking about altruism. "" No, that's expected, isn't it? 
So the banality of goodness is something that doesn't attract your attention, but it exists. 
Now, look at this. 
So some psychologists said, when I tell them I run 140 humanitarian projects in the Himalayas that give me so much joy, they said, "" Oh, I see, you work for the warm glow. 
That is not altruistic. You just feel good. "" You think this guy, when he jumped in front of the train, he thought, "" I'm going to feel so good when this is over? "" (Laughter) But that's not the end of it. 
They say, well, but when you interviewed him, he said, "I had no choice. I had to jump, of course." 
No choice? 
Well of course, this guy's not going to think for half an hour, "Should I give my hand? Not give my hand?" 
He does it. There is a choice, but it's obvious, it's immediate. 
And then, also, there he had a choice. 
(Laughter) There are people who had choice, like Pastor André Trocmé and his wife, and the whole village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France. 
For the whole Second World War, they saved 3,500 Jews, gave them shelter, brought them to Switzerland, against all odds, at the risk of their lives and those of their family. 
So altruism does exist. 
So what is altruism? 
Now, empathy is the affective resonance or cognitive resonance that tells you, this person is joyful, this person suffers. 
But empathy alone is not sufficient. 
If you keep on being confronted with suffering, you might have empathic distress, burnout, so you need the greater sphere of loving-kindness. 
With Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute of Leipzig, we showed that the brain networks for empathy and loving-kindness are different. 
Now, that's all well done, so we got that from evolution, from maternal care, parental love, but we need to extend that. 
It can be extended even to other species. 
Now, if we want a more altruistic society, we need two things: individual change and societal change. 
So is individual change possible? 
Two thousand years of contemplative study said yes, it is. 
So I spent 120 hours in an MRI machine. 
This is the first time I went after two and a half hours. 
And then the result has been published in many scientific papers. 
It shows without ambiguity that there is structural change and functional change in the brain when you train the altruistic love. 
Just to give you an idea: this is the meditator at rest on the left, meditator in compassion meditation, you see all the activity, and then the control group at rest, nothing happened, in meditation, nothing happened. 
They have not been trained. 
So do you need 50,000 hours of meditation? No, you don't. 
Four weeks, 20 minutes a day, of caring, mindfulness meditation already brings a structural change in the brain compared to a control group. 
That's only 20 minutes a day for four weeks. 
Even with preschoolers — Richard Davidson did that in Madison. 
You would say, "" Oh, they're just preschoolers. "" Look after eight weeks, the pro-social behavior, that's the blue line. 
And then comes the ultimate scientific test, the stickers test. 
Before, you determine for each child who is their best friend in the class, their least favorite child, an unknown child, and the sick child, and they have to give stickers away. 
Four, five years old, 20 minutes three times a week. 
After the intervention, no more discrimination: the same amount of stickers to their best friend and the least favorite child. 
That's something we should do in all the schools in the world. 
Now where do we go from there? 
(Applause) When the Dalai Lama heard that, he told Richard Davidson, "You go to 10 schools, 100 schools, the U.N., the whole world." 
So now where do we go from there? 
Individual change is possible. 
Now do we have to wait for an altruistic gene to be in the human race? 
That will take 50,000 years, too much for the environment. 
Fortunately, there is the evolution of culture. 
Cultures, as specialists have shown, change faster than genes. 
That's the good news. 
Look, attitude towards war has dramatically changed over the years. 
So now individual change and cultural change mutually fashion each other, and yes, we can achieve a more altruistic society. 
So where do we go from there? 
Myself, I will go back to the East. 
Now we treat 100,000 patients a year in our projects. 
We have 25,000 kids in school, four percent overhead. 
Some people say, "" Well, your stuff works in practice, but does it work in theory? "" There's always positive deviance. 
So I will also go back to my hermitage to find the inner resources to better serve others. 
But on the more global level, what can we do? 
We need three things. 
Enhancing cooperation: Cooperative learning in the school instead of competitive learning, Unconditional cooperation within corporations — there can be some competition between corporations, but not within. 
We need sustainable harmony. I love this term. 
Not sustainable growth anymore. 
Sustainable harmony means now we will reduce inequality. 
In the future, we do more with less, and we continue to grow qualitatively, not quantitatively. 
We need caring economics. 
The Homo economicus cannot deal with poverty in the midst of plenty, cannot deal with the problem of the common goods of the atmosphere, of the oceans. 
We need a caring economics. 
If you say economics should be compassionate, they say, "" That's not our job. "" But if you say they don't care, that looks bad. 
We need local commitment, global responsibility. 
We need to extend altruism to the other 1.6 million species. 
Sentient beings are co-citizens in this world. 
and we need to dare altruism. 
So, long live the altruistic revolution. 
Viva la revolución de altruismo. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. 
They said things like, "" I love a challenge, "" or, "" You know, I was hoping this would be informative. "" They understood that their abilities could be developed. 
But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. 
Are we raising them for now instead of yet? 
How can we build that bridge to yet? 
But praising the process that kids engage in, their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. 
There are other ways to reward yet. 
In this game, students were rewarded for effort, strategy and progress. 
The usual math game rewards you for getting answers right, right now, but this game rewarded process. 
And we got more effort, more strategies, more engagement over longer periods of time, and more perseverance when they hit really, really hard problems. 
In one study, we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time, they can get smarter. 
Look what happened: In this study, students who were not taught this growth mindset continued to show declining grades over this difficult school transition, but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades. 
In our country, there are groups of students who chronically underperform, for example, children in inner cities, or children on Native American reservations. 
In one year, a kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored in the 95th percentile on the national achievement test. 
Many of those kids could not hold a pencil when they arrived at school. 
So the Native kids outdid the Microsoft kids. 
That's when they're getting smarter. 
I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school, and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas. 
I now realize I've wasted most of my life. "" Let's not waste any more lives, because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children, to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with "" yet "". 

Is there a real you? 
This might seem to you like a very odd question. 
Because, you might ask, how do we find the real you, how do you know what the real you is? 
And so forth. 
But the idea that there must be a real you, surely that's obvious. 
If there's anything real in the world, it's you. 
Well, I'm not quite sure. 
At least we have to understand a bit better what that means. 
Now certainly, I think there are lots of things in our culture around us which sort of reinforce the idea that for each one of us, we have a kind of a core, an essence. 
There is something about what it means to be you which defines you, and it's kind of permanent and unchanging. 
The most kind of crude way in which we have it, are things like horoscopes. 
You know, people are very wedded to these, actually. 
People put them on their Facebook profile as though they are meaningul, you even know your Chinese horoscope as well. 
There are also more scientific versions of this, all sorts of ways of profiling personality type, such as the Myers-Briggs tests, for example. 
I don't know if you've done those. 
A lot of companies use these for recruitment. 
You answer a lot of questions, and this is supposed to reveal something about your core personality. 
And of course, the popular fascination with this is enormous. 
In magazines like this, you'll see, in the bottom left corner, they'll advertise in virtually every issue some kind of personality thing. 
And if you pick up one of those magazines, it's hard to resist, isn't it? 
Doing the test to find what is your learning style, what is your loving style, or what is your working style? 
Are you this kind of person or that? 
So I think that we have a common-sense idea that there is a kind of core or essence of ourselves to be discovered. 
And that this is kind of a permanent truth about ourselves, something that's the same throughout life. 
Well, that's the idea I want to challenge. 
And I have to say now, I'll say it a bit later, but I'm not challenging this just because I'm weird, the challenge actually has a very, very long and distinguished history. 
Here's the common-sense idea. 
There is you. 
You are the individuals you are, and you have this kind of core. 
Now in your life, what happens is that you, of course, accumulate different experiences and so forth. 
So you have memories, and these memories help to create what you are. 
You have desires, maybe for a cookie, maybe for something that we don't want to talk about at 11 o'clock in the morning in a school. 
You will have beliefs. 
This is a number plate from someone in America. 
I don't know whether this number plate, which says "" messiah 1, "" indicates that the driver believes in the messiah, or that they are the messiah. 
Either way, they have beliefs about messiahs. 
We have knowledge. 
We have sensations and experiences as well. 
It's not just intellectual things. 
So this is kind of the common-sense model, I think, of what a person is. 
There is a person who has all the things that make up our life experiences. 
But the suggestion I want to put to you today is that there's something fundamentally wrong with this model. 
And I can show you what's wrong with one click. 
Which is there isn't actually a "" you "" at the heart of all these experiences. 
Strange thought? Well, maybe not. 
What is there, then? 
Well, clearly there are memories, desires, intentions, sensations, and so forth. 
But what happens is these things exist, and they're kind of all integrated, they're overlapped, they're connected in various different ways. 
They're connecting partly, and perhaps even mainly, because they all belong to one body and one brain. 
But there's also a narrative, a story we tell about ourselves, the experiences we have when we remember past things. 
We do things because of other things. 
So what we desire is partly a result of what we believe, and what we remember is also informing us what we know. 
And so really, there are all these things, like beliefs, desires, sensations, experiences, they're all related to each other, and that just is you. 
In some ways, it's a small difference from the common-sense understanding. 
In some ways, it's a massive one. 
It's the shift between thinking of yourself as a thing which has all the experiences of life, and thinking of yourself as simply that collection of all experiences in life. 
You are the sum of your parts. 
Now those parts are also physical parts, of course, brains, bodies and legs and things, but they aren't so important, actually. 
If you have a heart transplant, you're still the same person. 
If you have a memory transplant, are you the same person? 
If you have a belief transplant, would you be the same person? 
Now this idea, that what we are, the way to understand ourselves, is as not of some permanent being, which has experiences, but is kind of a collection of experiences, might strike you as kind of weird. 
But actually, I don't think it should be weird. 
In a way, it's common sense. 
Because I just invite you to think about, by comparison, think about pretty much anything else in the universe, maybe apart from the very most fundamental forces or powers. 
Let's take something like water. 
Now my science isn't very good. 
We might say something like water has two parts hydrogen and one parts oxygen, right? 
We all know that. 
I hope no one in this room thinks that what that means is there is a thing called water, and attached to it are hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and that's what water is. 
Of course we don't. 
We understand, very easily, very straightforwardly, that water is nothing more than the hydrogen and oxygen molecules suitably arranged. 
Everything else in the universe is the same. 
There's no mystery about my watch, for example. 
We say the watch has a face, and hands, and a mechanism and a battery, But what we really mean is, we don't think there is a thing called the watch to which we then attach all these bits. 
We understand very clearly that you get the parts of the watch, you put them together, and you create a watch. 
Now if everything else in the universe is like this, why are we different? 
Why think of ourselves as somehow not just being a collection of all our parts, but somehow being a separate, permanent entity which has those parts? 
Now this view is not particularly new, actually. 
It has quite a long lineage. 
You find it in Buddhism, you find it in 17th, 18th-century philosophy going through to the current day, people like Locke and Hume. 
But interestingly, it's also a view increasingly being heard reinforced by neuroscience. 
This is Paul Broks, he's a clinical neuropsychologist, and he says this: "" We have a deep intuition that there is a core, an essence there, and it's hard to shake off, probably impossible to shake off, I suspect. 
But it's true that neuroscience shows that there is no centre in the brain where things do all come together. "" So when you look at the brain, and you look at how the brain makes possible a sense of self, you find that there isn't a central control spot in the brain. 
There is no kind of center where everything happens. 
There are lots of different processes in the brain, all of which operate, in a way, quite independently. 
But it's because of the way that they relate that we get this sense of self. 
The term I use in the book, I call it the ego trick. 
It's like a mechanical trick. 
It's not that we don't exist, it's just that the trick is to make us feel that inside of us is something more unified than is really there. 
Now you might think this is a worrying idea. 
You might think that if it's true, that for each one of us there is no abiding core of self, no permanent essence, does that mean that really, the self is an illusion? 
Does it mean that we really don't exist? 
There is no real you. 
Well, a lot of people actually do use this talk of illusion and so forth. 
These are three psychologists, Thomas Metzinger, Bruce Hood, Susan Blackmore, a lot of these people do talk the language of illusion, the self is an illusion, it's a fiction. 
But I don't think this is a very helpful way of looking at it. 
Go back to the watch. 
The watch isn't an illusion, because there is nothing to the watch other than a collection of its parts. 
In the same way, we're not illusions either. 
The fact that we are, in some ways, just this very, very complex collection, ordered collection of things, does not mean we're not real. 
I can give you a very sort of rough metaphor for this. 
Let's take something like a waterfall. 
Now if you take something like this, you can appreciate the fact that in lots of ways, there's nothing permanent about this. 
For one thing, it's always changing. 
The waters are always carving new channels. 
with changes and tides and the weather, some things dry up, new things are created. 
Of course the water that flows through the waterfall is different every single instance. 
But it doesn't mean that the Iguazu Falls are an illusion. 
It doesn't mean it's not real. 
What it means is we have to understand what it is as something which has a history, has certain things that keep it together, but it's a process, it's fluid, it's forever changing. 
Now that, I think, is a model for understanding ourselves, and I think it's a liberating model. 
Because if you think that you have this fixed, permanent essence, which is always the same, throughout your life, no matter what, in a sense you're kind of trapped. 
You're born with an essence, that's what you are until you die, if you believe in an afterlife, maybe you continue. 
But if you think of yourself as being, in a way, not a thing as such, but a kind of a process, something that is changing, then I think that's quite liberating. 
Because unlike the the waterfalls, we actually have the capacity to channel the direction of our development for ourselves to a certain degree. 
Now we've got to be careful here, right? 
If you watch the X-Factor too much, you might buy into this idea that we can all be whatever we want to be. 
That's not true. 
I've heard some fantastic musicians this morning, and I am very confident that I could in no way be as good as them. 
I could practice hard and maybe be good, but I don't have that really natural ability. 
There are limits to what we can achieve. 
There are limits to what we can make of ourselves. 
But nevertheless, we do have this capacity to, in a sense, shape ourselves. 
The true self, as it were then, is not something that is just there for you to discover, you don't sort of look into your soul and find your true self, What you are partly doing, at least, is actually creating your true self. 
And this, I think, is very, very significant, particularly at this stage of life you're at. 
You'll be aware of the fact how much of you changed over recent years. 
If you have any videos of yourself, three or four years ago, you probably feel embarrassed because you don't recognize yourself. 
So I want to get that message over, that what we need to do is think about ourselves as things that we can shape, and channel and change. 
This is the Buddha, again: "" Well-makers lead the water, fletchers bend the arrow, carpenters bend a log of wood, wise people fashion themselves. "" And that's the idea I want to leave you with, that your true self is not something that you will have to go searching for, as a mystery, and maybe never ever find. 
To the extent you have a true self, it's something that you in part discover, but in part create. 
and that, I think, is a liberating and exciting prospect. 
Thank you very much. 

So I'm here to explain why I'm wearing these ninja pajamas. 
And to do that, I'd like to talk first about environmental toxins in our bodies. 
So some of you may know about the chemical Bisphenol A, BPA. 
It's a material hardener and synthetic estrogen that's found in the lining of canned foods and some plastics. 
So BPA mimics the body's own hormones and causes neurological and reproductive problems. 
And it's everywhere. 
A recent study found BPA in 93 percent of people six and older. 
But it's just one chemical. 
The Center for Disease Control in the U.S. 
says we have 219 toxic pollutants in our bodies, and this includes preservatives, pesticides and heavy metals like lead and mercury. 
To me, this says three things. 
First, don't become a cannibal. 
Second, we are both responsible for and the victims of our own pollution. 
And third, our bodies are filters and storehouses for environmental toxins. 
So what happens to all these toxins when we die? 
The short answer is: They return to the environment in one way or another, continuing the cycle of toxicity. 
But our current funeral practices make the situation much worse. 
If you're cremated, all those toxins I mentioned are released into the atmosphere. 
And this includes 5,000 pounds of mercury from our dental fillings alone every year. 
And in a traditional American funeral, a dead body is covered with fillers and cosmetics to make it look alive. 
It's then pumped with toxic formaldehyde to slow decomposition — a practice which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel. 
So by trying to preserve our dead bodies, we deny death, poison the living and further harm the environment. 
Green or natural burials, which don't use embalming, are a step in the right direction, but they don't address the existing toxins in our bodies. 
I think there's a better solution. 
I'm an artist, so I'd like to offer a modest proposal at the intersection of art, science and culture. 
The Infinity Burial Project, an alternative burial system that uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies. The Infinity Burial Project 
began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the Infinity Mushroom — a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies, clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots, leaving clean compost. 
But I learned it's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom. 
I also learned that some of our tastiest mushrooms can clean environmental toxins in soil. 
So I thought maybe I could train an army of toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms to eat my body. 
So today, I'm collecting what I shed or slough off — my hair, skin and nails — and I'm feeding these to edible mushrooms. 
As the mushrooms grow, I pick the best feeders to become Infinity Mushrooms. 
It's a kind of imprinting and selective breeding process for the afterlife. 
So when I die, the Infinity Mushrooms will recognize my body and be able to eat it. 
All right, so for some of you, this may be really, really out there. 
(Laughter) Just a little. 
I realize this is not the kind of relationship that we usually aspire to have with our food. 
We want to eat, not be eaten by, our food. 
But as I watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body, I imagine the Infinity Mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment. 
See for me, cultivating the Infinity Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet, it's a step towards accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay. 
It's also a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet. 
Growing a mushroom is also part of a larger practice of cultivating decomposing organisms called decompiculture, a concept that was developed by an entomologist, Timothy Myles. 
The Infinity Mushroom is a subset of decompiculture I'm calling body decompiculture and toxin remediation — the cultivation of organisms that decompose and clean toxins in bodies. 
And now about these ninja pajamas. 
Once it's completed, I plan to integrate the Infinity Mushrooms into a number of objects. 
First, a burial suit infused with mushroom spores, the Mushroom Death Suit. 
(Laughter) I'm wearing the second prototype of this burial suit. 
It's covered with a crocheted netting that is embedded with mushroom spores. 
The dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia, which are the equivalent of plant roots. 
I'm also making a decompiculture kit, a cocktail of capsules that contain Infinity Mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation. 
These capsules are embedded in a nutrient-rich jelly, a kind of second skin, which dissolves quickly and becomes baby food for the growing mushrooms. 
So I plan to finish the mushroom and decompiculture kit in the next year or two, and then I'd like to begin testing them, first with expired meat from the market and then with human subjects. 
And believe it or not, a few people have offered to donate their bodies to the project to be eaten by mushrooms. 
(Laughter) What I've learned from talking to these folks is that we share a common desire to understand and accept death and to minimize the impact of our death on the environment. 
I wanted to cultivate this perspective just like the mushrooms, so I formed the Decompiculture Society, a group of people called decompinauts who actively explore their postmortem options, seek death acceptance and cultivate decomposing organisms like the Infinity Mushroom. 
The Decompiculture Society shares a vision of a cultural shift, from our current culture of death denial and body preservation to one of decompiculture, a radical acceptance of death and decomposition. 
Accepting death means accepting that we are physical beings who are intimately connected to the environment, as the research on environmental toxins confirms. 
And the saying goes, we came from dust and will return to dust. 
And once we understand that we're connected to the environment, we see that the survival of our species depends on the survival of the planet. 
I believe this is the beginning of true environmental responsibility. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So today, I want us to reflect on the demise of guys. 
Guys are flaming out academically; they're wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women. 
Other than that, there's not much of a problem. 
So what's the data? 
So the data on dropping out is amazing. 
Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school. 
In Canada, five boys drop out for every three girls. 
Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school. 
There's a 10 percent differential between getting BA's and all graduate programs, with guys falling behind girls. 
Two-thirds of all students in special ed. remedial programs are guys. 
And as you all know, boys are five times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention deficit disorder — and therefore we drug them with Ritalin. 
What's the evidence of wiping out? 
First, it's a new fear of intimacy. 
Intimacy means physical, emotional connection with somebody else — and especially with somebody of the opposite sex who gives off ambiguous, contradictory, phosphorescent signals. 
(Laughter) And every year there's research done on self-reported shyness among college students. 
And we're seeing a steady increase among males. 
And this is two kinds. 
It's a social awkwardness. 
The old shyness was a fear of rejection. 
It's a social awkwardness like you're a stranger in a foreign land. 
They don't know what to say, they don't know what to do, especially one-on-one [with the] opposite sex. 
They don't know the language of face contact, the non-verbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk to somebody else, listen to somebody else. 
There's something I'm developing here called social intensity syndrome, which tries to account for why guys really prefer male bonding over female mating. 
It turns out, from earliest childhood, boys, and then men, prefer the company of guys — physical company. 
And there's actually a cortical arousal we're looking at, because guys have been with guys in teams, in clubs, in gangs, in fraternities, especially in the military, and then in pubs. 
And this peaks at Super Bowl Sunday when guys would rather be in a bar with strangers, watching a totally overdressed Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers, rather than Jennifer Lopez totally naked in the bedroom. 
The problem is they now prefer [the] asynchronistic Internet world to the spontaneous interaction in social relationships. 
What are the causes? Well, it's an unintended consequence. 
I think it's excessive Internet use in general, excessive video gaming, excessive new access to pornography. 
The problem is these are arousal addictions. 
Drug addiction, you simply want more. 
Arousal addiction, you want different. 
Drugs, you want more of the same — different. 
So you need the novelty in order for the arousal to be sustained. 
And the problem is the industry is supplying it. 
Jane McGonigal told us last year that by the time a boy is 21, he's played 10,000 hours of video games, most of that in isolation. 
As you remember, Cindy Gallop said men don't know the difference between making love and doing porn. 
The average boy now watches 50 porn video clips a week. 
And there's some guy watching a hundred, obviously. 
(Laughter) And the porn industry is the fastest growing industry in America — 15 billion annually. 
For every 400 movies made in Hollywood, there are 11,000 now made porn videos. 
So the effect, very quickly, is it's a new kind of arousal. 
Boys' brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. 
That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive. 
They're also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which build gradually and subtly. 
So what's the solution? It's not my job. 
I'm here to alarm. It's your job to solve. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But who should care? The only people who should care about this is parents of boys and girls, educators, gamers, filmmakers and women who would like a real man who they can talk to, who can dance, who can make love slowly and contribute to the evolutionary pressures to keep our species above banana slugs. 
No offense to banana slug owners. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm an underwater explorer, more specifically a cave diver. 
I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a little kid, but growing up in Canada as a young girl, that wasn't really available to me. 
But as it turns out, we know a lot more about space than we do about the underground waterways coursing through our planet, the very lifeblood of Mother Earth. 
So I decided to do something that was even more remarkable. 
Instead of exploring outer space, I wanted to explore the wonders of inner space. 
Now, a lot of people will tell you that cave diving is perhaps one of the most dangerous endeavors. 
I mean, imagine yourself here in this room, if you were suddenly plunged into blackness, with your only job to find the exit, sometimes swimming through these large spaces, and at other times crawling beneath the seats, following a thin guideline, just waiting for the life support to provide your very next breath. 
Well, that's my workplace. 
But what I want to teach you today is that our world is not one big solid rock. 
It's a whole lot more like a sponge. 
I can swim through a lot of the pores in our earth's sponge, but where I can't, other life-forms and other materials can make that journey without me. 
And my voice is the one that's going to teach you about the inside of Mother Earth. 
There was no guidebook available to me when I decided to be the first person to cave dive inside Antarctic icebergs. 
In 2000, this was the largest moving object on the planet. 
It calved off the Ross Ice Shelf, and we went down there to explore ice edge ecology and search for life-forms beneath the ice. 
We use a technology called rebreathers. 
It's an awful lot like the same technology that is used for space walks. 
This technology enables us to go deeper than we could've imagined even 10 years ago. 
We use exotic gases, and we can make missions even up to 20 hours long underwater. 
I work with biologists. 
It turns out that caves are repositories of amazing life-forms, species that we never knew existed before. 
Many of these life-forms live in unusual ways. 
They have no pigment and no eyes in many cases, and these animals are also extremely long-lived. 
In fact, animals swimming in these caves today are identical in the fossil record that predates the extinction of the dinosaurs. 
So imagine that: these are like little swimming dinosaurs. 
What can they teach us about evolution and survival? 
When we look at an animal like this remipede swimming in the jar, he has giant fangs with venom. 
He can actually attack something 40 times his size and kill it. 
If he were the size of a cat, he'd be the most dangerous thing on our planet. 
And these animals live in remarkably beautiful places, and in some cases, caves like this, that are very young, yet the animals are ancient. 
How did they get there? 
I also work with physicists, and they're interested oftentimes in global climate change. 
They can take rocks within the caves, and they can slice them and look at the layers within with rocks, much like the rings of a tree, and they can count back in history and learn about the climate on our planet at very different times. 
The red that you see in this photograph is actually dust from the Sahara Desert. 
So it's been picked up by wind, blown across the Atlantic Ocean. 
It's rained down in this case on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas. 
It soaks in through the ground and deposits itself in the rocks within these caves. 
And when we look back in the layers of these rocks, we can find times when the climate was very, very dry on earth, and we can go back many hundreds of thousands of years. 
Paleoclimatologists are also interested in where the sea level stands were at other times on earth. 
Here in Bermuda, my team and I embarked on the deepest manned dives ever conducted in the region, and we were looking for places where the sea level used to lap up against the shoreline, many hundreds of feet below current levels. 
I also get to work with paleontologists and archaeologists. 
In places like Mexico, in the Bahamas, and even in Cuba, we're looking at cultural remains and also human remains in caves, and they tell us a lot about some of the earliest inhabitants of these regions. 
But my very favorite project of all was over 15 years ago, when I was a part of the team that made the very first accurate, three-dimensional map of a subterranean surface. 
This device that I'm driving through the cave was actually creating a three-dimensional model as we drove it. 
We also used ultra low frequency radio to broadcast back to the surface our exact position within the cave. 
So I swam under houses and businesses and bowling alleys and golf courses, and even under a Sonny's BBQ Restaurant, Pretty remarkable, and what that taught me was that everything we do on the surface of our earth will be returned to us to drink. 
Our water planet is not just rivers, lakes and oceans, but it's this vast network of groundwater that knits us all together. 
It's a shared resource from which we all drink. 
And when we can understand our human connections with our groundwater and all of our water resources on this planet, then we'll be working on the problem that's probably the most important issue of this century. 
So I never got to be that astronaut that I always wanted to be, but this mapping device, designed by Dr. Bill Stone, will be. 
It's actually morphed. 
It's now a self-swimming autonomous robot, artificially intelligent, and its ultimate goal is to go to Jupiter's moon Europa and explore oceans beneath the frozen surface of that body. 
And that's pretty amazing. 
(Applause) 

If you look deep into the night sky, you see stars, and if you look further, you see more stars, and further, galaxies, and further, more galaxies. 
But if you keep looking further and further, eventually you see nothing for a long while, and then finally you see a faint, fading afterglow, and it's the afterglow of the Big Bang. 
Now, the Big Bang was an era in the early universe when everything we see in the night sky was condensed into an incredibly small, incredibly hot, incredibly roiling mass, and from it sprung everything we see. 
Now, we've mapped that afterglow with great precision, and when I say we, I mean people who aren't me. 
We've mapped the afterglow with spectacular precision, and one of the shocks about it is that it's almost completely uniform. 
Fourteen billion light years that way and 14 billion light years that way, it's the same temperature. 
Now it's been 14 billion years since that Big Bang, and so it's got faint and cold. 
It's now 2.7 degrees. 
But it's not exactly 2.7 degrees. 
It's only 2.7 degrees to about 10 parts in a million. 
Over here, it's a little hotter, and over there, it's a little cooler, and that's incredibly important to everyone in this room, because where it was a little hotter, there was a little more stuff, and where there was a little more stuff, we have galaxies and clusters of galaxies and superclusters and all the structure you see in the cosmos. 
And those small, little, inhomogeneities, 20 parts in a million, those were formed by quantum mechanical wiggles in that early universe that were stretched across the size of the entire cosmos. 
That is spectacular, and that's not what they found on Monday; what they found on Monday is cooler. 
So here's what they found on Monday: Imagine you take a bell, and you whack the bell with a hammer. 
What happens? It rings. 
But if you wait, that ringing fades and fades and fades until you don't notice it anymore. 
Now, that early universe was incredibly dense, like a metal, way denser, and if you hit it, it would ring, but the thing ringing would be the structure of space-time itself, and the hammer would be quantum mechanics. 
What they found on Monday was evidence of the ringing of the space-time of the early universe, what we call gravitational waves from the fundamental era, and here's how they found it. 
Those waves have long since faded. 
If you go for a walk, you don't wiggle. 
Those gravitational waves in the structure of space are totally invisible for all practical purposes. 
But early on, when the universe was making that last afterglow, the gravitational waves put little twists in the structure of the light that we see. 
So by looking at the night sky deeper and deeper — in fact, these guys spent three years on the South Pole looking straight up through the coldest, clearest, cleanest air they possibly could find looking deep into the night sky and studying that glow and looking for the faint twists which are the symbol, the signal, of gravitational waves, the ringing of the early universe. 
And on Monday, they announced that they had found it. 
And the thing that's so spectacular about that to me is not just the ringing, though that is awesome. 
The thing that's totally amazing, the reason I'm on this stage, is because what that tells us is something deep about the early universe. 
It tells us that we and everything we see around us are basically one large bubble — and this is the idea of inflation — one large bubble surrounded by something else. 
This isn't conclusive evidence for inflation, but anything that isn't inflation that explains this will look the same. 
This is a theory, an idea, that has been around for a while, and we never thought we we'd really see it. 
For good reasons, we thought we'd never see killer evidence, and this is killer evidence. 
But the really crazy idea is that our bubble is just one bubble in a much larger, roiling pot of universal stuff. 
We're never going to see the stuff outside, but by going to the South Pole and spending three years looking at the detailed structure of the night sky, we can figure out that we're probably in a universe that looks kind of like that. 
Thanks a lot. 

Let's start with day and night. 
Life evolved under conditions of light and darkness, light and then darkness. 
And so plants and animals developed their own internal clocks so that they would be ready for these changes in light. 
These are chemical clocks, and they're found in every known being that has two or more cells and in some that only have one cell. 
I'll give you an example — if you take a horseshoe crab off the beach, and you fly it all the way across the continent, and you drop it into a sloped cage, it will scramble up the floor of the cage as the tide is rising on its home shores, and it'll skitter down again right as the water is receding thousands of miles away. 
It'll do this for weeks, until it kind of gradually loses the plot. 
And it's incredible to watch, but there's nothing psychic or paranormal going on; it's simply that these crabs have internal cycles that correspond, usually, with what's going on around it. 
So, we have this ability as well. 
And in humans, we call it the "" body clock. "" You can see this most clearly when you take away someone's watch and you shut them into a bunker, deep underground, for a couple of months. (Laughter) People actually volunteer for this, and they usually come out kind of raving about their productive time in the hole. 
So, no matter how atypical these subjects would have to be, they all show the same thing. 
They get up just a little bit later every day — say 15 minutes or so — and they kind of drift all the way around the clock like this over the course of the weeks. 
It's a huge driver for culture and I think that it's the most underrated force on our behavior. 
We evolved as a species near the equator, and so we're very well-equipped to deal with 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. 
But of course, we've spread to every corner of the globe and in Arctic Canada, where I live, we have perpetual daylight in summer and 24 hours of darkness in winter. 
So the culture, the northern aboriginal culture, traditionally has been highly seasonal. 
In winter, there's a lot of sleeping going on; you enjoy your family life inside. 
And in summer, it's almost manic hunting and working activity very long hours, very active. 
So, what would our natural rhythm look like? 
What would our sleeping patterns be in the sort of ideal sense? 
Well, it turns out that when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all, they sleep twice every night. 
They go to bed around 8: 00 p.m. 
until midnight and then again, they sleep from about 2: 00 a.m. until sunrise. 
And in-between, they have a couple of hours of sort of meditative quiet in bed. 
And during this time, there's a surge of prolactin, the likes of which a modern day never sees. 
The people in these studies report feeling so awake during the daytime, that they realize they're experiencing true wakefulness for the first time in their lives. 
So, cut to the modern day. 
We're living in a culture of jet lag, global travel, 24-hour business, shift work. 
And you know, our modern ways of doing things have their advantages, but I believe we should understand the costs. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

You know, I didn't set out to be a parenting expert. 
In fact, I'm not very interested in parenting, per Se. 
It's just that there's a certain style of parenting these days that is kind of messing up kids, impeding their chances to develop into theirselves. 
There's a certain style of parenting these days that's getting in the way. 
I guess what I'm saying is, we spend a lot of time being very concerned about parents who aren't involved enough in the lives of their kids and their education or their upbringing, and rightly so. 
But at the other end of the spectrum, there's a lot of harm going on there as well, where parents feel a kid can't be successful unless the parent is protecting and preventing at every turn and hovering over every happening, and micromanaging every moment, and steering their kid towards some small subset of colleges and careers. 
When we raise kids this way, and I'll say we, because Lord knows, in raising my two teenagers, I've had these tendencies myself, our kids end up leading a kind of checklisted childhood. 
And here's what the checklisted childhood looks like. 
We keep them safe and sound and fed and watered, and then we want to be sure they go to the right schools, that they're in the right classes at the right schools, and that they get the right grades in the right classes in the right schools. 
But not just the grades, the scores, and not just the grades and scores, but the accolades and the awards and the sports, the activities, the leadership. 
We tell our kids, don't just join a club, start a club, because colleges want to see that. 
And check the box for community service. 
I mean, show the colleges you care about others. 
(Laughter) And all of this is done to some hoped-for degree of perfection. 
We expect our kids to perform at a level of perfection we were never asked to perform at ourselves, and so because so much is required, we think, well then, of course we parents have to argue with every teacher and principal and coach and referee and act like our kid's concierge and personal handler and secretary. 
And then with our kids, our precious kids, we spend so much time nudging, cajoling, hinting, helping, haggling, nagging as the case may be, to be sure they're not screwing up, not closing doors, not ruining their future, some hoped-for admission to a tiny handful of colleges that deny almost every applicant. 
And here's what it feels like to be a kid in this checklisted childhood. 
First of all, there's no time for free play. 
There's no room in the afternoons, because everything has to be enriching, we think. 
It's as if every piece of homework, every quiz, every activity is a make-or-break moment for this future we have in mind for them, and we absolve them of helping out around the house, and we even absolve them of getting enough sleep as long as they're checking off the items on their checklist. 
And in the checklisted childhood, we say we just want them to be happy, but when they come home from school, what we ask about all too often first is their homework and their grades. 
And they see in our faces that our approval, that our love, that their very worth, comes from A's. 
And then we walk alongside them and offer clucking praise like a trainer at the Westminster Dog Show — (Laughter) coaxing them to just jump a little higher and soar a little farther, day after day after day. 
And when they get to high school, they don't say, "" Well, what might I be interested in studying or doing as an activity? "" They go to counselors and they say, "What do I need to do to get into the right college?" 
And then, when the grades start to roll in in high school, and they're getting some B's, or God forbid some C's, they frantically text their friends and say, "" Has anyone ever gotten into the right college with these grades? "" And our kids, regardless of where they end up at the end of high school, they're breathless. 
They're brittle. 
They're a little burned out. 
They're a little old before their time, wishing the grown-ups in their lives had said, "" What you've done is enough, this effort you've put forth in childhood is enough. "" And they're withering now under high rates of anxiety and depression and some of them are wondering, will this life ever turn out to have been worth it? 
Well, we parents, we parents are pretty sure it's all worth it. 
We seem to behave — it's like we literally think they will have no future if they don't get into one of these tiny set of colleges or careers we have in mind for them. 
Or maybe, maybe, we're just afraid they won't have a future we can brag about to our friends and with stickers on the backs of our cars. 
Yeah. 
(Applause) But if you look at what we've done, if you have the courage to really look at it, you'll see that not only do our kids think their worth comes from grades and scores, but that when we live right up inside their precious developing minds all the time, like our very own version of the movie "" Being John Malkovich, "" we send our children the message: "Hey kid, I don't think you can actually achieve any of this without me." 
And so with our overhelp, our overprotection and overdirection and hand-holding, we deprive our kids of the chance to build self-efficacy, which is a really fundamental tenet of the human psyche, far more important than that self-esteem they get every time we applaud. 
Self-efficacy is built when one sees that one's own actions lead to outcomes, not — There you go. 
(Applause) Not one's parents' actions on one's behalf, but when one's own actions lead to outcomes. 
So simply put, if our children are to develop self-efficacy, and they must, then they have to do a whole lot more of the thinking, planning, deciding, doing, hoping, coping, trial and error, dreaming and experiencing of life for themselves. 
Now, am I saying every kid is hard-working and motivated and doesn't need a parent's involvement or interest in their lives, and we should just back off and let go? 
Hell no. 
(Laughter) That is not what I'm saying. 
What I'm saying is, when we treat grades and scores and accolades and awards as the purpose of childhood, all in furtherance of some hoped-for admission to a tiny number of colleges or entrance to a small number of careers, that that's too narrow a definition of success for our kids. 
And even though we might help them achieve some short-term wins by overhelping — like they get a better grade if we help them do their homework, they might end up with a longer childhood résumé when we help — what I'm saying is that all of this comes at a long-term cost to their sense of self. 
What I'm saying is, we should be less concerned with the specific set of colleges they might be able to apply to or might get into and far more concerned that they have the habits, the mindset, the skill set, the wellness, to be successful wherever they go. What I'm saying is, 
our kids need us to be a little less obsessed with grades and scores and a whole lot more interested in childhood providing a foundation for their success built on things like love and chores. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Did I just say chores? Did I just say chores? I really did. 
But really, here's why. 
The longest longitudinal study of humans ever conducted is called the Harvard Grant Study. 
It found that professional success in life, which is what we want for our kids, that professional success in life comes from having done chores as a kid, and the earlier you started, the better, that a roll-up-your-sleeves- and-pitch-in mindset, a mindset that says, there's some unpleasant work, someone's got to do it, it might as well be me, a mindset that says, I will contribute my effort to the betterment of the whole, that that's what gets you ahead in the workplace. 
Now, we all know this. You know this. 
(Applause) We all know this, and yet, in the checklisted childhood, we absolve our kids of doing the work of chores around the house, and then they end up as young adults in the workplace still waiting for a checklist, but it doesn't exist, and more importantly, lacking the impulse, the instinct to roll up their sleeves and pitch in and look around and wonder, how can I be useful to my colleagues? 
How can I anticipate a few steps ahead to what my boss might need? 
A second very important finding from the Harvard Grant Study said that happiness in life comes from love, not love of work, love of humans: our spouse, our partner, our friends, our family. 
So childhood needs to teach our kids how to love, and they can't love others if they don't first love themselves, and they won't love themselves if we can't offer them unconditional love. 
(Applause) Right. 
And so, instead of being obsessed with grades and scores when our precious offspring come home from school, or we come home from work, we need to close our technology, put away our phones, and look them in the eye and let them see the joy that fills our faces when we see our child for the first time in a few hours. 
And then we have to say, "" How was your day? 
What did you like about today? "" And when your teenage daughter says, "" Lunch, "" like mine did, and I want to hear about the math test, not lunch, you have to still take an interest in lunch. 
You gotta say, "" What was great about lunch today? "" They need to know they matter to us as humans, not because of their GPA. 
All right, so you're thinking, chores and love, that sounds all well and good, but give me a break. 
The colleges want to see top scores and grades and accolades and awards, and I'm going to tell you, sort of. 
The very biggest brand-name schools are asking that of our young adults, but here's the good news. 
Contrary to what the college rankings racket would have us believe — (Applause) you don't have to go to one of the biggest brand name schools to be happy and successful in life. 
Happy and successful people went to state school, went to a small college no one has heard of, went to community college, went to a college over here and flunked out. 
(Applause) The evidence is in this room, is in our communities, that this is the truth. 
And if we could widen our blinders and be willing to look at a few more colleges, maybe remove our own egos from the equation, we could accept and embrace this truth and then realize, it is hardly the end of the world if our kids don't go to one of those big brand-name schools. 
And more importantly, if their childhood has not been lived according to a tyrannical checklist then when they get to college, whichever one it is, well, they'll have gone there on their own volition, fueled by their own desire, capable and ready to thrive there. 
I have to admit something to you. 
I've got two kids I mentioned, Sawyer and Avery. 
They're teenagers. 
And once upon a time, I think I was treating my Sawyer and Avery like little bonsai trees — (Laughter) that I was going to carefully clip and prune and shape into some perfect form of a human that might just be perfect enough to warrant them admission to one of the most highly selective colleges. 
But I've come to realize, after working with thousands of other people's kids — (Laughter) and raising two kids of my own, my kids aren't bonsai trees. 
They're wildflowers of an unknown genus and species — (Laughter) and it's my job to provide a nourishing environment, to strengthen them through chores and to love them so they can love others and receive love and the college, the major, the career, that's up to them. 
My job is not to make them become what I would have them become, but to support them in becoming their glorious selves. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So this is my niece. 
Her name is Yahli. 
She is nine months old. 
Her mum is a doctor, and her dad is a lawyer. 
By the time Yahli goes to college, the jobs her parents do are going to look dramatically different. 
In 2013, researchers at Oxford University did a study on the future of work. 
They concluded that almost one in every two jobs have a high risk of being automated by machines. 
Machine learning is the technology that's responsible for most of this disruption. 
It's the most powerful branch of artificial intelligence. 
It allows machines to learn from data and mimic some of the things that humans can do. 
My company, Kaggle, operates on the cutting edge of machine learning. 
We bring together hundreds of thousands of experts to solve important problems for industry and academia. 
This gives us a unique perspective on what machines can do, what they can't do and what jobs they might automate or threaten. 
Machine learning started making its way into industry in the early '90s. 
It started with relatively simple tasks. 
It started with things like assessing credit risk from loan applications, sorting the mail by reading handwritten characters from zip codes. 
Over the past few years, we have made dramatic breakthroughs. 
Machine learning is now capable of far, far more complex tasks. 
In 2012, Kaggle challenged its community to build an algorithm that could grade high-school essays. 
The winning algorithms were able to match the grades given by human teachers. 
Last year, we issued an even more difficult challenge. 
Can you take images of the eye and diagnose an eye disease called diabetic retinopathy? 
Again, the winning algorithms were able to match the diagnoses given by human ophthalmologists. 
Now, given the right data, machines are going to outperform humans at tasks like this. 
A teacher might read 10,000 essays over a 40-year career. 
An ophthalmologist might see 50,000 eyes. 
A machine can read millions of essays or see millions of eyes within minutes. 
We have no chance of competing against machines on frequent, high-volume tasks. 
But there are things we can do that machines can't do. 
Where machines have made very little progress is in tackling novel situations. 
They can't handle things they haven't seen many times before. 
The fundamental limitations of machine learning is that it needs to learn from large volumes of past data. 
Now, humans don't. 
We have the ability to connect seemingly disparate threads to solve problems we've never seen before. 
Percy Spencer was a physicist working on radar during World War II, when he noticed the magnetron was melting his chocolate bar. 
He was able to connect his understanding of electromagnetic radiation with his knowledge of cooking in order to invent — any guesses? — the microwave oven. 
Now, this is a particularly remarkable example of creativity. 
But this sort of cross-pollination happens for each of us in small ways thousands of times per day. 
Machines cannot compete with us when it comes to tackling novel situations, and this puts a fundamental limit on the human tasks that machines will automate. 
So what does this mean for the future of work? 
The future state of any single job lies in the answer to a single question: To what extent is that job reducible to frequent, high-volume tasks, and to what extent does it involve tackling novel situations? 
On frequent, high-volume tasks, machines are getting smarter and smarter. 
Today they grade essays. They diagnose certain diseases. 
Over coming years, they're going to conduct our audits, and they're going to read boilerplate from legal contracts. 
Accountants and lawyers are still needed. 
They're going to be needed for complex tax structuring, for pathbreaking litigation. 
But machines will shrink their ranks and make these jobs harder to come by. 
Now, as mentioned, machines are not making progress on novel situations. 
The copy behind a marketing campaign needs to grab consumers' attention. 
It has to stand out from the crowd. 
Business strategy means finding gaps in the market, things that nobody else is doing. 
It will be humans that are creating the copy behind our marketing campaigns, and it will be humans that are developing our business strategy. 
So Yahli, whatever you decide to do, let every day bring you a new challenge. 
If it does, then you will stay ahead of the machines. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we're going to become, and then when we become those people, we're not always thrilled with the decisions we made. 
So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. 
Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. 
Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. 
On and on and on. 
The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret? 
Now, I think one of the reasons — I'll try to convince you today — is that we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time. 
Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change by the minute but your parents seem to change by the year. 
But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? 
Is it old age? The answer, it turns out, for most people, is now, wherever now happens to be. 
What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion, an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. 
Let me give you some data to back up that claim. 
So here's a study of change in people's personal values over time. 
Here's three values. 
Everybody here holds all of them, but you probably know that as you grow, as you age, the balance of these values shifts. 
So how does it do so? 
Well, we asked thousands of people. 
We asked half of them to predict for us how much their values would change in the next 10 years, and the others to tell us how much their values had changed in the last 10 years. 
And this enabled us to do a really interesting kind of analysis, because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people, say, 18 years old, to the reports of people who were 28, and to do that kind of analysis throughout the lifespan. 
Here's what we found. 
First of all, you are right, change does slow down as we age, but second, you're wrong, because it doesn't slow nearly as much as we think. 
At every age, from 18 to 68 in our data set, people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years. 
We call this the "" end of history "" illusion. 
To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, you can connect these two lines, and what you see here is that 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do. 
Now it's not just values. It's all sorts of other things. 
For example, personality. 
Many of you know that psychologists now claim that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality: neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. 
Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years, and also how much they had changed over the last 10 years, and what we found, well, you're going to get used to seeing this diagram over and over, because once again the rate of change does slow as we age, but at every age, people underestimate how much their personalities will change in the next decade. 
And it isn't just ephemeral things like values and personality. 
You can ask people about their likes and dislikes, their basic preferences. 
For example, name your best friend, your favorite kind of vacation, what's your favorite hobby, what's your favorite kind of music. 
People can name these things. 
We ask half of them to tell us, "Do you think that that will change over the next 10 years?" 
and half of them to tell us, "Did that change over the last 10 years?" 
And what we find, well, you've seen it twice now, and here it is again: people predict that the friend they have now is the friend they'll have in 10 years, the vacation they most enjoy now is the one they'll enjoy in 10 years, and yet, people who are 10 years older all say, "Eh, you know, that's really changed." 
Does any of this matter? 
Is this just a form of mis-prediction that doesn't have consequences? 
No, it matters quite a bit, and I'll give you an example of why. 
It bedevils our decision-making in important ways. 
Bring to mind right now for yourself your favorite musician today and your favorite musician 10 years ago. 
I put mine up on the screen to help you along. 
Now we asked people to predict for us, to tell us how much money they would pay right now to see their current favorite musician perform in concert 10 years from now, and on average, people said they would pay 129 dollars for that ticket. 
And yet, when we asked them how much they would pay to see the person who was their favorite 10 years ago perform today, they say only 80 dollars. 
Now, in a perfectly rational world, these should be the same number, but we overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability. 
Why does this happen? We're not entirely sure, but it probably has to do with the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining. 
Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. 
Sorry, when people say "" I can't imagine that, "" they're usually talking about their own lack of imagination, and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they're describing. 
The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. 
It transforms our preferences. 
It reshapes our values. 
It alters our personalities. 
We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. 
Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. 
It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. 
It's a watershed on the timeline. 
It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. 
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. 
The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. 
The one constant in our life is change. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

About four years ago, the New Yorker published an article about a cache of dodo bones that was found in a pit on the island of Mauritius. 
Now, the island of Mauritius is a small island off the east coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, and it is the place where the dodo bird was discovered and extinguished, all within about 150 years. 
Everyone was very excited about this archaeological find, because it meant that they might finally be able to assemble a single dodo skeleton. 
See, while museums all over the world have dodo skeletons in their collection, nobody — not even the actual Natural History Museum on the island of Mauritius — has a skeleton that's made from the bones of a single dodo. 
Well, this isn't exactly true. 
The fact is, is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century — it was actually mummified, skin and all — but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire. 
If you go look at their website today, they'll actually list these specimens, saying, the rest was lost in a fire. 
Not quite the whole truth. Anyway. 
The frontispiece of this article was this photo, and I'm one of the people that thinks that Tina Brown was great for bringing photos to the New Yorker, because this photo completely rocked my world. 
I became obsessed with the object — not just the beautiful photograph itself, and the color, the shallow depth of field, the detail that's visible, the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put this skeleton together — there's an entire story here. 
And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if I had my own dodo skeleton? 
(Laughter) I want to point out here at this point that I've spent my life obsessed by objects and the stories that they tell, and this was the very latest one. 
So I began looking around for — to see if anyone sold a kit, some kind of model that I could get, and I found lots of reference material, lots of lovely pictures. 
No dice: no dodo skeleton for me. But the damage had been done. 
I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my "" Creative Projects "" folder — it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. 
Any time I have an internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos. 
The key that the Marquis du Lafayette sent to George Washington to celebrate the storming of the Bastille. 
Russian nuclear launch key: The one on the top is the picture of the one I found on eBay; the one on the bottom is the one I made for myself, because I couldn't afford the one on eBay. 
Storm trooper costumes. Maps of Middle Earth — that's one I hand-drew myself. There's the dodo skeleton folder. 
This folder has 17,000 photos — over 20 gigabytes of information — and it's growing constantly. 
And one day, a couple of weeks later, it might have been maybe a year later, I was in the art store with my kids, and I was buying some clay tools — we were going to have a craft day. 
I bought some Super Sculpeys, some armature wire, some various materials. 
And I looked down at this Sculpey, and I thought, maybe, yeah, maybe I could make my own dodo skull. 
I should point out at this time — I'm not a sculptor; I'm a hard-edged model maker. 
You give me a drawing, you give me a prop to replicate, you give me a crane, scaffolding, parts from "" Star Wars "" — especially parts from "" Star Wars "" — I can do this stuff all day long. 
It's exactly how I made my living for 15 years. 
But you give me something like this — my friend Mike Murnane sculpted this; it's a maquette for "" Star Wars, Episode Two "" — this is not my thing — this is something other people do — dragons, soft things. 
However, I felt like I had looked at enough photos of dodo skulls to actually be able to understand the topology and perhaps replicate it — I mean, it couldn't be that difficult. 
So, I started looking at the best photos I could find. 
I grabbed all the reference, and I found this lovely piece of reference. 
This is someone selling this on eBay; it was clearly a woman ’ s hand, hopefully a woman's hand. 
Assuming it was roughly the size of my wife's hand, I made some measurements of her thumb, and I scaled them out to the size of the skull. 
I blew it up to the actual size, and I began using that, along with all the other reference that I had, comparing it to it as size reference for figuring out exactly how big the beak should be, exactly how long, etc. 
And over a few hours, I eventually achieved what was actually a pretty reasonable dodo skull. And I didn't mean to continue, I — it's kind of like, you know, you can only clean a super messy room by picking up one thing at a time; you can't think about the totality. 
I wasn't thinking about a dodo skeleton; I just noticed that as I finished this skull, the armature wire that I had been used to holding it up was sticking out of the back just where a spine would be. 
And one of the other things I'd been interested in and obsessed with over the years is spines and skeletons, having collected a couple of hundred. 
I actually understood the mechanics of vertebrae enough to kind of start to imitate them. 
And so button by button, vertebrae by vertebrae, I built my way down. 
And actually, by the end of the day, I had a reasonable skull, a moderately good vertebrae and half of a pelvis. 
And again, I kept on going, looking for more reference, every bit of reference I could find — drawings, beautiful photos. 
This guy — I love this guy! He put a dodo leg bones on a scanner with a ruler. 
This is the kind of accuracy that I wanted, and I replicated every last bone and put it in. 
And after about six weeks, I finished, painted, mounted my own dodo skeleton. 
You can see that I even made a museum label for it that includes a brief history of the dodo. 
And TAP Plastics made me — although I didn't photograph it — a museum vitrine. 
I don't have the room for this in my house, but I had to finish what I had started. 
And this actually represented kind of a sea change to me. 
Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them. 
And in this folder, "" Creative Projects, "" there are tons of projects that I'm currently working on, projects that I've already worked on, things that I might want to work on some day, and things that I may just want to find and buy and have and look at and touch. 
But now there was potentially this new category of things that I could sculpt that was different, that I — you know, I have my own R2D2, but that's — honestly, relative to sculpting, to me, that's easy. 
And so I went back and looked through my "" Creative Projects "" folder, and I happened across the Maltese Falcon. 
Now, this is funny for me: to fall in love with an object from a Hammett novel, because if it's true that the world is divided into two types of people, Chandler people and Hammett people, I am absolutely a Chandler person. 
But in this case, it's not about the author, it's not about the book or the movie or the story, it's about the object in and of itself. 
And in this case, this object is — plays on a host of levels. 
First of all, there's the object in the world. 
This is the "" Kniphausen Hawk. "" It is a ceremonial pouring vessel made around 1700 for a Swedish Count, and it is very likely the object from which Hammett drew his inspiration for the Maltese Falcon. 
Then there is the fictional bird, the one that Hammett created for the book. 
Built out of words, it is the engine that drives the plot of his book and also the movie, in which another object is created: a prop that has to represent the thing that Hammett created out of words, inspired by the Kniphausen Hawk, and this represents the falcon in the movie. 
And then there is this fourth level, which is a whole new object in the world: the prop made for the movie, the representative of the thing, becomes, in its own right, a whole other thing, a whole new object of desire. 
And so now it was time to do some research. 
I actually had done some research a few years before — it's why the folder was there. 
I'd bought a replica, a really crappy replica, of the Maltese Falcon on eBay, and had downloaded enough pictures to actually have some reasonable reference. 
But I discovered, in researching further, really wanting precise reference, that one of the original lead birds had been sold at Christie's in 1994, and so I contacted an antiquarian bookseller who had the original Christie's catalogue, and in it I found this magnificent picture, which included a size reference. 
I was able to scan the picture, blow it up to exactly full size. 
I found other reference. Avi [Ara] Chekmayan, a New Jersey editor, actually found this resin Maltese Falcon at a flea market in 1991, although it took him five years to authenticate this bird to the auctioneers' specifications, because there was a lot of controversy about it. 
It was made out of resin, which wasn't a common material for movie props about the time the movie was made. 
It's funny to me that it took a while to authenticate it, because I can see it compared to this thing, and I can tell you — it's real, it's the real thing, it's made from the exact same mold that this one is. 
In this one, because the auction was actually so controversial, Profiles in History, the auction house that sold this — I think in 1995 for about 100,000 dollars — they actually included — you can see here on the bottom — not just a front elevation, but also a side, rear and other side elevation. 
So now, I had all the topology I needed to replicate the Maltese Falcon. 
What do they do, how do you start something like that? I really don't know. 
So what I did was, again, like I did with the dodo skull, I blew all my reference up to full size, and then I began cutting out the negatives and using those templates as shape references. 
So I took Sculpey, and I built a big block of it, and I passed it through until, you know, I got the right profiles. 
And then slowly, feather by feather, detail by detail, I worked out and achieved — working in front of the television and Super Sculpey — here's me sitting next to my wife — it's the only picture I took of the entire process. 
As I moved through, I achieved a very reasonable facsimile of the Maltese Falcon. 
But again, I am not a sculptor, and so I don't know a lot of the tricks, like, I don't know how my friend Mike gets beautiful, shiny surfaces with his Sculpey; I certainly wasn't able to get it. 
So, I went down to my shop, and I molded it and I cast it in resin, because in the resin, then, I could absolutely get the glass smooth finished. 
Now there's a lot of ways to fill and get yourself a nice smooth finish. 
My preference is about 70 coats of this — matte black auto primer. 
I spray it on for about three or four days, it drips to hell, but it allows me a really, really nice gentle sanding surface and I can get it glass-smooth. 
Oh, finishing up with triple-zero steel wool. 
Now, the great thing about getting it to this point was that because in the movie, when they finally bring out the bird at the end, and they place it on the table, they actually spin it. 
So I was able to actually screen-shot and freeze-frame to make sure. 
And I'm following all the light kicks on this thing and making sure that as I'm holding the light in the same position, I'm getting the same type of reflection on it — that's the level of detail I'm going into this thing. 
I ended up with this: my Maltese Falcon. 
And it's beautiful. And I can state with authority at this point in time, when I'd finished it, of all of the replicas out there — and there is a few — this is by far the most accurate representation of the original Maltese Falcon than anyone has sculpted. Now the original one, I should tell you, is sculpted by a guy named Fred Sexton. 
This is where it gets weird. 
Fred Sexton was a friend of this guy, George Hodel. 
Terrifying guy — agreed by many to be the killer of the Black Dahlia. 
Now, James Ellroy believes that Fred Sexton, the sculptor of the Maltese Falcon, killed James Elroy's mother. 
I'll go you one stranger than that: In 1974, during the production of a weird comedy sequel to "" The Maltese Falcon, "" called "" The Black Bird, "" starring George Segal, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a plaster original of the Maltese Falcon — one of the original six plasters, I think, made for the movie — stolen out of the museum. A lot of people thought it was a publicity stunt for the movie. 
John's Grill, which actually is seen briefly in "" The Maltese Falcon, "" is still a viable San Francisco eatery, counted amongst its regular customers Elisha Cook, who played Wilmer Cook in the movie, and he gave them one of his original plasters of the Maltese Falcon. 
And they had it in their cabinet for about 15 years, until it got stolen in January of 2007. 
It would seem that the object of desire only comes into its own by disappearing repeatedly. 
So here I had this Falcon, and it was lovely. It looked really great, the light worked on it really well, it was better than anything that I could achieve or obtain out in the world. 
But there was a problem. And the problem was that: I wanted the entirety of the object, I wanted the weight behind the object. 
This thing was made of resin and it was too light. 
There's this group online that I frequent. 
It's a group of prop crazies just like me called the Replica Props Forum, and it's people who trade, make and travel in information about movie props. 
And it turned out that one of the guys there, a friend of mine that I never actually met, but befriended through some prop deals, was the manager of a local foundry. 
He took my master Falcon pattern, he actually did lost wax casting in bronze for me, and this is the bronze I got back. 
And this is, after some acid etching, the one that I ended up with. 
And this thing, it's deeply, deeply satisfying to me. 
Here, I'm going to put it out there, later on tonight, and I want you to pick it up and handle it. 
You want to know how obsessed I am. This project's only for me, and yet I went so far as to buy on eBay a 1941 Chinese San Francisco-based newspaper, in order so that the bird could properly be wrapped... 
like it is in the movie. 
(Laughter) Yeah, I know! 
(Laughter) (Applause) There you can see, it's weighing in at 27 and a half pounds. 
That's half the weight of my dog, Huxley. 
But there's a problem. 
Now, here's the most recent progression of Falcons. 
On the far left is a piece of crap — a replica I bought on eBay. 
There's my somewhat ruined Sculpey Falcon, because I had to get it back out of the mold. There's my first casting, there's my master and there's my bronze. 
There's a thing that happens when you mold and cast things, which is that every time you throw it into silicone and cast it in resin, you lose a little bit of volume, you lose a little bit of size. 
And when I held my bronze one up against my Sculpey one, it was shorter by three-quarters of an inch. 
Yeah, no, really, this was like aah — why didn't I remember this? 
Why didn't I start and make it bigger? 
So what do I do? I figure I have two options. 
One, I can fire a freaking laser at it, which I have already done, to do a 3D scan — there's a 3D scan of this Falcon. 
I had figured out the exact amount of shrinkage I achieved going from a wax master to a bronze master and blown this up big enough to make a 3D lithography master of this, which I will polish, then I will send to the mold maker and then I will have it done in bronze. Or: There are several people who own originals, and I have been attempting to contact them and reach them, hoping that they will let me spend a few minutes in the presence of one of the real birds, maybe to take a picture, or even to pull out the hand-held laser scanner 
that I happen to own that fits inside a cereal box, and could maybe, without even touching their bird, I swear, get a perfect 3D scan. And I'm even willing to sign pages saying that I'll never let anyone else have it, except for me in my office, I promise. 
I'll give them one if they want it. 
And then, maybe, then I'll achieve the end of this exercise. 
But really, if we're all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it. 
Thank you. 

They're covered in sand, they're difficult to see. 
I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them. 
What I want to share with you today is how we've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years. 
This area is huge — it's four miles by three miles in size. 
The Nile used to flow right next to the city of Itjtawy, and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east, it covered over the city. 
So I wanted to end with my favorite quote from the Middle Kingdom — it was probably written at the city of Itjtawy four thousand years ago. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

It's often said that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at what's on their bookshelves. 
What do my bookshelves say about me? 
Well, when I asked myself this question a few years ago, I made an alarming discovery. 
I'd always thought of myself as a fairly cultured, cosmopolitan sort of person. 
But my bookshelves told a rather different story. 
Pretty much all the titles on them were by British or North American authors, and there was almost nothing in translation. 
Discovering this massive, cultural blind spot in my reading came as quite a shock. 
And when I thought about it, it seemed like a real shame. 
I knew there had to be lots of amazing stories out there by writers working in languages other than English. 
And it seemed really sad to think that my reading habits meant I would probably never encounter them. 
So, I decided to prescribe myself an intensive course of global reading. 
2012 was set to be a very international year for the UK; it was the year of the London Olympics. 
And so I decided to use it as my time frame to try to read a novel, short story collection or memoir from every country in the world. 
And so I did. 
And it was very exciting and I learned some remarkable things and made some wonderful connections that I want to share with you today. 
But it started with some practical problems. 
After I'd worked out which of the many different lists of countries in the world to use for my project, I ended up going with the list of UN-recognized nations, to which I added Taiwan, which gave me a total of 196 countries. 
And after I'd worked out how to fit reading and blogging about, roughly, four books a week around working five days a week, I then had to face up to the fact that I might even not be able to get books in English from every country. 
Only around 4.5 percent of the literary works published each year in the UK are translations, and the figures are similar for much of the English-speaking world. 
Although, the proportion of translated books published in many other countries is a lot higher. 
4.5 percent is tiny enough to start with, but what that figure doesn't tell you is that many of those books will come from countries with strong publishing networks and lots of industry professionals primed to go out and sell those titles to English-language publishers. 
So, for example, although well over 100 books are translated from French and published in the UK each year, most of them will come from countries like France or Switzerland. 
French-speaking Africa, on the other hand, will rarely ever get a look-in. 
The upshot is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no commercially available literature in English. 
Their books remain invisible to readers of the world's most published language. 
But when it came to reading the world, the biggest challenge of all for me was that fact that I didn't know where to start. 
Having spent my life reading almost exclusively British and North American books, I had no idea how to go about sourcing and finding stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world. 
I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland. 
I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia. 
There was no hiding it — I was a clueless literary xenophobe. 
So how on earth was I going to read the world? 
I was going to have to ask for help. 
So in October 2011, I registered my blog, ayearofreadingtheworld.com, and I posted a short appeal online. 
I explained who I was, how narrow my reading had been, and I asked anyone who cared to to leave a message suggesting what I might read from other parts of the planet. 
Now, I had no idea whether anyone would be interested, but within a few hours of me posting that appeal online, people started to get in touch. 
At first, it was friends and colleagues. 
Then it was friends of friends. 
And pretty soon, it was strangers. 
Four days after I put that appeal online, I got a message from a woman called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur. 
She said she loved the sound of my project, could she go to her local English-language bookshop and choose my Malaysian book and post it to me? 
I accepted enthusiastically, and a few weeks later, a package arrived containing not one, but two books — Rafidah's choice from Malaysia, and a book from Singapore that she had also picked out for me. 
Now, at the time, I was amazed that a stranger more than 6,000 miles away would go to such lengths to help someone she would probably never meet. 
But Rafidah's kindness proved to be the pattern for that year. 
Time and again, people went out of their way to help me. 
Some took on research on my behalf, and others made detours on holidays and business trips to go to bookshops for me. 
It turns out, if you want to read the world, if you want to encounter it with an open mind, the world will help you. 
When it came to countries with little or no commercially available literature in English, people went further still. 
Books often came from surprising sources. 
My Panamanian read, for example, came through a conversation I had with the Panama Canal on Twitter. 
Yes, the Panama Canal has a Twitter account. 
And when I tweeted at it about my project, it suggested that I might like to try and get hold of the work of the Panamanian author Juan David Morgan. 
I found Morgan's website and I sent him a message, asking if any of his Spanish-language novels had been translated into English. 
And he said that nothing had been published, but he did have an unpublished translation of his novel "" The Golden Horse. "" He emailed this to me, allowing me to become one of the first people ever to read that book in English. 
Morgan was by no means the only wordsmith to share his work with me in this way. 
From Sweden to Palau, writers and translators sent me self-published books and unpublished manuscripts of books that hadn't been picked up by Anglophone publishers or that were no longer available, giving me privileged glimpses of some remarkable imaginary worlds. 
I read, for example, about the Southern African king Ngungunhane, who led the resistance against the Portuguese in the 19th century; and about marriage rituals in a remote village on the shores of the Caspian sea in Turkmenistan. 
I met Kuwait's answer to Bridget Jones. 
(Laughter) And I read about an orgy in a tree in Angola. 
But perhaps the most amazing example of the lengths that people were prepared to go to to help me read the world, came towards the end of my quest, when I tried to get hold of a book from the tiny, Portuguese-speaking African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. 
Now, having spent several months trying everything I could think of to find a book that had been translated into English from the nation, it seemed as though the only option left to me was to see if I could get something translated for me from scratch. 
Now, I was really dubious whether anyone was going to want to help with this, and give up their time for something like that. 
But, within a week of me putting a call out on Twitter and Facebook for Portuguese speakers, I had more people than I could involve in the project, including Margaret Jull Costa, a leader in her field, who has translated the work of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago. 
With my nine volunteers in place, I managed to find a book by a São Toméan author that I could buy enough copies of online. 
Here's one of them. 
And I sent a copy out to each of my volunteers. 
They all took on a couple of short stories from this collection, stuck to their word, sent their translations back to me, and within six weeks, I had the entire book to read. 
In that case, as I found so often during my year of reading the world, my not knowing and being open about my limitations had become a big opportunity. 
When it came to São Tomé and Príncipe, it was a chance not only to learn something new and discover a new collection of stories, but also to bring together a group of people and facilitate a joint creative endeavor. 
My weakness had become the project's strength. 
The books I read that year opened my eyes to many things. 
As those who enjoy reading will know, books have an extraordinary power to take you out of yourself and into someone else's mindset, so that, for a while at least, you look at the world through different eyes. 
That can be an uncomfortable experience, particularly if you're reading a book from a culture that may have quite different values to your own. 
But it can also be really enlightening. 
Wrestling with unfamiliar ideas can help clarify your own thinking. 
And it can also show up blind spots in the way you might have been looking at the world. 
When I looked back at much of the English-language literature I'd grown up with, for example, I began to see how narrow a lot of it was, compared to the richness that the world has to offer. 
And as the pages turned, something else started to happen, too. 
Little by little, that long list of countries that I'd started the year with, changed from a rather dry, academic register of place names into living, breathing entities. 
Now, I don't want to suggest that it's at all possible to get a rounded picture of a country simply by reading one book. 
But cumulatively, the stories I read that year made me more alive than ever before to the richness, diversity and complexity of our remarkable planet. 
It was as though the world's stories and the people who'd gone to such lengths to help me read them had made it real to me. 
These days, when I look at my bookshelves or consider the works on my e-reader, they tell a rather different story. 
It's the story of the power books have to connect us across political, geographical, cultural, social, religious divides. 
It's the tale of the potential human beings have to work together. 
And, it's testament to the extraordinary times we live in, where, thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever before for a stranger to share a story, a worldview, a book with someone she may never meet, on the other side of the planet. 
I hope it's a story I'm reading for many years to come. 
And I hope many more people will join me. 
If we all read more widely, there'd be more incentive for publishers to translate more books, and we would all be richer for that. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Several years ago here at TED, Peter Skillman introduced a design challenge called the marshmallow challenge. 
And the idea's pretty simple: Teams of four have to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and a marshmallow. 
The marshmallow has to be on top. 
And, though it seems really simple, it's actually pretty hard because it forces people to collaborate very quickly. 
And so, I thought this was an interesting idea, and I incorporated it into a design workshop. 
And it was a huge success. 
And since then, I've conducted about 70 design workshops across the world with students and designers and architects, even the CTOs of the Fortune 50, and there's something about this exercise that reveals very deep lessons about the nature of collaboration, and I'd like to share some of them with you. 
So, normally, most people begin by orienting themselves to the task. 
They talk about it, they figure out what it's going to look like, they jockey for power. 
Then they spend some time planning, organizing, they sketch and they lay out spaghetti. 
They spend the majority of their time assembling the sticks into ever-growing structures. 
And then finally, just as they're running out of time, someone takes out the marshmallow, and then they gingerly put it on top, and then they stand back, and — ta-da! — they admire their work. 
But what really happens, most of the time, is that the "" ta-da "" turns into an "" uh-oh, "" because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and to collapse. 
So there are a number of people who have a lot more "" uh-oh "" moments than others, and among the worst are recent graduates of business school. 
(Laughter) They lie, they cheat, they get distracted and they produce really lame structures. 
And of course there are teams that have a lot more "" ta-da "" structures, and among the best are recent graduates of kindergarten. 
(Laughter) And it's pretty amazing. 
As Peter tells us, not only do they produce the tallest structures, but they're the most interesting structures of them all. 
So the question you want to ask is: How come? Why? What is it about them? 
And Peter likes to say that none of the kids spend any time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti, Inc. Right? 
They don't spend time jockeying for power. 
But there's another reason as well. 
And the reason is that business students are trained to find the single right plan, right? 
And then they execute on it. 
And then what happens is, when they put the marshmallow on the top, they run out of time and what happens? 
It's a crisis. 
Sound familiar? Right. 
What kindergarteners do differently is that they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keeping the marshmallow on top, so they have multiple times to fix when they build prototypes along the way. 
Designers recognize this type of collaboration as the essence of the iterative process. 
And with each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn't work. 
So the capacity to play in prototype is really essential, but let's look at how different teams perform. 
So the average for most people is around 20 inches; business schools students, about half of that; lawyers, a little better, but not much better than that, kindergarteners, better than most adults. 
Who does the very best? 
Architects and engineers, thankfully. 
(Laughter) Thirty-nine inches is the tallest structure I've seen. 
And why is it? Because they understand triangles and self-reinforcing geometrical patterns are the key to building stable structures. 
So CEOs, a little bit better than average, but here's where it gets interesting. 
If you put you put an executive admin. on the team, they get significantly better. 
(Laughter) It's incredible. You know, you look around, you go, "" Oh, that team's going to win. "" You can just tell beforehand. And why is that? 
Because they have special skills of facilitation. 
They manage the process, they understand the process. 
And any team who manages and pays close attention to work will significantly improve the team's performance. 
Specialized skills and facilitation skills are the combination that leads to strong success. 
If you have 10 teams that typically perform, you'll get maybe six or so that have standing structures. 
And I tried something interesting. 
I thought, let's up the ante, once. 
So I offered a 10,000 dollar prize of software to the winning team. 
So what do you think happened to these design students? 
What was the result? 
Here's what happened: Not one team had a standing structure. 
If anyone had built, say, a one inch structure, they would have taken home the prize. 
So, isn't that interesting? That high stakes have a strong impact. 
We did the exercise again with the same students. 
What do you think happened then? 
So now they understand the value of prototyping. 
So the same team went from being the very worst to being among the very best. 
They produced the tallest structures in the least amount of time. 
So there's deep lessons for us about the nature of incentives and success. 
So, you might ask: Why would anyone actually spend time writing a marshmallow challenge? 
And the reason is, I help create digital tools and processes to help teams build cars and video games and visual effects. 
And what the marshmallow challenge does is it helps them identify the hidden assumptions. 
Because, frankly, every project has its own marshmallow, doesn't it? 
The challenge provides a shared experience, a common language, a common stance to build the right prototype. 
And so, this is the value of the experience, of this so simple exercise. 
And those of you who are interested may want to go to MarshmallowChallenge.com. 
It's a blog that you can look at how to build the marshmallows. 
There's step-by-step instructions on this. 
There are crazy examples from around the world of how people tweak and adjust the system. 
There's world records that are on this as well. 
And the fundamental lesson, I believe, is that design truly is a contact sport. 
It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task, and that we apply the very best of our thinking, our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand. 
And sometimes, a little prototype of this experience is all that it takes to turn us from an "" uh-oh "" moment to a "" ta-da "" moment. 
And that can make a big difference. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

What makes a great leader today? 
Many of us carry this image of this all-knowing superhero who stands and commands and protects his followers. 
But that's kind of an image from another time, and what's also outdated are the leadership development programs that are based on success models for a world that was, not a world that is or that is coming. 
We conducted a study of 4,000 companies, and we asked them, let's see the effectiveness of your leadership development programs. 
Fifty-eight percent of the companies cited significant talent gaps for critical leadership roles. 
That means that despite corporate training programs, off-sites, assessments, coaching, all of these things, more than half the companies had failed to grow enough great leaders. 
You may be asking yourself, is my company helping me to prepare to be a great 21st-century leader? 
The odds are, probably not. 
Now, I've spent 25 years of my professional life observing what makes great leaders. 
I've worked inside Fortune 500 companies, I've advised over 200 CEOs, and I've cultivated more leadership pipelines than you can imagine. 
But a few years ago, I noticed a disturbing trend in leadership preparation. 
I noticed that, despite all the efforts, there were familiar stories that kept resurfacing about individuals. 
One story was about Chris, a high-potential, superstar leader who moves to a new unit and fails, destroying unrecoverable value. 
And then there were stories like Sidney, the CEO, who was so frustrated because her company is cited as a best company for leaders, but only one of the top 50 leaders is equipped to lead their crucial initiatives. And then there were stories 
like the senior leadership team of a once-thriving business that's surprised by a market shift, finds itself having to force the company to reduce its size in half or go out of business. 
Now, these recurring stories cause me to ask two questions. 
Why are the leadership gaps widening when there's so much more investment in leadership development? 
And what are the great leaders doing distinctly different to thrive and grow? 
One of the things that I did, I was so consumed by these questions and also frustrated by those stories, that I left my job so that I could study this full time, and I took a year to travel to different parts of the world to learn about effective and ineffective leadership practices in companies, countries and nonprofit organizations. 
And so I did things like travel to South Africa, where I had an opportunity to understand how Nelson Mandela was ahead of his time in anticipating and navigating his political, social and economic context. 
I also met a number of nonprofit leaders who, despite very limited financial resources, were making a huge impact in the world, often bringing together seeming adversaries. 
And I spent countless hours in presidential libraries trying to understand how the environment had shaped the leaders, the moves that they made, and then the impact of those moves beyond their tenure. 
And then, when I returned to work full time, in this role, I joined with wonderful colleagues who were also interested in these questions. 
Now, from all this, I distilled the characteristics of leaders who are thriving and what they do differently, and then I also distilled the preparation practices that enable people to grow to their potential. 
I want to share some of those with you now. 
("" What makes a great leader in the 21st century? "") In a 21st-century world, which is more global, digitally enabled and transparent, with faster speeds of information flow and innovation, and where nothing big gets done without some kind of a complex matrix, relying on traditional development practices will stunt your growth as a leader. 
In fact, traditional assessments like narrow 360 surveys or outdated performance criteria will give you false positives, lulling you into thinking that you are more prepared than you really are. 
Leadership in the 21st century is defined and evidenced by three questions. 
Where are you looking to anticipate the next change to your business model or your life? 
The answer to this question is on your calendar. 
Who are you spending time with? On what topics? 
Where are you traveling? What are you reading? 
And then how are you distilling this into understanding potential discontinuities, and then making a decision to do something right now so that you're prepared and ready? 
There's a leadership team that does a practice where they bring together each member collecting, here are trends that impact me, here are trends that impact another team member, and they share these, and then make decisions, to course-correct a strategy or to anticipate a new move. 
Great leaders are not head-down. 
They see around corners, shaping their future, not just reacting to it. 
The second question is, what is the diversity measure of your personal and professional stakeholder network? 
You know, we hear often about good ol 'boy networks and they're certainly alive and well in many institutions. 
But to some extent, we all have a network of people that we're comfortable with. 
So this question is about your capacity to develop relationships with people that are very different than you. 
And those differences can be biological, physical, functional, political, cultural, socioeconomic. 
And yet, despite all these differences, they connect with you and they trust you enough to cooperate with you in achieving a shared goal. 
Great leaders understand that having a more diverse network is a source of pattern identification at greater levels and also of solutions, because you have people that are thinking differently than you are. 
Third question: are you courageous enough to abandon a practice that has made you successful in the past? 
There's an expression: Go along to get along. 
But if you follow this advice, chances are as a leader, you're going to keep doing what's familiar and comfortable. 
Great leaders dare to be different. 
They don't just talk about risk-taking, they actually do it. 
And one of the leaders shared with me the fact that the most impactful development comes when you are able to build the emotional stamina to withstand people telling you that your new idea is naïve or reckless or just plain stupid. 
Now interestingly, the people who will join you are not your usual suspects in your network. 
They're often people that think differently and therefore are willing to join you in taking a courageous leap. 
And it's a leap, not a step. 
More than traditional leadership programs, answering these three questions will determine your effectiveness as a 21st-century leader. 
I've met many, and they stand out. 
They are women and men who are preparing themselves not for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but also for the realities of today and all of those unknown possibilities of tomorrow. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Ladies and gentlemen, the history of music and television on the Internet in three minutes. 
A TED medley — a TEDley. 
♫ It's nine o 'clock on a Saturday ♫ ♫ The record store's closed for the night ♫ ♫ So I fire up the old iTunes music store ♫ ♫ And soon I am feelin' all right ♫ ♫ I know Steve Jobs can find me a melody ♫ ♫ With one dollar pricing that rocks ♫ ♫ I can type in the track and get album names back ♫ ♫ While still in my PJs and socks ♫ ♫ Sell us a song, you're the music man ♫ ♫ My iPod's still got 10 gigs to go ♫ ♫ Yes, we might prefer more compatibility ♫ 
♫ But Steve likes to run the whole show ♫ ♫ I heard "" Desperate Housewives "" was great last night ♫ ♫ But I had a bad piece of cod ♫ ♫ As I threw up my meal, I thought, "" It's no big deal "" ♫ ♫ I'll watch it tonight on my 'Pod ♫ ♫ And now all of the networks are joining in ♫ ♫ Two bucks a show without ads ♫ ♫ It's a business those guys always wanted to try ♫ ♫ But only Steve Jobs had the' nads ♫ ♫ They say we're young, don't watch TV ♫ 
♫ They say the Internet is all we see ♫ ♫ But that's not true; they've got it wrong ♫ ♫ See, all our shows are just two minutes long ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ I got YouTube ♫ ♫ I got YouTube ♫ And now, ladies and gentlemen, a tribute to the Recording Industry Association of America — the RIAA! 
♫ Young man, you were surfin 'along ♫ ♫ And then, young man, you downloaded a song ♫ ♫ And then, dumb man, copied it to your' Pod ♫ ♫ Then a phone call came to tell you... ♫ ♫ You've just been sued by the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ You've just been screwed by the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ Their attorneys say you committed a crime ♫ ♫ And there'd better not be a next time ♫ ♫ They've lost their minds at the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ Justice is blind at the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ You're depriving the bands ♫ ♫ You are learning to steal ♫ 
♫ You can't do whatever you feel ♫ ♫ CD sales have dropped every year ♫ ♫ They're not greedy, they're just quaking with fear ♫ ♫ Yes indeedy, what if their end is near ♫ ♫ And we download all our music ♫ ♫ Yeah, that would piss off the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ No plastic discs from the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ What a way to make friends ♫ ♫ It's a plan that can't fail ♫ ♫ All your customers off to jail ♫ ♫ Who'll be next for the R-I-A-A? ♫ ♫ What else is vexing the R-I-A-A? ♫ 
♫ Maybe whistling a tune ♫ ♫ Maybe humming along ♫ ♫ Maybe mocking 'em in a song ♫ 

And there are days — I don't know about the rest of you — but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. 
So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. 
And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now, and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food. 
So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing. 

Hetain Patel: (In Chinese) Yuyu Rau: Hi, I'm Hetain. I'm an artist. 
And this is Yuyu, who is a dancer I have been working with. 
I have asked her to translate for me. 
HP: (In Chinese) YR: If I may, I would like to tell you a little bit about myself and my artwork. HP: (In Chinese) 
YR: I was born and raised near Manchester, in England, but I'm not going to say it in English to you, because I'm trying to avoid any assumptions that might be made from my northern accent. 
(Laughter) HP: (In Chinese) YR: The only problem with masking it with Chinese Mandarin is I can only speak this paragraph, which I have learned by heart when I was visiting in China. (Laughter) So all I can do is keep repeating it in different tones and hope you won't notice. (Laughter) HP: (In Chinese) (Laughter) 
YR: Needless to say, I would like to apologize to any Mandarin speakers in the audience. 
As a child, I would hate being made to wear the Indian kurta pajama, because I didn't think it was very cool. 
It felt a bit girly to me, like a dress, and it had this baggy trouser part you had to tie really tight to avoid the embarrassment of them falling down. 
My dad never wore it, so I didn't see why I had to. 
Also, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, that people assume I represent something genuinely Indian when I wear it, because that's not how I feel. 
HP: (In Chinese) YR: Actually, the only way I feel comfortable wearing it is by pretending they are the robes of a kung fu warrior like Li Mu Bai from that film, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." 
(Music) Okay. 
So my artwork is about identity and language, challenging common assumptions based on how we look like or where we come from, gender, race, class. 
What makes us who we are anyway? 
HP: (In Chinese) YR: I used to read Spider-Man comics, watch kung fu movies, take philosophy lessons from Bruce Lee. 
He would say things like — HP: Empty your mind. 
(Laughter) Be formless, shapeless, like water. 
Now you put water into a cup. 
It becomes the cup. 
You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. 
Put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. 
Now, water can flow or it can crash. 
Be water, my friend. (Applause) YR: This year, I am 32 years old, the same age Bruce Lee was when he died. 
I have been wondering recently, if he were alive today, what advice he would give me about making this TED Talk. 
HP: Don't imitate my voice. 
It offends me. 
(Laughter) YR: Good advice, but I still think that we learn who we are by copying others. 
Who here hasn't imitated their childhood hero in the playground, or mum or father? 
I have. 
HP: A few years ago, in order to make this video for my artwork, I shaved off all my hair so that I could grow it back as my father had it when he first emigrated from India to the U.K. in the 1960s. 
He had a side parting and a neat mustache. 
At first, it was going very well. 
I even started to get discounts in Indian shops. 
(Laughter) But then very quickly, I started to underestimate my mustache growing ability, and it got way too big. 
It didn't look Indian anymore. 
Instead, people from across the road, they would shout things like — HP and YR: Arriba! Arriba! Ándale! Ándale! 
(Laughter) HP: Actually, I don't know why I am even talking like this. 
My dad doesn't even have an Indian accent anymore. 
He talks like this now. 
So it's not just my father that I've imitated. 
A few years ago I went to China for a few months, and I couldn't speak Chinese, and this frustrated me, so I wrote about this and had it translated into Chinese, and then I learned this by heart, like music, I guess. 
YR: This phrase is now etched into my mind clearer than the pin number to my bank card, so I can pretend I speak Chinese fluently. 
When I had learned this phrase, I had an artist over there hear me out to see how accurate it sounded. 
I spoke the phrase, and then he laughed and told me, "" Oh yeah, that's great, only it kind of sounds like a woman. "" I said, "" What? "" He said, "" Yeah, you learned from a woman? "" I said, "" Yes. So? "" He then explained the tonal differences between male and female voices are very different and distinct, and that I had learned it very well, but in a woman's voice. 
(Laughter) (Applause) HP: Okay. So this imitation business does come with risk. 
It doesn't always go as you plan it, even with a talented translator. 
But I am going to stick with it, because contrary to what we might usually assume, imitating somebody can reveal something unique. 
So every time I fail to become more like my father, I become more like myself. 
Every time I fail to become Bruce Lee, I become more authentically me. 
This is my art. 
I strive for authenticity, even if it comes in a shape that we might not usually expect. 
It's only recently that I've started to understand that I didn't learn to sit like this through being Indian. 
I learned this from Spider-Man. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Almost two years ago, I was driving in my car in Germany, and I turned on the radio. 
Europe at the time was in the middle of the Euro crisis, and all the headlines were about European countries getting downgraded by rating agencies in the United States. 
I listened and thought to myself, "" What are these rating agencies, and why is everybody so upset about their work? "" Well, if you were sitting next to me in the car that day and would have told me that I would devote the next years to trying to reform them, obviously I would have called you crazy. 
But guess what's really crazy: the way these rating agencies are run. 
And I would like to explain to you not only why it's time to change this, but also how we can do it. 
So let me tell you a little bit about what rating agencies really do. 
As you would read a car magazine before purchasing a new car or taking a look at a product review before deciding which kind of tablet or phone to get, investors are reading ratings before they decide in which kind of product they are investing their money. 
A rating can range from a so-called AAA, which means it's a top-performing product, and it can go down to the level of the so-called BBB-, which means it's a fairly risky investment. 
Rating agencies are rating companies. 
They are rating banks. 
They are rating even financial products like the infamous mortgage-backed securities. 
But they can also rate countries, and these ratings are called sovereign ratings, and I would like to focus in particular on these sovereign ratings. 
And I can tell, as you're listening to me right now, you're thinking, so why should I really care about this, right? 
Be honest. 
Well, ratings affect you. 
They affect all of us. 
If a rating agency rates a country, it basically assesses and evaluates a country's debt and the ability and willingness of a country to repay its debt. 
So if a country gets downgraded by a rating agency, the country has to pay more in order to borrow money on the international markets. 
So it affects you as a citizen and as a taxpayer, because you and your fellow countrymen have to pony up more in order to borrow. 
But what if a country can't afford to pay more because it's maybe too expensive? 
Well, then the country has less available for other services, like roads, schools, healthcare. 
And this is the reason why you should care, because sovereign ratings affect everyone. 
And that is the reason why I believe they should be defined as public goods. 
They should be transparent, accessible, and available to everyone at no cost. 
But here's the situation: the rating agency market is dominated by three players and three players only — Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch — and we know whenever there is a market concentration, there is really no competition. 
There is no incentive to improve the quality of your product. 
And let's face it, the credit rating agencies have contributed, putting the global economy on the brink, and yet they have to change the way they operate. 
The second point, would you really buy a car just based on the advice of the dealer? 
Obviously not, right? That would be irresponsible. 
But that's actually what's going on in the rating agency sector every single day. 
The customers of these rating agencies, like countries or companies, they are paying for their own ratings, and obviously this is creating a conflict of interest. 
The third point is, the rating agencies are not really telling us how they are coming up with their ratings, but in this day and age, you can't even sell a candy bar without listing everything that's inside. 
But for ratings, a crucial element of our economy, we really do not know what all the different ingredients are. 
We are allowing the rating agencies to be intransparent about their work, and we need to change this. 
I think there is no doubt that the sector needs a complete overhaul, not just a trimming at the margins. 
I think it's time for a bold move. 
I think it's time to upgrade the system. 
And this is why we at the Bertelsmann Foundation have invested a lot of time and effort thinking about an alternative for the sector. 
And we have developed the first model for a nonprofit rating agency for sovereign risk, and we call it by its acronym, INCRA. 
INCRA would make a difference to the current system by adding another nonprofit player to the mix. 
It would be based on a nonprofit model that would be based on a sustainable endowment. 
The endowment would create income that would allow us to run the operation, to run the rating agency, and it would also allow us to make our ratings publicly available. 
But this is not enough to make a difference, right? 
INCRA would also be based on a very, very clear governance structure that would avoid any conflict of interest, and it would include many stakeholders from society. 
INCRA would not only be a European or an American rating agency, it would be a truly international one, in which, in particular, the emerging economies would have an equal interest, voice and representation. 
The second big difference that INCRA would make is that would it base its sovereign risk assessment on a broader set of indicators. 
Think about it that way. 
If we conduct a sovereign rating, we basically take a look at the economic soil of a country, its macroeconomic fundamentals. 
But we also have to ask the question, who is cultivating the economic soil of a country, right? 
Well, a country has many gardeners, and one of them is the government, so we have to ask the question, how is a country governed? 
How is it managed? 
And this is the reason why we have developed what we call forward-looking indicators. 
These are indicators that give you a much better read about the socioeconomic development of a country. 
I hope you would agree it's important for you to know if your government is willing to invest in renewable energy and education. 
It's important for you to know if the government of your country is able to manage a crisis, if the government is finally able to implement the reforms that it's promised. 
For example, if INCRA would rate South Africa right now, of course we would take a very, very close look at the youth unemployment of the country, the highest in the world. 
If over 70 percent of a country's population under the age of 35 is unemployed, of course this has a huge impact on the economy today and even more so in the future. 
Well, our friends at Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch will tell us we would take this into account as well. 
But guess what? We do not know exactly how they will take this into account. 
And this leads me to the third big difference that INCRA would make. 
INCRA would not only release its ratings but it would also release its indicators and methodology. 
So in contrast to the current system, INCRA would be fully transparent. 
So in a nutshell, INCRA would offer an alternative to the current system of the big three rating agencies by adding a new, nonprofit player to the mix that would increase the competition, it would increase the transparency of the sector, and it would also increase the quality. 
I can tell that sovereign ratings may still look to you like this very small piece of this very complex global financial world, but I tell you it's a very important one, and a very important one to fix, because sovereign ratings affect all of us, and they should be addressed and should be defined as public goods. 
And this is why we are testing our model right now, and why we are trying to find out if it can bring together a group of able and willing actors to bring INCRA to life. 
I truly believe building up INCRA is in everyone's interest, and that we have the unique opportunity right now to turn INCRA into a cornerstone of a new, more inclusive financial system. 
Because for way too long, we have left the big financial players on their own. 
It's time to give them some company. 
Thank you. 

Have you ever noticed when you ask someone to talk about a change they're making for the better in their personal lives, they're often really energetic? 
Whether it's training for a marathon, picking up an old hobby, or learning a new skill, for most people, self-transformation projects occupy a very positive emotional space. 
Self-transformation is empowering, energizing, even exhilarating. 
I mean just take a look at some of the titles of self-help books: "Awaken the Giant Within," "Practicing the Power of Now," or here's a great one we can all relate to, "" You are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life. "" (Laughter) When it comes to self-transformation, you can't help but get a sense of the excitement. 
But there's another type of transformation that occupies a very different emotional space. 
The transformation of organizations. 
If you're like most people, when you hear the words "" Our organization is going to start a transformation, "" you're thinking, "" Uh-oh. "" (Laughter) "Layoffs." 
The blood drains from your face, your mind goes into overdrive, frantically searching for some place to run and hide. 
Well, you can run, but you really can't hide. 
Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours involved in organizations. 
And due to changes in globalization, changes due to advances in technology and other factors, the reality is our organizations are constantly having to adapt. 
In fact, I call this the era of "" always-on "" transformation. 
When I shared this idea with my wife Nicola, she said, "" Always-on transformation? 
That sounds exhausting. "" And that may be exactly what you're thinking — and you would be right. 
Particularly if we continue to approach the transformation of organizations the way we always have been. 
But because we can't hide, we need to sort out two things. 
First, why is transformation so exhausting? 
And second, how do we fix it? 
First of all, let's acknowledge that change is hard. 
People naturally resist change, especially when it's imposed on them. 
But there are things that organizations do that make change even harder and more exhausting for people than it needs to be. 
First of all, leaders often wait too long to act. 
As a result, everything is happening in crisis mode. 
Which, of course, tends to be exhausting. 
Or, given the urgency, what they'll do is they'll just focus on the short-term results, but that doesn't give any hope for the future. 
Or they'll just take a superficial, one-off approach, hoping that they can return back to business as usual as soon as the crisis is over. 
This kind of approach is kind of the way some students approach preparing for standardized tests. 
In order to get test scores to go up, teachers will end up teaching to the test. 
Now, that approach can work; test results often do go up. 
But it fails the fundamental goal of education: to prepare students to succeed over the long term. 
So given these obstacles, what can we do to transform the way we transform organizations so rather than being exhausting, it's actually empowering and energizing? 
To do that, we need to focus on five strategic imperatives, all of which have one thing in common: putting people first. 
The first imperative for putting people first is to inspire through purpose. 
Most transformations have financial and operational goals. 
These are important and they can be energizing to leaders, but they tend not to be very motivating to most people in the organization. 
To motivate more broadly, the transformation needs to connect with a deeper sense of purpose. 
Take LEGO. 
The LEGO Group has become an extraordinary global company. 
Under their very capable leadership, they've actually undergone a series of transformations. 
While each of these has had a very specific focus, the North Star, linking and guiding all of them, has been Lego's powerful purpose: inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow. 
It's not about increasing sales, but about giving millions of additional children access to LEGO building bricks. 
It's not about developing new products, but about enabling more children to experience the joy of learning through play. 
Not surprisingly, that deep sense of purpose tends to be highly motivating to LEGO's people. 
The second imperative for putting people first is to go all in. 
Too many transformations are nothing more than head-count cutting exercises; layoffs under the guise of transformation. 
In the face of relentless competition, it may well be that you will have to take the painful decision to downsize the organization, just as you may have to lose some weight in order to run a marathon. 
To win you need to go all in. 
You need to go all in. 
Rather than just cutting costs, you need to think about initiatives that will enable you to win in the medium term, initiatives to drive growth, actions that will fundamentally change the way the company operates, and very importantly, investments to develop the leadership and the talent. 
The third imperative for putting people first is to enable people with the capabilities that they need to succeed during the transformation and beyond. 
You know, frankly, I'm not that good, but I do have one distinct capability; I am remarkably fast at finding my bike. 
(Laughter) By the time I finish the swim, almost all the bikes are already gone. (Laughter) 
Real triathletes know that each leg — the swim, the bike, the run — really requires different capabilities, different tools, different skills, different techniques. 
Likewise when we transform organizations, we need to be sure that we're giving our people the skills and the tools they need along the way. 
Chronos, a global software company, recognized the need to transfer from building products — software products — to building software as a service. 
To enable its people to take that transformation, first of all they invested in new tools that would enable their employees to monitor the usage of the features as well as customer satisfaction with the new service. 
They also invested in skill development, so that their employees would be able to resolve customer service problems on the spot. 
And very importantly, they also reinforced the collaborative behaviors that would be required to deliver an end-to-end seamless customer experience. 
Because of these investments, rather than feeling overwhelmed by the transformation, Chronos employees actually felt energized and empowered in their new roles. 
In the era of "" always-on "" transformation, change is a constant. 
My fourth imperative therefore is to instill a culture of continuous learning. 
When Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft in February 2014, he embarked on an ambitious transformation journey to prepare the company to compete in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. 
This included changes to strategy, the organization and very importantly, the culture. 
Microsoft's culture at the time was one of silos and internal competition — not exactly conducive to learning. 
Nadella took this head-on. 
He rallied his leadership around his vision for a living, learning culture, shifting from a fixed mindset, where your role was to show up as the smartest person in the room, to a growth mindset, where your role was to listen, to learn and to bring out the best in people. 
Well, early days, Microsoft employees already noticed this shift in the culture — clear evidence of Microsoft putting people first. 
My fifth and final imperative is specifically for leaders. 
In a transformation, a leader needs to have a vision, a clear road map with milestones, and then you need to hold people accountable for results. 
In other words, you need to be directive. 
But in order to capture the hearts and minds of people, you also need to be inclusive. 
Inclusive leadership is critical to putting people first. 
I live in the San Francisco Bay area. 
And right now, our basketball team is the best in the league. 
We won the 2015 championship, and we're favored to win again this year. 
They have some fabulous players, but one of the key reasons is their head coach, Steve Kerr, is an inclusive leader. 
When Kerr came to the Warriors in 2014, the Warriors were looking for a major transformation. 
They hadn't won a national championship since 1975. 
Kerr came in, and he had a clear vision, and he immediately got to work. 
From the outset, he reached out and engaged the players and the staff. 
He created an environment of open debate and solicited suggestions. 
During games he would often ask, "What are you seeing that I'm missing?" 
One the best examples of this came in game four of the 2015 finals. 
The Warriors were down two games to one when Kerr made the decision to change the starting lineup; a bold move by any measure. 
And it is widely viewed that that move was the pivotal move in their victory. 
Interestingly, it wasn't actually Kerr's idea. 
It was the idea of his 28-year-old assistant, Nick U'Ren. 
Because of Kerr's leadership style, U'Ren felt comfortable bringing the idea forward. 
And Kerr not only listened, but he implemented the idea and then afterwards, gave U'Ren all the credit — actions all consistent with Kerr's highly inclusive approach to leadership. 
In the era of "" always-on "" transformation, organizations are always going to be transforming. 
But doing so does not have to be exhausting. 
We owe it to ourselves, to our organizations and to society more broadly to boldly transform our approach to transformation. 
To do that, we need to start putting people first. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I came here to show you the Fotokite. 
It's a tethered, flying camera. 
But before I do that, I want to tell you a bit about where it came from, what motivated it. 
So I was born in Russia, and three years ago, in 2011, there were the Russian federal elections. 
There were massive irregularities reported, and people came out to protest, which was very unlikely for Russia. 
And no one really knew how significant these protests were, because, for whatever reason, the world media largely ignored it. 
Now, there was a group of photographers who kind of flew flying cameras as a hobby — usually photographing things like the Sphinx, the Pyramids — who happened to be right around the corner, and they flew a camera and they took some snapshots, some panoramas of this demonstration. 
Just completely independent entity, completely random occurrence, and the image, when I saw it, it really struck me. 
Here's one of the panoramas. 
So in a single image, you can really see the scale of this event — just the number of people, the colors, the banners. 
You just can't consider this insignificant. 
All in a single image, which was really cool to me. 
And I think, in the future, journalism and many other professions, there are flying cameras already quite commonly out there, but I think, you wait a few months, a few years, and for many professions, it's really going to be a requirement. 
And it make sense. It's such a unique perspective. 
Nothing really communicates this scale, for example, in context, in a way that this does. 
But there are a few hurdles, and they are quite basic and quite fundamental. 
One is piloting. 
So for this image, they flew a camera, a five kilogram device with an SLR under it. 
It's quite heavy, lots of spinning, sharp things. 
It's a bit uncomfortable to fly, probably also for the operator. 
In fact, you can see that on the back of the pilot's shirt, it says, "No questions until landing" in Russian and in English, because people are curious, and they'll go tap you, and then you lose your focus and things happen. 
And these guys are great. They're professionals; they're really careful in what they do. 
So in the protests, maybe you noticed, they flew over the river so it was quite safe. 
But this doesn't necessarily apply to all people and all conditions, so we really have to make piloting easier. 
The other problem is regulations, or rather, the lack of good regulation. 
For many good reasons, it's just difficult to come up with common sense laws to regulate flying cameras. 
So we already have cameras. 
There are more and more of them. 
You hear about, actually, a drone pilot, a hobbyist, was attacked two weeks ago because he was flying near a beach. 
Here's some personal input I didn't expect. 
Just yesterday, I was attacked by a guy who claimed that I was filming him. 
I was checking my email right here — easy way to get input for your talk. 
But I think there are better solutions. 
I think we have to defuse the situation. 
We have to come up with responsible solutions that address the privacy issues and the safety, accountability issues but still give us that perspective. 
And this is one potential solution. 
So this is the Fotokite. 
Well, let me see, it's a quadrocopter, but what's kind of special about it is there's a leash. 
It's literally a dog leash. It's very convenient. 
And the neat thing about it is, to fly it, there's no joysticks, nothing like this. 
You just turn it on and you point in the direction that you want to fly. 
You give it a little twist. 
That's kind of the way you communicate. 
And there it goes. 
(Applause) So the interaction is super simple. 
It's like a personal flying pet. 
It just always maintains a certain angle to you, and if I move around with it, it'll actually follow me naturally. 
And of course, we can build on top of this. 
So this leash has some additional electronics. 
You can turn it on. 
And now, it's like telling your dog to fly lower, if you have such a dog. So, I can press a button and manipulate it rather easily. 
So I just shifted its position. 
And it's really safe. 
I don't know about you guys in the front row — (Laughter) — but at least in principle, you have to agree that you feel safer because there is a physical connection. 
Live demos are hard, right? 
Things go wrong all the time. 
But no matter what, this thing will actually prevent this thing from going into you. 
What's more, it tells you immediately that I am the one responsible for this device. 
You don't have to look for someone controlling it. 
Now, I can tell you that it's easy a lot, but I think a really good way to prove that is to grab a second one and launch it. 
And if I can do this on stage live, then I can show each and every one of you in five minutes how to operate one of these devices. 
So now we have two eyes in the sky. (Applause) And now the trick is getting them back. 
(Laughter) So my question now to you is, well, it's a nice solution, it's very accessible, it's safe. 
What would you use it for? 
What would you use such a camera for in your life? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Obviously, that's changed, but only recently. 
It was several months ago that I gave my very first major public talk at the Forbes 30 Under 30 summit: 1,500 brilliant people, all under the age of 30. 
That meant that in 1998, the oldest among the group were only 14, and the youngest, just four. 
Yes, I'm in rap songs. 
Almost 40 rap songs. (Laughter) But the night of my speech, a surprising thing happened. 
At the age of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy. 
I know, right? 
He was charming and I was flattered, and I declined. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I realized later that night, I'm probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again. (Laughter) (Applause) 
At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss, and at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences. 
Can I see a show of hands of anyone here who didn't make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22? 
Yep. That's what I thought. 
So like me, at 22, a few of you may have also taken wrong turns and fallen in love with the wrong person, maybe even your boss. 
Unlike me, though, your boss probably wasn't the president of the United States of America. 
Of course, life is full of surprises. 
Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of my mistake, and I regret that mistake deeply. 
In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we had never seen before. 
Remember, just a few years earlier, news was consumed from just three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio, or watching television. 
That was it. 
But that wasn't my fate. 
Instead, this scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution. 
That meant we could access all the information we wanted, when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere, and when the story broke in January 1998, it broke online. 
It was the first time the traditional news was usurped by the Internet for a major news story, a click that reverberated around the world. 
What that meant for me personally was that overnight I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. 
Granted, it was before social media, but people could still comment online, email stories, and, of course, email cruel jokes. 
News sources plastered photos of me all over to sell newspapers, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned to the TV. 
Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret? 
Now, I admit I made mistakes, especially wearing that beret. 
But the attention and judgment that I received, not the story, but that I personally received, was unprecedented. 
I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, that woman. 
I was seen by many but actually known by few. 
And I get it: it was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken. 
I lost almost everything, and I almost lost my life. 
Let me paint a picture for you. 
It is September of 1998. 
I'm sitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the Independent Counsel underneath humming fluorescent lights. 
I'm listening to the sound of my voice, my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the year before. 
Scared and mortified, I listen, listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of the day; listen as I confess my love for the president, and, of course, my heartbreak; listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self I don't even recognize. 
That people can read the transcripts is horrific enough, but a few weeks later, the audio tapes are aired on TV, and significant portions made available online. 
The public humiliation was excruciating. 
Life was almost unbearable. 
This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998, and by this, I mean the stealing of people's private words, actions, conversations or photos, and then making them public — public without consent, public without context, and public without compassion. 
Fast forward 12 years to 2010, and now social media has been born. 
I was on the phone with my mom in September of 2010, and we were talking about the news of a young college freshman from Rutgers University named Tyler Clementi. 
Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler was secretly webcammed by his roommate while being intimate with another man. 
When the online world learned of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited. 
A few days later, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge to his death. 
He was 18. 
My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and his family, and she was gutted with pain in a way that I just couldn't quite understand, and then eventually I realized she was reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night, reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally. 
Today, too many parents haven't had the chance to step in and rescue their loved ones. 
Too many have learned of their child's suffering and humiliation after it was too late. 
It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I then began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different. 
Since then, it has connected people in unimaginable ways, joining lost siblings, saving lives, launching revolutions, but the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that I experienced had mushroomed. 
Every day online, people, especially young people who are not developmentally equipped to handle this, are so abused and humiliated that they can't imagine living to the next day, and some, tragically, don't, and there's nothing virtual about that. 
ChildLine, a U.K. nonprofit that's focused on helping young people on various issues, released a staggering statistic late last year: From 2012 to 2013, there was an 87 percent increase in calls and emails related to cyberbullying. 
A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time, cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offline bullying. 
And you know what shocked me, although it shouldn't have, was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger. 
Cruelty to others is nothing new, but online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified, uncontained, and permanently accessible. 
The echo of embarrassment used to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community, but now it's the online community too. 
Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with their words, and that's a lot of pain, and there are no perimeters around how many people can publicly observe you and put you in a public stockade. 
There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price. 
For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline. 
This shift has created what Professor Nicolaus Mills calls a culture of humiliation. 
Snapchat, the service which is used mainly by younger generations and claims that its messages only have the lifespan of a few seconds. 
A third-party app which Snapchatters use to preserve the lifespan of the messages was hacked, and 100,000 personal conversations, photos, and videos were leaked online to now have a lifespan of forever. 
Jennifer Lawrence and several other actors had their iCloud accounts hacked, and private, intimate, nude photos were plastered across the Internet without their permission. 
One gossip website had over five million hits for this one story. 
And what about the Sony Pictures cyberhacking? 
The documents which received the most attention were private emails that had maximum public embarrassment value. 
But in this culture of humiliation, there is another kind of price tag attached to public shaming. 
The price does not measure the cost to the victim, which Tyler and too many others, notably women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community have paid, but the price measures the profit of those who prey on them. 
A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry. 
How is the money made? 
Clicks. 
The more shame, the more clicks. 
The more clicks, the more advertising dollars. 
We're in a dangerous cycle. 
The more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it, and the more numb we get, the more we click. 
All the while, someone is making money off of the back of someone else's suffering. 
The more we saturate our culture with public shaming, the more accepted it is, the more we will see behavior like cyberbullying, trolling, some forms of hacking, and online harassment. 
Just think about it. 
When we began valuing sustainability, more people began to recycle. 
So as far as our culture of humiliation goes, what we need is a cultural revolution. 
Online, we've got a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis. 
Researcher Brené Brown said, and I quote, "Shame can't survive empathy." 
I've seen some very dark days in my life, and it was the compassion and empathy from my family, friends, professionals, and sometimes even strangers that saved me. 
The theory of minority influence, proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there's consistency over time, change can happen. 
In the online world, we can foster minority influence by becoming upstanders. 
We can also counteract the culture by supporting organizations that deal with these kinds of issues, like the Tyler Clementi Foundation in the U.S., In the U.K., there's Anti-Bullying Pro, and in Australia, there's Project Rockit. 
We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression, but we need to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression. 
We all want to be heard, but let's acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention and speaking up for attention. 
The Internet is the superhighway for the id, but online, showing empathy to others benefits us all and helps create a safer and better world. 
We need to communicate online with compassion, consume news with compassion, and click with compassion. 
I'd like to end on a personal note. 
In the past nine months, the question I've been asked the most is why. 
You can read between the lines in those questions, and the answer has nothing to do with politics. 
It's also not just about saving myself. 
Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: You can survive it. 
I know it's hard. 
It may not be painless, quick or easy, but you can insist on a different ending to your story. 
Have compassion for yourself. 
We all deserve compassion, and to live both online and off in a more compassionate world. 
Thank you for listening. 
(Applause) 

When we're designing new products, services or businesses, the only time you'll know if they're any good, if the designs are good, is to see how they're used in the real world, in context. 
I'm reminded of that every time I walk past Highbury Fields in north London. 
It's absolutely beautiful. 
There's a big open green space. 
There's Georgian buildings around the side. 
But then there's this mud trap that cuts across the middle. 
People clearly don't want to walk all the way around the edge. 
Instead, they want to take the shortcut, and that shortcut is self-reinforcing. 
Now, this shortcut is called a desire path, and it's often the path of least resistance. 
I find them fascinating, because they're often the point where design and user experience diverge. 
Now at this point, I should apologize, because you guys are going to start seeing these everywhere. 
But today, I'm going to pick three I find interesting and share what actually it reminds me about launching new products and services. 
The first is in the capital city of Brazil — Brasilia. 
And it reminds me that sometimes, you have to just focus on designing for a real need at low friction. 
Now, Brasilia is fascinating. 
It was designed by Niemeyer in the '50s. 
It was the golden age of flying, so he laid it out like a plane, as you can see there. 
Slightly worryingly, he put most of the important government buildings in the cockpit. 
But if you zoom in, in the very center of Brasilia, just where the point is there, you see it's littered with desire paths. 
They're absolutely everywhere. 
Now, they thought that they had future-proofed this design. 
They thought in the future we wouldn't need to walk anywhere — we'd be able to drive — so there was little need for walkways or pavements. 
But as you can see, there's a real need. 
These are very dangerous desire paths. 
If we just pick one, in the middle, you can see it crosses 15 lanes of traffic. 
It won't surprise you guys that Brasilia has five times the pedestrian accident rate of your average US city. 
People are resourceful. 
They'll always find the low-friction route to save money, save time. 
Not all these desire paths are dangerous, I was reminded flying here when I was in Heathrow. 
Many of us get frustrated when we're confronted with the obligatory walk through duty-free. 
It was amazing to me how many people refused to take the long, meandering path to the left, and just cut through to the right, cut through the desire path. 
The question that's interesting is: What do designers think when they see our behavior here? 
Do they think we're stupid? 
Do they think we're lazy? 
Or do they accept that this is the only truth? 
This is their product. 
We're effectively co-designing their product. 
So our job is to design for real needs at low friction, because if you don't, the customer will, anyway. 
The second desire path I wanted to share is at the University of California. 
And it reminds me that sometimes the best way to come up with a great design is just to launch it. 
Now, university campuses are fantastic for spotting desire paths. 
I think it's because students are always late and they're pretty smart. 
So they're dashing to lectures. 
They'll always find the shortcut. 
And the designers here knew that. 
So they built the buildings and then they waited a few months for the paths to form. 
They then paved them. 
(Laughter) Incredibly smart approach. 
In fact, often, just launching the straw man of a service can teach you what people really want. 
For example, Ayr Muir in Boston knew he wanted to open a restaurant. 
But where should it be? 
What should the menu be? 
He launched a service, in this case a food truck, and he changed the location each day. 
He'd write a different menu on the side in a whiteboard marker to figure out what people wanted. 
He now has a chain of restaurants. 
So it can be incredibly efficient to launch something to spot the desire paths. 
The third and final desire path I wanted to share with you is the UNIH. 
It reminds me that the world's in flux, and we have to respond to those changes. 
So as you'll guess, this is a hospital. 
I've marked for you on the left the Oncology Department. 
The patients would usually stay in the hotels down on the bottom right. 
This was a patient-centered organization, so they laid on cars for their patients. 
But what they realized when they started offering chemotherapy is the patients rarely wanted to get in cars. 
They were too nauseous, so they'd walk back to their hotels. 
This desire path that you see diagonally, formed. 
The patients even called it "" The Chemo Trail. "" Now, when the hospital saw this originally, they tried to lay turf back over it, ignore it. 
But after a while, they realized it was an important need they were meeting for their patients, so they paved it. 
And I think our job is often to pave these emerging desire paths. 
If we look back at the one in North London again, that desire path hasn't always been there. 
The reason it sprung up is people were traveling to the mighty Arsenal Football Club stadium on game days, from the Underground station you see on the bottom right. 
So you see the desire path. 
If we just wind the clock back a few years, when the stadium was being constructed, there is no desire path. 
So our job is to watch for these desire paths emerging, and, where appropriate, pave them, as someone did here. 
Someone installed a barrier, people started walking across and round the bottom as you see, and they paved it. 
(Laughter) But I think this is a wonderful reminder as well, that, actually, the world is in flux. 
It's constantly changing, because if you look at the top of this image, there's another desire path forming. 
So these three desire paths remind me we need to design for real human needs. 
I think empathy for what your customers want is probably the biggest leading indicator of business success. 
Design for real needs and design them in low friction, because if you don't offer them in low friction, someone else will, often the customer. 
Secondly, often the best way to learn what people really want is to launch your service. 
The answer is rarely inside the building. 
Get out there and see what people really want. 
And finally, in part because of technology, the world is incredibly flux at the moment. 
It's changing constantly. 
These desire paths are going to spring up faster than ever. 
Our job is to pick the appropriate ones and pave over them. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Contagious is a good word. 
Even in the times of H1N1, I like the word. 
Laughter is contagious. Passion is contagious. 
Inspiration is contagious. 
We've heard some remarkable stories from some remarkable speakers. 
But for me, what was contagious about all of them was that they were infected by something I call the "" I Can "" bug. 
So, the question is, why only them? 
In a country of a billion people and some, why so few? 
Is it luck? Is it chance? 
Can we all not systematically and consciously get infected? 
So, in the next eight minutes I would like to share with you my story. 
I got infected when I was 17, when, as a student of the design college, I encountered adults who actually believed in my ideas, challenged me and had lots of cups of chai with me. 
And I was struck by just how wonderful it felt, and how contagious that feeling was. 
I also realized I should have got infected when I was seven. 
So, when I started Riverside school 10 years ago it became a lab, a lab to prototype and refine a design process that could consciously infect the mind with the "" I Can "" bug. 
And I uncovered that if learning is embedded in real-world context, that if you blur the boundaries between school and life, then children go through a journey of "" aware, "" where they can see the change, "" enable, "" be changed, and then "" empower, "" lead the change. 
And that directly increased student wellbeing. 
Children became more competent, and less helpless. 
But this was all common sense. 
So, I'd like to show you a little glimpse of what common practice looks like at Riverside. 
A little background: when my grade five was learning about child rights, they were made to roll incense sticks, agarbattis, for eight hours to experience what it means to be a child laborer. 
It transformed them. What you will see is their journey, and then their utter conviction that they could go out and change the world. 
(Music) That's them rolling. 
And in two hours, after their backs were broke, they were changed. 
And once that happened, they were out in the city convincing everybody that child labor just had to be abolished. 
And look at Ragav, that moment when his face changes because he's been able to understand that he has shifted that man's mindset. 
And that can't happen in a classroom. 
So, when Ragav experienced that he went from "" teacher told me, "" to "" I am doing it. "" And that's the "" I Can "" mindshift. 
And it is a process that can be energized and nurtured. 
But we had parents who said, "" Okay, making our children good human beings is all very well, but what about math and science and English? 
Show us the grades. "" And we did. The data was conclusive. 
When children are empowered, not only do they do good, they do well, in fact very well, as you can see in this national benchmarking assessment taken by over 2,000 schools in India, Riverside children were outperforming the top 10 schools in India in math, English and science. 
So, it worked. It was now time to take it outside Riverside. 
So, on August 15th, Independence Day, 2007, the children of Riverside set out to infect Ahmedabad. 
Now it was not about Riverside school. 
It was about all children. So, we were shameless. 
We walked into the offices of the municipal corporation, the police, the press, businesses, and basically said, "" When are you going to wake up and recognize the potential that resides in every child? 
When will you include the child in the city? 
Basically, open your hearts and your minds to the child. "" So, how did the city respond? 
Since 2007 every other month the city closes down the busiest streets for traffic and converts it into a playground for children and childhood. 
Here was a city telling its child, "" You can. "" A glimpse of infection in Ahmedabad. 
Video: [Unclear] So, the busiest streets closed down. 
We have the traffic police and municipal corporation helping us. 
It gets taken over by children. 
They are skating. They are doing street plays. 
They are playing, all free, for all children. 
(Music) Atul Karwal: aProCh is an organization which has been doing things for kids earlier. 
And we plan to extend this to other parts of the city. 
(Music) Kiran Bir Sethi: And the city will give free time. 
And Ahmedabad got the first child-friendly zebra crossing in the world. 
Geet Sethi: When a city gives to the children, in the future the children will give back to the city. 
(Music) KBS: And because of that, Ahmedabad is known as India's first child-friendly city. 
So, you're getting the pattern. First 200 children at Riverside. 
Then 30,000 children in Ahmedabad, and growing. 
It was time now to infect India. 
So, on August 15th, again, Independence Day, 2009, empowered with the same process, we empowered 100,000 children to say, "" I can. "" How? We designed a simple toolkit, converted it into eight languages, and reached 32,000 schools. 
We basically gave children a very simple challenge. 
We said, take one idea, anything that bothers you, choose one week, and change a billion lives. 
And they did. Stories of change poured in from all over India, from Nagaland in the east, to Jhunjhunu in the west, from Sikkim in the north, to Krishnagiri in the south. 
Children were designing solutions for a diverse range of problems. 
Right from loneliness to filling potholes in the street to alcoholism, and 32 children who stopped 16 child marriages in Rajasthan. 
I mean, it was incredible. 
Basically again reaffirming that when adults believe in children and say, "" You can, "" then they will. 
Infection in India. 
This is in Rajasthan, a rural village. 
Child: Our parents are illiterate and we want to teach them how to read and write. 
KBS: First time, a rally and a street play in a rural school — unheard of — to tell their parents why literacy is important. 
Look at what their parents says. 
Man: This program is wonderful. 
We feel so nice that our children can teach us how to read and write. 
Woman: I am so happy that my students did this campaign. 
In the future, I will never doubt my students' abilities. 
See? They have done it. 
KBS: An inner city school in Hyderabad. 
Girl: 581. This house is 581... 
We have to start collecting from 555. 
KBS: Girls and boys in Hyderabad, going out, pretty difficult, but they did it. 
Woman: Even though they are so young, they have done such good work. 
First they have cleaned the society, then it will be Hyderabad, and soon India. 
Woman: It was a revelation for me. It doesn't strike me that they had so much inside them. 
Girl: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. 
For our auction we have some wonderful paintings for you, for a very good cause, the money you give us will be used to buy hearing aids. 
Are you ready, ladies and gentlemen? Audience: Yes! 
Girl: Are you ready? Audience: Yes! Girl: Are you ready? Audience: Yes! 
KBS: So, the charter of compassion starts right here. Street plays, auctions, petitions. I mean, they were changing lives. It was incredible. So, how can we still stay immune? How can we stay immune to that passion, that energy, that excitement? I know it's obvious, 
but I have to end with the most powerful symbol of change, Gandhiji. 
70 years ago, it took one man to infect an entire nation with the power of "" We can. "" So, today who is it going to take to spread the infection from 100,000 children to the 200 million children in India? 
Last I heard, the preamble still said, "" We, the people of India, "" right? 
So, if not us, then who? 
If not now, then when? 
Like I said, contagious is a good word. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Today I'm going to talk about work. 
And the question I want to ask and answer is this: "Why do we work?" 
Why do we drag ourselves out of bed every morning instead of living our lives just filled with bouncing from one TED-like adventure to another? 
(Laughter) You may be asking yourselves that very question. 
Now, I know of course, we have to make a living, but nobody in this room thinks that that's the answer to the question, "Why do we work?" 
For folks in this room, the work we do is challenging, it's engaging, it's stimulating, it's meaningful. 
And if we're lucky, it might even be important. 
So, we wouldn't work if we didn't get paid, but that's not why we do what we do. 
And in general, I think we think that material rewards are a pretty bad reason for doing the work that we do. 
When we say of somebody that he's "" in it for the money, "" we are not just being descriptive. 
(Laughter) Now, I think this is totally obvious, but the very obviousness of it raises what is for me an incredibly profound question. 
Why, if this is so obvious, why is it that for the overwhelming majority of people on the planet, the work they do has none of the characteristics that get us up and out of bed and off to the office every morning? 
How is it that we allow the majority of people on the planet to do work that is monotonous, meaningless and soul-deadening? 
Why is it that as capitalism developed, it created a mode of production, of goods and services, in which all the nonmaterial satisfactions that might come from work were eliminated? 
Workers who do this kind of work, whether they do it in factories, in call centers, or in fulfillment warehouses, do it for pay. 
There is certainly no other earthly reason to do what they do except for pay. 
So the question is, "" Why? "" And here's the answer: the answer is technology. 
Now, I know, I know — yeah, yeah, yeah, technology, automation screws people, blah blah — that's not what I mean. 
I'm not talking about the kind of technology that has enveloped our lives, and that people come to TED to hear about. 
I'm not talking about the technology of things, profound though that is. 
I'm talking about another technology. 
I'm talking about the technology of ideas. 
I call it, "" idea technology "" — how clever of me. 
(Laughter) In addition to creating things, science creates ideas. 
Science creates ways of understanding. 
And in the social sciences, the ways of understanding that get created are ways of understanding ourselves. 
And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire to, and how we act. 
If you think your poverty is God's will, you pray. 
If you think your poverty is the result of your own inadequacy, you shrink into despair. 
And if you think your poverty is the result of oppression and domination, then you rise up in revolt. 
Whether your response to poverty is resignation or revolution, depends on how you understand the sources of your poverty. 
This is the role that ideas play in shaping us as human beings, and this is why idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us. 
And there's something special about idea technology, that makes it different from the technology of things. 
With things, if the technology sucks, it just vanishes, right? 
Bad technology disappears. 
With ideas — false ideas about human beings will not go away if people believe that they're true. 
Because if people believe that they're true, they create ways of living and institutions that are consistent with these very false ideas. 
And that's how the industrial revolution created a factory system in which there was really nothing you could possibly get out of your day's work, except for the pay at the end of the day. 
Because the father — one of the fathers of the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith — was convinced that human beings were by their very natures lazy, and wouldn't do anything unless you made it worth their while, and the way you made it worth their while was by incentivizing, by giving them rewards. 
That was the only reason anyone ever did anything. 
So we created a factory system consistent with that false view of human nature. 
But once that system of production was in place, there was really no other way for people to operate, except in a way that was consistent with Adam Smith's vision. 
So the work example is merely an example of how false ideas can create a circumstance that ends up making them true. 
It is not true that you "" just can't get good help anymore. "" It is true that you "" can't get good help anymore "" when you give people work to do that is demeaning and soulless. 
And interestingly enough, Adam Smith — the same guy who gave us this incredible invention of mass production, and division of labor — understood this. 
He said, of people who worked in assembly lines, of men who worked in assembly lines, he says: "He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become." 
Now, notice the word here is "" become. "" "He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become." 
Whether he intended it or not, what Adam Smith was telling us there, is that the very shape of the institution within which people work creates people who are fitted to the demands of that institution and deprives people of the opportunity to derive the kinds of satisfactions from their work that we take for granted. 
The thing about science — natural science — is that we can spin fantastic theories about the cosmos, and have complete confidence that the cosmos is completely indifferent to our theories. 
It's going to work the same damn way no matter what theories we have about the cosmos. 
But we do have to worry about the theories we have of human nature, because human nature will be changed by the theories we have that are designed to explain and help us understand human beings. 
The distinguished anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, said, years ago, that human beings are the "" unfinished animals. "" And what he meant by that was that it is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live. 
That human nature, that is to say our human nature, is much more created than it is discovered. 
We design human nature by designing the institutions within which people live and work. 
And so you people — pretty much the closest I ever get to being with masters of the universe — you people should be asking yourself a question, as you go back home to run your organizations. 
Just what kind of human nature do you want to help design? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thanks. 

In Kenya, 1984 is known as the year of the cup, or the goro goro. 
The goro goro is a cup used to measure two kilograms of maize flower on the market, and the maize flower is used to make ugali, a polenta-like cake that is eaten together with vegetables. 
Both the maize and the vegetables are grown on most Kenyan farms, which means that most families can feed themselves from their own farm. 
One goro goro can feed three meals for an average family, and in 1984, the whole harvest could fit in one goro goro. 
It was and still is one of the worst droughts in living memory. 
Now today, I insure farmers against droughts like those in the year of the cup, or to be more specific, I insure the rains. 
I come from a family of missionaries who built hospitals in Indonesia, and my father built a psychiatric hospital in Tanzania. 
This is me, age five, in front of that hospital. 
I don't think they thought I'd grow up to sell insurance. (Laughter) So let me tell you how that happened. 
In 2008, I was working for the Ministry of Agriculture of Rwanda, and my boss had just been promoted to become the minister. 
She launched an ambitious plan to start a green revolution in her country, and before we knew it, we were importing tons of fertilizer and seed and telling farmers how to apply that fertilizer and plant. 
A couple of weeks later, the International Monetary Fund visited us, and asked my minister, "" Minister, it's great that you want to help farmers reach food security, but what if it doesn't rain? "" My minister answered proudly and somewhat defiantly, "I am going to pray for rain." 
That ended the discussion. 
On the way back to the ministry in the car, she turned around to me and said, "" Rose, you've always been interested in finance. 
Go find us some insurance. "" It's been six years since, and last year I was fortunate enough to be part of a team that insured over 185,000 farmers in Kenya and Rwanda against drought. 
They owned an average of half an acre and paid on average two Euros in premium. 
It's microinsurance. 
Now, traditional insurance doesn't work with two to three Euros of premium, because traditional insurance relies on farm visits. 
A farmer here in Germany would be visited for the start of the season, halfway through, and at the end, and again if there was a loss, to estimate the damages. 
For a small-scale farmer in the middle of Africa, the maths of doing those visits simply don't add up. 
So instead, we rely on technology and data. 
This satellite measures whether there were clouds or not, because think about it: If there are clouds, then you might have some rain, but if there are no clouds, then it's actually impossible for it to rain. 
These images show the onset of the rains this season in Kenya. 
You see that around March 6, the clouds move in and then disappear, and then around the March 11, the clouds really move in. 
That, and those clouds, were the onset of the rains this year. 
This satellite covers the whole of Africa and goes back as far as 1984, and that's important, because if you know how many times a place has had a drought in the last 30 years, you can make a pretty good estimate what the chances are of drought in the future, and that means that you can put a price tag on the risk of drought. 
The data alone isn't enough. 
We devise agronomic algorithms which tell us how much rainfall a crop needs and when. 
For example, for maize at planting, you need to have two days of rain for farmers to plant, and then it needs to rain once every two weeks for the crop to properly germinate. 
After that, you need rain every three weeks for the crop to form its leaves, whereas at flowering, you need it to rain more frequently, about once every 10 days for the crop to form its cob. 
At the end of the season, you actually don't want it to rain, because rains then can damage the crop. 
Devising such a cover is difficult, but it turned out the real challenge was selling insurance. 
We set ourselves a modest target of 500 farmers insured after our first season. 
After a couple of months' intense marketing, we had signed up the grand total of 185 farmers. 
I was disappointed and confounded. 
Everybody kept telling me that farmers wanted insurance, but our prime customers simply weren't buying. 
They were waiting to see what would happen, didn't trust insurance companies, or thought, "" I've managed for so many years. 
Why would I buy insurance now? "" Now many of you know microcredit, the method of providing small loans to poor people pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Grameen Bank. 
Turns out, selling microcredit isn't the same as selling insurance. 
For credit, a farmer needs to earn the trust of a bank, and if it succeeds, the bank will advance him money. 
That's an attractive proposition. 
For insurance, the farmer needs to trust the insurance company, and needs to advance the insurance company money. 
It's a very different value proposition. 
And so the uptick of insurance has been slow, with so far only 4.4 percent of Africans taking up insurance in 2012, and half of that number is in one country, South Africa. 
We tried for some years selling insurance directly to farmers, with very high marketing cost and very limited success. 
Then we realized that there were many organizations working with farmers: seed companies, microfinance institutions, mobile phone companies, government agencies. 
They were all providing loans to farmers, and often, just before they'd finalize the loan, the farmer would say, "" But what if it doesn't rain? 
How do you expect me to repay my loan? "" Many of these organizations were taking on the risk themselves, simply hoping that that year, the worst wouldn't happen. 
Most of the organizations, however, were limiting their growth in agriculture. 
They couldn't take on this kind of risk. 
These organizations became our customers, and when combining credit and insurance, interesting things can happen. 
Let me tell you one more story. 
At the start of February 2012 in western Kenya, the rains started, and they started early, and when rains start early, farmers are encouraged, because it usually means that the season is going to be good. 
So they took out loans and planted. 
For the next three weeks, there wasn't a single drop of rain, and the crops that had germinated so well shriveled and died. 
We'd insured the loans of a microfinance institution that had provided those loans to about 6,000 farmers in that area, and we called them up and said, "" Look, we know about the drought. 
We've got you. 
We'll give you 200,000 Euros at the end of the season. "" They said, "" Wow, that's great, but that'll be late. 
Could you give us the money now? 
Then these farmers can still replant and can get a harvest this season. "" So we convinced our insurance partners, and later that April, these farmers replanted. 
We took the idea of replanting to a seed company and convinced them to price the cost of insurance into every bag of seed, and in every bag, we packed a card that had a number on it, and when the farmers would open the card, they'd text in that number, and that number would actually help us to locate the farmer and allocate them to a satellite pixel. 
A satellite would then measure the rainfall for the next three weeks, and if it didn't rain, we'd replace their seed. 
One of the first — (Applause) — Hold on, I'm not there! 
One of the first beneficiaries of this replanting guarantee was Bosco Mwinyi. 
We visited his farm later that August, and I wish I could show you the smile on his face when he showed us his harvest, because it warmed my heart and it made me realize why selling insurance can be a good thing. 
But you know, he insisted that we get his whole harvest in the picture, so we had to zoom out a lot. 
Insurance secured his harvest that season, and I believe that today, we have all the tools to enable African farmers to take control of their own destiny. 
No more years of the cup. 
Instead, I am looking forward to, at least somehow, the year of the insurance, or the year of the great harvest. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A few years ago, my eyes were opened to the dark side of the construction industry. 
In 2006, young Qatari students took me to go and see the migrant worker camps. 
And since then I've followed the unfolding issue of worker rights. 
In the last six months, more than 300 skyscrapers in the UAE have been put on hold or canceled. 
Behind the headlines that lay behind these buildings is the fate of the often-indentured construction worker. 
1.1 million of them. 
Mainly Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Nepalese, these laborers risk everything to make money for their families back home. 
They pay a middle-man thousands of dollars to be there. 
And when they arrive, they find themselves in labor camps with no water, no air conditioning, and their passports taken away. 
While it's easy to point the finger at local officials and higher authorities, 99 percent of these people are hired by the private sector, and so therefore we're equally, if not more, accountable. 
Groups like Buildsafe UAE have emerged, but the numbers are simply overwhelming. 
In August 2008, UAE public officials noted that 40 percent of the country's 1,098 labor camps had violated minimum health and fire safety regulations. 
And last summer, more than 10,000 workers protested for the non-payment of wages, for the poor quality of food, and inadequate housing. 
And then the financial collapse happened. 
When the contractors have gone bust, as they've been overleveraged like everyone else, the difference is everything goes missing, documentation, passports, and tickets home for these workers. 
Currently, right now, thousands of workers are abandoned. 
There is no way back home. 
And there is no way, and no proof of arrival. 
These are the boom-and-bust refugees. 
The question is, as a building professional, as an architect, an engineer, as a developer, if you know this is going on, as we go to the sights every single week, are you complacent or complicit in the human rights violations? 
So let's forget your environmental footprint. 
Let's think about your ethical footprint. 
What good is it to build a zero-carbon, energy efficient complex, when the labor producing this architectural gem is unethical at best? 
Now, recently I've been told I've been taking the high road. 
But, quite frankly, on this issue, there is no other road. 
So let's not forget who is really paying the price of this financial collapse. 
And that as we worry about our next job in the office, the next design that we can get, to keep our workers. 
Let's not forget these men, who are truly dying to work. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

One way to change our genes is to make new ones, as Craig Venter has so elegantly shown. 
Another is to change our lifestyles. 
And what we're learning is how powerful and dynamic these changes can be, that you don't have to wait very long to see the benefits. 
When you eat healthier, manage stress, exercise and love more, your brain actually gets more blood flow and more oxygen. 
But more than that, your brain gets measurably bigger. 
Things that were thought impossible just a few years ago can actually be measured now. 
This was figured out by Robin Williams a few years before the rest of us. 
Now, there's some things that you can do to make your brain grow new brain cells. 
Some of my favorite things, like chocolate and tea, blueberries, alcohol in moderation, stress management and cannabinoids found in marijuana. 
I'm just the messenger. 
(Laughter) What were we just talking about? (Laughter) 
And other things that can make it worse, that can cause you to lose brain cells. 
The usual suspects, like saturated fat and sugar, nicotine, opiates, cocaine, too much alcohol and chronic stress. 
Your skin gets more blood flow when you change your lifestyle, so you age less quickly. Your skin doesn't wrinkle as much. 
Your heart gets more blood flow. 
We've shown that you can actually reverse heart disease. 
That these clogged arteries that you see on the upper left, after only a year become measurably less clogged. 
And the cardiac PET scan shown on the lower left, the blue means no blood flow. 
A year later — orange and white is maximum blood flow. 
We've shown you may be able to stop and reverse the progression of early prostate cancer and, by extension, breast cancer, simply by making these changes. 
We've found that tumor growth in vitro was inhibited 70 percent in the group that made these changes, whereas only nine percent in the comparison group. 
These differences were highly significant. 
Even your sexual organs get more blood flow, so you increase sexual potency. 
One of the most effective anti-smoking ads was done by the Department of Health Services, showing that nicotine, which constricts your arteries, can cause a heart attack or a stroke, but it also causes impotence. 
Half of guys who smoke are impotent. 
How sexy is that? 
Now we're also about to publish a study — the first study showing you can change gene expression in men with prostate cancer. 
This is what's called a heat map — and the different colors — and along the side, on the right, are different genes. 
And we found that over 500 genes were favorably changed — in effect, turning on the good genes, the disease-preventing genes, turning off the disease-promoting genes. 
And so these findings I think are really very powerful, giving many people new hope and new choices. 
And companies like Navigenics and DNA Direct and 23andMe, that are giving you your genetic profiles, are giving some people a sense of, "" Gosh, well, what can I do about it? "" Well, our genes are not our fate, and if we make these changes — they're a predisposition — but if we make bigger changes than we might have made otherwise, we can actually change how our genes are expressed. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

About a year ago, I asked myself a question: "" Knowing what I know, why am I not a vegetarian? "" After all, I'm one of the green guys: I grew up with hippie parents in a log cabin. 
I started a site called TreeHugger — I care about this stuff. 
I knew that eating a mere hamburger a day can increase my risk of dying by a third. 
Cruelty: I knew that the 10 billion animals we raise each year for meat are raised in factory farm conditions that we, hypocritically, wouldn't even consider for our own cats, dogs and other pets. 
Environmentally, meat, amazingly, causes more emissions than all of transportation combined: cars, trains, planes, buses, boats, all of it. 
And beef production uses 100 times the water that most vegetables do. 
I also knew that I'm not alone. 
We as a society are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s. 
So what was once the special little side treat now is the main, much more regular. 
So really, any of these angles should have been enough to convince me to go vegetarian. 
Yet, there I was — chk, chk, chk — tucking into a big old steak. 
So why was I stalling? 
I realized that what I was being pitched was a binary solution. 
It was either you're a meat eater or you're a vegetarian, and I guess I just wasn't quite ready. 
Imagine your last hamburger. 
(Laughter) So my common sense, my good intentions, were in conflict with my taste buds. 
And I'd commit to doing it later, and not surprisingly, later never came. 
So I wondered, might there be a third solution? 
And I thought about it, and I came up with one. 
I've been doing it for the last year, and it's great. 
It's called weekday veg. 
The name says it all: Nothing with a face Monday through Friday. 
On the weekend, your choice. 
Simple. 
If you want to take it to the next level, remember, the major culprits in terms of environmental damage and health are red and processed meats. 
So you want to swap those out with some good, sustainably harvested fish. 
It's structured, so it ends up being simple to remember, and it's okay to break it here and there. 
After all, cutting five days a week is cutting 70 percent of your meat intake. 
The program has been great, weekday veg. 
My footprint's smaller, I'm lessening pollution, I feel better about the animals, I'm even saving money. 
Best of all, I'm healthier, I know that I'm going to live longer, and I've even lost a little weight. 
So, please ask yourselves, for your health, for your pocketbook, for the environment, for the animals: What's stopping you from giving weekday veg a shot? 
After all, if all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarians. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Imagine you're walking through a forest. 
I'm guessing you're thinking of a collection of trees, what we foresters call a stand, with their rugged stems and their beautiful crowns. 
Yes, trees are the foundation of forests, but a forest is much more than what you see, and today I want to change the way you think about forests. 
You see, underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave as though it's a single organism. 
It might remind you of a sort of intelligence. 
How do I know this? 
Here's my story. 
I grew up in the forests of British Columbia. 
I used to lay on the forest floor and stare up at the tree crowns. 
They were giants. 
My grandfather was a giant, too. 
He was a horse logger, and he used to selectively cut cedar poles from the inland rainforest. 
Grandpa taught me about the quiet and cohesive ways of the woods, and how my family was knit into it. 
So I followed in grandpa's footsteps. 
He and I had this curiosity about forests, and my first big "" aha "" moment was at the outhouse by our lake. 
Our poor dog Jigs had slipped and fallen into the pit. 
So grandpa ran up with his shovel to rescue the poor dog. 
He was down there, swimming in the muck. 
But as grandpa dug through that forest floor, I became fascinated with the roots, and under that, what I learned later was the white mycelium and under that the red and yellow mineral horizons. 
Eventually, grandpa and I rescued the poor dog, but it was at that moment that I realized that that palette of roots and soil was really the foundation of the forest. 
And I wanted to know more. 
So I studied forestry. 
But soon I found myself working alongside the powerful people in charge of the commercial harvest. 
The extent of the clear-cutting was alarming, and I soon found myself conflicted by my part in it. 
Not only that, the spraying and hacking of the aspens and birches to make way for the more commercially valuable planted pines and firs was astounding. 
It seemed that nothing could stop this relentless industrial machine. 
So I went back to school, and I studied my other world. 
You see, scientists had just discovered in the laboratory in vitro that one pine seedling root could transmit carbon to another pine seedling root. 
But this was in the laboratory, and I wondered, could this happen in real forests? 
I thought yes. 
Trees in real forests might also share information below ground. 
But this was really controversial, and some people thought I was crazy, and I had a really hard time getting research funding. 
But I persevered, and I eventually conducted some experiments deep in the forest, 25 years ago. 
I grew 80 replicates of three species: paper birch, Douglas fir, and western red cedar. 
I figured the birch and the fir would be connected in a belowground web, but not the cedar. 
It was in its own other world. 
And I gathered my apparatus, and I had no money, so I had to do it on the cheap. 
So I went to Canadian Tire — (Laughter) and I bought some plastic bags and duct tape and shade cloth, a timer, a paper suit, a respirator. 
And then I borrowed some high-tech stuff from my university: a Geiger counter, a scintillation counter, a mass spectrometer, microscopes. 
And then I got some really dangerous stuff: syringes full of radioactive carbon-14 carbon dioxide gas and some high pressure bottles of the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas. 
But I was legally permitted. 
(Laughter) Oh, and I forgot some stuff, important stuff: the bug spray, the bear spray, the filters for my respirator. 
Oh well. 
The first day of the experiment, we got out to our plot and a grizzly bear and her cub chased us off. 
And I had no bear spray. 
But you know, this is how forest research in Canada goes. 
(Laughter) So I came back the next day, and mama grizzly and her cub were gone. 
So this time, we really got started, and I pulled on my white paper suit, I put on my respirator, and then I put the plastic bags over my trees. 
I got my giant syringes, and I injected the bags with my tracer isotope carbon dioxide gases, first the birch. 
I injected carbon-14, the radioactive gas, into the bag of birch. 
And then for fir, I injected the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas. 
I used two isotopes, because I was wondering whether there was two-way communication going on between these species. 
I got to the final bag, the 80th replicate, and all of a sudden mama grizzly showed up again. 
And she started to chase me, and I had my syringes above my head, and I was swatting the mosquitos, and I jumped into the truck, and I thought, "This is why people do lab studies." 
(Laughter) I waited an hour. 
I figured it would take this long for the trees to suck up the CO2 through photosynthesis, turn it into sugars, send it down into their roots, and maybe, I hypothesized, shuttle that carbon belowground to their neighbors. 
After the hour was up, I rolled down my window, and I checked for mama grizzly. 
Oh good, she's over there eating her huckleberries. 
So I got out of the truck and I got to work. 
I went to my first bag with the birch. I pulled the bag off. 
I ran my Geiger counter over its leaves. 
Kkhh! 
Perfect. 
The birch had taken up the radioactive gas. 
Then the moment of truth. 
I went over to the fir tree. 
I pulled off its bag. 
I ran the Geiger counter up its needles, and I heard the most beautiful sound. 
Kkhh! 
It was the sound of birch talking to fir, and birch was saying, "" Hey, can I help you? "" And fir was saying, "" Yeah, can you send me some of your carbon? 
Because somebody threw a shade cloth over me. "" I went up to cedar, and I ran the Geiger counter over its leaves, and as I suspected, silence. 
Cedar was in its own world. 
It was not connected into the web interlinking birch and fir. 
I was so excited, I ran from plot to plot and I checked all 80 replicates. 
The evidence was clear. 
The C-13 and C-14 was showing me that paper birch and Douglas fir were in a lively two-way conversation. 
It turns out at that time of the year, in the summer, that birch was sending more carbon to fir than fir was sending back to birch, especially when the fir was shaded. 
So it turns out the two species were interdependent, like yin and yang. 
And at that moment, everything came into focus for me. 
I knew I had found something big, something that would change the way we look at how trees interact in forests, from not just competitors but to cooperators. 
And I had found solid evidence of this massive belowground communications network, the other world. 
Now, I truly hoped and believed that my discovery would change how we practice forestry, from clear-cutting and herbiciding to more holistic and sustainable methods, methods that were less expensive and more practical. 
What was I thinking? 
I'll come back to that. 
So how do we do science in complex systems like forests? 
Well, as forest scientists, we have to do our research in the forests, and that's really tough, as I've shown you. 
And we have to be really good at running from bears. 
But mostly, we have to persevere in spite of all the stuff stacked against us. 
And we have to follow our intuition and our experiences and ask really good questions. 
And then we've got to gather our data and then go verify. 
For me, I've conducted and published hundreds of experiments in the forest. 
Some of my oldest experimental plantations are now over 30 years old. 
You can check them out. 
That's how forest science works. 
So now I want to talk about the science. 
How were paper birch and Douglas fir communicating? 
Well, it turns out they were conversing not only in the language of carbon but also nitrogen and phosphorus and water and defense signals and allele chemicals and hormones — information. 
And you know, I have to tell you, before me, scientists had thought that this belowground mutualistic symbiosis called a mycorrhiza was involved. 
Mycorrhiza literally means "" fungus root. "" You see their reproductive organs when you walk through the forest. 
They're the mushrooms. 
The mushrooms, though, are just the tip of the iceberg, because coming out of those stems are fungal threads that form a mycelium, and that mycelium infects and colonizes the roots of all the trees and plants. 
And where the fungal cells interact with the root cells, there's a trade of carbon for nutrients, and that fungus gets those nutrients by growing through the soil and coating every soil particle. 
The web is so dense that there can be hundreds of kilometers of mycelium under a single footstep. 
And not only that, that mycelium connects different individuals in the forest, individuals not only of the same species but between species, like birch and fir, and it works kind of like the Internet. 
You see, like all networks, mycorrhizal networks have nodes and links. 
We made this map by examining the short sequences of DNA of every tree and every fungal individual in a patch of Douglas fir forest. 
In this picture, the circles represent the Douglas fir, or the nodes, and the lines represent the interlinking fungal highways, or the links. 
The biggest, darkest nodes are the busiest nodes. 
We call those hub trees, or more fondly, mother trees, because it turns out that those hub trees nurture their young, the ones growing in the understory. 
And if you can see those yellow dots, those are the young seedlings that have established within the network of the old mother trees. 
In a single forest, a mother tree can be connected to hundreds of other trees. 
And using our isotope tracers, we have found that mother trees will send their excess carbon through the mycorrhizal network to the understory seedlings, and we've associated this with increased seedling survival by four times. 
Now, we know we all favor our own children, and I wondered, could Douglas fir recognize its own kin, like mama grizzly and her cub? 
So we set about an experiment, and we grew mother trees with kin and stranger's seedlings. 
And it turns out they do recognize their kin. 
Mother trees colonize their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks. 
They send them more carbon below ground. 
They even reduce their own root competition to make elbow room for their kids. 
When mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings. 
And these two compounds have increased the resistance of those seedlings to future stresses. 
So trees talk. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Through back and forth conversations, they increase the resilience of the whole community. 
It probably reminds you of our own social communities, and our families, well, at least some families. 
Forests aren't simply collections of trees, they're complex systems with hubs and networks that overlap and connect trees and allow them to communicate, and they provide avenues for feedbacks and adaptation, and this makes the forest resilient. 
That's because there are many hub trees and many overlapping networks. 
But they're also vulnerable, vulnerable not only to natural disturbances like bark beetles that preferentially attack big old trees but high-grade logging and clear-cut logging. 
You see, you can take out one or two hub trees, but there comes a tipping point, because hub trees are not unlike rivets in an airplane. 
You can take out one or two and the plane still flies, but you take out one too many, or maybe that one holding on the wings, and the whole system collapses. 
(Audience) Yes. 
Cool. 
I'm glad. 
So, remember I said earlier that I hoped that my research, my discoveries would change the way we practice forestry. 
Well, I want to take a check on that 30 years later here in western Canada. 
This is about 100 kilometers to the west of us, just on the border of Banff National Park. 
That's a lot of clear-cuts. 
It's not so pristine. 
In 2014, the World Resources Institute reported that Canada in the past decade has had the highest forest disturbance rate of any country worldwide, and I bet you thought it was Brazil. 
In Canada, it's 3.6 percent per year. 
Now, by my estimation, that's about four times the rate that is sustainable. 
Now, massive disturbance at this scale is known to affect hydrological cycles, degrade wildlife habitat, and emit greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere, which creates more disturbance and more tree diebacks. 
Not only that, we're continuing to plant one or two species and weed out the aspens and birches. 
And as climate changes, this is creating a perfect storm for extreme events, like the massive mountain pine beetle outbreak that just swept across North America, or that megafire in the last couple months in Alberta. 
So I want to come back to my final question: instead of weakening our forests, how can we reinforce them and help them deal with climate change? 
Well, you know, the great thing about forests as complex systems is they have enormous capacity to self-heal. 
In our recent experiments, we found with patch-cutting and retention of hub trees and regeneration to a diversity of species and genes and genotypes that these mycorrhizal networks, they recover really rapidly. 
So with this in mind, I want to leave you with four simple solutions. 
And we can't kid ourselves that these are too complicated to act on. 
First, we all need to get out in the forest. 
We need to reestablish local involvement in our own forests. 
You see, most of our forests now are managed using a one-size-fits-all approach, but good forest stewardship requires knowledge of local conditions. 
Second, we need to save our old-growth forests. 
These are the repositories of genes and mother trees and mycorrhizal networks. 
So this means less cutting. 
I don't mean no cutting, but less cutting. 
And third, when we do cut, we need to save the legacies, the mother trees and networks, and the wood, the genes, so they can pass their wisdom onto the next generation of trees so they can withstand the future stresses coming down the road. 
And finally, fourthly and finally, we need to regenerate our forests with a diversity of species and genotypes and structures by planting and allowing natural regeneration. 
We have to give Mother Nature the tools she needs to use her intelligence to self-heal. 
So back to Jigs. 
Jigs's fall into the outhouse showed me this other world, and it changed my view of forests. 

I'm a textile artist most widely known for starting the yarn bombing movement. 
Yarn bombing is when you take knitted or crocheted material out into the urban environment, graffiti-style — or, more specifically, without permission and unsanctioned. 
But when I started this over 10 years ago, I didn't have a word for it, I didn't have any ambitious notions about it, I had no visions of grandeur. 
All I wanted to see was something warm and fuzzy and human-like on the cold, steel, gray facade that I looked at everyday. 
So I wrapped the door handle. 
I call this the Alpha Piece. 
Little did I know that this tiny piece would change the course of my life. 
So clearly the reaction was interesting. 
It intrigued me and I thought, "" What else could I do? "" Could I do something in the public domain that would get the same reaction? 
So I wrapped the stop sign pole near my house. 
The reaction was wild. 
People would park their cars and get out of their cars and stare at it, and scratch their heads and stare at it, and take pictures of it and take pictures next to it, and all of that was really exciting to me and I wanted to do every stop sign pole in the neighborhood. 
And the more that I did, the stronger the reaction. 
So at this point I'm smitten. 
I'm hooked. 
This was all seductive. 
I found my new passion and the urban environment was my playground. 
So this is some of my early work. 
I was very curious about this idea of enhancing the ordinary, the mundane, even the ugly, and not taking away its identity or its functionality but just giving it a well-tailored suit out of knitting. 
And this was fun for me. 
It was really fun to take inanimate objects and have them come to life. 
So... 
I think we all see the humor in this, but — (Laughter) I was at a point where I wanted to take it seriously. 
I wanted to analyze it. 
I wanted to know why I was letting this take over my life, why I was passionate about it, why were other people reacting so strongly to it. 
And I realized something. 
We all live in this fast-paced, digital world, but we still crave and desire something that's relatable. 
I think we've all become desensitized by our overdeveloped cities that we live in, and billboards and advertisements, and giant parking lots, and we don't even complain about that stuff anymore. 
So when you stumble upon a stop sign pole that's wrapped in knitting and it seems so out of place and then gradually — weirdly — you find a connection to it, that is the moment. 
That is the moment I love and that is the moment I love to share with others. 
So at this point, my curiosity grew. 
It went from the fire hydrants and the stop sign poles to what else can I do with this material. 
Can I do something big and large-scale and insurmountable? 
So that's when the bus happened. 
This was a real game changer for me. 
I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for this one. 
At this point, people were recognizing my work but there wasn't much out there that was wrapped in knitting that was large-scale, and this definitely was the first city bus to be wrapped in knitting. 
So at this point, I'm experiencing, or I'm witnessing something interesting. 
I may have started yarn bombing but I certainly don't own it anymore. 
It had reached global status. 
People from all over the world were doing this. 
And I know this because I would travel to certain parts of the world that I'd never been to, and I'd stumble upon a stop sign pole and I knew I didn't wrap it. 
So as I pursued my own goals with my art — this is a lot of my recent work — so was yarn bombing. 
Yarn bombing was also growing. 
And that experience showed me the hidden power of this craft and showed me that there was this common language I had with the rest of the world. 
It was through this granny hobby — this unassuming hobby — that I found commonality with people that I never thought I'd have a connection with. 
So as I tell my story today, I'd also like to convey to you that hidden power can be found in the most unassuming places, and we all possess skills that are just waiting to be discovered. 
If you think about our hands, these tools that are connected to us, and what they're capable of doing — building houses and furniture, and painting giant murals — and most of the time we hold a controller or a cell phone. 
And I'm totally guilty of this as well. 
But if you think about it, what would happen if you put those things down? 
What would you make? What would you create with your own hands? 
A lot of people think that I am a master knitter but I actually couldn't knit a sweater to save my life. 
But I did something interesting with knitting that had never been done before. 
I also wasn't "" supposed to be "" an artist in the sense that I wasn't formally trained to do this — I'm a math major actually. 
So I didn't think this was in the cards for me, but I also know that I didn't stumble upon this. 
And when this happened to me, I held on tight, I fought for it and I'm proud to say that I am a working artist today. 
So as we ponder the future, know that your future might not be so seamless. 
And one day, you might be as bored as I was and knit a door handle to change your world forever. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Ten years ago, on a Tuesday morning, I conducted a parachute jump at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 
It was a routine training jump, like many more I'd done since I became a paratrooper 27 years before. 
We went down to the airfield early because this is the Army and you always go early. 
You do some routine refresher training, and then you go to put on your parachute and a buddy helps you. 
And you put on the T-10 parachute. 
And you're very careful how you put the straps, particularly the leg straps because they go between your legs. 
And then you put on your reserve, and then you put on your heavy rucksack. 
And then a jumpmaster comes, and he's an experienced NCO in parachute operations. 
He checks you out, he grabs your adjusting straps and he tightens everything so that your chest is crushed, your shoulders are crushed down, and, of course, he's tightened so your voice goes up a couple octaves as well. 
Then you sit down, and you wait a little while, because this is the Army. 
Then you load the aircraft, and then you stand up and you get on, and you kind of lumber to the aircraft like this, in a line of people, and you sit down on canvas seats on either side of the aircraft. 
And you wait a little bit longer, because this is the Air Force teaching the Army how to wait. 
Then you take off. 
And it's painful enough now — and I think it's designed this way — it's painful enough so you want to jump. 
You didn't really want to jump, but you want out. 
So you get in the aircraft, you're flying along, and at 20 minutes out, these jumpmasters start giving you commands. 
They give 20 minutes — that's a time warning. 
You sit there, OK. 
Then they give you 10 minutes. 
And of course, you're responding with all of these. 
And that's to boost everybody's confidence, to show that you're not scared. 
Then they give you, "" Get ready. "" Then they go, "" Outboard personnel, stand up. "" If you're an outboard personnel, now you stand up. 
If you're an inboard personnel, stand up. 
And then you hook up, and you hook up your static line. 
And at that point, you think, "" Hey, guess what? 
I'm probably going to jump. 
There's no way to get out of this at this point. "" You go through some additional checks, and then they open the door. 
And this was that Tuesday morning in September, and it was pretty nice outside. 
So nice air comes flowing in. 
The jumpmasters start to check the door. 
And then when it's time to go, a green light goes and the jumpmaster goes, "" Go. "" The first guy goes, and you're just in line, and you just kind of lumber to the door. 
Jump is a misnomer; you fall. 
You fall outside the door, you're caught in the slipstream. 
The first thing you do is lock into a tight body position — head down in your chest, your arms extended, put over your reserve parachute. 
You do that because, 27 years before, an airborne sergeant had taught me to do that. 
I have no idea whether it makes any difference, but he seemed to make sense, and I wasn't going to test the hypothesis that he'd be wrong. 
And then you wait for the opening shock for your parachute to open. 
If you don't get an opening shock, you don't get a parachute — you've got a whole new problem set. 
But typically you do; typically it opens. 
And of course, if your leg straps aren't set right, at that point you get another little thrill. 
Boom. 
So then you look around, you're under a canopy and you say, "" This is good. "" Now you prepare for the inevitable. 
You are going to hit the ground. 
You can't delay that much. 
And you really can't decide where you hit very much, because they pretend you can steer, but you're being delivered. 
So you look around, where you're going to land, you try to make yourself ready. 
And then as you get close, you lower your rucksack below you on a lowering line, so that it's not on you when you land, and you prepare to do a parachute-landing fall. 
Now the Army teaches you to do five points of performance — the toes of your feet, your calves, your thighs, your buttocks and your push-up muscles. 
It's this elegant little land, twist and roll. 
And that's not going to hurt. 
In 30-some years of jumping, I never did one. 
(Laughter) I always landed like a watermelon out of a third floor window. (Laughter) 
And as soon as I hit, the first thing I did is I'd see if I'd broken anything that I needed. 
I'd shake my head, and I'd ask myself the eternal question: "Why didn't I go into banking?" 
(Laughter) And I'd look around, and then I'd see another paratrooper, a young guy or girl, and they'd have pulled out their M4 carbine and they'd be picking up their equipment. 
They'd be doing everything that we had taught them. 
And I realized that, if they had to go into combat, they would do what we had taught them and they would follow leaders. 
And I realized that, if they came out of combat, it would be because we led them well. 
And I was hooked again on the importance of what I did. 
So now I do that Tuesday morning jump, but it's not any jump — that was September 11th, 2001. 
And when we took off from the airfield, America was at peace. 
When we landed on the drop-zone, everything had changed. 
And what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical was now very, very real — and leadership seemed important. 
But things had changed; I was a 46-year-old brigadier general. 
I'd been successful, but things changed so much that I was going to have to make some significant changes, and on that morning, I didn't know it. 
I was raised with traditional stories of leadership: Robert E. Lee, John Buford at Gettysburg. 
And I also was raised with personal examples of leadership. 
This was my father in Vietnam. 
And I was raised to believe that soldiers were strong and wise and brave and faithful; they didn't lie, cheat, steal or abandon their comrades. 
And I still believe real leaders are like that. 
But in my first 25 years of career, I had a bunch of different experiences. 
One of my first battalion commanders, I worked in his battalion for 18 months and the only conversation he ever had with Lt. McChrystal was at mile 18 of a 25-mile road march, and he chewed my ass for about 40 seconds. 
And I'm not sure that was real interaction. 
But then a couple of years later, when I was a company commander, I went out to the National Training Center. 
And we did an operation, and my company did a dawn attack — you know, the classic dawn attack: you prepare all night, move to the line of departure. 
And I had an armored organization at that point. 
We move forward, and we get wiped out — I mean, wiped out immediately. 
The enemy didn't break a sweat doing it. 
And after the battle, they bring this mobile theater and they do what they call an "" after action review "" to teach you what you've done wrong. 
Sort of leadership by humiliation. 
They put a big screen up, and they take you through everything: "and then you didn't do this, and you didn't do this, etc." 
I walked out feeling as low as a snake's belly in a wagon rut. 
And I saw my battalion commander, because I had let him down. 
And I went up to apologize to him, and he said, "" Stanley, I thought you did great. "" And in one sentence, he lifted me, put me back on my feet, and taught me that leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure. 
When 9 / 11 came, 46-year-old Brig. Gen. McChrystal sees a whole new world. 
First, the things that are obvious, that you're familiar with: the environment changed — the speed, the scrutiny, the sensitivity of everything now is so fast, sometimes it evolves faster than people have time to really reflect on it. 
But everything we do is in a different context. 
More importantly, the force that I led was spread over more than 20 countries. 
And instead of being able to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look them in the eye and build their confidence and get trust from them, I'm now leading a force that's dispersed, and I've got to use other techniques. 
I've got to use video teleconferences, I've got to use chat, I've got to use email, I've got to use phone calls — I've got to use everything I can, not just for communication, but for leadership. 
A 22-year-old individual operating alone, thousands of miles from me, has got to communicate to me with confidence. 
I have to have trust in them and vice versa. 
And I also have to build their faith. 
And that's a new kind of leadership for me. 
We had one operation where we had to coordinate it from multiple locations. 
An emerging opportunity came — didn't have time to get everybody together. 
So we had to get complex intelligence together, we had to line up the ability to act. 
It was sensitive, we had to go up the chain of command, convince them that this was the right thing to do and do all of this on electronic medium. 
We failed. 
The mission didn't work. 
And so now what we had to do is I had to reach out to try to rebuild the trust of that force, rebuild their confidence — me and them, and them and me, and our seniors and us as a force — all without the ability to put a hand on a shoulder. 
Entirely new requirement. 
Also, the people had changed. 
You probably think that the force that I led was all steely-eyed commandos with big knuckle fists carrying exotic weapons. 
In reality, much of the force I led looked exactly like you. 
It was men, women, young, old — not just from military; from different organizations, many of them detailed to us just from a handshake. 
And so instead of giving orders, you're now building consensus and you're building a sense of shared purpose. 
Probably the biggest change was understanding that the generational difference, the ages, had changed so much. 
I went down to be with a Ranger platoon on an operation in Afghanistan, and on that operation, a sergeant in the platoon had lost about half his arm throwing a Taliban hand grenade back at the enemy after it had landed in his fire team. 
We talked about the operation, and then at the end I did what I often do with a force like that. 
I asked, "" Where were you on 9 / 11? "" And one young Ranger in the back — his hair's tousled and his face is red and windblown from being in combat in the cold Afghan wind — he said, "" Sir, I was in the sixth grade. "" And it reminded me that we're operating a force that must have shared purpose and shared consciousness, and yet he has different experiences, in many cases a different vocabulary, a completely different skill set in terms of digital media than I do and many of the other senior leaders. 
And yet, we need to have that shared sense. 
It also produced something which I call an inversion of expertise, because we had so many changes at the lower levels in technology and tactics and whatnot, that suddenly the things that we grew up doing wasn't what the force was doing anymore. 
So how does a leader stay credible and legitimate when they haven't done what the people you're leading are doing? 
And it's a brand new leadership challenge. 
And it forced me to become a lot more transparent, a lot more willing to listen, a lot more willing to be reverse-mentored from lower. 
And yet, again, you're not all in one room. 
Then another thing. 
There's an effect on you and on your leaders. 
There's an impact, it's cumulative. 
You don't reset, or recharge your battery every time. 
I stood in front of a screen one night in Iraq with one of my senior officers and we watched a firefight from one of our forces. 
And I remembered his son was in our force. 
And I said, "" John, where's your son? And how is he? "" And he said, "" Sir, he's fine. Thanks for asking. "" I said, "" Where is he now? "" And he pointed at the screen, he said, "" He's in that firefight. "" Think about watching your brother, father, daughter, son, wife in a firefight in real time and you can't do anything about it. 
Think about knowing that over time. 
And it's a new cumulative pressure on leaders. 
And you have to watch and take care of each other. 
I probably learned the most about relationships. 
I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. 
I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. 
And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger — and there are more than 2,000 of them — says a six-stanza Ranger creed. 
You may know one line of it, it says, "I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." 
And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. 
It's a promise. 
Every Ranger promises every other Ranger, "" No matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming. "" And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. 
Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. 
It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. 
And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. 
And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing. 
And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. 
We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with — godfather to one of their kids — he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "" I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive. "" And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career. 
And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. 
That was my journey. 
I hope it's not over. 
I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. 
This isn't easy stuff. 
It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. 
(Laughter) And it isn't always fair. 
You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. 
But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. 
And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. 
Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish. 
After all, take a look at these events: Imperialism and colonization, world wars, George W. Bush. 
Ask yourself, who's responsible? Adults. 
Now, what have kids done? 
Well, Anne Frank touched millions with her powerful account of the Holocaust. 
Ruby Bridges helped to end segregation in the United States. 
And, most recently, Charlie Simpson helped to raise 120,000 pounds for Haiti, on his little bike. 
So as you can see evidenced by such examples, age has absolutely nothing to do with it. 
The traits the word "" childish "" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking. 
Maybe you've had grand plans before, but stopped yourself, thinking, "That's impossible," or "That costs too much," or "" That won't benefit me. "" For better or worse, we kids aren't hampered as much when it comes to thinking about reasons why not to do things. 
In many ways, our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility. 
(Applause) has a program called Kids Design Glass, and kids draw their own ideas for glass art. 
Now, when you think of glass, you might think of colorful Chihuly designs, or maybe Italian vases, but kids challenge glass artists to go beyond that, into the realm of brokenhearted snakes and bacon boys, who you can see has meat vision. 
The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it. 
Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right? 
If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me, until she pays it back. 
Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids, from every "" Don't do that, don't do this "" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school Internet use. 
And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no or very little say in making the rules, when really, the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population. 
Now, what's even worse than restriction, is that adults often underestimate kids' abilities. 
Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ-fighters, when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." 
Thank you, Bill Gates, and thank you, Ma. 
I wrote over 300 short stories on that little laptop, and I wanted to get published. 
Instead of just scoffing at this heresy that a kid wanted to get published, or saying wait until you're older, my parents were really supportive. 
One large children's publisher ironically said that they didn't work with children. 
And from there on, it's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools, keynoting to thousands of educators, and finally, today, speaking to you. 
But there's a problem with this rosy picture of kids being so much better than adults. 
Kids grow up and become adults just like you. 
(Laughter) Or just like you? Really? 
The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather, better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging, considering your guys' credentials. 
(Laughter) But the way progress happens, is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. 
It's the reason we're not in the Dark Ages anymore. 
No matter your position or place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children, so that we can grow up to blow you away. 
(Laughter) Adults and fellow TEDsters, you need to listen and learn from kids, and trust us and expect more from us. 
And in case you don't think that this really has meaning for you, remember that cloning is possible, and that involves going through childhood again, in which case you'll want to be heard, just like my generation. 
Now, the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas. 
Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 

I published this article in the New York Times Modern Love column in January of this year. 
"To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This." 
And the article is about a psychological study designed to create romantic love in the laboratory, and my own experience trying the study myself one night last summer. 
So the procedure is fairly simple: two strangers take turns asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions and then they stare into each other's eyes without speaking for four minutes. 
So here are a couple of sample questions. 
Number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be? 
Number 28: When did you last cry in front of another person? 
By yourself? 
As you can see, they really do get more personal as they go along. 
Number 30, I really like this one: Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things you might not say to someone you just met. 
So when I first came across this study a few years earlier, one detail really stuck out to me, and that was the rumor that two of the participants had gotten married six months later, and they'd invited the entire lab to the ceremony. 
So I was of course very skeptical about this process of just manufacturing romantic love, but of course I was intrigued. 
And when I got the chance to try this study myself, with someone I knew but not particularly well, I wasn't expecting to fall in love. 
But then we did, and — (Laughter) And I thought it made a good story, so I sent it to the Modern Love column a few months later. 
Now, this was published in January, and now it is August, so I'm guessing that some of you are probably wondering, are we still together? 
And the reason I think you might be wondering this is because I have been asked this question again and again and again for the past seven months. 
And this question is really what I want to talk about today. 
But let's come back to it. 
(Laughter) So the week before the article came out, I was very nervous. 
I had been working on a book about love stories for the past few years, so I had gotten used to writing about my own experiences with romantic love on my blog. 
But a blog post might get a couple hundred views at the most, and those were usually just my Facebook friends, and I figured my article in the New York Times would probably get a few thousand views. 
And that felt like a lot of attention on a relatively new relationship. 
But as it turned out, I had no idea. 
So the article was published online on a Friday evening, and by Saturday, this had happened to the traffic on my blog. 
And by Sunday, both the Today Show and Good Morning America had called. 
Within a month, the article would receive over 8 million views, and I was, to say the least, underprepared for this sort of attention. 
It's one thing to work up the confidence to write honestly about your experiences with love, but it is another thing to discover that your love life has made international news — (Laughter) and to realize that people across the world are genuinely invested in the status of your new relationship. (Laughter) 
And when people called or emailed, which they did every day for weeks, they always asked the same question first: are you guys still together? 
In fact, as I was preparing this talk, I did a quick search of my email inbox for the phrase "" Are you still together? "" and several messages popped up immediately. 
They were from students and journalists and friendly strangers like this one. 
I did radio interviews and they asked. 
I even gave a talk, and one woman shouted up to the stage, "Hey Mandy, where's your boyfriend?" 
And I promptly turned bright red. 
I understand that this is part of the deal. 
If you write about your relationship in an international newspaper, you should expect people to feel comfortable asking about it. 
But I just wasn't prepared for the scope of the response. 
The 36 questions seem to have taken on a life of their own. 
In fact, the New York Times published a follow-up article for Valentine's Day, which featured readers' experiences of trying the study themselves, with varying degrees of success. 
So my first impulse in the face of all of this attention was to become very protective of my own relationship. 
I said no to every request for the two of us to do a media appearance together. 
I turned down TV interviews, and I said no to every request for photos of the two us. 
I think I was afraid that we would become inadvertent icons for the process of falling in love, a position I did not at all feel qualified for. 
And I get it: people didn't just want to know if the study worked, they wanted to know if it really worked: that is, if it was capable of producing love that would last, not just a fling, but real love, sustainable love. 
But this was a question I didn't feel capable of answering. 
My own relationship was only a few months old, and I felt like people were asking the wrong question in the first place. 
What would knowing whether or not we were still together really tell them? 
If the answer was no, would it make the experience of doing these 36 questions any less worthwhile? 
Dr. Arthur Aron first wrote about these questions in this study here in 1997, and here, the researcher's goal was not to produce romantic love. 
Instead, they wanted to foster interpersonal closeness among college students, by using what Aron called "sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure." 
Sounds romantic, doesn't it? 
But the study did work. 
The participants did feel closer after doing it, and several subsequent studies have also used Aron's fast friends protocol as a way to quickly create trust and intimacy between strangers. 
They've used it between members of the police and members of community, and they've used it between people of opposing political ideologies. 
The original version of the story, the one that I tried last summer, that pairs the personal questions with four minutes of eye contact, was referenced in this article, but unfortunately it was never published. 
So a few months ago, I was giving a talk at a small liberal arts college, and a student came up to me afterwards and he said, kind of shyly, "So, I tried your study, and it didn't work." 
He seemed a little mystified by this. 
"" You mean, you didn't fall in love with the person you did it with? "" I asked. 
"" Well... "" He paused. 
"I think she just wants to be friends." 
"" But did you become better friends? "" I asked. 
"Did you feel like you got to really know each other after doing the study?" 
He nodded. 
"" So, then it worked, "" I said. 
I don't think this is the answer he was looking for. 
In fact, I don't think this is the answer that any of us are looking for when it comes to love. 
I first came across this study when I was 29 and I was going through a really difficult breakup. 
I had been in the relationship since I was 20, which was basically my entire adult life, and he was my first real love, and I had no idea how or if I could make a life without him. 
So I turned to science. 
I researched everything I could find about the science of romantic love, and I think I was hoping that it might somehow inoculate me from heartache. 
I don't know if I realized this at the time — I thought I was just doing research for this book I was writing — but it seems really obvious in retrospect. 
I hoped that if I armed myself with the knowledge of romantic love, I might never have to feel as terrible and lonely as I did then. 
And all this knowledge has been useful in some ways. 
I am more patient with love. I am more relaxed. 
I am more confident about asking for what I want. 
But I can also see myself more clearly, and I can see that what I want is sometimes more than can reasonably be asked for. 
What I want from love is a guarantee, not just that I am loved today and that I will be loved tomorrow, but that I will continue to be loved by the person I love indefinitely. 
Maybe it's this possibility of a guarantee that people were really asking about when they wanted to know if we were still together. 
So the story that the media told about the 36 questions was that there might be a shortcut to falling in love. 
There might be a way to somehow mitigate some of the risk involved, and this is a very appealing story, because falling in love feels amazing, but it's also terrifying. 
The moment you admit to loving someone, you admit to having a lot to lose, and it's true that these questions do provide a mechanism for getting to know someone quickly, which is also a mechanism for being known, and I think this is the thing that most of us really want from love: to be known, to be seen, to be understood. 
But I think when it comes to love, we are too willing to accept the short version of the story. 
The version of the story that asks, "" Are you still together? "" and is content with a yes or no answer. 
So rather than that question, I would propose we ask some more difficult questions, questions like: How do you decide who deserves your love and who does not? 
How do you stay in love when things get difficult, and how do you know when to just cut and run? 
How do you live with the doubt that inevitably creeps into every relationship, or even harder, how do you live with your partner's doubt? 
I don't necessarily know the answers to these questions, but I think they're an important start at having a more thoughtful conversation about what it means to love someone. 
So, if you want it, the short version of the story of my relationship is this: a year ago, an acquaintance and I did a study designed to create romantic love, and we fell in love, and we are still together, and I am so glad. 
But falling in love is not the same thing as staying in love. 
Falling in love is the easy part. 
So at the end of my article, I wrote, "" Love didn't happen to us. 
We're in love because we each made the choice to be. "" And I cringe a little when I read that now, not because it isn't true, but because at the time, I really hadn't considered everything that was contained in that choice. 
I didn't consider how many times we would each have to make that choice, and how many times I will continue to have to make that choice without knowing whether or not he will always choose me. 
I want it to be enough to have asked and answered 36 questions, and to have chosen to love someone so generous and kind and fun and to have broadcast that choice in the biggest newspaper in America. 
But what I have done instead is turn my relationship into the kind of myth I don't quite believe in. 
And what I want, what perhaps I will spend my life wanting, is for that myth to be true. 
I want the happy ending implied by the title to my article, which is, incidentally, the only part of the article that I didn't actually write. 
(Laughter) But what I have instead is the chance to make the choice to love someone, and the hope that he will choose to love me back, and it is terrifying, but that's the deal with love. 
Thank you. 

Hi, my name is Marcin — farmer, technologist. 
I was born in Poland, now in the U.S. 
I started a group called Open Source Ecology. 
We've identified the 50 most important machines that we think it takes for modern life to exist — things from tractors, bread ovens, circuit makers. 
Then we set out to create an open source, DIY, do it yourself version that anyone can build and maintain at a fraction of the cost. 
We call this the Global Village Construction Set. 
So let me tell you a story. 
So I finished my 20s with a Ph.D. in fusion energy, and I discovered I was useless. 
I had no practical skills. 
The world presented me with options, and I took them. 
I guess you can call it the consumer lifestyle. 
So I started a farm in Missouri and learned about the economics of farming. 
I bought a tractor — then it broke. 
I paid to get it repaired — then it broke again. 
Then pretty soon, I was broke too. 
I realized that the truly appropriate, low-cost tools that I needed to start a sustainable farm and settlement just didn't exist yet. 
I needed tools that were robust, modular, highly efficient and optimized, low-cost, made from local and recycled materials that would last a lifetime, not designed for obsolescence. 
I found that I would have to build them myself. 
So I did just that. 
And I tested them. 
And I found that industrial productivity can be achieved on a small scale. 
So then I published the 3D designs, schematics, instructional videos and budgets on a wiki. 
Then contributors from all over the world began showing up, prototyping new machines during dedicated project visits. 
So far, we have prototyped eight of the 50 machines. 
And now the project is beginning to grow on its own. 
We know that open source has succeeded with tools for managing knowledge and creativity. 
And the same is starting to happen with hardware too. 
We're focusing on hardware because it is hardware that can change people's lives in such tangible material ways. 
If we can lower the barriers to farming, building, manufacturing, then we can unleash just massive amounts of human potential. 
That's not only in the developing world. 
Our tools are being made for the American farmer, builder, entrepreneur, maker. 
We've seen lots of excitement from these people, who can now start a construction business, parts manufacturing, organic CSA or just selling power back to the grid. 
Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear, so complete, that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit. 
I've planted a hundred trees in a day. 
I've pressed 5,000 bricks in one day from the dirt beneath my feet and built a tractor in six days. 
From what I've seen, this is only the beginning. 
If this idea is truly sound, then the implications are significant. 
A greater distribution of the means of production, environmentally sound supply chains, and a newly relevant DIY maker culture can hope to transcend artificial scarcity. 
We're exploring the limits of what we all can do to make a better world with open hardware technology. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A girl I've never met before changed my life and the life of thousands of other people. 
I'm the CEO of DoSomething.org. 
It's one of the largest organizations in the world for young people. 
In fact it's bigger than the Boy Scouts in the United States. 
And we're not homophobic. 
(Laughter) And it's true — the way we communicate with young people is by text, because that's how young people communicate. 
So we'll run over 200 campaigns this year, things like collecting peanut butter for food pantries, or making Valentine's Day cards for senior citizens who are homebound. 
And we'll text them. 
And we'll have a 97 percent open rate. 
It'll over-index Hispanic and urban. 
We collected 200,000 jars of peanut butter and over 365,000 Valentine's Day cards. 
This is big scale. OK — (Applause) But there's one weird side effect. 
Every time we send out a text message, we get back a few dozen text messages having nothing to do with peanut butter or hunger or senior citizens — but text messages about being bullied, text messages about being addicted to pot. 
And the worst message we ever got said exactly this: "" He won't stop raping me. 
It's my dad. 
He told me not to tell anyone. Are you there? "" We couldn't believe this was happening. 
We couldn't believe that something so horrific could happen to a human being, and that she would share it with us — something so intimate, so personal. 
And we realized we had to stop triaging this and we had to build a crisis text line for these people in pain. 
So we launched Crisis Text Line, very quietly, in Chicago and El Paso — just a few thousand people in each market. 
And in four months, we were in all 295 area codes in America. 
Just to put that into perspective, that's zero marketing and faster growth than when Facebook first launched. 
(Applause) Text is unbelievably private. 
No one hears you talking. 
So we spike everyday at lunch time — kids are sitting at the lunch table and you think that she's texting the cute boy across the hall, but she's actually texting us about her bulimia. 
And we don't get the word "" like "" or "" um "" or hyperventilating or crying. 
We just get facts. 
We get things like, "" I want to die. 
I have a bottle of pills on the desk in front of me. "" And so the crisis counselor says, "How about you put those pills in the drawer while we text?" 
And they go back and forth for a while. 
And the crisis counselor gets the girl to give her her address, because if you're texting a text line, you want help. 
So she gets the address and the counselor triggers an active rescue while they're texting back and forth. 
And then it goes quiet — 23 minutes with no response from this girl. 
And the next message that comes in says — it's the mom — "" I had no idea, and I was in the house, we're in an ambulance on our way to the hospital. "" As a mom that one just — The next message comes a month later. 
"" I just got out of the hospital. 
I was diagnosed as bipolar, and I think I'm going to be OK. "" (Applause) I would love to tell you that that's an unusual exchange, but we're doing on average 2.41 active rescues a day. 
Thirty percent of our text messages are about suicide and depression — huge. 
The beautiful thing about Crisis Text Line is that these are strangers counseling other strangers on the most intimate issues, and getting them from hot moments to cold moments. 
It's exciting, and I will tell you that we have done a total of more than 6.5 million text messages in less than two years. 
(Applause) But the thing that really gets me hot and sweaty about this, the thing that really gets me psyched is the data: 6.5 million messages — that's the volume, velocity and variety to provide a really juicy corpus. 
We can do things like predictive work. 
We can do all kinds of conclusions and learnings from that data set. 
So we can be better, and the world can be better. 
So how do we use the data to make us better? 
Alright, chances are someone here, someone watching this has seen a therapist or a shrink at some point in time in your life — you do not have to raise your hand. 
(Laughter) How do you know that person's any good? 
Oh, they have a degree from Harvard on the wall? 
Are you sure he didn't graduate in the bottom 10 percent? 
(Laughter) When my husband and I saw a marriage counselor, I thought she was a genius when she said, "I'll see you guys in two weeks — but I need to see you next week, sir." (Laughter) 
We have the data to know what makes a great counselor. 
We know that if you text the words "" numbs "" and "" sleeve, "" there's a 99 percent match for cutting. 
We know that if you text in the words "" mg "" and "" rubber band, "" there's a 99 percent match for substance abuse. 
And we know that if you text in "" sex, "" "" oral "" and "" Mormon, "" you're questioning if you're gay. 
Now that's interesting information that a counselor could figure out but that algorithm in our hands means that an automatic pop-up says, "99 percent match for cutting — try asking one of these questions" to prompt the counselor. 
Or "" 99 percent match for substance abuse, here are three drug clinics near the texter. "" It makes us more accurate. 
On the day that Robin Williams committed suicide, people flooded hotlines all over this country. 
It was sad to see an icon, a funnyman, commit suicide, and there were three hour wait times on every phone hotline in the country. 
We had a spike in volume also. 
The difference was if you text us, "" I want to die, "" or "" I want to kill myself, "" the algorithm reads that, you're code orange, and you become number one in the queue. 
So we can handle severity, not chronological. 
(Applause) This data is also making the world better because I'm sitting on the world's first map of real-time crises. 
Think about it: those 6.5 million messages, auto-tagging through natural language processes, all of these data points — I can tell you that the worst day of the week for eating disorders: Monday. 
The worst time of day for substance abuse: 5am. 
And that Montana is a beautiful place to visit but you do not want to live there, because it is the number one state for suicidal ideation. 
And we've made this data public and free and open. 
We've pulled all the personally identifiable information. 
And it's in a place called CrisisTrends.org. 
Because I want schools to be able to see that Monday is the worst day for eating disorders, so that they can plan meals and guidance counselors to be there on Mondays. 
And I want families to see that substance abuse questions spike at 5am. 
I want somebody to take care of those Native American reservations in Montana. 
(Applause) Data, evidence makes policy, research, journalism, policing, school boards — everything better. 
I don't think of myself as a mental health activist. 
I think of myself as a national health activist. 
I get really excited about this data, I'm a little nerdy. 
Yeah, that sounded too girly. 
I'm nerdy. 
(Laughter) I love data. 
And the only difference really between me and those people in hoodies down the road with their fat-funded companies, is that I'm not inspired by helping you find Chinese food at 2am in Dallas, or helping you touch your wrist and get a car immediately, or swipe right and get laid. 
I'm inspired — (Laughter, applause) I want to use tech and data to make the world a better place. 
I want to use it to help that girl, who texted in about being raped by her father. 
Because the truth is we never heard from her again. 
And I hope that she is somewhere safe and healthy, and I hope that she sees this talk and she knows that her desperation and her courage inspired the creation of Crisis Text Line and inspires me every freaking day. 
(Applause) 

I'd like to tell you a story about death and architecture. 
A hundred years ago, we tended to die of infectious diseases like pneumonia, that, if they took hold, would take us away quite quickly. 
We tended to die at home, in our own beds, looked after by family, although that was the default option because a lot of people lacked access to medical care. 
And then in the 20th century a lot of things changed. 
We developed new medicines like penicillin so we could treat those infectious diseases. 
New medical technologies like x-ray machines were invented. 
And because they were so big and expensive, we needed large, centralized buildings to keep them in, and they became our modern hospitals. 
After the Second World War, a lot of countries set up universal healthcare systems so that everyone who needed treatment could get it. 
The result was that lifespans extended from about 45 at the start of the century to almost double that today. 
The 20th century was this time of huge optimism about what science could offer, but with all of the focus on life, death was forgotten, even as our approach to death changed dramatically. 
Now, I'm an architect, and for the past year and a half I've been looking at these changes and at what they mean for architecture related to death and dying. 
We now tend to die of cancer and heart disease, and what that means is that many of us will have a long period of chronic illness at the end of our lives. 
During that period, we'll likely spend a lot of time in hospitals and hospices and care homes. 
Now, we've all been in a modern hospital. 
You know those fluorescent lights and the endless corridors and those rows of uncomfortable chairs. 
Hospital architecture has earned its bad reputation. 
But the surprising thing is, it wasn't always like this. 
This is L'Ospedale degli Innocenti, built in 1419 by Brunelleschi, who was one of the most famous and influential architects of his time. 
And when I look at this building and then think about hospitals today, what amazes me is this building's ambition. 
It's just a really great building. 
It has these courtyards in the middle so that all of the rooms have daylight and fresh air, and the rooms are big and they have high ceilings, so they just feel more comfortable to be in. 
And it's also beautiful. 
Somehow, we've forgotten that that's even possible for a hospital. 
Now, if we want better buildings for dying, then we have to talk about it, but because we find the subject of death uncomfortable, we don't talk about it, and we don't question how we as a society approach death. 
One of the things that surprised me most in my research, though, is how changeable attitudes actually are. 
This is the first crematorium in the U.K., which was built in Woking in the 1870s. 
And when this was first built, there were protests in the local village. 
And yet, only a hundred years later, three quarters of us get cremated. 
People are actually really open to changing things if they're given the chance to talk about them. 
So this conversation about death and architecture was what I wanted to start when I did my first exhibition on it in Venice in June, which was called "" Death in Venice. "" It was designed to be quite playful so that people would literally engage with it. 
This is one of our exhibits, which is an interactive map of London that shows just how much of the real estate in the city is given over to death and dying, and as you wave your hand across the map, the name of that piece of real estate, the building or cemetery, is revealed. 
Another of our exhibits was a series of postcards that people could take away with them. 
And they showed people's homes and hospitals and cemeteries and mortuaries, and they tell the story of the different spaces that we pass through on either side of death. 
We wanted to show that where we die is a key part of how we die. 
Now, the strangest thing was the way that visitors reacted to the exhibition, especially the audio-visual works. 
We had people dancing and running and jumping as they tried to activate the exhibits in different ways, and at a certain point they would kind of stop and remember that they were in an exhibition about death, and that maybe that's not how you're supposed to act. 
But actually, I would question whether there is one way that you're supposed to act around death, and if there's not, I'd ask you to think about what you think a good death is, and what you think that architecture that supports a good death might be like, and mightn't it be a little less like this and a little more like this? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Everything is interconnected. 
As a Shinnecock Indian, I was raised to know this. 
We are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of Long Island near the town of Southampton in New York. 
When I was a little girl, my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day. 
There were no clouds in the sky. 
And after a while I began to perspire. 
And he pointed up to the sky, and he said, "" Look, do you see that? 
That's part of you up there. 
That's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals. "" In my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life, I started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said, "" Mom, you should do that. "" And so three days later, driving very fast, I found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell, capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes, although only two percent actually do. 
These clouds can grow so big, up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere. 
They can grow so big, blocking all daylight, making it very dark and ominous standing under them. 
Storm chasing is a very tactile experience. 
There's a warm, moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth, the wheat, the grass, the charged particles. 
And then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming, the greens and the turquoise blues. 
I've learned to respect the lightning. 
My hair used to be straight. 
(Laughter) I'm just kidding. (Laughter) 
What really excites me about these storms is their movement, the way they swirl and spin and undulate, with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds. 
They become lovely monsters. 
When I'm photographing them, I cannot help but remember my grandfather's lesson. 
As I stand under them, I see not just a cloud, but understand that what I have the privilege to witness is the same forces, the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy, our solar system, our sun and even this very planet. 
All my relations. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So, I have an overlooked but potentially lucrative investment opportunity for you. 
Over the past 10 years in the UK, the return on burial plots has outperformed the UK property market by a ratio of around three to one. 
There are private cemeteries being set up with plots for sale to investors, and they start at around 3,900 pounds. 
And they're projected to achieve about 40 percent growth. 
The biggest advantage is that this is a market with continuous demand. 
Now, this is a real proposition, and there are companies out there that really are offering this investment, but my interest in it is quite different. 
I'm an architect and urban designer, and for the past year and a half, I've been looking at approaches to death and dying and at how they've shaped our cities and the buildings within them. 
So in the summer, I did my first exhibition on death and architecture in Venice, and it was called "" Death in Venice. "" And because death is a subject that many of us find quite uncomfortable to talk about, the exhibition was designed to be quite playful, so that people would literally engage with it. 
So one of our exhibits was an interactive map of London which showed just how much of the real estate in the city is given over to death. 
As you wave your hand across the map, the name of the piece of real estate — the building or the cemetery — is revealed. 
And those white shapes that you can see, they're all of the hospitals and hospices and mortuaries and cemeteries in the city. 
In fact, the majority are cemeteries. 
We wanted to show that, even though death and burial are things that we might not think about, they're all around us, and they're important parts of our cities. 
So about half a million people die in the UK each year, and of those, around a quarter will want to be buried. 
But the UK, like many Western European countries, is running out of burial space, especially in the major cities. 
And the Greater London Authority has been aware of this for a while, and the main causes are population growth, the fact that existing cemeteries are almost full. 
There's a custom in the UK that graves are considered to be occupied forever, and there's also development pressure — people want to use that same land to build houses or offices or shops. 
So they came up with a few solutions. 
They were like, well, maybe we can reuse those graves after 50 years. 
Or maybe we can bury people, like, four deep, so that four people can be buried in the same plot, and we can make more efficient use of the land that way, and in that way, hopefully London will still have space to bury people in the near future. 
But, traditionally, cemeteries haven't been taken care of by the local authority. 
In fact, the surprising thing is that there's no legal obligation on anyone in the UK to provide burial space. 
Traditionally, it's been done by private and religious organizations, like churches and mosques and synagogues. 
But there's also occasionally been a for-profit group who has wanted to get in on the act. 
And, you know, they look at the small size of a burial plot and that high cost, and it looks like there's serious money to be made. 
So, actually, if you want to go out and start your own cemetery, you kind of can. 
There was this couple in South Wales, and they had a farmhouse and a load of fields next to it, and they wanted to develop the land. 
They had a load of ideas. 
They first thought about making a caravan park, but the council said no. 
And then they wanted to make a fish farm and again the council said no. 
Then they hit on the idea of making a cemetery and they calculated that by doing this, they could increase the value of their land from about 95,000 pounds to over one million pounds. 
But just to come back to this idea of making profit from cemeteries, like, it's kind of ludicrous, right? 
The thing is that the high cost of those burial plots is actually very misleading. 
They look like they're expensive, but that cost reflects the fact that you need to maintain the burial plot — like, someone has to cut the grass for the next 50 years. 
That means it's very difficult to make money from cemeteries. 
And it's the reason that normally they're run by the council or by a not-for-profit group. 
But anyway, the council granted these people permission, and they're now trying to build their cemetery. 
So just to explain to you kind of how this works: If I want to build something in the UK, like a cemetery for example, then I have to apply for planning permission first. 
So if I want to build a new office building for a client or if I want to extend my home or, you know, if I have a shop and I want to convert it into an office, I have to do a load of drawings, and I submit them to the council for permission. 
And they'll look at things like how it fits in the surroundings. 
So they'll look at what it looks like. 
But they'll also think about things like what impact is it going to have on the local environment? 
And they'll be thinking about things like, is this thing going to cause pollution or is there going to be a lot of traffic that wants to go to this thing that I've built? 
But also good things. 
Is it going to add local services like shops to the neighborhood that local people would like to use? 
And they'll weigh up the advantages and the disadvantages and they'll make a decision. 
So that's how it works if I want to build a large cemetery. 
But what if I've got a piece of land and I just want to bury a few people, like five or six? 
Well, then — actually, I don't need permission from anyone! 
There's actually almost no regulation in the UK around burial, and the little bit that there is, is about not polluting water courses, like not polluting rivers or groundwater. 
So actually, if you want to go and make your own mini-cemetery, then you can. 
But I mean, like — really, who does this? Right? 
Well, if you're an aristocratic family and you have a large estate, then there's a chance that you'll have a mausoleum on it, and you'll bury your family there. 
But the really weird thing is that you don't need to have a piece of land of a certain size before you're allowed to start burying people on it. 
And so that means that, technically, this applies to, like, the back garden of your house in the suburbs. 
(Laughter) So what if you wanted to try this yourself at home? 
Well, there's a few councils that have guidance on their website which can help you. 
So, the first thing that they tell you is that you need to have a certificate of burial before you can go ahead — you're not allowed to just murder people and put them under the patio. 
(Laughter) They also tell you that you need to keep a record of where the grave is. 
But that's pretty much it for formal requirements. 
Now, they do warn you that your neighbors might not like this, but, legally speaking, there's almost nothing that they can do about it. 
And just in case any of you still had that profit idea in your mind about how much those burial plots cost and how much money you might be able to make, they also warn that it might cause the value of your house to drop by 20 percent. 
Although, actually, it's more likely that no one will want to buy your house at all after that. 
So what I find fascinating about this is the fact that it kind of sums up many of our attitudes towards death. 
In the UK, and I think that the figures across Europe are probably similar, only about 30 percent of people have ever talked to anyone about their wishes around death, and even for people over 75, only 45 percent of people have ever talked about this. 
And the reasons that people give... you know, they think that their death is far off or they think that they're going to make people uncomfortable by talking about it. 
And you know, to a certain extent, there are other people out there who are taking care of things for us. 
The government has all this regulation and bureaucracy around things like burying a death, for example, and there's people like funeral directors who devote their entire working lives to this issue. 
But when it comes to our cities and thinking about how death fits in our cities, there's much less regulation and design and thought than we might imagine. 
So we're not thinking about this, but all of the people we imagine are thinking about it — they're not taking care of it either. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Well, that's kind of an obvious statement up there. 
I started with that sentence about 12 years ago, and I started in the context of developing countries, but you're sitting here from every corner of the world. 
So if you think of a map of your country, I think you'll realize that for every country on Earth, you could draw little circles to say, "These are places where good teachers won't go." 
On top of that, those are the places from where trouble comes. 
So we have an ironic problem — good teachers don't want to go to just those places where they're needed the most. 
I started in 1999 to try and address this problem with an experiment, which was a very simple experiment in New Delhi. 
I basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in New Delhi. 
The children barely went to school, they didn't know any English — they'd never seen a computer before, and they didn't know what the internet was. 
I connected high speed internet to it — it's about three feet off the ground — turned it on and left it there. 
After this, we noticed a couple of interesting things, which you'll see. 
But I repeated this all over India and then through a large part of the world and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do. 
This is the first experiment that we did — eight year-old boy on your right teaching his student, a six year-old girl, and he was teaching her how to browse. 
This boy here in the middle of central India — this is in a Rajasthan village, where the children recorded their own music and then played it back to each other and in the process, they've enjoyed themselves thoroughly. 
They did all of this in four hours after seeing the computer for the first time. 
In another South Indian village, these boys here had assembled a video camera and were trying to take the photograph of a bumble bee. 
They downloaded it from Disney.com, or one of these websites, 14 days after putting the computer in their village. 
So at the end of it, we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were. 
At that point, I became a little more ambitious and decided to see what else could children do with a computer. 
We started off with an experiment in Hyderabad, India, where I gave a group of children — they spoke English with a very strong Telugu accent. 
I gave them a computer with a speech-to-text interface, which you now get free with Windows, and asked them to speak into it. 
So when they spoke into it, the computer typed out gibberish, so they said, "" Well, it doesn't understand anything of what we are saying. "" So I said, "" Yeah, I'll leave it here for two months. 
Make yourself understood to the computer. "" So the children said, "" How do we do that. "" And I said, "I don't know, actually." 
(Laughter) And I left. (Laughter) 
Two months later — and this is now documented in the Information Technology for International Development journal — that accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral British accent in which I had trained the speech-to-text synthesizer. 
In other words, they were all speaking like James Tooley. 
(Laughter) So they could do that on their own. 
After that, I started to experiment with various other things that they might learn to do on their own. 
I got an interesting phone call once from Columbo, from the late Arthur C. Clarke, who said, "" I want to see what's going on. "" And he couldn't travel, so I went over there. 
He said two interesting things, "A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be." 
(Laughter) The second thing he said was that, "" If children have interest, then education happens. "" And I was doing that in the field, so every time I would watch it and think of him. 
(Video) Arthur C. Clarke: And they can definitely help people, because children quickly learn to navigate the web and find things which interest them. 
And when you've got interest, then you have education. 
Sugata Mitra: I took the experiment to South Africa. 
This is a 15 year-old boy. 
(Video) Boy:... just mention, I play games like animals, and I listen to music. 
SM: And I asked him, "" Do you send emails? "" And he said, "" Yes, and they hop across the ocean. "" This is in Cambodia, rural Cambodia — a fairly silly arithmetic game, which no child would play inside the classroom or at home. 
They would, you know, throw it back at you. 
They'd say, "" This is very boring. "" If you leave it on the pavement and if all the adults go away, then they will show off with each other about what they can do. 
This is what these children are doing. 
They are trying to multiply, I think. 
And all over India, at the end of about two years, children were beginning to Google their homework. 
As a result, the teachers reported tremendous improvements in their English — (Laughter) rapid improvement and all sorts of things. 
They said, "" They have become really deep thinkers and so on and so forth. 
(Laughter) And indeed they had. 
I mean, if there's stuff on Google, why would you need to stuff it into your head? 
So at the end of the next four years, I decided that groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own. 
At that time, a large amount of money had come into Newcastle University to improve schooling in India. 
So Newcastle gave me a call. I said, "" I'll do it from Delhi. "" They said, "" There's no way you're going to handle a million pounds-worth of University money sitting in Delhi. "" So in 2006, I bought myself a heavy overcoat and moved to Newcastle. 
I wanted to test the limits of the system. 
The first experiment I did out of Newcastle was actually done in India. 
And I set myself and impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own? 
And I thought, I'll test them, they'll get a zero — I'll give the materials, I'll come back and test them — they get another zero, I'll go back and say, "" Yes, we need teachers for certain things. "" I called in 26 children. 
They all came in there, and I told them that there's some really difficult stuff on this computer. 
I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't understand anything. 
It's all in English, and I'm going. 
(Laughter) So I left them with it. 
I came back after two months, and the 26 children marched in looking very, very quiet. 
I said, "" Well, did you look at any of the stuff? "" They said, "" Yes, we did. "" "Did you understand anything?" "No, nothing." 
So I said, "" Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing? "" They said, "" We look at it every day. "" So I said, "" For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand? "" So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, "" Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else. "" (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) It took me three years to publish that. 
It's just been published in the British Journal of Educational Technology. 
One of the referees who refereed the paper said, "It's too good to be true," which was not very nice. 
Well, one of the girls had taught herself to become the teacher. 
And then that's her over there. 
Remember, they don't study English. 
I edited out the last bit when I asked, "" Where is the neuron? "" and she says, "" The neuron? The neuron, "" and then she looked and did this. 
Whatever the expression, it was not very nice. 
So their scores had gone up from zero to 30 percent, which is an educational impossibility under the circumstances. 
But 30 percent is not a pass. 
So I found that they had a friend, a local accountant, a young girl, and they played football with her. 
I asked that girl, "" Would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass? "" And she said, "" How would I do that? I don't know the subject. "" I said, "" No, use the method of the grandmother. "" She said, "" What's that? "" I said, "" Well, what you've got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time. 
Just say to them, 'That's cool. That's fantastic. 
What is that? Can you do that again? Can you show me some more? '"" She did that for two months. 
The scores went up to 50, which is what the posh schools of New Delhi, with a trained biotechnology teacher were getting. 
So I came back to Newcastle with these results and decided that there was something happening here that definitely was getting very serious. 
So, having experimented in all sorts of remote places, I came to the most remote place that I could think of. 
(Laughter) Approximately 5,000 miles from Delhi is the little town of Gateshead. 
In Gateshead, I took 32 children and I started to fine-tune the method. 
I made them into groups of four. 
I said, "" You make your own groups of four. 
Each group of four can use one computer and not four computers. "" Remember, from the Hole in the Wall. 
"" You can exchange groups. 
You can walk across to another group, if you don't like your group, etc. 
You can go to another group, peer over their shoulders, see what they're doing, come back to you own group and claim it as your own work. "" And I explained to them that, you know, a lot of scientific research is done using that method. 
(Laughter) (Applause) The children enthusiastically got after me and said, "Now, what do you want us to do?" 
I gave them six GCSE questions. 
The first group — the best one — solved everything in 20 minutes. 
The worst, in 45. 
They used everything that they knew — news groups, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc. 
The teachers said, "" Is this deep learning? "" I said, "" Well, let's try it. 
I'll come back after two months. 
We'll give them a paper test — no computers, no talking to each other, etc. "" The average score when I'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent. 
When I did the experiment, when I did the test, after two months, the score was 76 percent. 
There was photographic recall inside the children, I suspect because they're discussing with each other. 
A single child in front of a single computer will not do that. 
I have further results, which are almost unbelievable, of scores which go up with time. 
Because their teachers say that after the session is over, the children continue to Google further. 
Here in Britain, I put out a call for British grandmothers, after my Kuppam experiment. 
Well, you know, they're very vigorous people, British grandmothers. 
200 of them volunteered immediately. 
(Laughter) The deal was that they would give me one hour of broadband time, sitting in their homes, one day in a week. 
So they did that, and over the last two years, over 600 hours of instruction has happened over Skype, using what my students call the granny cloud. 
The granny cloud sits over there. 
I can beam them to whichever school I want to. 
(Video) Teacher: You can't catch me. 
You say it. 
You can't catch me. 
Children: You can't catch me. 
Teacher: I'm the gingerbread man. 
Children: I'm the gingerbread man. 
Teacher: Well done. Very good... 
SM: Back at Gateshead, a 10-year-old girl gets into the heart of Hinduism in 15 minutes. 
You know, stuff which I don't know anything about. 
Two children watch a TEDTalk. 
They wanted to be footballers before. 
After watching eight TEDTalks, he wants to become Leonardo da Vinci. 
(Laughter) (Applause) It's pretty simple stuff. 
This is what I'm building now — they're called SOLEs: Self Organized Learning Environments. 
The furniture is designed so that children can sit in front of big, powerful screens, big broadband connections, but in groups. 
If they want, they can call the granny cloud. 
This is a SOLE in Newcastle. 
The mediator is from Pune, India. 
So how far can we go? One last little bit and I'll stop. 
I went to Turin in May. 
I sent all the teachers away from my group of 10 year-old students. 
I speak only English, they speak only Italian, so we had no way to communicate. 
I started writing English questions on the blackboard. 
The children looked at it and said, "" What? "" I said, "" Well, do it. "" They typed it into Google, translated it into Italian, went back into Italian Google. 
Fifteen minutes later — next question: where is Calcutta? 
This one, they took only 10 minutes. 
I tried a really hard one then. 
Who was Pythagoras, and what did he do? 
There was silence for a while, then they said, "" You've spelled it wrong. 
It's Pitagora. "" And then, in 20 minutes, the right-angled triangles began to appear on the screens. 
This sent shivers up my spine. 
These are 10 year-olds. 
Text: In another 30 minutes they would reach the Theory of Relativity. And then? 
(Laughter) (Applause) SM: So you know what's happened? 
I think we've just stumbled across a self-organizing system. 
A self-organizing system is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside. 
Self-organizing systems also always show emergence, which is that the system starts to do things, which it was never designed for. 
Which is why you react the way you do, because it looks impossible. 
I think I can make a guess now — education is self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon. 
It'll take a few years to prove it, experimentally, but I'm going to try. 
But in the meanwhile, there is a method available. 
One billion children, we need 100 million mediators — there are many more than that on the planet — 10 million SOLEs, 180 billion dollars and 10 years. 
We could change everything. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

(Music) Roughly 43,000 years ago, a young cave bear died in the rolling hills on the northwest border of modern day Slovenia. 
A thousand years later, a mammoth died in southern Germany. 
A few centuries after that, a griffon vulture also died in the same vicinity. 
And we know almost nothing about how these animals met their deaths, but these different creatures dispersed across both time and space did share one remarkable fate. 
After their deaths, a bone from each of their skeletons was crafted by human hands into a flute. 
Think about that for a second. 
Imagine you're a caveman, 40,000 years ago. 
You've mastered fire. 
You've built simple tools for hunting. 
You've learned how to craft garments from animal skins to keep yourself warm in the winter. 
What would you choose to invent next? 
It seems preposterous that you would invent the flute, a tool that created useless vibrations in air molecules. 
But that is exactly what our ancestors did. 
Now this turns out to be surprisingly common in the history of innovation. 
Sometimes people invent things because they want to stay alive or feed their children or conquer the village next door. 
But just as often, new ideas come into the world simply because they're fun. 
And here's the really strange thing: many of those playful but seemingly frivolous inventions ended up sparking momentous transformations in science, in politics and society. 
Take what may be the most important invention of modern times: programmable computers. 
Now, the standard story is that computers descend from military technology, since many of the early computers were designed specifically to crack wartime codes or calculate rocket trajectories. 
But in fact, the origins of the modern computer are much more playful, even musical, than you might imagine. 
The idea behind the flute, of just pushing air through tubes to make a sound, was eventually modified to create the first organ more than 2,000 years ago. 
Someone came up with the brilliant idea of triggering sounds by pressing small levers with our fingers, inventing the first musical keyboard. 
Now, keyboards evolved from organs to clavichords to harpsichords to the piano, until the middle of the 19th century, when a bunch of inventors finally hit on the idea of using a keyboard to trigger not sounds but letters. 
In fact, the very first typewriter was originally called "" the writing harpsichord. "" Flutes and music led to even more powerful breakthroughs. 
About a thousand years ago, at the height of the Islamic Renaissance, three brothers in Baghdad designed a device that was an automated organ. 
They called it "" the instrument that plays itself. "" Now, the instrument was basically a giant music box. 
The organ could be trained to play various songs by using instructions encoded by placing pins on a rotating cylinder. 
And if you wanted the machine to play a different song, you just swapped a new cylinder in with a different code on it. 
This instrument was the first of its kind. 
It was programmable. 
Now, conceptually, this was a massive leap forward. 
The whole idea of hardware and software becomes thinkable for the first time with this invention. 
And that incredibly powerful concept didn't come to us as an instrument of war or of conquest, or necessity at all. 
It came from the strange delight of watching a machine play music. 
In fact, the idea of programmable machines was exclusively kept alive by music for about 700 years. 
In the 1700s, music-making machines became the playthings of the Parisian elite. 
Showmen used the same coded cylinders to control the physical movements of what were called automata, an early kind of robot. 
One of the most famous of those robots was, you guessed it, an automated flute player designed by a brilliant French inventor named Jacques de Vaucanson. 
And as de Vaucanson was designing his robot musician, he had another idea. 
If you could program a machine to make pleasing sounds, why not program it to weave delightful patterns of color out of cloth? 
Instead of using the pins of the cylinder to represent musical notes, they would represent threads with different colors. 
If you wanted a new pattern for your fabric, you just programmed a new cylinder. 
This was the first programmable loom. 
Now, the cylinders were too expensive and time-consuming to make, but a half century later, another French inventor named Jacquard hit upon the brilliant idea of using paper-punched cards instead of metal cylinders. 
Paper turned out to be much cheaper and more flexible as a way of programming the device. 
That punch card system inspired Victorian inventor Charles Babbage to create his analytical engine, the first true programmable computer ever designed. 
And punch cards were used by computer programmers as late as the 1970s. 
So ask yourself this question: what really made the modern computer possible? 
Yes, the military involvement is an important part of the story, but inventing a computer also required other building blocks: music boxes, toy robot flute players, harpsichord keyboards, colorful patterns woven into fabric, and that's just a small part of the story. 
There's a long list of world-changing ideas and technologies that came out of play: public museums, rubber, probability theory, the insurance business and many more. 
Necessity isn't always the mother of invention. 
The playful state of mind is fundamentally exploratory, seeking out new possibilities in the world around us. 
And that seeking is why so many experiences that started with simple delight and amusement eventually led us to profound breakthroughs. 
Now, I think this has implications for how we teach kids in school and how we encourage innovation in our workspaces, but thinking about play and delight this way also helps us detect what's coming next. 
Think about it: if you were sitting there in 1750 trying to figure out the big changes coming to society in the 19th, the 20th centuries, automated machines, computers, artificial intelligence, a programmable flute entertaining the Parisian elite would have been as powerful a clue as anything else at the time. 
It seemed like an amusement at best, not useful in any serious way, but it turned out to be the beginning of a tech revolution that would change the world. 
You'll find the future wherever people are having the most fun. 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1968 speech where he reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement, states, "" In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. "" As a teacher, I've internalized this message. 
Every day, all around us, we see the consequences of silence manifest themselves in the form of discrimination, violence, genocide and war. 
In the classroom, I challenge my students to explore the silences in their own lives through poetry. 
We work together to fill those spaces, to recognize them, to name them, to understand that they don't have to be sources of shame. 
In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth. 
And I find myself thinking a lot about that last point, tell your truth. 
And I realized that if I was going to ask my students to speak up, I was going to have to tell my truth and be honest with them about the times where I failed to do so. 
So I tell them that growing up, as a kid in a Catholic family in New Orleans, during Lent I was always taught that the most meaningful thing one could do was to give something up, sacrifice something you typically indulge in to prove to God you understand his sanctity. 
I've given up soda, McDonald's, French fries, French kisses, and everything in between. 
But one year, I gave up speaking. 
I figured the most valuable thing I could sacrifice was my own voice, but it was like I hadn't realized that I had given that up a long time ago. 
I spent so much of my life telling people the things they wanted to hear instead of the things they needed to, told myself I wasn't meant to be anyone's conscience because I still had to figure out being my own, so sometimes I just wouldn't say anything, appeasing ignorance with my silence, unaware that validation doesn't need words to endorse its existence. 
When Christian was beat up for being gay, I put my hands in my pocket and walked with my head down as if I didn't even notice. 
I couldn't use my locker for weeks because the bolt on the lock reminded me of the one I had put on my lips when the homeless man on the corner looked at me with eyes up merely searching for an affirmation that he was worth seeing. 
I was more concerned with touching the screen on my Apple than actually feeding him one. 
When the woman at the fundraising gala said "" I'm so proud of you. 
It must be so hard teaching those poor, unintelligent kids, "" I bit my lip, because apparently we needed her money more than my students needed their dignity. 
We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't. 
Silence is the residue of fear. 
It is feeling your flaws gut-wrench guillotine your tongue. 
It is the air retreating from your chest because it doesn't feel safe in your lungs. 
Silence is Rwandan genocide. Silence is Katrina. 
It is what you hear when there aren't enough body bags left. 
It is the sound after the noose is already tied. 
It is charring. It is chains. It is privilege. It is pain. 
There is no time to pick your battles when your battles have already picked you. 
I will not let silence wrap itself around my indecision. 
I will tell Christian that he is a lion, a sanctuary of bravery and brilliance. 
I will ask that homeless man what his name is and how his day was, because sometimes all people want to be is human. 
I will tell that woman that my students can talk about transcendentalism like their last name was Thoreau, and just because you watched one episode of "" The Wire "" doesn't mean you know anything about my kids. 
So this year, instead of giving something up, I will live every day as if there were a microphone tucked under my tongue, a stage on the underside of my inhibition. 
Because who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Everyone needs a coach. 
It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. 
(Laughter) My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else's in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go. 
We all need people who will give us feedback. 
That's how we improve. 
Unfortunately, there's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better, and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world. 
I'm talking about teachers. 
When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get, we were blown away. 
Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: Satisfactory. 
If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was "" satisfactory, "" I would have no hope of ever getting better. 
How would I know who was the best? 
How would I know what I was doing differently? 
Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice. 
Our teachers deserve better. 
The system we have today isn't fair to them. 
It's not fair to students, and it's putting America's global leadership at risk. 
So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve. 
Let's start by asking who's doing well. 
Well, unfortunately there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems. 
So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve. 
Consider the rankings for reading proficiency. 
The U.S. isn't number one. 
We're not even in the top 10. 
We're tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland. 
Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve? 
Eleven out of 14. 
The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math. 
So there's really only one area where we're near the top, and that's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills. 
Let's look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China. 
Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving. 
They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work. 
They have weekly study groups, where teachers get together and talk about what's working. 
They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues. 
You might ask, why is a system like this so important? 
It's because there's so much variation in the teaching profession. 
Some teachers are far more effective than others. 
In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains. 
If today's average teacher could become as good as those teachers, our students would be blowing away the rest of the world. 
So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best. 
What would that system look like? 
Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching. 
For example, did they ask their students challenging questions? 
Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea? 
We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, "" Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson? "" "Do you learn to correct your mistakes?" 
And what we found is very exciting. 
First, the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes. 
So it tells us we're asking the right questions. 
And second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools, because they pointed to specific places where they can improve. 
I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action. 
(Music) (Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Good morning everybody. 
My name is Sarah Brown Wessling. 
I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa. 
Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove. I've talk about — I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it. 
Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers. 
I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality. 
You can't really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this. 
I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens. 
It doesn't catch every little thing that's going on. 
But I can hear the sound. I can see a lot. 
And I'm able to learn a lot from it. 
So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection. 
All right, let's take a look at the long one first, okay? 
Once I'm finished taping, then I put it in my computer, and then I'll scan it and take a peek at it. 
If I don't write things down, I don't remember them. 
So having the notes is a part of my thinking process, and I discover what I'm seeing as I'm writing. 
I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom. 
I'm glad that we've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works, what doesn't. 
I think that video exposes so much of what's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about. 
I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan, things you cannot convey in a standard, things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy. 
I'll see you later. 
[Every classroom could look like that] (Applause) Bill Gates: One day, we'd like every classroom in America to look something like that. 
But we still have more work to do. 
Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle. 
We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis. 
If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions. 
So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won't be easy. 
For example, I know some teachers aren't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom. 
That's understandable, but our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process, if they collect video in their own classrooms, and they pick the lessons they want to submit, a lot of them will be eager to participate. 
Building this system will also require a considerable investment. 
Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars. 
Now that's a big number, but to put it in perspective, it's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries. 
The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. 
We would finally have a way to give them feedback, as well as the means to act on it. 
But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country. 
It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams. 
This wouldn't just make us a more successful country. 
It would also make us a more fair and just one, too. 
I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

They revealed to us a tiny world of objects, life and structures that are too small for us to see with our naked eyes. 
They are a tremendous contribution to science and technology. 
Today I'd like to introduce you to a new type of microscope, a microscope for changes. 
It doesn't use optics like a regular microscope to make small objects bigger, but instead it uses a video camera and image processing to reveal to us the tiniest motions and color changes in objects and people, changes that are impossible for us to see with our naked eyes. 
And it lets us look at our world in a completely new way. 
So what do I mean by color changes? 
Our skin, for example, changes its color very slightly when the blood flows under it. 
That change is incredibly subtle, which is why, when you look at other people, when you look at the person sitting next to you, you don't see their skin or their face changing color. 
When we look at this video of Steve here, it appears to us like a static picture, but once we look at this video through our new, special microscope, suddenly we see a completely different image. 
What you see here are small changes in the color of Steve's skin, magnified 100 times so that they become visible. 
We can actually see a human pulse. 
We can see how fast Steve's heart is beating, but we can also see the actual way that the blood flows in his face. 
And we can do that not just to visualize the pulse, but also to actually recover our heart rates, and measure our heart rates. 
And we can do it with regular cameras and without touching the patients. 
So here you see the pulse and heart rate we extracted from a neonatal baby from a video we took with a regular DSLR camera, and the heart rate measurement we get is as accurate as the one you'd get with a standard monitor in a hospital. 
And it doesn't even have to be a video we recorded. 
We can do it essentially with other videos as well. 
So I just took a short clip from "" Batman Begins "" here just to show Christian Bale's pulse. 
(Laughter) And you know, presumably he's wearing makeup, the lighting here is kind of challenging, but still, just from the video, we're able to extract his pulse and show it quite well. 
So how do we do all that? 
We basically analyze the changes in the light that are recorded at every pixel in the video over time, and then we crank up those changes. 
We make them bigger so that we can see them. 
The tricky part is that those signals, those changes that we're after, are extremely subtle, so we have to be very careful when you try to separate them from noise that always exists in videos. 
So we use some clever image processing techniques to get a very accurate measurement of the color at each pixel in the video, and then the way the color changes over time, and then we amplify those changes. 
But it turns out we can do that not just to show tiny changes in color, but also tiny motions, and that's because the light that gets recorded in our cameras will change not only if the color of the object changes, but also if the object moves. 
So this is my daughter when she was about two months old. 
It's a video I recorded about three years ago. 
So I too got one of those baby monitors so that I could see my daughter when she was asleep. 
There's not too much we can see. 
(Laughter) Here is a side-by-side comparison. 
So again, in the source video, in the original video, there's not too much we can see, but once we magnify the motions, the breathing becomes much more visible. 
And it turns out, there's a lot of phenomena we can reveal and magnify with our new motion microscope. 
We can see that our eyes are constantly moving in this wobbly motion. 
And that's actually my eye, and again this video was taken right after my daughter was born, so you can see I wasn't getting too much sleep. (Laughter) Even when a person is sitting still, there's a lot of information we can extract about their breathing patterns, small facial expressions. 
Maybe we could use those motions to tell us something about our thoughts or our emotions. 
We can also magnify small mechanical movements, like vibrations in engines, that can help engineers detect and diagnose machinery problems, or see how our buildings and structures sway in the wind and react to forces. 
Those are all things that our society knows how to measure in various ways, but measuring those motions is one thing, and actually seeing those motions as they happen is a whole different thing. 
And ever since we discovered this new technology, we made our code available online so that others could use and experiment with it. 
It's very simple to use. 
It can work on your own videos. 
And I'd like to show you just a couple of examples of what others have done with it. 
So this video was made by a YouTube user called Tamez85. 
I don't know who that user is, but he, or she, used our code to magnify small belly movements during pregnancy. 
It's kind of creepy. 
(Laughter) People have used it to magnify pulsing veins in their hands. 
And you know it's not real science unless you use guinea pigs, and apparently this guinea pig is called Tiffany, and this YouTube user claims it is the first rodent on Earth that was motion-magnified. 
She wanted to see if there's any difference in the way her classmates move. 
It's like seeing still pictures come to life. 
And the nice thing with all those examples is that we had nothing to do with them. 
But we didn't stop there. 
This tool not only allows us to look at the world in a new way, it also redefines what we can do and pushes the limits of what we can do with our cameras. 
So as scientists, we started wondering, what other types of physical phenomena produce tiny motions that we could now use our cameras to measure? 
Sound, as we all know, is basically changes in air pressure that travel through the air. 
Those are motions that are not visible to us but are visible to a camera with the right processing. 
So here are two examples. 
This is me demonstrating my great singing skills. 
(Singing) (Laughter) And I took a high-speed video of my throat while I was humming. 
Again, if you stare at that video, there's not too much you'll be able to see, but once we magnify the motions 100 times, we can see all the motions and ripples in the neck that are involved in producing the sound. 
That signal is there in that video. 
We also know that singers can break a wine glass if they hit the correct note. 
So here, we're going to play a note that's in the resonance frequency of that glass through a loudspeaker that's next to it. 
Once we play that note and magnify the motions 250 times, we can very clearly see how the glass vibrates and resonates in response to the sound. 
It's not something you're used to seeing every day. 
So that's exactly what we did. 
So here's an empty bag of chips that was lying on a table, and we're going to turn that bag of chips into a microphone by filming it with a video camera and analyzing the tiny motions that sound waves create in it. 
So here's the sound that we played in the room. 
(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") And this is a high-speed video we recorded of that bag of chips. 
Again it's playing. 
There's no chance you'll be able to see anything going on in that video just by looking at it, but here's the sound we were able to recover just by analyzing the tiny motions in that video. 
(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") I call it — Thank you. 
(Applause) I call it the visual microphone. 
We actually extract audio signals from video signals. 
And just to give you a sense of the scale of the motions here, a pretty loud sound will cause that bag of chips to move less than a micrometer. 
That's one thousandth of a millimeter. 
That's how tiny the motions are that we are now able to pull out just by observing how light bounces off objects and gets recorded by our cameras. 
We can recover sounds from other objects, like plants. 
(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") And we can recover speech as well. 
So here's a person speaking in a room. 
Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
Michael Rubinstein: And here's that speech again recovered just from this video of that same bag of chips. 
Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
MR: We used "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "" because those are said to be the first words that Thomas Edison spoke into his phonograph in 1877. 
It was one of the first sound recording devices in history. 
It basically directed the sounds onto a diaphragm that vibrated a needle that essentially engraved the sound on tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder. 
Here's a demonstration of recording and replaying sound with Edison's phonograph. 
(Video) Voice: Testing, testing, one two three. 
Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
Testing, testing, one two three. 
Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
MR: And now, 137 years later, we're able to get sound in pretty much similar quality but by just watching objects vibrate to sound with cameras, and we can even do that when the camera is 15 feet away from the object, behind soundproof glass. 
So this is the sound that we were able to recover in that case. 
Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
MR: And of course, surveillance is the first application that comes to mind. 
(Laughter) But it might actually be useful for other things as well. 
Maybe in the future, we'll be able to use it, for example, to recover sound across space, because sound can't travel in space, but light can. 
We've only just begun exploring other possible uses for this new technology. 
It lets us see physical processes that we know are there but that we've never been able to see with our own eyes until now. 
This is our team. 
Everything I showed you today is a result of a collaboration with this great group of people you see here, and I encourage you and welcome you to check out our website, try it out yourself, and join us in exploring this world of tiny motions. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is a man-made forest. 
It can spread over acres and acres of area, or it could fit in a small space — as small as your house garden. 
Each of these forests is just two years old. 
I have a forest in the backyard of my own house. 
It attracts a lot of biodiversity. 
(Bird call) I wake up to this every morning, like a Disney princess. 
(Laughter) I am an entrepreneur who facilitates the making of these forests professionally. 
We have helped factories, farms, schools, homes, resorts, apartment buildings, public parks and even a zoo to have one of such forests. 
A forest is not an isolated piece of land where animals live together. 
A forest can be an integral part of our urban existence. 
A forest, for me, is a place so dense with trees that you just can't walk into it. 
It doesn't matter how big or small they are. 
Most of the world we live in today was forest. 
This was before human intervention. 
Then we built up our cities on those forests, like São Paulo, forgetting that we belong to nature as well, as much as 8.4 million other species on the planet. 
Our habitat stopped being our natural habitat. 
But not anymore for some of us. 
A few others and I today make these forests professionally — anywhere and everywhere. 
I'm an industrial engineer. 
I specialize in making cars. 
In my previous job at Toyota, I learned how to convert natural resources into products. 
To give you an example, we would drip the sap out of a rubber tree, convert it into raw rubber and make a tire out of it — the product. 
But these products can never become a natural resource again. 
We separate the elements from nature and convert them into an irreversible state. 
That's industrial production. 
Nature, on the other hand, works in a totally opposite way. 
The natural system produces by bringing elements together, atom by atom. 
All the natural products become a natural resource again. 
This is something which I learned when I made a forest in the backyard of my own house. 
And this was the first time I worked with nature, rather than against it. 
Since then, we have made 75 such forests in 25 cities across the world. 
Every time we work at a new place, we find that every single element needed to make a forest is available right around us. 
All we have to do is to bring these elements together and let nature take over. 
To make a forest we start with soil. 
We touch, feel and even taste it to identify what properties it lacks. 
If the soil is made up of small particles it becomes compact — so compact, that water cannot seep in. 
We mix some local biomass available around, which can help soil become more porous. 
Water can now seep in. 
If the soil doesn't have the capacity to hold water, we will mix some more biomass — some water-absorbent material like peat or bagasse, so soil can hold this water and it stays moist. 
To grow, plants need water, sunlight and nutrition. 
What if the soil doesn't have any nutrition in it? 
We don't just add nutrition directly to the soil. 
That would be the industrial way. 
It goes against nature. 
We instead add microorganisms to the soil. 
They produce the nutrients in the soil naturally. 
They feed on the biomass we have mixed in the soil, so all they have to do is eat and multiply. 
And as their number grows, the soil starts breathing again. 
It becomes alive. 
We survey the native tree species of the place. 
How do we decide what's native or not? 
Well, whatever existed before human intervention is native. 
That's the simple rule. 
We survey a national park to find the last remains of a natural forest. 
We survey the sacred groves, or sacred forests around old temples. 
And if we don't find anything at all, we go to museums to see the seeds or wood of trees existing there a long time ago. 
We research old paintings, poems and literature from the place, to identify the tree species belonging there. 
Once we know our trees, we divide them in four different layers: shrub layer, sub-tree layer, tree layer and canopy layer. 
We fix the ratios of each layer, and then we decide the percentage of each tree species in the mix. 
If we are making a fruit forest, we increase the percentage of fruit-bearing trees. 
It could be a flowering forest, a forest that attracts a lot of birds or bees, or it could simply be a native, wild evergreen forest. 
We collect the seeds and germinate saplings out of them. 
We make sure that trees belonging to the same layer are not planted next to each other, or they will fight for the same vertical space when they grow tall. 
We plant the saplings close to each other. 
On the surface, we spread a thick layer of mulch, so when it's hot outside the soil stays moist. 
When it's cold, frost formation happens only on the mulch, so soil can still breathe while it's freezing outside. 
The soil is very soft — so soft, that roots can penetrate into it easily, rapidly. 
Initially, the forest doesn't seem like it's growing, but it's growing under the surface. 
In the first three months, roots reach a depth of one meter. 
These roots form a mesh, tightly holding the soil. 
Microbes and fungi live throughout this network of roots. 
So if some nutrition is not available in the vicinity of a tree, these microbes are going to get the nutrition to the tree. 
Whenever it rains, magically, mushrooms appear overnight. 
And this means the soil below has a healthy fungal network. 
Once these roots are established, forest starts growing on the surface. 
As the forest grows we keep watering it — for the next two to three years, we water the forest. 
We want to keep all the water and soil nutrition only for our trees, so we remove the weeds growing on the ground. 
As this forest grows, it blocks the sunlight. 
Eventually, the forest becomes so dense that sunlight can't reach the ground anymore. 
Weeds cannot grow now, because they need sunlight as well. 
At this stage, every single drop of water that falls into the forest doesn't evaporate back into the atmosphere. 
This dense forest condenses the moist air and retains its moisture. 
We gradually reduce and eventually stop watering the forest. 
And even without watering, the forest floor stays moist and sometimes even dark. 
Now, when a single leaf falls on this forest floor, it immediately starts decaying. 
This decayed biomass forms humus, which is food for the forest. 
As the forest grows, more leaves fall on the surface — it means more humus is produced, it means more food so the forest can grow still bigger. 
And this forest keeps growing exponentially. 
Once established, these forests are going to regenerate themselves again and again — probably forever. 
In a natural forest like this, no management is the best management. 
It's a tiny jungle party. 
(Laughter) This forest grows as a collective. 
If the same trees — same species — would have been planted independently, it wouldn't grow so fast. 
And this is how we create a 100-year-old forest in just 10 years. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

As a little girl, I always imagined I would one day run away. 
From the age of six on, I kept a packed bag with some clothes and cans of food tucked away in the back of a closet. 
There was a deep restlessness in me, a primal fear that I would fall prey to a life of routine and boredom. 
And so, many of my early memories involved intricate daydreams where I would walk across borders, forage for berries, and meet all kinds of strange people living unconventional lives on the road. 
Years have passed, but many of the adventures I fantasized about as a child — traveling and weaving my way between worlds other than my own — have become realities through my work as a documentary photographer. 
But no other experience has felt as true to my childhood dreams as living amongst and documenting the lives of fellow wanderers across the United States. 
This is the nomadic dream, a different kind of American dream lived by young hobos, travelers, hitchhikers, vagrants and tramps. 
In most of our minds, the vagabond is a creature from the past. 
The word "" hobo "" conjures up an old black and white image of a weathered old man covered in coal, legs dangling out of a boxcar, but these photographs are in color, and they portray a community swirling across the country, fiercely alive and creatively free, seeing sides of America that no one else gets to see. 
Like their predecessors, today's nomads travel the steel and asphalt arteries of the United States. 
By day, they hop freight trains, stick out their thumbs, and ride the highways with anyone from truckers to soccer moms. 
By night, they sleep beneath the stars, huddled together with their packs of dogs, cats and pet rats between their bodies. 
Some travelers take to the road by choice, renouncing materialism, traditional jobs and university degrees in exchange for a glimmer of adventure. 
Others come from the underbelly of society, never given a chance to mobilize upwards: foster care dropouts, teenage runaways escaping abuse and unforgiving homes. 
Where others see stories of privation and economic failure, travelers view their own existence through the prism of liberation and freedom. 
They'd rather live off of the excess of what they view as a wasteful consumer society than slave away at an unrealistic chance at the traditional American dream. 
They take advantage of the fact that in the United States, up to 40 percent of all food ends up in the garbage by scavenging for perfectly good produce in dumpsters and trash cans. 
They sacrifice material comforts in exchange for the space and the time to explore a creative interior, to dream, to read, to work on music, art and writing. 
But there are many aspects to this life that are far from idyllic. 
No one loses their inner demons by taking to the road. 
Addiction is real, the elements are real, freight trains maim and kill, and anyone who has lived on the streets can attest to the exhaustive list of laws that criminalize homeless existence. 
Who here knows that in many cities across the United States it is now illegal to sit on the sidewalk, to wrap oneself in a blanket, to sleep in your own car, to offer food to a stranger? 
I know about these laws because I've watched as friends and other travelers were hauled off to jail or received citations for committing these so-called crimes. 
Many of you might be wondering why anyone would choose a life like this, under the thumb of discriminatory laws, eating out of trash cans, sleeping under bridges, picking up seasonal jobs here and there. 
The answer to such a question is as varied as the people that take to the road, but travelers often respond with a single word: freedom. 
Until we live in a society where every human is assured dignity in their labor so that they can work to live well, not only work to survive, there will always be an element of those who seek the open road as a means of escape, of liberation and, of course, of rebellion. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Tonight, I'm going to share with you my passion for science. 
I'm not talking about science that takes baby steps. 
I'm talking about science that takes enormous leaps. 
I'm talking Darwin, I'm talking Einstein, I'm talking revolutionary science that turns the world on its head. 
In a moment, I'm going to talk about two ideas that might do this. 
I say "" might "" because, with revolutionary ideas, most are flat wrong, and even those that are right seldom have the impact that we want them to have. 
To explain why I picked two ideas in particular, I'm going to start with a mystery. 
1847, Vienna, Austria. 
Ignaz Semmelweis was a somber, compulsively thorough doctor who ran two maternity clinics. 
They were identical except for one thing. 
Women were dying of high fevers soon after giving birth three times more often at one of the clinics than at the other. 
Trying to figure out what the difference was that caused this, Semmelweis looked at everything he could. 
Sanitation? No. 
Medical procedures? No. 
Air flow? No. 
The puzzle went unsolved until he happened to autopsy a doctor who died of an infected scalpel cut. 
The doctor's symptoms were identical to those of the mothers who were dying. 
How was that possible? 
How could a male doctor get the same thing as new mothers? 
Semmelweis reconstructed everything the doctor had done right before he got sick, and he discovered that he'd been autopsying a corpse. 
Had something gotten in his wound that killed him? 
With growing excitement, Semmelweis looked for any connection he could between dead bodies in the morgue and dead mothers in his delivery room, and he found it. 
It turned out that at the hospital with the high death rate, but not the others, doctors delivered babies immediately after autopsying corpses in the morgue. 
Aha! Corpses were contaminating the doctors' hands and killing his mothers. 
So he ordered the doctors to sterilize their hands, and the deaths stopped. 
Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis had discovered infectious disease. 
But the doctors of the day thought he was crazy, because they knew, and had for hundreds of years, that odorous vapors called miasmas caused disease, not these hypothetical particles that you couldn't see. 
It took 20 years for Frenchman Louis Pasteur to prove that Semmelweis was right. 
Pasteur was an agricultural chemist who tried to figure out why milk and beer spoiled so often. 
He found that bacteria were the culprits. 
He also found that bacteria could kill people in exactly the same way that Semmelweis's patients were dying. 
We now look at what I want to talk about tonight, in two ideas. 
We saw it with Semmelweis, that he was a revolutionary. 
He did it for two reasons. 
One, he opened our eyes to a completely new world. 
We'd known since the 1680s about bacteria. 
We just didn't know that bacteria killed people. 
And he also demolished fond ideas that people kept close to their heart. 
Miasmas didn't kill people. Bacteria killed people. 
So this brings me to the two ideas I want to talk about tonight. 
One has opened our eyes to a completely new universe, and the other attacks long-held beliefs. 
Let's get started with Dr. Eric Betzig. 
He's a physicist who has opened our eyes to an entirely new world by violating the laws of physics. 
Betzig is a true rebel. 
He quit a job at prestigious Bell Laboratory inventing new microscopes for biology because he thought scientists were taking his brilliant inventions and doing lousy work with them. 
So he became a househusband, but he never lost his passion for figuring out how to get microscopes to see finer and finer details than had ever been seen before or ever could be seen. 
This is crucial if we're ever going to understand how cells work, and how cancer works, and how something 150th the size of a head of a pin can do all these amazing things, like make proteins and move charges around and all of those things. 
There's just one problem. 
There's this thing called the law of physics, and part of the law of physics is the thing called the diffraction limit. 
The diffraction limit is kind of like when you go to a doctor's office, you can only see so far down, no matter how good glasses you have. 
This was a so-called impossible problem. 
But one of Betzig's friends figured out how to take a tiny molecule that was smaller than the best microscope could see and get it to light up and fluoresce. 
"" Aha! "" Betzig said. 
"I think maybe the laws of physics are not so unbreakable after all." 
So he lashed together a microscope in his friend's living room. 
He had no laboratory. 
This revolutionary instrument got different protein molecules to light up in different colors, and with a computer, he was able to turn very, very fuzzy blurs into very sharp dots and produce images of unprecedented and startling clarity. 
For this work, last year, Eric Betzig won the Nobel Prize. 
Why? 
Because now we can see with unprecedented detail things that we never had seen before, and now doctors can get a better handle on things like cancer. 
But do you think Betzig was satisfied there? 
No. 
He wanted movies. 
The problem was that even the genius microscopes that he invented were just too slow. 
So what did he do? 
He came up with a 200-year-old idea called moiré patterns. 
So the way that works is if you take two very, very fine patterns and you move them across each other, you will see a gross pattern that a microscope can see that otherwise you would not be able to see. 
So he applied this technique to taking a really blurry image of a cell and moving lots of structured light patterns across it until this cell became crystal clear. 
And here is the result: a mysterious new world, full of strange things zipping around doing things that we don't know what they're doing. 
But when we figure it out, we'll have a better handle on life itself. 
For example, those green globs that you see? 
Those things are called clathrins. 
They're molecules that protect other molecules as they move through a cell. 
Unfortunately, viruses sometimes hijack those to infect cells. 
Also, you see those little squiggly wormlike things moving around? 
Those are actin molecules. 
Unfortunately, viruses also climb down those things to get into the cell nucleus to replicate themselves and make you sick. 
Now that we can look at movies of what's actually going on deep inside a cell, we have a much better chance of curing viral diseases like AIDS. 
So when you look at a movie like this, it's very clear that Betzig has opened our eyes to a completely new world. 
But he hasn't shattered any cherished beliefs. 
That leads us to Dr. Aubrey de Grey at Cambridge. 
De Grey definitely has scientists squirming with an interesting idea: we can be immortal. 
We can beat aging. 
Now, most scientists think he's a crackpot. 
Any Biology 101 student knows that aging is an inevitable consequence of living. 
For example, when we eat, we take in food and we metabolize it, and that throws off what we call free radicals. 
You might have heard of those. 
(Laughter) It's just like, no, it's exactly like oxygen binding to iron and making it rust. 
So you age because you rust out. 
(Laughter) Oh, and scientists also know there is something called immortality: in cancer cells. 
So if you stop aging, all of you are going to turn into giant walking malignant tumors. 
These are cherished beliefs, but could de Grey be on to something? 
I think he deserves a closer look. 
First of all, I have a really hard time seeing him as a crackpot. 
Yeah, he started off life as a computer scientist, not a biologist, but he earned a PhD in biology from Cambridge, and he has published some very significant work on mitochondrial DNA and a bunch of other stuff. 
Secondly, he started an antiaging foundation that has identified seven different causes of aging, to me, that seem very plausible, and he is hot in pursuit of fixes for every single one of them. 
For example, one of the reasons we age is that our mitochondrial DNA mutates, and we get kind of old and our cells lose energy. 
He believes, and he's made a convincing case, that using viruses we can do gene therapy, fix that DNA and rejuvenate our cells. 
One more thing. 
We have an existent proof that extreme longevity is possible. 
Bristlecone pine trees live 5,000 years, and some lobsters don't age at all. 
Now, this doesn't mean that de Grey is going to revolutionize our lifespans. 
I mean, after all, we're not trees, and most of us are not lobsters. 
(Laughter) But I've got to believe that there are Darwins and Einsteins out there, and I'll tell you why. 
Consider this: there are seven times more people alive today than during Darwin's time. 
There are four times as many people alive today as Einstein. 
When you consider that the proportion of scientists in the population has skyrocketed, there are now seven million scientists. 
I've got to believe, and I do believe, that there's one of them out there who is working right now in obscurity to rock our lives, and I don't know about you, but I can't wait to be rocked. 
(Applause)